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

Chapter 176: What He Decided to Do About It

Caleb told them all at once, in the basement, under the number on the wall, because saying it twice would have cost more than he had.

He laid the letter on the workbench where they could read it if they wanted, and most of them didn’t, because they were watching his face instead. He told them about the pod and the small dead silver child with his face.

He told them what his father had built, what it had become, and what the woman had done with it for thirty-one years.

And then he told them the part that was about him, the part he had carried up out of that storage unit on Vesper Street. The thing in the tower was the first attempt. He was the second.

The only difference between them was that he had been raised with a self on purpose and it had been grown without one.

The basement was quiet when he finished.

Rina spoke first, because Rina had spent two years being told she was nothing and had a particular ear for it. "So they made you a person to use you. The bowl, your mom, all of it. It was a design." Her jaw did the thing.

"That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, Caleb. I’m sorry. That’s worse than what they did to me, and I didn’t think anything was."

"It was a design and it was real," Caleb said. "Both. That’s the part my father couldn’t make clean and neither can I. They built me a real self because a real self is the only thing that holds. The love was the method. It was also the love." He looked around at them.

"I’m telling you because you’ve been carrying this with me door by door, and you deserve to know what I am before you decide whether to keep carrying it."

"I’m the thing the whole forty years was for. I’m the chair they finally built right. And in a few more doors the silver hits a hundred, and the question everyone’s been circling becomes the only question."

"Which is," Tali said, flat, already knowing.

"Whether there’s still a Caleb at a hundred, or just the thing they grew me to seat." He said it level, because they’d earned level. "My father thought the self would hold. The woman thinks it won’t. The Child thinks I’ll throw it away myself once I see being a person is the only thing keeping me weak."

"Three different people betting on what I turn into, and I’m the only one who actually gets to call it. So I will."

***

He sent the team up to sleep, eventually, and kept Sam.

Sam had not said much during the telling, because Sam had been doing the thing he did, which was running the numbers underneath the feelings, and now the two of them stood in front of the wall with the fifty-one on it and Sam finally spoke.

"You’ve decided something," Sam said. "You came back from that unit with a decision in you, and you told the team the facts but you didn’t tell them the decision, which means the decision is the part you only tell me. So tell me. What did you decide, standing over the dead one with Dad’s letter in your hand."

Caleb looked at the number on the wall for a while.

"I’ve been treating the hundred like a cliff," he said. "Like the thing to do is slow the climb, ration the doors, stay as far from a hundred as I can for as long as I can, because a hundred is where I stop being me."

"Everybody’s been helping me do that. You with the wall. Me being careful which doors cost what. All of it built around the idea that the silver is a countdown and the move is to run out the clock."

"It’s not a bad idea," Sam said. "It’s kept you you this far."

"It’s a loser’s idea," Caleb said. "It’s the idea of a man waiting to find out whether he survives. And I’m done finding out."

"Sam, listen to the shape of what Dad’s letter actually said. The first one failed because it was made without a self, so when the thing got seated there was nothing there to stay."

"I was made with a self on purpose, a whole one, too strong to erase, because that’s the only kind that holds." He turned to his brother.

"So if that’s true, if Dad and the woman and forty years of work are right that I’m the one who can hold all twelve and stay myself, then the hundred isn’t a cliff. It’s a finish line."

"And I’ve been running toward it backwards, trying not to arrive, when the actual move is to run at it as hard as I can and get there on my own feet, as myself, before she’s ready to take the wheel."

Sam went still.

"You want to go faster," Sam said. "You want to push the silver to a hundred. On purpose."

"I want to stop letting it happen to me and start doing it to myself." Caleb’s voice was steady and certain in a way it had not been since the tower.

"Every door so far, I’ve arrived at the silver scared, one fragment at a time, on her schedule. The Child told me fear is the only thing keeping me weak, and the Child is wrong about almost everything, but it’s right about that one thing, and I hate that it’s right."

"The fear is the leash. As long as I’m afraid of the hundred, I’m hers, because she’s the one growing me toward it and I’m the one flinching."

"The second I decide to run at it myself, decide to become the whole thing on purpose, as me, the climb stops being her harvest and starts being my choice. She can’t seat a man who’s already walking to the chair on his own."

"Caleb." Sam’s voice was careful. "If you’re wrong. If Dad was wrong, and the self doesn’t hold, then running at a hundred is running at the end of you, faster, on purpose, and there’s no slowing down to find out partway."

"I know."

"I track that wall every morning so I can see you coming. You’re asking me to help you run at the thing the wall is warning you about."

"I’m asking you to stop helping me run out a clock I was always going to lose," Caleb said. "And start helping me win the only version of this where I’m still the one deciding when I get there."

"Dad spent twenty-nine years trying to make me a person and not a project, and he couldn’t, and he died sorry about it."

"But here’s the thing he got that the woman never will. He gave me a self so it would hold. She thinks she’s growing a chair. He raised a man."

"And a man gets to decide to walk to his own center on his own feet and dare the thing she’s been waiting forty years for to happen on his terms instead of hers." He looked at the wall.

"I’m going to hit a hundred, Sam. We both know it. What’s still mine to decide is whether I get there as her vessel or as your brother. I’m choosing your brother. I need you to help me run."

The basement was quiet a long time.

Then Sam picked up the grease pencil, and instead of the careful tracking marks he’d kept for months, the patient ranging of a man watching a tide come in, he drew a single hard line under the fifty-one, and beside it he wrote one word, and the word was *GO.*

"Okay," Sam said, and his voice was rough and steady and all the way his brother’s. "Then we don’t ration the doors anymore. We don’t stay small."

"You want to arrive at a hundred as yourself, we train you to hold more, faster, on purpose, and we stop flinching every time the number climbs. I’ll still track it. Not so you can run from it now. So you can aim." He set the pencil down.

"But I’m telling you the brother thing, not the quartermaster thing, first. If I see you going under in there, if I see the self stop holding, I will do everything I can to pull you back."

"And if I can’t, I’m going to be the one standing closest when it happens, because somebody who loves you should be, and it’s going to be me. That’s my condition. You run at it. I get to be the one who’s there."

"Deal," Caleb said, and his voice cracked on it, finally, the one place it had been holding all morning.

The two of them stood in front of the wall, the fifty-one and the hard line under it and the word *GO.* The bowl was somewhere upstairs on the table where it had always been, the design and the love both real.

The whole long climb had stopped being a question Caleb waited for someone else to answer.

He had decided. He was going to become the thing his whole cursed life had been pointed at, the center, the assembled Twelfth, the kaiju they’d spent forty years engineering. And he was going to do it as himself, on his own feet, and dare the woman to take a chair that was already walking.

"One more thing," Caleb said, at the stairs. "Don’t tell the others the decision. Just the facts. They’d try to talk me out of the speed, or worse, they’d try to share the cost, and they can’t. This part’s mine. Let them think we’re still rationing. You’re the only one who knows we’re running."

"I’m the only one who ever knows the real thing," Sam said. "It’s the job. Go to bed, Caleb. Tomorrow we start teaching you how to hold a hundred without it holding you."

Caleb went up. Behind him the wall said fifty-one, and under it the line, and under that the word, and the number was not a countdown anymore.

It was a distance he meant to close.