My Scumbag System Chapter 729: The Triage Protocol

"Great." I rolled my shoulders and something deep in the joint popped and the sound went around the basement. "That’s great. Love that for me."

Natalia’s hands were still on my chest. She had not moved them the entire time.

"Six days," she said.

"I know."

"You were going to walk into Sublevel Eleven in six days with a body that is turning into a Gate." Her voice did not rise. It just got very, very cold, and the drain on the floor cracked again. "Do you understand what happens if the thing on that floor is what’s doing this? You would be carrying the door directly to whoever wants to use it. You would be delivering yourself."

"Or," I said, "I’d be the only person on the planet who can walk into that basement and understand what I’m looking at."

She closed her eyes.

"I hate you."

"I know."

"I hate that you’re right."

"I know that too."

Skylar stood up off the bench and stretched until something in her back clicked and then she pulled her hood down for once, which she does about as often as an eclipse.

"Okay. New plan," she said. "Because the old plan was already stupid and now it is stupid and load-bearing." She held up one finger. "One. Nobody outside this basement hears the word lattice. Not Braxton, not Isabelle, not Cel, and especially not Akari, because Akari will sell it and she will get a good price."

"Braxton already knows something’s wrong."

"Braxton knows you’re growing. That’s a different sentence." Second finger. "Two. Jacob, you sit on that correspondence data. Air-gapped. No cloud, no Academy net, nothing that touches a VHC pipe."

Jacob nodded so hard his glasses slipped. "Local drive only. I have a drive that isn’t in any inventory. I built it out of parts."

"Of course you did." Third finger. "Three. Emi maps him every twelve hours. Full aura sweep, logged by hand, on paper, because paper cannot be hacked by a woman with an Aspect that reads probability."

"Every eight," Emi said.

Skylar looked at her.

"Every eight," Emi repeated, and she did not apologize for it, and her chin came up. "If the growth curve spikes again I need the resolution to catch it inside one cycle. Twelve is too coarse. Every eight, and he eats before every session, and he does not fight for three days."

"Braxton said seventy-two hours too," I said.

"Then Braxton and I agree about something and you are outvoted." Emi grabbed my jaw with one hand, which she has never done in her life, and turned my head to look at her. "Three days. Say it."

Her fingers were warm. Her eyes were red-rimmed and absolutely unmoved, and there was still flour on her cheekbone from the dough she abandoned upstairs, and I have looked cosmic horror in the face and been less bothered than I was right then.

"Three days," I said.

"Good." She let go and immediately went scarlet and busied herself with the cart. "Okay. Good. That’s, that’s medically appropriate. That was a medical hold. On your face."

Maki’s tails started moving again.

Natalia finally took her hands off my chest, and where they had been my skin was cold enough to see, five pale fingerprints over the sternum where the fifth node sat, and she looked at those marks for a long moment.

Then she picked up my shirt off the bench and threw it at my head.

"Get dressed," she said. "We have work."

"You’ve been awake for thirty hours."

"So have you, and you are apparently a construction site, so neither of us gets sympathy." She was already moving toward the stairs and her Ring was already glowing and she was already talking faster than her feet. "Formations are wrong. All of them. Every draft I made assumed a five-person entry with you as the primary threat vector and now you are also the primary liability, which means the entry team has to be able to extract you unconscious, which means someone has to be able to carry you, which means Raphael is coming."

"Raphael can’t do subtle."

"Raphael can carry two hundred and thirty pounds up eleven flights of stairs while things are exploding. That’s the job." She stopped at the base of the stairs and turned around and pointed at me with the Ring blazing. "You go to Braxton at nine and you tell him about the three days and nothing else. You eat. You sit down. And at seven tonight you are in my room and you are going to tell me every single thing your father said in that cabin again, from the beginning, and this time I am writing it down."

"That’s an eleven-hour day of paperwork and yelling."

"Yes."

"And then what."

Something crossed her face that I did not have a name for.

"And then it’s Sunday," Natalia said, "and your mother is expecting us for dinner, and she is going to look at you and know, because she always knows, and I am going to sit at that table and hold your hand and let her." She went up two steps and stopped again. "She closed this door once. If anyone on this planet knows what it feels like from the inside, it’s her."

She left.

Skylar picked a cinnamon roll off the tray Emi had abandoned, took a bite, and made a face like she was annoyed at how good it was.

"For the record," she said around it, "when I told you this morning to keep scaring me? I meant a little bit."

"Noted."

"Cool." She headed up. "Dying in a basement, Nakano. Bad aesthetic. Still holds."

Jacob went after her with his tablet clutched to his chest like scripture and his socks slipping on the stairs. Emi stayed to pack the cart, and she kept sneaking looks at the two diagrams sitting side by side on the mats, and every time she looked her hands got a little slower.

Maki came and put her chin on my shoulder from behind, and her tails wrapped my waist, and she smelled like ozone and warm milk.

"Master."

"Yeah."

"If you become a door," she said, very quietly, into my ear, "I will sit in front of it, and nothing will get through."