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

Chapter 163: The Number on the Wall

Sam had drawn a number on the basement wall in grease pencil, big enough to read from the stairs, and he updated it every morning before Caleb was awake. Today it said thirty-one.

"That’s the spread," Sam said, when Caleb came down. He had the diagnostic cuff hooked to the old tablet and a fresh chart taped beside the number, and he wore the careful, unhurried manner he used when he was about to tell his brother something his brother would not like.

"Thirty-one percent. That’s how much of you the silver’s taken. It was twenty-six the morning of the exam, so that’s five points in three weeks, and it’s not slowing."

"I want you to look at it every day, so it stops being a thing that happens to you in your sleep and starts being a thing you can see coming."

"Because at a hundred, the spread finishes. The thing the statues are is the thing you are, all the way through. There’s no Caleb left over at a hundred. So we watch the number."

Caleb looked at the number on the wall.

The silver had spread along the lines Sam’s chart tracked, up out of the second rib where it had branched a month ago, along the collarbone, a fine pale thread now reaching the top of his shoulder and a fainter one starting down the inside of his right forearm.

In the low basement light it gave nothing back, the same dead non-shine the statues gave, the people the silver had already finished and turned to standing metal. He could feel it under his own skin now like a second pulse that kept its own time.

"Thirty-one," Caleb said. "And the other number."

"The control number’s better. That’s the good news, so let me give it to you straight before the bad part." Sam tapped the tablet. "You held forty-one percent of full output for ninety seconds yesterday without the burn starting. When we began this you held twenty-two for thirty seconds."

"So your ceiling’s climbing as fast as the spread is. The part of you that decides what the silver does is keeping pace with the part that’s becoming it. That’s the whole game now. Spread versus control. If control stays ahead, you run this. If spread gets ahead, it runs you."

"And right now."

"Right now you’re tied. Thirty-one and forty-one sounds like control’s winning, but they don’t measure the same thing, and you know it. One’s how much of you is left. The other’s how much of what’s left you can aim. I’m not going to insult you by pretending the gap is comfort."

Sam set the tablet down and looked at his brother. "Eat something, then we train. I’m not letting that wall get to a hundred with you behind on the other number."

***

The Hacker’s first message of the day came while Caleb was still at the table.

[Hacker]: Cassius Voss did a sit-down interview last night. Forty minutes, prime slot, AldricCorp Media’s flagship channel. He did not mention you by name once.

[Hacker]: He talked about "the unclassified individual the courts declined to examine" and "the question a responsible city deserves answered." He did it in a gray suit with his dead grandfather’s restraint. It was very good, and it worked.

[Hacker]: The Guild suspended your field sanction at six this morning. Not revoked, only suspended, pending review, which is the polite way to make you radioactive without having to defend it.

[Hacker]: You can’t deploy under their banner anymore. Neither can anyone who deploys with you, which means your team has a choice to make, and you need to make it easy for them to walk away.

Caleb read it twice. Cassius had inherited more than the media empire. He had inherited the method, the gentle one that never raised its voice and let a city arrive at the cruelty on its own.

He was Aldric’s grandson, and he did not know, as Aldric had not known, that the manner he wore so well had been installed in his family by a thing none of them could remember meeting.

"He’s doing his grandfather’s voice," Caleb said to the room. "He doesn’t even know it’s not his."

***

Tali came to the safe house at noon with the rest of them, which answered the question of whether the team would walk away before Caleb had to ask it.

She put a tablet on the table and brought up a map of the city, a scatter of old markers across it. She had the flat competent manner of someone who had already decided and only wanted to confirm the others had too.

"We talked," Tali said. "Without you, on purpose, because you’d have tried to give us an out and we didn’t want one offered. Kikaru wanted me to tell you the vote was five to nothing, and Iharu wanted me to tell you he voted first, which is a lie, but let him have it."

She nodded at the map. "We’re off the Guild banner. Fine. The Guild was never the reason any of us showed up. So tell us what the work is now, because the Record your brother’s been reading from says it isn’t over."

Caleb looked at the five of them around his mother’s table. Tali with the map. Kikaru and Iharu already arguing quietly about something at the far end.

