Chapter 98: Live Session
The hospital had been dark for ninety seconds when the Hacker’s voice came back on the comm.
[Hacker: Caleb. They forced the feed. I lost the firewall. You are going live in sixty seconds and there is nothing I can do about it.]
Caleb was already on his feet.
His helmet was on the floor beside the bed his brother had been on. He picked it up. The visor came online when he clamped the chinstrap. The HUD inside the visor lit pale green and showed him the problem.
PUBLIC FEED: RESTORING. ESTIMATED LIVE: 00:00:54.
PUBLIC SYNC RATE: 1.2%.
PRIVATE OUTPUT CHANNEL: MASKED BY PRIMARY RIGHTS HOLDER.
"Who pushed it?"
[Hacker: VeilWard Premier-Tier. Three secondary investors filed an emergency stake-protection motion. They claimed the blackout deprived them of contracted visibility during a confirmed incident. The Guild Lawbook arbiter sided with them in forty seconds. They won access, not control, and I have never seen the arbiter move that fast. Someone paid for it.]
"Iris."
[Hacker: She’s twelve minutes out. She’s breaking traffic. She knows the feed is going live.]
"What does she want me to do?"
[Hacker: She says: ’Do not glow on camera. Do not kill a civilian on camera. Do not give them anything they can use to bid on you. Survive twelve minutes.’]
[Hacker: If the output climbs, I can hide numbers. I cannot hide light.]
PUBLIC FEED: RESTORING. ESTIMATED LIVE: 00:00:31.
Caleb’s ribs were already warm under his coat.
-----
The first tagged civilian came up the stairwell at the twenty-eight-second mark.
He heard her before he saw her. The medical-floor nurse from the audit support shift. She had been at her station with her hands flat on the counter when Soma and Caleb had walked past her at six minutes after twenty-two-hundred. She had stayed there through the fight in his brother’s room, while the second statue stood three floors above and used the hospital like a signal tower.
She was awake now.
She was walking up the stairs.
Her mouth was slack. A faint purple glow showed at her sternum, low under the cotton of her scrubs. She wasn’t bleeding. She wasn’t injured. She wasn’t in her own body anymore, and hadn’t been since the second statue entered the building.
PUBLIC FEED: LIVE. 00:00:00.
VIEWERS: 12,400.
VIEWERS: 87,000.
VIEWERS: 340,000.
Caleb’s visor lit blue across the top edge.
The numbers kept climbing in the corner of his eye and he made himself stop watching them.
The nurse came up the last three steps onto the fourth-floor landing.
She turned to Caleb, and her mouth opened.
"You weren’t supposed to be born, Caleb."
His own voice came out of the nurse’s mouth, the same vocal print the kid had used.
VIEWERS: 612,000.
PUBLIC CHAT: SCROLLING.
[RedLine: who is she]
[G-Corp: kaiju-adjacent civilian. they’re tagging hospital staff now]
[VeilWard_Investor_44: This is the second statue’s radiation effect. Confirmed. 200 Stakes purchased.]
[NullViewer: is he going to kill her]
[WorkerFeed_12: she’s a hospital nurse, look at the scrubs, he can’t kill her]
[ColdThread: He WILL kill her. Watch.]
-----
Caleb put both palms up.
He kept the bone-core dagger in his belt. The dagger had a kaiju-bone center and the camera would have read it as a weapon. Sponsor pings would have started inside three seconds. He left it sheathed.
"Ma’am," he said. He said it clearly. He said it for the audience. "I’m not going to hurt you. You’re not in your right mind right now. I’m going to put you somewhere safe until you come back."
She walked toward him.
He stepped sideways into the corridor wall. The supply closet door was three steps to his left. He opened it with his off hand. The nurse kept walking.
He caught her at the shoulders.
She offered no resistance. Her body had forgotten the shape of it. The thing using her body had come to look at him, not fight him. The purple glow at her sternum pulsed low and steady, dimmer than the spool his brother had carried. She was an antenna, not a vessel. The thing in her was rented, not owned.
