My Scumbag System Chapter 740: The Coward’s Museum

I have had a lot of bad mornings.

I have woken up in a body that was not mine with a god’s voice in my skull telling me I had two months to seduce my stepsister or my testicles would experience a religious event. I have watched a tree older than human language cry through a puppet shaped like a child. I have been struck by enough lightning to run a hospital.

Somehow the worst one is this. Standing in a basement full of preserved people while the most powerful woman in Valoria asks me if I want to hear a story, and me wanting to say yes.

"Everybody hold," I said.

Raphael did not hold. He half turned, gold crackling up his forearms, and Natalia’s voice hit him like a thrown brick.

"Santoro. Stand down."

"She’s got a Sanctions team stacked in that stairwell."

"She does not," Seraphina said. She lifted her hand off the tank glass and studied her palm as if checking for dust. "I came alone. It would be difficult to explain to my staff why the President of the Commission required access to a floor that does not exist."

Skylar laughed, one flat syllable with no humor in it at all.

"Sure. And you just happened to be here on a Friday at seven-forty in the morning."

"I have been here every Friday at seven-forty in the morning for eleven years." Seraphina walked. She did not hurry, and her shoes made no sound on the black stone, and she stopped at the edge of the circle with the chair between us. "The maintenance log Mister Williams is currently copying will confirm that. I would ask him to stop, but he has already sent it to three separate drives and I find the initiative admirable."

Jacob made a noise on the comm like a mouse being stepped on.

"Kid," Isabelle said in my ear, dry as bone. "Keep uploading. She is talking, which means she wants something. Sixteen minutes."

Emi had not moved from behind me. Her aura had gone strange, guttering green and then flaring, and I felt her hand fist in the back of my suit.

"They’re all awake," she said.

She said it to Seraphina. Not a question, not a plea. Emi Aoyama, who eight months ago apologized to furniture, looked at the woman who ran the country and told her a fact.

"Yes," Seraphina said.

"Every single one of them is conscious. Their mana channels are open, they have full neural activity, and they have been like this for years." Emi’s voice climbed and did not break. "Do you know what that feels like?"

"No."

"Then why are they still in there?"

Seraphina looked at her. Really looked, the way she had looked at me in the glass room, sorting every version of what happens next into columns.

"Because the alternative was killing them," she said, "and I was twenty-one years old, and I was a coward."

Nobody said anything.

The door breathed. That is the only word for it. The air in the circle pulled toward it and then pushed back out, one long slow cycle, and the amber light in every tank within twenty meters dimmed and came back.

"Nine minutes early," Seraphina said, "and yet still late. Look at the floor, Satori."

I looked.

The symbols worked into the black stone were not decoration. I had thought they were the same as the ones on that A-Rank’s bone spur and they were, but seeing them at scale, in a circle, with the chair at the center and the door at the arc, the shape resolved.

Trunk line. Four heavy nodes. Loops closing instead of branching.

A fifth node in the middle.

Emi had drawn this on a tablet in my kitchen five days ago while flour dried on her cheek. Jacob had drawn it in Sector Twelve from particulate density readings. I was carrying it in my ribs.

"That’s the lattice," I said.

"That is a receiver," Seraphina said. "The Gate structure you have been growing since Tuesday morning is the transmitter. My grandfather built this room to house the receiver. Your father built you to be the other half."

"Fourteen minutes," Isabelle said.

"Nel."

Nel said, and she sounded ill.

"Yeah, I got that part."

"He isn’t leaving," said the Fox.

Soomin, or the thing wearing her, had drifted three steps toward the door, and her tails threw blue light across the tanks in a slow sweep. She was smiling. She had a lot of teeth for a girl who apologized when she sneezed.

"Soomin," I said.

"She’s here. She’s just excited." Gold eyes slid to me, and the Fox tilted her head. "Do you know what’s on the other side of that? I do. I’ve smelled it in the deep places. It doesn’t have a shape yet."

"Get behind Raphael."

"Make me."

"Soomin." I put it flat and I put weight in it, the thing I had been building all year, the thing that made seventeen people follow me into an evacuated block before breakfast. "Behind Raphael."

The Fox’s tails snapped once. Then Soomin’s shoulders came down and pink bled back into her hair from the roots and she scrambled backward so fast she tripped on nothing.

"Sorry. Sorry. She wanted to see, I couldn’t, I’m sorry."

"You’re fine."

"I’m not fine, I almost, she almost."

"Soomin." I did not look away from Seraphina. "You held her off in a room that’s screaming at both of us. That’s the whole job."

Soomin made a wounded sound and got behind Raphael, and Raphael put a hand on her shoulder without looking at her, which for Raphael Vargas was basically a marriage proposal.

Natalia had not moved from in front of me. Her palms were still on my chest and there was frost forming on my suit in a ring around them.

"Twelve minutes," she said, low, only for me. "She’s stalling you."

"I know."

"Then stop enjoying it."

"I’m not enjoying it."

"You’re doing the thing with your mouth."

"There’s no thing with my mouth."

"There is a thing with your mouth and I have seen it exactly four times and every single time it ended with me putting you in a medical bay." She pressed harder. "Ask the question and then we run."

She was right. She was so consistently, infuriatingly right that if my brain had a leash it would be purple and it would be in her hand.

I looked over her shoulder at Seraphina Vance.

"Why didn’t you fix it?"

"Which part?"

"All of it. You’ve had eleven years and a black ops division and every scientist in Valoria on payroll." I felt the door pulling at my sternum and I ignored it. "You could have burned this room down."

"I tried." She said it without any inflection at all, which was somehow worse. "Twice. In year three I ordered the tanks drained. Nine of them ruptured before the order was rescinded and the nine people inside them did not die. They also did not stop." A pause that had a body under it. "They are in a storage unit on Sublevel Nine. Mister Williams will find that log as well, eventually. I recommend he not open it at home."

Emi made a small terrible noise.

"In year seven," Seraphina said, "I ordered the door destroyed. Structural charges, sufficient to collapse forty meters of bedrock. The team went down. The charges were placed correctly." She looked at the door for the first time since she had walked in. "The building above sustained no damage. The team did not come back up. The door has no wall, Satori. There is nothing holding it. It is not in the room. The room is around it."

"Ten minutes," Isabelle said, and her voice had lost its edge, which frightened me more than anything Seraphina had said. "Satori. I am counting down out loud now."