My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 162: The Ground We Were Standing On Started Answering Back

The day off ended and the festival took them back.

Class Z returned to the main floor, to the square they’d fought to keep, and Soren stood on it knowing what was under it.

That was the thing about the square now. Everyone else on the floor saw an exhibition space. He saw the lid of something.

◆◆◆◆

He’d spent the day off letting himself be buried under his own pack, and it had helped, and now he was back on the one patch of ground in the building he could not stop reading.

Down and slightly east.

The pull hadn’t come again since the night of the phantom draw. He’d half-let himself believe it had been a one-time thing, a reach that the buried thing had made once and not repeated.

That belief lasted until midmorning.

◆◆◆◆

The floor was full. The crowd was thick and warm and ordinary, families and students and a scatter of delegation gray in the good seats.

Selah was at her display in the center of the reception hall two floors up. Maren was on the demonstration floor. Dani was at the booth. Joan was greeting.

And Soren, standing on the square, felt the ground pull.

Not hard. A thread of it, the same one-way tug he’d felt in the dark, reaching up through the floor and into his wire and taking a small piece of him before he’d finished registering it had started.

He did not move.

He’d trained a season of not moving. He stood on the exhibition square with a crowd flowing past him and let a buried thing take a degree of him in front of two hundred people, and none of them saw it, because there was nothing to see. The cost was felt. It was never visible.

◆◆◆◆

Then something new happened.

The pull reached for him, and this time, from two floors up, something reached back.

Selah.

He felt it as clearly as he felt the draw itself, her cold current in his wire flexing, turning, orienting toward the same down-and-east direction the pull came from. She was at her display, hands full of ice for a hall of strangers, and some part of her bond had just swung to face the thing under the yard. A compass needle, finding a pole it hadn’t known was there.

She didn’t know she was doing it.

He was sure of that. Selah rationed. Selah tracked. If Selah had felt a second draw on the soul she’d have said so, cold and immediate. This wasn’t something she was choosing. It was something in her bond answering a call on a frequency she didn’t have conscious access to.

The buried thing pulled.

Selah’s bond turned toward it.

And Maren, on the demonstration floor, dropped a flame.

◆◆◆◆

Soren saw it happen across the hall.

Maren was running a small showcase, easy fire, nothing that should have slipped. And in the middle of a shape she’d made a hundred times, the flame guttered, went the wrong color for less than a second, that deep blue-white he’d seen once on the back of her hand, and then it was orange again and she caught it and covered the stumble with a flourish and the crowd thought it was part of the act.

Maren looked up.

Across the whole floor, over the heads of the crowd, she found Soren, because she’d felt something too and she’d learned this season that when she felt something wrong the first thing to do was find him.

He gave her nothing. Not because he had nothing. Because they were both in front of an audience and he needed her to keep the flame steady more than he needed to confirm what she already knew.

She kept the flame steady.

The blue did not come again.

◆◆◆◆

Three of them had reacted to the pull at once.

Soren stood on the square and understood the shape of what he’d just felt, and the shape was worse than a single leak.

The thing under the east yard hadn’t just reached for him. It had reached for him, and his bond had carried the reach out to the pack, and two of the strongest linkages he had, ice and fire, had turned toward the source without being asked. The buried thing pulled on Soren, and because the pack ran on Soren, the buried thing had brushed all of them.

He was the door. They were the rooms behind it.

And the thing under the yard had just knocked on the door and felt every room shift.

◆◆◆◆

He found Dani at the booth without hurrying.

"Log a time," Soren said, low, both of them facing the crowd. "Mark it now. Exact."

Dani marked it without asking why. That was the new Dani. The why came after the log, not before.

"Now tell me," she said.

"Something reached up through the floor about a minute ago. It took a piece of me. And Selah and Maren both answered it without knowing they answered it."

Dani’s hands went still on the terminal.

"Answered it how?"

"Selah’s bond turned toward the source. Maren dropped a color she’s only made once. Neither of them chose it. It went through me and out to them."

◆◆◆◆

Dani was quiet for a moment, and Soren watched her run it, the fast inward recalculation she ran on everything.

"That’s not a leak," she said finally. "A leak is you losing something. This is you conducting something. You’re not a hole it’s draining. You’re a line it’s using to reach the rest of us."

