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

Chapter 167: What We Tell People

The kneeling statue spent the night in the safe house garage, and by morning the whole team had walked out to look at it at least once, alone, when they thought no one was watching.

Caleb knew because he had the garage camera on his tablet, not to spy, just because a Class-unknown sleeping next to the van was a thing you kept an eye on.

One by one they had come. Kikaru stood in front of it with her arms crossed for a long time and left without touching it. Iharu came at three in the morning and talked to it, low, and Caleb did not turn the audio up, because some things were not his to hear.

Hiro brought it a bowl of noodles and set it down in front of the kneeling thing like an offering, then took the bowl away again, embarrassed, when nobody came to eat it.

It just knelt. It did not move. It waited for the only voice it answered to, and that voice belonged to Caleb, and Caleb was beginning to understand that this was going to be the shape of everything now.

"We have to talk about what it is," Tali said, when they gathered in the kitchen. "Not what it means. I don’t have the stomach for what it means before coffee."

"What it is, operationally, because we drove a kneeling Class-unknown across the city last night and parked it next to where we sleep, and at some point one of us has to be the person who says that out loud."

"It’s a piece of the eleven that won’t fight me and does what I tell it," Caleb said. "That’s the operational answer. The rest is the part you don’t want before coffee, so I’ll keep it short."

"It thinks I’m the thing it was made to come home to. As long as that’s true, it’s the safest object in this house. The day it stops being true, it’s the most dangerous, and I don’t know what makes it stop, so we watch it the same as we watch the number on the wall."

Kikaru put her mug down. "And if Cassius finds out we’ve got one in the garage."

"Then we’re not a suspended team off the Guild banner anymore. We’re a cell of unclassified individuals harboring an active kaiju asset, which is the exact phrase they’ll use, and they’ll be right enough that it won’t matter that they’re wrong." Caleb looked around the table.

"Which is why nobody outside this room knows it exists. Not a word, not a hint, not to anybody you trust, because the people you trust have people they trust, and that’s how a thing gets out. The statue is the team’s secret or it’s the end of the team. There’s no version where it’s halfway."

Around the table, five heads took that in, and nobody argued, because they had all watched it kneel.

***

The Hacker called at nine, and the news was not about the statue, which was the first relief of the day and the last.

[Hacker]: Cassius is escalating, and he is doing it cleverly, so listen to the whole thing before you react to the first part. He has stopped asking what you are. He has started asking what you are doing.

[Hacker]: Last night’s broadcast was forty minutes on the people who go missing in the dead sectors, the washouts, the salvage crews, the ones nobody files reports on. He had grieving families. Real ones. He had a mother whose son walked into the yards eight months ago and never came home.

[Hacker]: He did not say your name. He said someone is out in those sectors, unsanctioned and unaccountable, the disappearances have a pattern, and the city deserves to know who moves through the places where the forgotten people vanish.

[Hacker]: He has turned the thing you are actually doing, the most decent thing anyone has done for those people in a hundred years, into evidence that you are the one making them disappear.

Caleb set the tablet down on the table where the team could see it and read it twice.

It was very good. It was, he could admit with the cold part of him that had learned to admire a clean move from an enemy, close to perfect. Cassius had taken the truth and folded it exactly once, and the fold turned rescue into predation.

Caleb went into the dead sectors. People vanished from the dead sectors. He had even, last night, taken a man named Pasco out of one.

Pasco’s mother, if he had one, would never know it was a mercy. She would only know her son was gone, and a man without a badge had been in the yards the night the trail went cold.

"He’s not wrong about the pattern," Caleb said slowly. "That’s the part that makes it work. People are disappearing into the dead sectors. We know exactly why, and we can’t say it, because the truth is worse than the lie he’s telling, and he knows that too."

"He’s betting I can’t defend myself without explaining the harvest, and explaining the harvest means explaining what I am, and the day I do that, he wins everything."

"So we say nothing," Iharu said. "Again. We let a guy in a gray suit tell the whole city we eat washouts, and we say nothing."

"For now we say nothing true." Caleb looked at the tablet, at the grieving mother frozen on the screen. "But there’s a difference between saying nothing and doing nothing, and I’ve been letting them be the same thing, and that stops."

"Cassius is using the families of the taken to hunt the one person trying to give them their names back. So we’re going to start giving the names back where it can be seen, not the supernatural part, just the names."

Tali’s eyes sharpened. "Explain."

"Pasco had no family on file. But four of the five we’re going for might. The Record has last-seen places, and last-seen places have neighborhoods, and neighborhoods have people who knew them and never got told anything." Caleb felt the shape of it forming, the first move he’d made against Cassius that wasn’t just absorbing the hit.

"We can’t tell a mother her son became a statue. But we can be the people who found out where her son’s trail actually ended."

"We can tell her she was right that he didn’t just quit and walk off, and we can do it quietly, person to person, in the exact sectors Cassius is telling everyone to fear us in."

"He’s building a story about a predator in the dead places. We’re going to be the only people who ever came back from those places with an answer for the families. Let him out-broadcast that."

***

Soma had been quiet at the end of the table, three feeds open, and now Soma turned the laptop around.

[Soma, on screen, a map]: Before everyone gets attached to the door-by-door plan, you need to see this. I have been tracking the other vault-pieces since the first one walked. Here is the problem. Watch the timestamps.

The map was the city, and then it was more than the city. Soma pulled it back, and back again, and the markers spread, and they were not all in this city.

"There are three pieces moving," Soma said. "Ours, that knelt, here. But two more woke in the last thirty hours, and they are not in our city. One came up under Lagos. One came up outside Paris."

"And they are doing what ours did. They are walking, slowly, toward something. When I draw the line each one is following and trace it out far enough, all three point at the same place."

"They point here. At this city. At, as far as I can put a pin in it, this house."

The kitchen was quiet.

"They’re all walking to Caleb," Tali said. It was not a question. "From other countries. On foot."

"They will take weeks to arrive at that pace, maybe longer, and the ocean is going to be interesting to watch them solve," Soma said. "But that is the picture. It is not five doors in five cities we get to visit on our schedule."

"It is the whole set, every waking piece, converging on this address from across the world, and the doors we are choosing to open are the same statues they are already walking toward. We are not hunting them. We are racing them to the same finish line, and the finish line is standing in this kitchen drinking coffee."

Caleb looked at the map, at the three slow lines reaching across the world toward the house where his mother kept a bowl on the table. He felt the silver under his ribs lean, gently, toward all three at once, kin calling to kin across an ocean.

"Then the plan doesn’t change, it just gets a clock on it," Caleb said. "We were always going to the doors. Now we know the doors are also coming to us, which means every one we open on our terms is one that doesn’t arrive here on hers."

He closed the laptop. "Where’s the nearest one we haven’t been to. The next door."

"Coastal," Soma said. "Two hours down the line, a quarantine town that got shut down and never reopened. There’s a statue in the old hospital. The Record has a name."

"What’s the name."

Soma checked the green volume, open now on the counter where Sam had left it, and found the line in Mira’s careful hand.

"Halden," Soma said. "He was a doctor."