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

Chapter 165: The Asking

The moment Pasco’s head turned, Caleb stopped being in the turntable pit.

He was somewhere cold instead, a flat gray nowhere with no walls and no floor. He understood it without being told, because his father had described it, and Owen had described it, and now he was inside it.

This was the asking, the cold place the thing in the statues put a person, where it sat with them and asked its slow questions until the answers wore down to yes. Owen had survived it for eight months. Pasco had been in it for seven.

Rina’s hum was there with him. He could not see her, but he could feel the low junk-frequency note she made, threaded under everything, steady, a sound too quiet to be a threat.

He understood now why the door had never opened for strength and opened a crack for her. Strength was another voice in the cold telling Pasco what to do. Rina’s hum told him nothing. It just sat with him, as she had, twice, across two years.

Pasco was a shape in the gray. He looked as the statue looked, narrow and apologetic, a man who had spent his life trying to take up less room. He did not look furious, as Theo had warned the given always were. He looked tired, a tiredness that had gone all the way down.

"Pasco," Caleb said, not as a question, but as a name said by someone who had bothered to learn it. "It’s Caleb. We worked the same yards."

"You probably don’t remember me. There were a hundred of us and we all kept our heads down. But I remember you, and somebody else came all this way for you, and I need you to listen."

The shape in the gray turned toward him, slow, like turning cost something.

"Nobody comes for the yard guys," Pasco said. His voice was the cold’s voice, flat, worn smooth. "That’s the first true thing anybody told me in years. The man who opened the door. He said nobody was coming, and he was the only one who ever told me the truth, so I believed the rest."

"He told you that everywhere, to everybody he found." Caleb kept his voice level, matching the worn flatness, not pushing against it. "He found six people the world had already thrown out, and he told every one of them the same true thing so they’d swallow the lie underneath it."

"The truth was nobody came. The lie was that nobody ever would. He was wrong about the second part, Pasco, and I can prove it. There’s a woman standing in the real world right now with her hand on you who has been coming for two years."

Something crossed the tired shape, not hope, because hope was too big, but something smaller, a crack. "Rina," Pasco said.

"She bought you lunch twice a week for a year." Caleb felt the hum brighten when he said her name, the frequency lifting half a step. She could not hear this, but the thing in the cold could, and it mattered.

"She requested this site eight times. They told her no eight times because her sync was too low, and the thing they called too low is the exact thing holding this door open right now. The reason they said she’d never matter is the only reason you’ve got a way out."

"She made them wrong, Pasco. Two years of being told no, so she could be standing here tonight. That’s somebody coming. That’s somebody who came."

The shape in the gray stayed quiet.

"It costs," Pasco said finally, and the cold was going out of his voice, leaving something rawer underneath. "He told me. Coming back costs. I won’t be what I was."

"You were never going to be what you were. None of them are." Caleb made himself say the whole truth, because half-truths were the thing that had put Pasco here. "I’m not going to lie to you like that man at the door did, the one who put you here."

"Coming back is going to cost you everything that’s left, and there isn’t much left, and I think you know that. You’ve been in here seven months. There’s a sliver of you that’s still you, and the rest has already gone into the metal. I can’t bring back what’s already gone. Nobody can."

"Then why are you here."

"Because the sliver that’s left gets to choose how it ends." Caleb’s voice stayed steady. Far away, in the warm world, he felt the silver under his own ribs go tight, because he understood what the next part would cost him and he was going to do it anyway.

"You can stay in here and let it finish you slow, become another piece of the thing she’s building, go into the ground as a number nobody reads."

"Or you can open the door from your side and walk up into the light for one minute as Pasco. I’ll carry your name out of here myself and put it in a book a hundred and forty-seven years long, so you go into the ground as a person."

"That’s the choice. It’s small. It’s the only honest one I’ve got."

"One minute," Pasco said.

"One minute, in the air, as yourself. After everything. It’s not nothing." Caleb held out his good hand into the gray, palm up, as he had at the reservoir, a gesture the shape could not take and would understand.

"And you won’t be alone for it. She’s right here, the one who came. Open the door, Pasco, and the first thing you’ll see is the person who never stopped showing up."

The shape in the gray looked at the offered hand. And then, with the last of what a washout had left, Pasco reached back.

***

In the turntable pit, the statue moved. Not like the vault-pieces moved, grinding and certain. It moved like a man waking from a hard sleep, the dull silver cracking at the joints, light coming through, warm light, the first warm thing the metal had given.

