My Scumbag System Chapter 738: The Cathedral of Glass

The tile did not unlock. That would have been too easy, and nothing about my life has ever been easy.

Instead reality peeled.

A seam ran out from the Key in a line about four feet long, and the floor on either side of that line stopped agreeing with itself. Left side stayed tile. Right side became a stairwell that had absolutely not been there a second earlier, going down at an angle that made my eyes water because it was going down in a direction that had no business existing in a building.

"Oh, I hate that," Jacob said in my ear. "I hate that so much. The sensor feed just recorded a floor appearing. I am editing that out. I am editing that out right now, please give me nine seconds."

"Nine seconds," Isabelle said, calm as a woman ordering tea. "Thirty-nine minutes remaining on your clock, Nakano."

I put the Key away. It had gone cold in my hand, spent for another seven days, and if this went badly it meant we were walking out through concrete or not at all.

Raphael went first. He did not ask. He just squared up and dropped onto the top step and his shoulders filled the whole width of it, gold energy crawling over his fists like static.

"Anything moves, I hit it," he said.

"Anything moves, you tell me first," Natalia said.

"I hit it, then I tell you."

"Raphael."

"Fine. I say the word, then I hit it. The word is ."

Skylar exhaled twelve pockets of smoke over the stairs and it settled without any wind to move it, which meant the air down there was not moving either.

We descended.

Twenty-two steps. I counted because counting kept me from thinking about the fact that my chest was pulling toward the bottom of them, the whole lattice leaning like a dog on a leash that had scented something it wanted. Every step down, the fifth node under my sternum warmed another degree. By step fourteen the pendant was hot enough that Natalia’s Ring had started making the air around us crackle where the two energies met and disagreed.

By step twenty-two I understood that Sublevel Eleven was not a floor.

It was a cathedral.

The ceiling went up. Not eleven floors, not twenty. It went up into a dark that had no top and did not echo, which is a thing you do not notice until it happens to you and then you cannot stop noticing it. The chamber ran out in every direction farther than my thermal sight could reach, and it was full of columns.

Not columns. Tanks.

Glass, or something wearing glass as a rumor, each one twelve feet tall and lit from inside by a pale amber that did not flicker. They ran in rows that went on and on into that unechoing dark, and every single one had something in it.

Emi made a sound behind me. Small. Like someone had stepped on her.

They were people.

Suspended in fluid that hung in stripes instead of settling, arms slightly out, hair floating, eyes open. Every one of them had their eyes open. Men, women, one who looked maybe nineteen, all of them in the same white shift, all of them with electrode ports at the temples that had scarred over and healed and scarred over again.

None of them were breathing.

All of them were alive.

"Oh," Maki said against my ear, very quietly, and her claws came out into my shoulder through the suit. "Oh, I do not like this at all, Master."

"Talk to me, Soomin."

She had gone still at the bottom of the stairs with her gauntlets up and gold burning in both eyes now, no pretense left of the Fox being tucked away.

"They’re all awake," she said. Her voice came out layered, hers and something older sharing a throat. "Every one of them. They’ve been awake the whole time. Master, they can hear us."

"Count."

"I can’t." Her tails flickered into existence, white fire, three of them. "It goes back too far. Hundreds. More than hundreds."

Natalia had stopped walking. She was staring into the nearest tank with her jaw locked so hard I could see the muscle jumping, and the frost coming off her had crawled six feet out along the floor in a fan.

The woman in the tank had electrode scars at her temples and pale eyes and a face I did not know.

The one behind her did.

I knew that face because I had seen it in a photograph three weeks ago, standing in front of a cabin with my father, smiling like a man who had no idea what was coming. Helena Vasquez’s father. Dead twenty years in a Gate accident that never happened.

"Jacob," I said.

"I’m getting nothing." His voice had gone up half an octave. "There is nothing here. No power draw, no heat signature, no mass. This floor does not exist to any instrument I have access to and I have access to a lot right now, which I want to say is going to be a problem legally, but also, what am I looking at? Emi, are you seeing this on your side?"

"I’m seeing it," Emi said.

She had gone up to the glass. Both palms flat against it, green pouring out of her hands into a surface that did not warm and did not respond, and her braids had come loose on one side and she had not noticed.

"Their channels are open," she said. "All of them. Wide open. Nobody closed anybody. They’ve just been held there. For years." Her voice went thin. "Someone put them in a jar and left the lid off and then never came back."

"Emi."

"Their mana is still moving." She turned and her eyes were wet and absolutely furious, which was a combination I had learned to be genuinely afraid of. "Do you understand what that means? Their bodies are still trying. Twenty years of trying. Nobody let them finish and nobody let them stop."

Skylar had not said anything.

That was the loudest thing in the room. Skylar Amane always had something, some flat little knife of a comment to jam into the seam of a moment, and she was standing three tanks down with her hood back and her knives still in their sheaths and her face doing absolutely nothing at all.

"Bubblegum."

"Don’t." She did not look at me. "Give me a second."

"You okay?"

"No." She reached up and put two fingers against the glass, barely touching, the way you touch something at a funeral. "My dad played a benefit show in ninety-four for the families of Gate researchers who died at a facility in the Northern Wastes. Sold out three nights. Raised forty million." Her hand dropped. "There was no facility in the Northern Wastes, was there."