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

Chapter 164: The Yards

Rina was waiting at the transit yard fence when they got there, which should not have been possible, because Caleb had not told anyone outside the team where they were going.

She had a duffel over one shoulder and a Division-issue tracker in her hand and the set jaw of someone who had practiced an argument in the car and meant to win it.

She was maybe twenty-four, small, built lean enough that recruiters wrote her off and the front line ground her down. Caleb knew her about as well as he knew most people from the division, which was barely, a name and a low sync score and a habit of being somewhere she was not assigned.

"Before you tell me to go home," Rina said, "you should know I’ve been watching this statue for two years, and I know things about it you don’t, and you need them tonight."

"We’re not Division anymore," Tali said, stepping up beside Caleb with the flat patience she used on people she had already decided about. "Whatever you’re tracking, it’s not your assignment now. Nobody’s going to write you up for going home."

"I’m not here on assignment. I requested this statue eight times in two years and got told eight times I didn’t have the sync rate to be near it." Rina did not look at Tali. She looked at Caleb, and there was something underneath the practiced argument that was older than it.

"I’m here because the man inside it has a name, and I’m the only person in that whole building who ever bothered to learn it. I am not letting you walk up to him like he’s a job."

The yard went quiet around that. Somewhere east, under the ground, the silver in Caleb’s chest leaned toward the waking thing that was coming, and he held it, and he looked at the small angry woman at the fence who had said the one thing that cut straight through every reason he had to send her away.

"What’s his name," Caleb said.

"Pasco." She said it like it cost her. "His name is Pasco. He was a washout, like you were, before whatever you are now."

"He couldn’t hold a sync above eight percent, and they kept sending him down inside dead kaiju anyway, salvage work, because washouts are cheap and nobody counts them."

"One day about seven months ago he stopped showing up, and everybody said he finally quit. I knew he didn’t. I’d been buying him lunch twice a week for a year, and he’d have told me."

Her voice did not break, but it went somewhere very controlled to keep from breaking. "He didn’t quit. He’s the statue. He walked into it on his own. And I have spent two years finding out where, so don’t you dare tell me to go home."

***

They went over the fence together, which was Caleb’s answer.

Tali fell in on his left without comment, having recalculated the op the moment Pasco got a name. Kikaru and Iharu took the flanks with the easy wordless split of two people who had done this enough to stop discussing it.

Hiro went high onto a dead signal tower with the rifle, and Soma stayed at the fence line with the feeds.

[Soma]: I have the eleven-piece on thermal. It came up out of the vault two hours ago and it has not stopped walking once.

[Soma]: It is four hundred meters out and closing at a walking pace. It is going to reach the statue about the same time you do, and I want everyone to hear me say that part out loud so nobody pretends it’s a coincidence.

"It’s not a coincidence," Caleb said, low, for the team channel. "It’s coming to the same place we are because it’s coming to Pasco. They’re assembling, and Pasco’s next."

"We got here the same night by accident only if you think the woman doesn’t know exactly where I am at all times. She does. So we move like she’s watching, because she is."

The yards were a graveyard of dead transit stock, rail cars rusted to the rails, a roundhouse with its roof open to the sky. At the center of it, in the turntable pit where the engines used to be spun, stood the statue.

Caleb had seen a lot of them now. This one was different where it counted.

It was small. Not small like the strange statue from the bridge weeks ago, the one that had no business existing, that opened its mouth and spoke to him in his own voice and called him Father.

He still had no idea what that one was. The memory of it put a cold spike under his lowest right rib, and he set it aside, because tonight was about a different statue.

This one was just a smaller man than the others, narrow-shouldered, the silver of it dull and unfinished-looking, the marks fewer and shallower than the deep-graven statues from the vault. It looked like what it was. A washout who hadn’t held much, even at the end.

The silver under Caleb’s skin went toward it, gentle, recognizing, and the recognition no longer felt like the pull toward the vault-eleven. It felt like meeting someone.

