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

Chapter 171: Iharu’s City

They came into Lagos at night, on a cargo flight Iharu’s cousin arranged, in the hold of a plane that officially carried machine parts and unofficially carried six suspended operators and their bags.

Caleb had braced for a hard landing in every sense. He had spent the whole flight running the ways this could go wrong, a wanted man on another continent with no Guild, no sanction, no cover but a teammate’s word. What he had not braced for was how cleanly the wrongness stopped at the edge of Iharu’s world.

The cousin met them on the tarmac, not a checkpoint in sight, and embraced Iharu hard and long. Then he looked at the five strangers his cousin had brought across an ocean and said something to Iharu in a language Caleb didn’t have.

Iharu answered, and whatever he said made the cousin look at all of them differently, with a kind of weight. The cousin nodded once, and the question of whether they belonged here was closed.

"What did you tell him," Caleb asked, in the van, as the airport gave way to a city that did not sleep as the cities back home did.

"The truth," Iharu said. "That you’re the one who gives the names back. He’d heard about the doctor. The story made it here, the small stubborn one, the widow with the documents. People on this side of the world pay attention to who’s been throwing people away, because we’re the ones who get thrown." He looked out at his city.

"I told him you came all this way to do for one of ours what you did for the doctor. After that, you’re not a stranger. You’re a guest, and a guest who came to bring somebody home is the highest kind there is."

***

Iharu’s city was not the Lagos that showed up in the Guild’s risk assessments, and Caleb understood within an hour why the institutions had never been able to see into it.

Nothing about it was hidden. That was the thing. It was huge and loud and fully out in the open, markets that ran past midnight, generators humming behind every shopfront, a press of life that made the dead sectors back home feel like what they were, a place people had given up on.

The reason the Guild and the courts and Cassius Voss could not see into it was simpler than secrecy. They had never once looked at it as a place where people lived.

They had looked at it as a risk on a map, a category, a sector to be assessed, and you cannot see a person you have already filed as a statistic.

Iharu moved through it like a man who had been water-starved and was finally drinking.

Here he was nobody’s second voice and nobody’s muscle. People knew him, called to him from stalls.

The loud proud needling thing that had always been his armor turned out to be, here, just his ordinary volume, the same pitch everyone he’d grown up around used. In this room, Iharu was not too loud. He was exactly the right size for his home.

"His tower’s on the north edge," Iharu said, when they’d reached the flat his aunt kept, three rooms that somehow held all six of them and a table that somehow fed them. "Sefa’s. You can see it from the main road, the half of it that got built. Everybody knows it."

"For a while it was going to be the thing, you know, the building that said somebody from here could put up something that lasted. Twenty floors planned. He got to eleven before the bank pulled the financing and called the loans, all at once, on a technicality everybody knew was really about a bigger company wanting the land."

"Eleven floors," Caleb said.

"Eleven floors of a twenty-floor building, standing empty on the north edge for three years, with his name still on the hoarding because nobody bothered to take it down." Iharu’s jaw worked. "He didn’t leave either. Same as your doctor."

"He had a little office in a building across the road, and every day for three years he sat where he could see the eleven floors of the thing that was supposed to last, and then about ten months ago he stopped being seen." He looked at Caleb.

"Somebody found him sitting across the road from his own unfinished tower, certain he’d failed at the one thing he was put here to do. The door wouldn’t have had to say much."

***

That night, while the others slept, Marek found him.

Caleb was on the roof of the aunt’s building, where he had gone to put a minute between himself and the city’s huge unsleeping life. The silver under his ribs turned the slow way it turned for the woman’s things.

Marek was at the far edge of the roof with the city’s glow behind him, thinner than the last time, close to gone.

"You came a long way for a builder," Marek said.

"You came a long way to tell me something. So tell me." Caleb did not move toward him. "You’re nearly out, Marek. She topped you off for this, which means she wanted me to hear whatever this is."

"So I’m listening to both of you at once, you and her behind you, and I’m going to try to tell which part is the message and which part is you."

"Smart." Marek’s smile was the tired one, the man under the calm. "Then here’s the message, hers. She wants you to know she’s pleased. Three doors, the spread climbing, you learning to use the authority. Every empty one you shut down makes you more useful and less able to leave."

"She wanted me to tell you that, to make you despair, because despair is soft and soft is easier to seat." The smile flickered.

"And here’s my part, the part she thinks doesn’t matter. This door, the builder. Something else is coming to it, and not one of the vault-pieces. The small one. The one that wears a piece of you and calls you what it calls you."

Caleb went still.

"You’ve seen it once," Marek said. "On the bridge. The small statue, four marks lit, your voice. It’s been kept back until now. She’s letting it off the leash for this door, and I don’t know why, because she didn’t tell me."

"But I know what it is even if I can’t say it plain, and I’m telling you to be ready, because when you reach the builder, you’re not going to be the only thing in that tower that can do what you do." The tired man surfaced all the way for a second.

"It’s better at it than you, Cal. Whatever it is. It doesn’t have the part that hesitates. Be ready to see that and not break."

"What is it, Marek. You keep almost saying it."

"Because saying it is the one thing she’d notice, and she’s right behind me. I’ve got one thing left to spend, and it’s not that." Marek stepped back toward the edge and the city glow. "You’ll understand when you see it work. I’m sorry, kid. I wish I had more than a warning."

"Watch the small one. And when the wall gets high enough that you start thinking it’s already over, remember the room. Keep one room she can’t walk into. That’s still the whole secret. It’s the only thing I ever got right."

"Marek, wait."

"Go get your builder," Marek said, from the dark. "Give him his tower back, even if it’s only the truth of it. That’s good work. It’s the work I never did. Somebody should."

The silver went slack and cold as the thing that wore Marek went back down into wherever she kept him, and Caleb stood alone on a roof in Iharu’s city with a warning about a small statue that wore his own face.

***

In the morning, they went to see the tower.

It stood on the north edge exactly as Iharu had said, eleven floors of a planned twenty, raw concrete and empty window-holes, the hoarding around its base faded but legible, a builder’s name and a promise about something that would last.

Up close it was not a ruin. That was the part that caught in Caleb’s chest. It had not collapsed and it had not rotted.

It was a good building, well made and only unfinished, eleven careful floors that someone had put up with skill and pride and then been stopped, mid-reach, by people who wanted the dirt under it.

And in the unfinished lobby, in the gray morning light coming through the window-holes, the statue of Sefa the builder stood looking up through the open center of his own tower at the sky where the other nine floors should have been.

"That’s him," Iharu said quietly, and there was a grief in it that was for the builder, for the building, for every person from this side of the world who had ever made something good and watched it taken. "That’s the man who stayed."

Caleb looked at the statue, and Rina checked her tracker, and the reading was not the dead flat of Halden and it was not the living hum of Pasco. It was something in between, faint, flickering, a hum that came and went.

"He’s partly there," Rina said. "Caleb, this one’s not empty and it’s not whole. There’s something still in there, but it’s going. Like a signal at the edge of range. If we’re going to reach him, it has to be now, because in another month there won’t be enough left to answer."

Caleb stepped into the lobby of the unfinished tower, under eleven floors of a dream somebody had been stopped from finishing, and felt the silver under his ribs lean toward the flickering thing in the statue, kin to kin, here to bring somebody home.

And under his lowest right rib, faint but unmistakable, something else woke up hot.

The small one was close.