Rina had both hands on it now, talking low and fast and steady, the junk-frequency hum of her under the words. Caleb stood beside her with his palm flat against the statue’s chest, the silver pouring out of his own arm into the cracks.

And it cost, exactly as he had known it would. The thing in the cold did not let a piece go for free. As Pasco came up out of the metal, something came the other way, into Caleb, up the silver thread in his forearm, a weight that settled under his ribs and did not leave.

A piece of the cold. A fragment of what Pasco had been, the tired apologetic shape of him, the seven months of questions, folding into the silver that was already eating Caleb from the inside, making it one increment more than it had been.

Far away, in a basement, a number on a wall would need changing. Caleb bore it and kept his hand on the chest and did not pull back.

Sam had drilled it into him until it was reflex. You do not grab, and you do not run. You hold steady and let it sit at the edge with you. He held steady. He let Pasco come.

The statue’s face, the dull apologetic metal of it, softened and cracked and became, for a moment, a face. A narrow tired man’s face, blinking in the cold yard air like someone who had not expected to feel air again.

His eyes found Rina first, exactly as Caleb had promised, and what crossed them was not fury and not even grief. It was recognition.

"You kept buying me lunch," Pasco said, in a voice that was his own and not the cold’s, wondering, breaking. "Even when I never paid you back. Two years, Rina. Why."

Rina was crying and not bothering to hide it, both hands pressed to the warming metal of a man she had refused to give up on.

"Because somebody had to know your name," she said. "And nobody else was going to."

Pasco looked at her for the length of the minute Caleb had promised him.

Then he turned his head, the last of the movement he had, and he looked at Caleb, and the recognition in his face sharpened into something deliberate, a man with one thing left to spend and choosing where to spend it.

"You’re the one they’re all walking toward," Pasco said. The yard had gone silent around them, even the distant sounds of the team holding the line. "I can feel the others from in here. All of them. They’re coming to you, you’re the..."

And he said Caleb’s name.

He said it as the bridge statue had said *Father*, in a voice layered with another underneath, the cold’s voice speaking through the man’s, and the name came out wrong, came out as a title, came out as the thing the eleven called the center they were walking toward.

Caleb felt every hair on his body rise.

Because Pasco had not said *Caleb*. Pasco, in his last clear second, looking at the man who had come for him, had called him by the name the statues used for the thing at the center of the board.

And then the warmth went out of the metal all at once, and the face that had been Pasco’s for one minute went still, and the small dull statue stood empty in the turntable pit, a body with nobody home, the sliver of a washout gone up into the air it had asked to feel one more time.

Rina’s hands slid off the cooling metal.

"What did he call you," she whispered. She had heard it too. Everyone in range had heard it, the wrong name, the title in the doubled voice. "Caleb. That wasn’t your name. What did he call you."

Caleb did not answer, because four hundred meters had become forty while Pasco died, and the thing from the vault arrived at the lip of the turntable pit, and it had heard the name too, and it knelt.

It knelt to him.

The vault-piece, the unkillable thing the team had been dying to slow, came to the edge of the pit where Pasco’s empty statue stood, and it looked at Caleb with a face that was no face, and it lowered itself to the ground, a person kneeling to the thing they have walked a long way to reach.

"Caleb," Tali said over the channel, very quietly, from somewhere behind it. "It stopped fighting us. It just walked past us, like we weren’t there. It’s not attacking you. Why is it not attacking you."

Caleb stood in the turntable pit with a dead man’s name in a book he had not opened yet, a piece of Pasco freshly cold under his ribs, and an unkillable statue kneeling at his feet.

He understood, finally and all the way through, what the woman had built and why she was not in a hurry.

They were not weapons being gathered to a general. They were subjects, walking home to a king the world had not finished making yet.

"Because I’m what it’s been walking toward," Caleb said. His own voice sounded strange to him. "It’s not here to fight me. None of them are. They’re here to kneel. She’s not assembling an army."

He looked at the thing on its knees, kin to the silver climbing his arm, kin to the dead man in the pit, kin to the thing he was becoming one fragment at a time. "She’s assembling a court. And I’m the throne."

The statue knelt in the dead yard, and the silver sang under Caleb’s ribs, and somewhere a patient woman watched her single viewer and was, after forty years, very nearly content.