"That’s what it felt like."

"Then standing on this square is worse than we thought." She kept her voice flat and her eyes on the crowd. "We fought to stand you here. Directly over it. You didn’t just plant yourself on the thing that drains you. You planted the whole pack on the one spot where it can touch all of you through you."

"I know."

"Somebody wanted exactly that. The pre-filled coordinate. They didn’t put us here to watch us. They put us here to use you as a cable."

◆◆◆◆

Soren had already reached the same place. Hearing Dani say it did not make it better. It made it real, and a thing did not become real until a second person had seen it too.

"Don’t tell the others yet," he said.

"You always say that."

"And you always agree, so far."

"So far." Dani pulled up her private file, the one he’d told her to keep, and he watched her add a line to it without reading the line. "I agree. But there’s a cost to the not-telling, and it’s going up. You know that."

"I know."

"Selah already caught Yara at something. Maren’s already carrying a hole she can’t see the bottom of. You’re building a pack that trusts you by keeping each of them one secret short of the full picture. That works until it doesn’t."

"When it stops working, I’ll tell them everything."

"You’ll tell them everything the day it’s too late to have told them sooner." Dani said it without heat, a fact laid on a table. "That’s the day. I’ve met you. That’s always the day."

◆◆◆◆

He didn’t argue, because she wasn’t wrong, and arguing would have been asking her to pretend she was.

Two floors up, Selah finished her display and did not know her bond had swung on a hinge she couldn’t feel.

On the demonstration floor, Maren restarted her showcase and did not know her fire had answered a language she didn’t speak.

At the booth, Dani closed her file, and the newest line sat under the older ones, and somewhere near the top of that file a two-word column header waited with two names under it.

Soren stood on the square.

◆◆◆◆

The delegate came through late in the morning.

Not to the Class Z floor. He kept his distance from the exhibition now, since the bout, since whatever word he’d said to his aide. He walked the far side of the hall with his hands folded, and he did not look at Maren, and the not-looking was louder than looking would have been.

He looked at the floor instead.

Soren watched him do it. The delegate crossed the hall on the far side, and at one point he slowed, and his eyes went down to the ground, to a spot on the exhibition floor, and he studied it with the settled attention of a man looking at a place he already has a name for.

The spot he studied was the square Class Z was standing on.

The delegate looked at the ground under Soren’s pack for the length of three breaths, and his face did the small private work of a man confirming a location, and then he moved on and did not look back.

◆◆◆◆

Soren filed it.

The delegate knew about the square.

That man had crossed a border to read a fox’s blood, had answered Maren’s win with a place name Soren couldn’t hear, and had just looked at the exact ground the buried thing was reaching up through and known it for what it was.

The foreign interest and the thing under the yard were not two threads either.

Everything was converging on one square of floor. The fame that built the festival. The office that pre-filled the coordinate. The delegate who came for Maren’s line. The buried thing that pulled on the wire. All of it pointing at one patch of ground, and his whole pack standing on top of it because he’d fought to keep them there.

He had never in his life wanted his old sight back as badly as he wanted it now, the thing that used to hand him a man’s intent for free, so he could have looked at the delegate across the hall and known what the word had been.

He didn’t have it.

What he had was trained eyes and a buried thing under his feet and a pack that trusted him one secret short, and a festival with three days left to run.

◆◆◆◆

That night he did not sleep on the square, because you did not sleep at a festival exhibit, but he lay in the dorm and felt the direction of the thing even from there, down and slightly east, patient, no longer a single reach in the dark but a presence he could feel the shape of now that he knew to feel for it.

Yara found him awake.

She did not ask what was wrong. She lay down along his back, humanoid, warm, her arm over him and her mouth near the back of his neck, and she said the only thing that needed saying.

"It’s closer," she said. "I feel it too now. Since the floor."

"I know."

"Whatever it is. It’s learning us." Her arm tightened. "It touched all of us today, through you. I felt Selah turn. I felt Maren slip. I felt you not scream again."

"I didn’t have anything to scream about. It was small."

"It’s small the way the first cold morning is small," Yara said, into his neck. "And then it’s winter."

Soren lay in the dark and did not answer, and Yara held on, and two floors of quiet dorm sat above a patch of ground that had spent the day learning the shape of everyone he loved.