My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 156: They Tried To Bury Us In A Corner and Left A Fingerprint On The Grave

The committee’s runner found Soren at the booth an hour after the floor opened.

The reassignment came folded, official, stamped.

Class Z was being moved.

◆◆◆◆

Off the main exhibition floor.

To a peripheral slot near the service corridors, where the foot traffic thinned and the good sightlines ran out.

The paper called it a rebalancing of exhibition density.

Soren read the real sentence under the official one, the one he’d learned to read all winter.

They were embarrassed.

The servant-role framing had collapsed in front of the delegation, and the crowd around Class Z had kept growing after it collapsed, and a committee that could not control the story wanted the story somewhere fewer people were standing.

Bury the thing you can’t file.

◆◆◆◆

He did not argue with the runner.

You did not argue with a runner, who carried paper and no authority to change it.

He went to the committee room, where the authority was, and he brought Dani’s numbers with him.

The chair was there. Two faculty. Marsh at the end of the table, still wearing the small tight face he’d worn since Selah had made ice in front of the delegation and he’d failed to find a word for it.

"You’re moving us," Soren said.

"We’re rebalancing the floor."

"You’re moving the busiest exhibition in the building to a corridor nobody walks."

◆◆◆◆

The chair started to say the thing about density again.

Soren put the tablet on the table before the sentence finished.

Dani had built it clean. Foot traffic by zone, hour by hour, the whole first day of the festival mapped. The Class Z floor in a color that climbed while the rest of the hall stayed flat.

"That’s your gate count," Soren said. "Every attendance number you’ll report to the delegation runs through the floor where we’re standing. Move us to the service corridor and you move a third of your foot traffic with us, into a hallway with one exit and no delegation sightline."

Marsh looked at the numbers.

"These could be manufactured," he said.

"They’re your sensors, not mine. Your gates, your counters. Dani read them off your own system. If they’re manufactured, you manufactured them."

Marsh had no answer for that, which was the answer.

"The delegation came for openness," Soren said. "You’ve been telling them all week how open you are. Then on the second morning your busiest attraction vanishes into a back hall. They’ll ask why. You don’t want to answer the why."

"You presume a great deal about what the delegation notices," the chair said.

"They crossed a border to notice things. One of them crossed it to notice us." Soren let that sit. "You can move us. I won’t stop you. I’ll just be standing in a corridor with my pack when a delegate goes looking for the exhibition his own hosts buried, and he’ll find us there, and he’ll ask us why, and I’ll tell him."

◆◆◆◆

The room did the quiet it did when a committee realized it had walked itself somewhere it couldn’t walk back from.

The chair looked at the numbers.

Marsh looked at the chair.

Nobody looked at Soren, which was how he knew he’d won.

"You’ll stay on the main floor," the chair said. "For continuity of the visitor experience."

"For continuity," Soren agreed. "Send me the amended assignment."

"It’ll come through channels."

"Send it today. I’d hate for a clerical delay to move us by accident."

◆◆◆◆

They sent it within the hour.

Soren read it at the booth, the whole thing, the parts he’d have skipped a season ago and never skipped now.

The amended assignment kept Class Z on the main floor.

It kept the booth, the demonstration space, the reception slot.

And it kept one more thing, a thing that had not been in the fight at all, a thing that had already been filled in before the reassignment was ever drafted.

A location.

◆◆◆◆

The main-floor exhibition space had a coordinate on it.

Every slot did. The festival grounds were gridded, and each assignment carried the square it sat on, and Soren had never once cared about the square because a square was just a place to stand.

He cared now.

He read the coordinate on Class Z’s main-floor slot, and then he read it again, and then he pulled up the grounds map Dani had lifted off the works order in the winter.

The coordinate sat over the east yard.

Not near it. Over it. The exhibition space Class Z had just fought to keep put the whole pack directly above the patch of ground Mona had pointed her blunt face at, the down-and-slightly-east square where the pull came from in the dark.

◆◆◆◆

Soren sat with the paper.

The field for the coordinate was pre-filled.

That was the piece that would not leave him. The reassignment had been drafted to move them, and the move had been beaten, and underneath the fight nobody had bothered to have, the main-floor coordinate had already been entered in a hand that wasn’t the committee’s, before the committee ever picked the fight.

Someone had wanted Class Z on the main floor.

Someone had wanted them on this exact square.

The committee’s move to bury them had been real, and clumsy, and it had failed, and it had never mattered, because whoever pre-filled the coordinate had built the fight so that Soren would win it and plant his own pack on the grave believing he’d chosen the spot.

He had fought to stand them on the exact ground the buried thing was reaching up through.

◆◆◆◆

Dani found him still holding the paper.

"You won," she said. "Why do you look like you lost?"

"Because I won." He turned the assignment so she could see the coordinate field. "Read the location."

She read it. She pulled the grounds map without being asked, laid the two side by side, and went quiet.

"That’s the east yard," she said.

"That’s the east yard."

"We fought to stay here. And here is the one square in the building I’d have told you to avoid."

"The field was pre-filled, Dani. Before the reassignment was drafted. Somebody entered this coordinate before the committee ever decided to move us."

Dani looked at the pre-filled field, and then at the map, and then at him, and she did the fast recalculation behind the eyes she did when a thing she’d thought was one shape turned out to be another.

"So the whole reassignment was theater," she said.

"They needed us to choose this square. So they threatened to take it and let me win it back."

◆◆◆◆

Soren looked at the pre-filled field for a long time.

Then he did not tell the rest of the pack, because there was nothing yet to tell them that would do anything but move them off the only square he could now watch.

He told Dani to keep the map open.

She already had.