Hiro turned a noodle-shop chopstick over in his fingers because his hands needed a job, the same restlessness that lived in Caleb’s own. Soma had three feeds open, listening to cities that were not this one.

He had spent a long time being a man nobody helped for free. He was going to have to learn a different math now, one where people helped because they chose to. He found it harder to accept than the old arithmetic, and he made himself accept it anyway.

"The keeper in London gave us a record with five names in the last pages," Caleb said. "Five people the world had already thrown away, who got offered a door by the woman who’s been hunting me, and walked through it on their own feet. They’re statues now, in five cities."

"They weren’t dragged off in a disaster like the others. They volunteered. That changes how you reach them, and it’s the whole reason this is a job only I can do."

He turned his right forearm over on the table, the thread of silver catching nothing in the kitchen light. "It has to be someone who’s the same thing they are. That’s me."

"So we go get them, one door at a time, before she finishes using them, and we bring back whoever’s still inside if there’s enough person left to bring."

"And if there isn’t," Tali said, and it wasn’t a challenge, only a planner pricing the job.

"Then we stop the statue, and we carry the name back to whoever’s owed it, because that’s the other half of the work, and it’s the half that matters when the first half can’t be done." Caleb put his hand flat over the map.

"My great-grandfather started a list so nobody the statues swallowed goes into the ground as a number. Two hundred and ten people, a hundred and forty-seven years of them. I’ve got all their names now."

"I’m not adding a two-hundred-and-eleventh I could have stopped, and I’m not leaving five doors open for her to walk more people through behind me. We start with the nearest. Where is it, Tali."

***

The nearest was forty minutes northeast, in the old transit yards past the disposal sectors. They never got to it that day, because at sixteen-forty the vault opened.

Caleb felt it before the Hacker’s message landed. The silver under his ribs went taut and then sang, a high clean note that ran the length of every thread at once, up the collarbone, out along the forearm, into the new place at the base of his throat he had not known it had reached.

He was on his feet with a hand on the wall before he understood he had stood.

[Hacker]: The seal is gone. Not thinning this time, gone. The last layer went at sixteen-forty, the vault is open, and one of the eleven is awake. Theo felt it from across the city and he is not calm, Caleb, and Theo is always calm.

[Hacker]: It is moving. I have it on three traffic cameras. It came up out of the vault and it is walking, and it is headed neither for the city center nor for people.

[Hacker]: I am putting the route on your map. Tell me if it means to you what it is starting to mean to me.

The route drew itself across Tali’s map in a thin red line, out of the vault, through the dead sectors, turning northeast.

Northeast. Toward the old transit yards. Toward the first door.

"It’s not attacking," Caleb said. The room had gone still around him. "Forty years everyone thought the harvest was about waking them up to tear the city down. It was never that. Look where it’s going."

Tali looked. Her competent flatness cracked. "It’s going to the other one. The given one. In the yards."

"It’s assembling." Caleb watched the red line crawl toward the marker, one waking piece walking to meet another, unhurried and certain of the route. "She’s not waking them to fight. She’s gathering them, pulling the pieces toward the center one at a time, and the center isn’t a place."

He felt the high note under his throat, the silver leaning after the thing on the map like iron after a magnet, wanting to go, wanting to join. He held it where he stood with everything Sam had drilled into him and watched his own hand stay steady.

"The center’s me. They’re all going to come toward me, because I’m the same thing they are, and she built forty years of machinery to make sure that when they came, I’d be strong enough to be worth it."

Sam came up beside him and looked at the number on the wall, thirty-one in grease pencil, and then at the red line walking northeast toward the first door.

"Then we get there first," Sam said. "Same as always. Badly, and stubbornly, and together. What’s the call."

Caleb looked at the five who had voted five to nothing, and his brother who set the bowl down, and the thread of silver under his skin that wanted to walk out to meet the thing on the map and that he was not going to let.

"We move tonight," he said. "We get to the door before the eleven do. And we find out what happens when the thing she’s gathering decides to walk toward her on its own feet instead of being pulled."

He took his coat off the hook.

The number on the wall said thirty-one, and behind them the red line kept walking, and somewhere a patient woman watched a single viewer’s feed and was not in a hurry, because everything was finally, after forty years, beginning to move along the path she had arranged for it.

She had not accounted for one thing. The piece at the center had decided to walk.