He turned her into the supply closet, shut the door, and pulled the manual deadbolt from the outside.
VIEWERS: 1,100,000.
PUBLIC CHAT: SCROLLING FAST.
[VeilWard_Investor_44: Confirmed restraint without injury. 4,000 Stakes added.]
[G-Corp: that’s a Jaeger-tier nonlethal containment. Mercer is performing.]
[ColdThread: He locked her in a closet.]
[ColdThread: He LOCKED HER IN A CLOSET.]
[BountyPool_LedgerNine: 50,000 credit bonus for any viewer-submitted footage of him drawing a weapon.]
[Hacker_Verified: There will be no such footage.]
The Hacker had pushed her verified handle into the public chat. Caleb saw it scroll past. She wasn’t supposed to do that. The verified handle was a tactical asset.
She was burning capital to defend his stream in real time.
[Hacker: Two more on the stairwell. One on the elevator. Iris is nine minutes out. Move.]
-----
Caleb moved.
He took the corridor at a jog with his head down so the visor camera was getting floor and not face. His ribs were burning. The key in his ribs was reacting to the proximity of the tagged civilians. Heat built under his coat, bringing the pressure that meant the spirals were close to bleeding light through the fabric.
Glowing on camera would end him.
The audience would see purple light coming out of a Rank C Jaeger’s ribs and put it together with the second statue and the sample in Sector Nine inside of an hour. The Hacker would have no way to bury that. No one would.
He pressed his left forearm hard against his side to compress the spirals against bone. The pressure failed to stop the heat. It hid the light.
VIEWERS: 1,840,000.
PUBLIC CHAT: SCROLLING.
[Mitsurugi_Compliance: Subject Mercer is operating outside designated rest period. Compliance flag pending.]
[VeilWard_Investor_44: Disregard Mitsurugi. They’re stake-poor and salty. 200 more Stakes.]
[RedLine: where is he going]
[G-Corp: basement. fourth-floor stairwell going down.]
[ColdThread: Why basement.]
[Hacker_Verified: He is following a Rank C standard nonlethal containment protocol. The basement has a designated quiet room.]
She was lying to the public to cover the vault.
He took the second stairwell down.
-----
The second tagged civilian was the elevator operator. Old man. Sixty-something. He was standing in the open elevator on the third floor with his hands at his sides and a purple glow at his sternum and a slow, even breathing pattern that meant whatever was using him wasn’t asking him for much. Caleb passed the elevator without looking at the man.
The old man’s head turned to follow him, and his mouth opened.
"Caleb. You weren’t supposed to be born."
VIEWERS: 2,200,000.
[BountyPool_LedgerNine: 100,000 credit bonus for any viewer-submitted footage of the elevator operator’s eyes during this incident.]
The bounty pool was building a portfolio out of his crisis. Every interaction with a tagged civilian was being scored, weighted, and resold.
He took the stairs two at a time.
-----
The third tagged civilian was in the second-floor service corridor.
She was the gowned woman in 4-12, the long-term care patient who had been three doors down from his brother. Caleb had never spoken to her in two years of monthly visits. She was leaning against the corridor wall in a hospital gown with her IV stand beside her and a purple glow at her sternum that was brighter than the nurse’s had been.
The IV bag was empty.
She had pulled the line.
Her attention fixed on Caleb. Her mouth stayed shut. The line never came. Wherever the third statue was, it was using her for something else.
She was watching him, just watching.
VIEWERS: 2,610,000.
[ColdThread: Why isn’t she saying it.]
[G-Corp: She’s a different node. Different protocol.]
[Hacker_Verified: She is a long-term care patient who pulled her own IV. She is a danger to herself. Mercer will guide her back to her room. This is not a containment incident.]
He guided her back to her room without touching her. He walked alongside, gestured toward the door, and her body turned and went.
He shut the door behind her.
