My Kaiju Parasite Revived Me, But a Yandere Bought My Streaming Rights

Chapter 157: Two Days

The note came back to him in pieces all the next morning, which was how good threats worked.

He’d read it twice and folded it into his pocket, and now it surfaced between other things, while he was eating, while Sam counted reps at the table, while his mother moved around the kitchen like the day was an ordinary one.

I will have to come at this another way, and I will. Aldric did not waste words, so the second half of that sentence was a schedule, not a feeling.

Two days left on the clock. The petition still moving on the eleven even with the living-person bridge dead. And somewhere in those two days, Aldric Voss starting down a road Caleb couldn’t see the shape of yet.

He laid it out for Elara in her car because her car was the one place the Hacker had checked and cleared, and because Elara was the one who would know what a man like Aldric did when the clean path closed.

"He files something else," she said.

She had picked him up at the corner two blocks from the safe house, their habit now, and drove with both hands on the wheel, her eyes on the road.

"If he can’t classify you, he goes back to the eleven and argues they’re enough on their own. He doesn’t need a living person if the magistrate decides eleven sleeping assets are worth a recovery order by themselves."

"You think the magistrate grants that."

"I think the magistrate is tired and the clock is almost out and Aldric’s seal is shielded so well nobody upstairs wants to be the one who challenged it and was wrong." She took a turn smooth, no wasted motion. "Two days is enough for him. It isn’t enough for us. That’s the math."

It was good reading, exactly what he’d have wanted from her, fast and cold and right. He sat with it a second and found, under the gratitude, the small thing that had been bothering him since the parking structure and would not name itself.

She was always right, always early, always exactly where the thing was about to happen, with the answer already loaded. And she never once paid for it.

He pushed the thought down. It was an ugly thought to have about the person who’d just driven across the city to help him, and he was tired, and tired was when his head did this, took the people who loved him and held them up to the light looking for the catch.

He’d done it to Kim. He’d done it to his own father at the kitchen table. It was a disposal-yard reflex, the part of him that had learned nobody helps a washout for free, and it was not a thing he wanted to aim at Elara.

"You’ve known him longer than I have," Caleb said. "Aldric. You ever meet him?"

"Once. A function, years ago. He called me by my last name and asked after my father’s health, and my father had been dead three years." She said it flat. "He knew that. He wanted me to know he knew it. That’s the whole man, in one sentence."

"Your father." Caleb watched the side of her face. "You don’t talk about him."

"There’s nothing to talk about. He’s dead."

"Marcus taught you to shoot."

Her hands did not move on the wheel. That was the thing. A person hears the name of the man who raised them next to a gun and something happens in the hands, a tightening, a shift, the body remembering before the face decides what to do.

Elara’s hands stayed exactly where they were, light and even at ten and two, and her voice came out level.

"He did. I was nine. He was a friend of my father’s, and he was around, and he taught me because somebody had to and my father’s hands shook." A beat. "Why."

"No reason. Came up."

"It didn’t come up. You brought it up." She glanced at him, quick, then back to the road. "You’re doing the thing you do. You’ve got two days and a man coming at you sideways and you can’t get your hands on the problem, so you’re turning over the people next to you instead."

"I’ve watched you do it. You did it to the Hacker for a month."

He had not told her that, not once, not ever.

"How do you know I did it to the Hacker."

The pause was the size of a blink. If he had not spent three weeks learning to hear the half-second hitch in another voice on a wire, learning it so well it kept him up, he would have missed it.

It was the same length as that other hitch. Exactly the same length.

"Because you do it to everyone," Elara said, smooth, the hitch already closed over. "It’s your whole pattern. The washout who knows nobody helps for free, so he goes looking for the bill. I’ve known you since we were kids, Caleb. I don’t need a file to know how you think."

It was a good answer, and a true one. It explained everything, cost her nothing, landed soft.

He sat there in the passenger seat of the car of the one person from his childhood who’d come back into his life, and he felt the small cold note again, the one from a clinic parking lot two days ago, the one he’d filed under the nurse’s calm.

He filed this one in the same drawer. He did not look at it. He kept his face ordinary, because the worst mistake he could make, if it was nothing, was to let her see him weigh her.

And the worst mistake, if it was something, was to let her see he’d weighed her and found the weight.

"Yeah, probably. Old habit." He looked out the window. "Drop me at the market. My mother needs things, and I need to walk."

"Caleb."

"It’s fine. It’s the habit, like you said." He made himself grin, the easy one. "You’re right. You’re always right. It’s annoying."

"It is one of my better features." She pulled over at the market without being told which one, because of course she knew which market his mother used, and the easy version of that was that she paid attention, and he was going to let it be the easy version for as long as he could.

He got out, then leaned back down before he shut the door.

"Thanks for the read. On Aldric. You’re right about the angle, I’d bet on it."

And he meant it, because she was right. She was always right. That was either the best thing about having her back or the first thread of the worst, and he could not yet tell which. He was starting to understand he might not get to choose when he found out.

"Two days," she said. "Eat something, and don’t do anything brave."

"That’s the second time someone’s told me that this week."

"Then maybe listen." She put the car in gear. "Go. I’ll call you when I hear how he files."

She would, too. She’d call him the minute it happened, early, with the answer already loaded, exactly where the thing was about to happen.

He shut the door and watched her pull into traffic, clean and unhurried. He stood on the curb outside his mother’s market with two days on the clock and a note in his pocket from a man coming at him sideways. Beside the note sat a new weight, smaller, colder, that he had no name for and did not want.

Then he went in and bought the things his mother needed, because a man still had to do that, and because keeping his hands busy was the only thing that had ever quieted his head, and his head had just found something it was not going to be quiet about.

Behind him, the car was already gone. It was always already gone by the time he thought to look.