"That’s him," Rina said. She had come down off the fence behind them, against every instruction, and she stood at the edge of the turntable pit looking at the dull small statue with two years of looking in her face. "That’s Pasco. I’d know him anywhere, he stood like that. Shoulders like he was apologizing for being in the room."

"Rina." Caleb kept his voice even. "I need you to step back to the rail line with Soma. What’s about to happen is going to be loud, and the thing walking toward us is going to get here in about three minutes, and I can’t reach him and watch you at the same time."

"You can’t reach him at all without me." She said it flat, not defiant now, just stating a fact she’d carried a long way. "That’s the thing I came to give you."

"I’ve watched this statue for two years. It doesn’t react to anything. Not noise, not heat, not people walking right up to it. The Division ran every test. It’s dead quiet. Except twice."

She held up the Division tracker. "Twice in two years it moved. Both times, it was when I came alone and talked to it, not loud, just talked. And both times the readout did the same thing, a little flat hum at a frequency the techs called nothing, a junk reading, too low to mean anything."

Caleb looked at the tracker, then at her.

"Eight percent," he said slowly. "Your sync. They wouldn’t let you near the front line because you couldn’t hold above eight."

"Eight-point-one. They put it on my file like a death sentence." Something moved behind her eyes. "Why."

"Because the statues from the vault, the deep ones, you reach with strength. High sync, high output, you force the door." The understanding came up in Caleb cold and clean and certain, as the best and worst ones always did.

"But Pasco wasn’t taken. He gave himself. The asking works backwards on the given, Sam figured that part out. You don’t force a given door. You can’t. Force just makes it worse." He looked at the small woman with the junk-frequency sync that the whole division had written off.

"You don’t open a given door with strength. You open it with the exact low quiet thing that doesn’t threaten it. A frequency too low to mean anything. The thing they put on your file as the reason you’d never matter."

Rina stared at him.

"They benched you for two years," Caleb said, "for having the one thing that can reach him."

***

Soma’s voice came sharp over the channel before Rina could answer.

[Soma]: Two minutes. The eleven-piece just changed pace. It was walking. It is not walking now.

[Soma]: It knows something it wants is here, and it intends to reach the statue first. Caleb, if it gets to Pasco before you do, I don’t know what assembling looks like up close, and I don’t want to find out tonight.

Caleb felt it then without the thermal, the vault-piece closing, a second weight in the dark that was the same kind of thing he was and nothing like the small dull statue in the pit.

The silver in him pulled two directions at once, toward the kin coming to assemble and toward the man waiting to be reached. He stood in the turntable pit and made the call that the whole rest of the night would hang on.

"Tali, Kikaru, Iharu, you hold the eleven-piece off the pit," he said. "Do not try to kill it. There’s a person sealed inside it, same as Pasco, and the body just knits the damage shut and keeps coming. You can’t put it down, and you’ll die finding that out."

"So don’t try. Slow it, get in its way, and buy me three minutes." He turned. "Hiro, you watch Rina, not me. Soma, you call the piece’s position every ten seconds. And Rina."

She was already stepping down into the pit beside him, duffel dropped, the tracker in her hand, her jaw still set but her eyes wide now with the size of what he’d just told her she was.

"You and me reach Pasco together," Caleb said. "You do the quiet thing you’ve been doing for two years. I do the part only I can do. And we get him out, or we get his name, before that thing arrives. You ready?"

"No," Rina said. "Two years I wanted this and I’m not ready at all." She wiped her palms on her jacket and stepped up to the dull small statue of the man she’d bought lunch for twice a week. "But I learned his name when nobody else would. So let’s go get him."

She put her hand on the statue, as she had alone, twice, across two years.

And this time, with Caleb’s silver reaching alongside her junk-frequency hum, the small dull statue of Pasco the washout turned its head and looked at them, and the air in the turntable pit went cold, and somewhere four hundred meters back the thing from the vault began to run.