My Scumbag System Chapter 741: Boring Is a Victory

"So you left it," I said.

"I contained it. I built the Insight Division to watch for exactly one thing, and it was not Gates, and it was not you." Her crystalline eyes came back to me and something in them finally moved. "It was the day someone finished the transmitter. I have been waiting twenty-three years for a boy to walk into this room with a lattice in his chest, and I have spent that entire time preparing to kill him."

Natalia’s Ring flared. The floor cracked in a spiderweb three meters wide.

"Try it," she said.

"I do not intend to." Seraphina did not so much as glance at her. "I have made the calculation nine hundred times, Miss Kuzmina. In every branch where he dies in this room, the receiver remains, and the next transmitter is built by someone with worse intentions and no six women standing in front of him. The variable I could not model was whether the boy would want the door open."

She tilted her head. It was the first human gesture I had ever seen her make.

"Do you?"

And there it was.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about being built. Everyone assumes the horror is the loss of control, the puppet strings, the moment you find out your father drew a diagram and your body is following it. That is not the horror. I have been somebody else’s tool before. Kaelen spent eleven years being pointed at people and he never once lost sleep about it.

The horror is that it feels good.

The lattice had been screaming since the stairs, and it was not screaming in pain. Thirty-four channels and forty-nine secondaries all lit up like a city coming on at dusk, every one of them oriented on that iron and bronze shape, and standing here in front of it was the first time in seven months that my body felt finished. Whole. Correct.

Like a key sliding into a lock it was cut for.

I wanted it. Not because something was making me. Because it was mine, the way the bat was mine, the way the six of them were mine, and I have never in two lifetimes been good at leaving mine alone.

"Eight minutes," Isabelle said.

"Yes," I said.

Natalia’s head snapped up.

"Satori."

"I said yes because she’d know if I lied." I put my hands over hers where they sat on my chest and held them there. "That’s not the same as doing it."

"That is exactly the same as doing it, that is how it starts, that is how it has always started with you." Her voice cracked wide open and she did not bother patching it. "You want everything. You always want everything, it’s the worst thing about you and it’s why I’m still here, and I am asking you for one thing in eight months, one, do not open that door."

"Seven minutes," Isabelle said.

Skylar stepped in on my left, close enough that her shoulder hit my arm, and she had put her knives away, which she never did.

"Hey. Scumbag."

"Bad timing, Bubblegum."

"Shut up." She looked up at me from under the hood and her eyes were wet and furious and she was not going to acknowledge it, ever, under any circumstance. "You remember what I told you on the balcony. Everybody I ever met who had something interesting inside them fed it to something bigger and called it destiny. My dad played benefit concerts for the families of these people." She jerked her chin at the tanks. "Forty million credits for a facility that didn’t exist. He cried onstage. He didn’t know. He thought he was helping."

"Skylar."

"You know what I want you to be?" She grabbed the front of my suit, both fists. "Boring. I want you to be so boring. I want you to walk up those stairs and get in a stolen catering van and eat a rice ball with a face on it and be the most boring man in Valoria."

Emi’s hand slid around my waist from behind and her forehead pressed between my shoulder blades and her aura came up so hot I felt it in my teeth.

"Your channel count went up four in the last six minutes," she said into my back. "Thirty-eight and fifty-three. If it hits forty in this room I don’t know what happens and neither does anybody else and I am calling the abort. I’m calling it. Natalia said it was mine to call."

"Six minutes," Isabelle said. "Raphael."

"On it." Raphael was already moving, and Raphael Vargas moving with purpose was a freight event. He came in on my right and got a hand around my bicep, and it was not gentle. "Told you I’d carry you."

"I can walk."

"Didn’t ask."

Maki uncoiled off my shoulders and hit the floor as a woman, naked as the day she stopped aging, tails high and ears flat.

"Master." She got in front of all of them, in front of Natalia, and put both palms against my sternum on top of Natalia’s hands, and she was shaking. Three hundred years old and shaking. "It says your name in a voice I know. Do not answer it. I sat in front of your door for a week. Let me sit in front of this one."

The door breathed.

I looked at it. Twelve feet of something that had waited eighteen years for me to be finished, and every symbol on it pointing home, and behind it something that had no shape yet.

Then I looked at what was between me and it.

A telekinetic with white in her hair from the night she tore reality apart because she refused to let me die. A healer with flour still on her cheekbone who had learned to give medical ultimatums. A girl with knives who wanted me to be boring. A shy fox in a boy’s shadow. An explosion in a person suit who had decided I was pack. A three-hundred-year-old monster kneeling on stone to hold my chest closed.

Six of them and one of me and a door that fit.

Kaelen would have opened it. Kaelen died alone in an alley because he never once had a reason not to reach.

"Five minutes," Isabelle said.

"Isabelle."

"Yes."

"Start the van."

I turned my back on the door.

It hurt. Physically hurt, a wrench behind the sternum like a hook being set, and I heard Emi gasp because she felt it through her aura, and I put my hand on top of six other hands and I walked.

"Vance."

She had not moved. She stood in her floor-length white with the tanks glowing behind her and she watched me go with an expression I could not read and would think about for a long time.

"Yes?"

"Helena Vasquez."

"Sublevel Four. Interrogation, day six. She has said nothing." A pause. "She is one of two people in this building I have never been able to model."

"Who’s the other one?"

Seraphina Vance smiled. It was small and it was tired and it belonged to a twenty-one-year-old girl who had been handed a room full of open eyes and told to keep the lights on.

"Sunday," she said. "Your mother’s table. Seven o’clock. I will bring the second half of the log."

Natalia’s grip tightened on my arm hard enough to bruise.

"That’s not an invitation you get to accept," she said.

"I know."

"You’re going to accept it."

"Four minutes," Isabelle said. "Stairs. Now."

We ran.