The Hacker had said *guide her back* and his body had done it. He hadn’t decided to do it. He had heard the Hacker’s words in his ear and his arms had moved. He had been performing for the camera without knowing he had started performing.
That was new too.
-----
He hit the basement at minute six.
The basement of Saint Halvard’s was unfinished concrete and exposed conduit. The lights flickered when the building’s secondary generator kicked. He passed the laundry hall. He passed the morgue door. He passed a maintenance closet with a yellow STAFF ONLY sign that had been painted over and repainted three times.
The vault door was at the end of the service hall.
It was open.
It was open eight inches.
It was a vault door that had been welded into the wall of Saint Halvard’s nineteen years ago and it should not have been open and someone had opened it within the last forty minutes.
VIEWERS: 3,100,000.
[Hacker: Caleb. Stop. Do not go in.]
"Why?"
[Hacker: Because whoever opened it opened it for someone else and is still inside.]
He stopped at the door.
The vault was lit faintly from the inside. A single yellow utility lamp on a battery cell. He could see a row of empty shelves. He could see one filing cabinet. He could see a folding chair set up in the middle of the room with no one sitting in it.
The folding chair had been used.
A coat was draped over the back of the folding chair.
The coat was his father’s coat.
[Iris on shared comm: Caleb. I’m in the stairwell. Three minutes. Do not enter that room without me.]
He stayed outside the room.
He stood at the eight-inch gap in the door and watched the chair and the coat for the next two minutes and forty seconds, and the chair did not move and the coat did not move and the room held the yellow light of the utility lamp without changing.
VIEWERS: 3,840,000.
PUBLIC CHAT: SCROLLING SLOWLY NOW.
The audience waited with him.
-----
Iris hit the basement at minute nine.
She had her sidearm in her right hand and a tranquilizer rifle slung across her back. She was breathing harder than Caleb had ever heard her breathe. There were three sets of tranq-dart impacts on the leg of her tactical pants where she had taken hits she had not bothered to flinch at.
"In," she said.
They went in.
The vault was a single small room. Concrete walls. Shelving along three sides. One filing cabinet. The folding chair. The coat. The utility lamp.
The shelves were empty.
The filing cabinet was open and empty.
There had been folders in the filing cabinet. The dust at the front edge of each shelf showed where the folders had sat. Someone had taken them out. Recently. The dust pattern was disturbed in a way Caleb had now seen three times in three different vaults, and he was starting to recognize the disturbance left by efficient hands.
Iris went to the filing cabinet.
She left the coat alone.
There was a single piece of paper on the top shelf of the cabinet, weighted with a brass paperweight Caleb recognized from the photograph on the safe-house mantel he had not been to yet but had heard about in his ear thirty minutes ago.
The paper had two words written on it.
*Day 1.*
The handwriting was his father’s.
Iris studied the paper, the coat, and then Caleb.
"He was here," she said. "He was here recently. He was here in the last forty minutes."
VIEWERS: 4,210,000.
The Hacker could not cut the feed; the arbiter still had it pinned open.
The Hacker was watching this with the rest of the world.
[Hacker_Verified: Subject Mercer has secured the basement. Civilian incident contained. Stream returning to standard rotation in sixty seconds.]
She was lying to the audience.
She was lying to the audience because Caleb’s father had been in this room thirty-five minutes ago and was now somewhere in the city, on the first day of sixteen, walking through his own life again for the first time since he had disappeared from Caleb’s, and if four million people found that out before Caleb did, the city would tear itself apart looking for him.
Caleb picked up the paper.
He folded it once.
He put it in his coat pocket next to his brother’s hospital gown.
The brother’s warmth was still in the fabric. The paper was cold against it.
He closed the vault door behind them and Iris locked it from the outside with a key she had been carrying since she was nineteen years old, and they walked back up the stairs in the dark while the public feed rolled credits on the incident and the bounty pool closed out at four hundred and ninety thousand credits, and Caleb knew without anyone telling him that day one had started.
