My Scumbag System Chapter 739: The Maintenance Log of Failures

"No."

"Cool. Great. Love that for me." Her voice cracked exactly once on the word and then locked itself back down, and she pulled her hood up. "Moving. Somebody give me a direction before I start setting things on fire, and I don’t even have a fire Aspect, so that would be embarrassing for everyone."

I gave them a direction because the lattice gave me one.

It had stopped leaning west. Down here it leaned forward, deeper into the rows, and the pull had gone from a tug to a hand between my shoulder blades pushing.

We moved. Raphael front, me center, Natalia right, Skylar bleeding smoke on the left, Emi at my back with her aura up so bright I could see my own shadow thrown forward on the floor. Soomin took the ceiling, and I mean the ceiling, gauntlets punched into stone eight meters up, running ahead in the dark like something out of a story that ends badly for everybody.

Twenty-two minutes on the clock.

The tanks changed as we went.

Older. The glass got cloudier and the shifts got a different cut and the amber light dimmed a shade every fifty meters, and the faces started looking wrong in a way I could not name for a while and then could. The ones farther back were not human.

Not monsters. Not Gate-spawn. Human shaped, human sized, and something about the joints was off by a few degrees, the way that A-Rank in Meridian Heights had been off, and their eyes had no whites at all.

"Nel."

Nel said, and there was nothing playful in it.

"Guess."

A pause.

The lattice pushed harder.

We came out of the rows into an open circle maybe forty meters across, and in the center of it, on a floor of black stone worked with symbols I had last seen carved into the skull of something I killed with a baseball bat, was a chair.

Just a chair. Old steel, restraints on the arms and ankles, a neural halo on a swing arm. Electrode ports. It was the chair from the photograph, the one my mother sat in twenty-three years ago while my father put a Gate in a laboratory and asked something on the other side to reach through.

It had never been moved. The floor around it was worn where feet had shuffled.

Behind it, filling the far arc of the circle, was the door.

Not a Gate. There was no seam, no tear, no white light. It was an actual door, iron and bronze and something that hurt to look at directly, twelve feet tall, set into nothing, standing in open air with no wall to hold it. Every symbol on my Key was on that door somewhere, and every symbol on that door was doing what the Key had done at the top of the stairs.

They were all pointing at me.

"Well," I said. "That’s mine."

"Don’t." Natalia’s hand closed around my wrist and her Ring bit so cold it burned. "Don’t you dare say that like it’s funny."

"It’s a little funny."

"It is not a little funny." She got in front of me. Both hands on my chest, both palms right over the node, and the cold went into me until my teeth ached. "Nineteen minutes. We take images, we take samples, we take whatever Jacob can rip out of that stone, and we leave. You do not touch that door."

"Natalia."

"Say it."

The lattice hummed. Every channel in my body, thirty-four primary and forty-nine secondary and however many had grown in the last two hours, all of them singing on the same frequency as the thing across the room, and it felt like standing in a doorway on a winter night with a hand on the knob and someone warm calling your name from inside.

I wanted to open it so badly my hands were shaking.

"I’m not touching it," I said.

Her eyes searched mine for the lie. She did not find one, because it was not one yet, and Natalia Kuzmina had gotten very good at spotting the difference.

"Okay," she said. She did not let go.

Raphael had walked out toward the door and stopped ten meters short with his arms crossed, staring at it like it had insulted his grandmother.

"Hey."

"What."

"There’s something on the other side." His jaw worked. "I can hear breathing. I’ve been listening to it since we hit the bottom of the stairs and I figured it was the tanks but it’s not the tanks. It’s coming from there."

Soomin dropped off the ceiling and landed in a crouch, and when she stood up she was mostly the Fox, white hair and gold eyes and five tails burning behind her, and she looked at the door the way a starving thing looks at a butcher window.

"It’s been waiting for him," she said, and her voice was all the Fox now, low and delighted. "It knows his name. It’s been saying his name for eighteen years and nobody ever answered."

"Great. Cool. Everyone hearing voices from the murder door, that’s the vibe now," Skylar said. She had her knives out. "Isabelle. Clock."

"Eighteen minutes," Isabelle said. "Jacob is uploading. Extract on my mark or I come down there myself, and I will be extremely rude about it."

Jacob’s voice cracked in.

"Guys. Guys, guys, guys. The stone. The floor around the chair. It’s not stone, it’s a storage medium, there’s a data structure carved into it, and I am pulling it and it’s, uh." He stopped. "It’s a log. It’s a maintenance log."

"Of what?"

"Of them." Something scraped over his mic. "Every tank has an entry. Date of insertion, subject designation, integration percentage at time of arrest, and, uh, and a line for authorization signature." He swallowed. "They’re all signed by the same person. Every one. For twenty-three years."

Emi’s aura flickered.

"Jacob," she said. "Whose name is on the last one?"

"The last one’s not twenty years ago," Jacob said. "The last entry’s from Tuesday."

The temperature dropped and it was not Natalia.

Something in the dark past the door shifted its weight, and I heard it, all of us heard it, a sound like a building settling in a body that had been holding one position for a very long time.

And then a voice came out of the black beyond the rows behind us, from the direction we had come, from the stairs.

Pleasant. Unhurried. A voice I had heard in a glass room one hundred and forty-six floors up while the city glittered underneath us like something she owned.

"You are exactly nine minutes early," Seraphina Vance said. "I confess I expected better arithmetic from a boy who broke my sister’s guild in a single afternoon."

Every one of us turned.

She stood at the mouth of the rows in floor-length white, silver hair down her back, one hand resting on the glass of a tank as casually as a woman leaning on a garden gate. No aides. No Sanctions Division. Nothing behind her but rows of open eyes.

Natalia’s Ring flared so hard the floor cracked.

"Don’t," Seraphina said, not looking at her. "You would be very fast, and I would be very dead, and then nobody in this room would learn a single useful thing."

Her crystalline eyes found me over Natalia’s shoulder.

"Hello, Satori," she said. "You found my grandfather’s mistake. Would you like to know why I never fixed it?"