My Scumbag System Chapter 742: The Architecture of the Con

Twenty-two steps.

I made it four.

Then the hook behind my sternum set proper and yanked, and my legs went out from under me like somebody had unplugged the cord. I hit the stairs on one knee. The stone was warm. Stone should not be warm.

"Up," Raphael said.

"Working on it."

"Not fast enough." He got a fist in the back of my collar and hauled, and I have absorbed a punch from that man that put a dent in a training wall, so being lifted by him felt roughly like being nominated for something.

"Thirty-nine," Emi said behind me. Her voice had gone thin and flat, the doctor voice, the one she found somewhere between the Necropolis and now. "Thirty-nine primary. It’s still climbing while we move."

"Faster is better then."

"Faster is not medicine."

"Nine steps," Isabelle said in my ear. "Three minutes forty. Jacob is holding the loop with tape and prayer."

"Tape is generous," Jacob said. "I’m running a nested spoof off a coffee shop badge cloner and one of the sensor arrays keeps trying to phone home about a thermal anomaly on Sublevel Ten and I keep telling it the anomaly is a vending machine and it keeps saying the vending machine is one hundred and one degrees and moving."

"Tell it the vending machine is having a day."

"I hate you so much."

Behind us the cathedral did something I am going to think about on my deathbed.

All of them turned.

Not their bodies. The bodies were suspended, arms out, hair floating, and none of that changed. Their eyes tracked me. Every tank in every row for however many hundred meters that room went, and the amber light shifted a half shade as their pupils came around and followed the stairwell up. Twenty-three years of people who had never been allowed to finish dying, watching the exit like a congregation watching a door they had been told about.

Skylar looked back once and then did not look back again, and Skylar looks at everything.

"Move," Natalia said.

She was not touching me anymore. She was three steps above with her palm flat on the wall and frost racing out from under it, sheeting the stone in a rime that crunched under our boots and gave us grip on stairs that had started sweating. Her Ring threw blue on the ceiling. Her braid had come apart at the back and the white in her hair had gone bright as filament.

She had done the math the same as me. If the transmitter finished in that room, the two halves bound. So she was making distance a physical object. Every meter of ice behind us was a meter she had personally put between me and the thing that fit.

"Talk to me," she said, without turning around.

"I’m here."

"Keep saying it."

"I’m here."

"Two minutes fifty," Isabelle said.

We came out onto Sublevel Ten and the change in air pressure popped my ears. No smell. Still no smell. Records annex, one hundred and forty meters of bedrock beneath our feet according to every blueprint that existed, and I could feel a cathedral down there breathing through the tile.

Soomin dropped out of nothing and landed in front of me on all fours. Pink had almost lost the argument. Five tails, gold eyes, and her voice came out layered, two people using one throat.

"It followed us to the stairs," she said. "It stopped at the bottom step. It cannot come up."

"You sure?"

"It is polite." The Fox showed teeth. "It wants you to walk down."

"Everybody wants something."

"Two minutes twenty," Isabelle said. "Service elevator, then the freight, then the dock. Do not take the stairs at nine, the stairwell camera at nine is on a separate loop and Jacob does not own it."

"I do not own it," Jacob confirmed. "I want you all to know how much I do not own it."

We ran the corridor. Emi kept pace at my back with one hand fisted in my suit, which meant her aura was on me the whole way, which meant she was burning through reserve she was going to need later and I did not tell her to stop because I am not a good person and also because it was the only thing keeping my legs from folding again.

"Thirty-nine and fifty-five," she said. "Satori."

"Yeah."

"When we get in the van you’re going to lie down and I’m going to put my hands on your chest and you’re going to let me."

"That’s the best offer I’ve had all week."

"I will sedate you."

"Also on the table."

"Sublevel Four," Skylar said.

I stopped.

Everybody stopped, which is a thing I still have not adjusted to. Seventeen people who will plant their feet because I planted mine, and every single time it lands in me like swallowing something too hot.

The corridor kept going and there was a stairwell head twenty meters up with a stenciled number and an access panel, and behind that number was a woman in her fifties who had spent twenty years pretending to be a bureaucrat so she could keep her father’s death from being a lie, and who had stayed behind in the archives so we could get out, and who had said nothing for six days.

"No," Natalia said.

"Two minutes," Isabelle said, and her voice had changed. "Satori. No."

"She held the door," I said.

"She held the door so you could be somewhere else. If you go get her now she held it for nothing." Natalia came back down the corridor at me and she was not shouting. That was the worst part. "You cannot carry her out and be carried out. Raphael has one set of arms."

"I have two," Raphael said.

"You have one job."

"Ninety seconds," Isabelle said. "The dock supervisor’s shift change is in six minutes and after that there are eleven people between you and the van."

Here is what nobody warns you about the throne.

I spent seven months building a court so that I would never again be a thing that got left. I made them into weapons and I let them make me into something worth standing in front of, and the whole point of all of it, the whole architecture of the con, was that I would never have to leave anybody in a room.

And I stood in a hallway with no smell and I left her.

"Mark it," I said. "Jacob. Sublevel Four, interrogation. I want the schedule, I want the guard rotation, I want to know what she eats and who brings it."

"Marking." A pause, and his voice cracked. "I’m marking it."

"Seventy seconds," Isabelle said.

We ran.

The freight elevator smelled like cardboard and machine oil and it was the best thing I have ever smelled in my life. Six of us and a naked bakeneko crammed into a steel box going up while the numbers ticked, and Maki had climbed me like scaffolding and wrapped both tails around my ribs and put her mouth against my ear.

"You did not open it," she said.

"Noticed that, did you."

"I have had eleven masters." Her claws were in my shoulder and she was still shaking. "They all opened it. Whatever their door was. Every single one."

"I’m going to need better tuna."

She bit my earlobe hard enough to draw a bead of blood and then licked it off, and Natalia’s Ring flared, and the temperature in a freight elevator dropped eleven degrees in one second.

"Off," Natalia said.

"He is warm."

"Off."