My Scumbag System Chapter 704: Someone Built a Room in My City

547.

Sky going gray at the edges. Streetlights still on. The mural sun with eleven rays and a face, watching us.

I stood in the middle of the intersection with the bat off my back and let myself look at the thing I’d been avoiding all night.

Because I could see it now. That was the part that had my stomach in a knot.

With the new sense, the block wasn’t a block. It was a diagram. The trans-dimensional particulate hung in the air in a lattice, and the lattice had corners. It had a center. It had four points where the density spiked, one at each street mouth, arranged with a symmetry that no wound in reality has ever bothered with.

Someone had drawn this. On the ground. Under the asphalt. Weeks ago, probably. And then they’d walked away and let it cook.

Nel said.

"By who."

"Third revision."

I looked at the yellow door of the daycare and thought about my father, sitting in a mountain cabin, patient, hiding, telling me he’d spent eighteen years keeping this out of the wrong hands.

Somebody had it anyway.

"Nat."

"Here."

"When it opens, I want the walls staggered. Don’t box the intersection. Leave the east leg open."

A pause. Then: "You want a funnel."

"I want them to come at me in a line."

"That’s not a funnel, that’s a doorman routine." Her voice went thin and dangerous. "You want to stand in the open and let a B-Rank spawn wave walk into you one at a time because you think you can eat it."

"I know I can eat it."

"Satori."

"Kinetic Absorption converts. Every hit makes the next one worse for them. If I take the whole line myself, by the tenth one I’m hitting like something with a rank letter that isn’t C." I turned in a slow circle, checking angles. "And nobody else has to stand in front of anything."

The bond went absolutely silent. Which is the worst thing it does.

Then Natalia said, very quietly, "You planned this before we left the house."

"Yeah."

"You let me draft two formations and you already knew you were going to change it."

"I needed you to draft two formations so the parts that weren’t me were airtight." I looked up at the pharmacy roof. I couldn’t see her. I could feel her, cold and bright and furious, three blocks east with her hand on the ledge. "Nat. Everything you built, I’m using. Every single piece. The walls, the smoke, the scout, the triage. I’m not throwing your work away."

"You’re throwing yourself away."

"I’m throwing myself in front."

"That is the same sentence."

"It really isn’t." I let out a breath. "And you know it isn’t, because you’re the one who told me at three in the morning that this is who I am, and you’d rather burn beside me than freeze in a nice house."

The silence had a different texture this time.

"When this is over," Natalia said, "I am going to make you regret being right."

"Looking forward to it."

"Skylar."

"Yeah," Skylar said.

"If he goes down, you get him out and I don’t care what you have to leave behind."

"Obviously."

"Emi."

"I’m ready," Emi said, and her voice didn’t shake at all, which two months ago it would have.

The streetlights went out all at once. Not a flicker. Just gone, the whole block, like somebody had reached into the grid and closed a hand.

"That wasn’t the grid," Jacob said in my ear, breathless. "That was the Gate. It’s pulling. It’s drawing power off the local infrastructure to finish the resonance, which is insane, that’s, nobody has ever documented a formation doing that because formations don’t need anything, they just happen, they don’t need to be plugged in."

"This one needs to be plugged in."

"This one needs to be plugged in!"

The air went thick. My teeth started to hurt. Down at the mouth of the north street the asphalt developed a hairline crack that ran forty feet in a straight line and then stopped, and out of it came a smell like copper and hot rain.

Soomin’s voice came down from the roof, and it wasn’t quite Soomin’s voice.

"It’s hungry," the Fox said, and she sounded delighted about it. "Oh, it’s very hungry. Master. There’s a lot of them."

"How many."

"More than the paper said."

"Soomin. How many."

The Fox laughed, low in her throat. "Enough."

Air pressure dropped. My ears popped. Twenty feet above the center of the intersection, right over the storm drain, reality developed a seam.

It didn’t tear. That’s what got me. Gates tear. This one opened like a zipper, running down through the air in a line so clean it looked machined, and the light that came out of it was the wrong color for anything. Not the oily blue of a standard formation. Not the sick violet of a Black. This was a flat white with no warmth in it at all, like the inside of a fluorescent tube.

I looked at it with the new sense and immediately wished I hadn’t.

Because behind it, past the membrane, there were lines. Grid lines. A lattice running off in every direction into a distance that didn’t have a horizon, and things moving along the lattice like beads on wire.

Somebody had built a room and put a door in my city.

"Contact," Natalia said flatly, and the first wall of ice went up across the west leg with a crack that shook windows for a block.

The second went up on the south. The third on the north.

East stayed open.

I planted my feet in the middle of the intersection, right on top of somebody’s chalk hopscotch grid, and rolled the bat off my shoulder into both hands. The Dragon Witch’s Ring came awake against my finger, hot enough to feel through the glove.

The first thing came out of the seam at a dead sprint.

It hit the ground on four legs that bent the wrong way, and it was gray and hairless and had a face like somebody had described a wolf to a machine that had never seen one. Behind it, two more. Behind those, six. Behind those, a shape big enough that it had to fold to come through the opening.

They looked at the ice. They looked at the smoke.

Then they looked at the one open street, and the one guy standing in front of it.

"Okay," I said. "Line forms here."

They came.