My Scumbag System Chapter 701: Every Thread Leads to Me

"Noah."

"You’ll do it," Noah said, "because he’s right, and because if you go to Meridian Heights I will physically remove you, and neither of us wants that conversation."

Cel exhaled. Then she stepped up and kissed my cheek, dry and quick and entirely unlike her, and she was already walking before I processed it.

"Come back," she said over her shoulder. "I have a full report to demand."

Monday night through Tuesday afternoon, the house turned into a machine.

Natalia ran both formations in the basement gym like she was auditioning for a war. Isabelle drilled her seven on corridor rotation until Hikari begged for mercy and Marco stopped being able to lift his arms. My five ran barrier timing over and over: Natalia throwing walls, Skylar seeding smoke, Soomin calling threat vectors from a catwalk twelve feet up, Emi tracking output on all four of us so she’d know who was about to break before they knew.

Akari negotiated her participation for two hours, settled on a cut of whatever we recovered plus one favor of her choosing, and then executed her chain work so flawlessly that Natalia stopped being able to complain about her.

I tested what I could without showing my hand. The new sense was still faint, like tasting color. But standing in the gym with my eyes shut, I could feel the lines: Natalia’s threads running out of her spine, cold and glassy where the ring touched them. Skylar’s smoke reading as a soft absence, a hole shaped like a person. Emi’s aura not as light but as a slow green pressure, a hand on the back of the world. Soomin’s Fox coiled in her chest like something huge folded into a shoebox.

I could see how they connected. That was the part I didn’t tell anyone. There were threads between us, thin and bright, and they all ran to the same place.

They ran to me.

Nel found that hilarious. Apollo apparently opened a market on whether I’d say something insufferable about it.

I said nothing insufferable about it. I’m growing.

Emi cried twice. Once Tuesday morning when Soomin’s Fox slipped for four seconds and left claw marks in a padded wall. Once Tuesday evening for no reason she’d admit to, into a mixing bowl, while making enough onigiri to feed a small army through a siege. She packed twelve of them into my bag before I could stop her, and then she grabbed my collar and pulled me down and pressed her forehead against mine and said, "I’m going to be behind you the whole time. Don’t turn around to check."

"Wasn’t going to."

"You always turn around to check."

"That’s slander."

"It’s not slander, it’s a pattern," she said, and her eyes were wet and furious and absolutely certain, and I thought about how six months ago this girl apologized to a chair for bumping it.

Skylar didn’t say anything at all until Tuesday at 2340, when she appeared on the back porch railing beside me with a clove cigarette she wasn’t smoking.

"Jacob did it," she said.

"He did it?"

"Forty minutes ago. Category Two escalation, node four differential, automated closure notice went out through the municipal alert net at twenty-three hundred." She flicked ash off a cigarette that had no ash. "Six blocks. Daycare’s closed through Thursday. Retail strip’s under advisory. The three towers got voluntary relocation vouchers and a hotline number that leads to a man named Gerald."

"Who is Gerald."

"Gerald is real. Gerald is a genuine gas authority employee who is currently very confused." Skylar’s mouth curved. "Jacob’s in the common room. He hasn’t blinked in an hour. Marco brought him a sandwich and he cried on it."

"He’s had a big week."

"He closed six city blocks with a spreadsheet and a moral justification, exactly like you said he would." She turned her head, and the porch light caught the pink in her hair. "You do that a lot. Look at somebody and see the one thing they’ve been dying for someone to ask them for."

"It’s a talent."

"It’s a con."

"It’s a con that saves four hundred people, so I’m going to keep doing it."

Skylar looked at me for a long moment. Then she leaned over and kissed the corner of my mouth, brief and warm and not remotely brief enough, and slid off the railing.

"Don’t die in an intersection," she said. "It’s a bad place to die. No aesthetic."

I went up at one in the morning. Maki had annexed the pillow and one of her tails had annexed my wrist, and she opened one gold eye when I sat on the edge of the mattress.

"You bought the tuna," she said.

"I bought the tuna."

"The good tuna. From the harbor place. Not the box tuna."

"The good tuna. It’s in the fridge with your name on it in Emi’s handwriting."

She purred so hard the terrarium rattled. Bartholomew continued his lettuce campaign, unbothered by mortal concerns, an immortal snail with better work-life balance than anyone in this house.

Natalia came in without knocking. She’d changed out of the suit, and she stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and the ring throwing faint blue across the doorframe.

"Jacob’s asleep on the datapad," she said. "Isabelle briefed her seven at midnight and made them repeat it back twice. Akari has already sold three people on a betting pool about Wednesday."

"Who’s she got favored?"

"You, at nine to two. Emi bet on you and doesn’t understand how odds work." Natalia crossed the room. Sat down on the mattress next to me, close enough that the cold off her shoulder raised the hair on my arm. "Five hours."

"Five hours."

She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she reached over and took my hand and pressed my palm flat against her sternum, right over her heartbeat, which was going faster than she’d ever admit.

"Whoever’s on that block Wednesday morning," she said. "They’ll be watching to see what you do."

"Then they’ll get a show."

"Satori."

"I know."

"They wanted you standing there."

"I know."

She turned my hand over and closed her fingers around it, and her ring bit cold into my knuckles, and her eyes had that white fire at the edges that meant the bond was wide open and she wasn’t bothering to hide anything anymore.

"Then let’s give them exactly what they asked for," Natalia said, "and let’s make sure they hate it."