My Scumbag System Chapter 696: A Squeeze Play

Eleven minutes and forty seconds.

She’d shaved twenty seconds off her own estimate, which meant she’d run part of the way. I heard her boots hit the stairs before I heard her key in the lock, and by the time I had the door open she was already stepping past me into the room with the momentum of someone who’d been walking through obstacles her entire life and expected the pattern to continue.

She’d changed. Full combat suit, the custom job in purple and black that hugged every inch of her like it had been painted on by someone with a very specific agenda. Her hair was pulled back into the tight tactical braid she only used when she expected violence, white streaks catching the moonlight from the window and glowing faintly the way they did when the Covenant hummed too loud in her chest.

She looked at the blown-out lamp. Then the feathers. Then Maki, still purring, still naked under the blanket, one tail wrapped around my wrist like a claim of ownership.

"The cat sneezed," Natalia said.

"Sneezed hard."

"Uh huh."

She crossed the room and pulled the blanket up higher over Maki’s shoulders, which was possibly the single most confusing act of tenderness I’d witnessed all week. Then she turned, dropped her bag on the desk, and yanked open the encrypted map file on her datapad before she’d even fully sat down.

The holographic display bloomed above the surface. Meridian Heights in wireframe, streets and structures rendered in pale blue lines, with a pulsing red marker sitting directly over a residential block.

"Show me the message," she said.

I handed her my phone. She read it four times. I watched her eyes move, tracking the same nine words over and over, hunting for something buried in the syntax that I’d missed.

"It’s not a warning," she said finally.

"It reads like a warning."

"It reads like an invitation dressed as a warning." She turned the phone toward me, tapping the screen with one finger. "This isn’t Kenji’s work. Why include that? If the goal was to alert you to a threat, the origin is irrelevant. You’d respond to a Gate in a residential zone regardless of who made it. But they specified. Which means the origin is the point. They want you to know someone else has the research."

Gods, she was good.

Six months ago this woman had wanted me dead. She used to walk past my door and radiate contempt so thick I could taste it. Now she was sitting in my ruined bedroom at two in the morning, dissecting a message from an interdimensional stalker with the surgical attention of a woman who’d already decided that my problems were the only problems worth having.

"So it’s a lure," I said.

"It’s a lure with a real Gate attached, which is worse. Whoever sent this doesn’t need you to walk into a trap. They just need you to walk into a place where they’ve already decided what happens next." She expanded the map with two fingers, zooming into the marked block. "Sector 12, block four. Residential. Three apartment complexes, a strip of retail, and this."

She tapped a building. The label resolved.

MERIDIAN HEIGHTS COMMUNITY CENTER.

"Daycare on the ground floor," she said. "Capacity for sixty children. Operating hours seven to six."

The air in the room went thin.

"Seventy-two hours from now," she continued, "puts formation somewhere around Wednesday morning. Peak drop-off window."

I set the bat down against the desk because I didn’t trust my grip.

Here’s the thing about being a scumbag. You get comfortable with it. You build an identity around it, you tell yourself the morality is a costume you wear when it’s useful and discard when it isn’t, and you sleep just fine at night because you’ve done the math and concluded that a world that eats people alive doesn’t get to demand you play nice.

And then somebody puts a dimensional wound under a room full of four-year-olds and every part of you that thought it was above caring stands up and starts screaming.

Kaelen would have felt this too. That was the part that surprised me. The old enforcer had killed people for money and slept through the aftermath, but he’d had rules, and one of them had involved children in a way he’d never explained to anyone, and I’d inherited that piece of him along with the pressure points and the knife work and the ability to read a room for exits.

"We’re not waiting three days," I said.

"No," Natalia agreed. "We’re not."

"The B-Rank contract is Wednesday."

"The B-Rank contract is Wednesday at zero six hundred." She was already pulling up a second window, cross-referencing timestamps. "Which means if the Sector 12 formation holds to a seventy-two hour window, we’re being asked to be in two places at once. That’s not coincidence. That’s design."

"Someone knows our schedule."

"Someone knows Braxton’s schedule, which means someone has access to Academy contract assignments, which means someone is either inside the VHC or has bought somebody who is." Her jaw tightened. Frost bloomed across the datapad’s edge and she wiped it away without looking. "Satori. This is a squeeze play. They want us to choose. Either we abandon the official contract and get flagged as unreliable, or we run the contract and let Sector 12 happen."

"Or."

She looked up.

"Or we do both."

"Explain."

I pulled a chair around and dropped into it backward, arms folded over the backrest, close enough that our knees touched. Her leg pressed against mine without shifting away, which was as close to a hug as she got when she was in tactical mode.

"Braxton assigned me to lead," I said. "That’s my roster. Mine. Not his. He handed me command and walked out of the room, which means the composition is my call and nobody upstairs gets to second-guess it until the after-action report."

Understanding moved across her face. "You’re going to split the team."

"I’m going to split the team."

"That’s insane."

"That’s Tuesday."

"It’s Sunday."

"Metaphorically Tuesday."