My Scumbag System Chapter 703: The Tuning of Sector Twelve

They left first. Fourteen minutes of boots and gear and Hikari trying to hug everyone and Marco getting emotional in the doorway, and then the front hall was empty and the house had that ringing quiet you only get after a lot of people go somewhere dangerous.

Braxton was on the porch smoking a synth-cigarette he hadn’t lit. He didn’t ask where the second van was going. He didn’t ask why my name wasn’t on the contract roster he’d handed me himself.

He just said, "Zero six hundred."

"Zero six hundred."

"Whatever’s in Sector Twelve." He tapped ash off the unlit end. "It’s not going to be what the readouts say."

"I know."

"You don’t." He looked at me sideways with one exhausted eye. "You think you know. That’s different. That’s how people end up as a smear on a wall with a really confident expression." He put the cigarette away. "Go on. And Nakano. If someone’s standing on that block waiting for you, don’t talk to them for as long as you want to."

"That’s not really my strong suit."

"Yeah," Braxton said. "I know."

Meridian Heights at 0512 was the worst thing I’d seen in a month, and I’d recently had a conversation with a library.

Because it was empty.

Jacob’s gas leak had worked exactly the way he said it would. Six blocks. Category Two escalation, automatic municipal closure, voluntary relocation vouchers, a hotline that led to a bewildered man named Gerald. Barricades at every intersection with those orange sawhorses that mean nothing to anyone. A gas authority truck parked crooked outside a bakery with the hazard lights going, and no one in it, because the actual inspection wasn’t scheduled until noon.

And nine thousand people gone.

Streets with nobody in them. A swing set moving because of wind. A shop sign flipped to CLOSED with a handwritten note underneath apologizing for the inconvenience, and a chalkboard outside the coffee place that still said TUESDAY’S SPECIAL in someone’s careful handwriting.

The community center sat on the corner of block four. Two stories, brick, a mural on the side wall that a bunch of kids had clearly painted themselves because one of the suns had eleven rays and a face. Bright yellow door. A rack of tiny chairs visible through the window.

Sixty kids came through that door at seven every morning.

I stood in the street looking at that mural and felt the thing in my chest go very quiet and very cold, and it wasn’t Kaelen’s cold and it wasn’t the new cosmic thing either. It was just mine.

"Satori." Natalia’s hand landed between my shoulder blades. "Breathe."

"I’m breathing."

"You’re grinding your teeth. You do it when you’ve decided something."

"I decided something."

"I know." Her hand didn’t move. "Do it after we get everyone out."

I opened my eyes. Turned around. Five faces.

"Positions," I said.

Natalia took the roof of the pharmacy three blocks east, because it had the sightline down all four legs of the intersection and because she’d chosen it forty hours ago off a wireframe map. She went up the fire escape without touching more than four rungs, purple hair vanishing over the lip, and then her voice came through the earpiece.

"In position. I have the whole intersection. First wall goes up the second something comes through, and I can hold three at ninety seconds each before my channels start screaming."

"Don’t hold three."

"I’ll hold three."

"Nat."

"I’ll hold what I have to hold." The ring pulsed in the bond, cold and steady. "Don’t make me hold four."

Skylar walked the perimeter, and by 0530 there was smoke lying in every gutter and doorway on the block, so thin you’d think it was morning haze if you didn’t know better. She seeds it low and lets it climb. She’d shown me once, on the porch, how she stacks layers so that the third one is the only real one and the first two are just for teaching you where to look.

"Twelve pockets," she said, dropping down beside me. Her violet eyes had that flat quality they get when she stops performing. "Six on the north face, four along the retail strip, two inside the community center lobby in case something’s already in there."

"Is something already in there?"

"No." She flicked her hood back. "But I don’t like the lobby."

Soomin went vertical. She was up the community center wall in under six seconds, gauntlets biting brick, and she perched on the roof edge with one white tail out and her eyes going that blue at the rims.

"Building’s clear," she said. "I went through all of it. Nobody’s in the daycare, nobody’s in the offices, there’s a cat in the storage room and I put it in a carrier and I put the carrier two streets away, please don’t be mad."

"Why would I be mad."

"Because it took ninety seconds," Soomin said miserably.

"Soomin."

"Yes?"

"Good work on the cat."

She made a small strangled noise and disappeared behind a vent housing, and I heard Akari cackle over the comm.

Emi set up her triage point in the loading bay of the pharmacy, under Natalia’s roof, because it had a roll door she could drop and a wall she could put between herself and the street. She laid out her kit on a folded tarp in the order she’d drilled for two days. Then she came out and grabbed my wrist and pushed a pulse of green into me until the ache in my ribs from Sunday finally shut up.

"You’re at ninety-four percent," she said. "That’s the highest you’ve been since the Necropolis and I want you to notice that, because it took me nine days."

"I noticed."

"You didn’t."

"I noticed the thread in my harness strap too."

Emi’s whole face went red from the collarbone up. She let go of my wrist, said something about calibrating her aura, and walked into the loading bay at a speed that was not walking.

Akari took the chokepoint. She stood in the middle of the intersection with her hands in her pockets and her chains not out, looking up at the four street mouths like a woman deciding which door to leave a party through.

"So," she said. "Nine thousand people got a text message and a hotel voucher, and none of them will ever know."

"That’s the idea."

"That’s very boring of you."

She rolled her shoulders. The chains came out then, gold and ethereal, twelve meters unspooling from each wrist and pooling on the asphalt like something spilled. "You could have called the VHC. You’d be a hero on the news by lunch. Four hundred saved lives with your face on it. Sponsorships. My betting pools would have printed money."

"And whoever built this Gate walks off the block with their data."

"Mm." Akari smiled at me sideways, and for one second it wasn’t the flirt or the hustler. It was the girl who’d asked her sister a question and hadn’t liked the answer. "That’s the right call, Daddy. Just so you know. I’m still charging you for it."

Jacob set up in the pharmacy stairwell with three datapads and a laptop that had visible scorch damage, and I honestly do not want to know.

"Okay so, okay," he said, glasses sliding, fingers already going. "I’ve got the municipal sensor grid pulled, I’ve got seismic, I’ve got the trans-dimensional particulate feed from the VHC’s own array which I am absolutely not authorized to see, and, um, the numbers are wrong."

"Wrong how."

"Wrong like." He turned a screen toward me. Lines. Peaks. A curve that climbed and then did something it shouldn’t. "Natural pre-formation has a chaotic ramp. It’s noise. It’s a wound opening. This isn’t noise. This is a sine wave with harmonics." He looked up, and behind the panic there was that other thing, the thing that lit up when the puzzle got good. "Satori, this Gate is being tuned."