My Scumbag System Chapter 743: The Signatory

Maki got off. She did it slowly, which was the point.

The dock was empty. Jacob’s fake inspection order was still taped inside the window of the van, and the plates were still wrong in the right way, and Isabelle had the engine running and the side door open before we cleared the loading bay.

I made it three steps onto the ramp and then the hook pulled again, one hard wrench that felt like a hand closing around my spine from the inside, and I went down.

"Got him." Raphael’s arms went under me and the world tipped and I was moving without moving, and somewhere above my head Emi was saying numbers and Skylar was saying my name without the nickname attached, which is how I knew it was actually bad.

The van door slammed.

"Go," Isabelle said, and then, louder, and this is the part that surprised me. "Go, Malachi. Now."

Malachi drove. I did not know Malachi could drive.

I came back somewhere on the highway with my head in Emi’s lap and her hands flat on my sternum and green light bleeding up the inside of the van roof. Her braids had come loose. She had flour on her cheekbone still, from four in the morning, from thirty-six cinnamon rolls, and her eyes were red and streaming and her hands were rock steady.

"Say something insufferable," she said.

"Your lap is the second best thing about you."

"Oh thank God." She sobbed once and kept working. "Thirty-nine and fifty-five. It stopped. Six minutes after we left the floor it stopped climbing and it hasn’t moved since. Satori, it stopped."

"So the room was the accelerant."

"The room, or the door, or the thing behind the door, I don’t know, I’m eighteen and I’ve read four books about this." She dragged the back of her wrist across her eyes. "But it stopped."

Natalia was on the bench. She had not said anything since the elevator. Her gloves were off and there was frost on her knuckles that had nothing to do with her Ring, and she was staring at the van floor like it owed her money.

"Nat."

"Do not."

"Nat."

"You said yes." Her voice came out flat as a sheet of ice on a lake. "She asked you if you wanted it open and you said yes, in front of me, in front of all of us, and then you turned around."

"Yeah."

"Why."

"Because you were standing there."

The van went quiet. Even the datapads.

"That’s the whole answer," I said. "It’s not noble. I want everything. You told me that’s the worst thing about me and you’re right, and if that room had been empty I would have opened it and I’d have thought it was my idea. The only reason I’m in this van is that there were six of you in the way and I have gotten weak about you."

Skylar made a sound in her corner like a laugh that had been strangled at birth.

"Weak," she said.

"Extremely weak. It’s humiliating. I used to be a person who could walk past things."

"You have never once walked past anything."

Natalia crossed the van. She dropped down beside my head and got her fingers into my hair and gripped, and she pressed her forehead to my temple, and she was crying, which she does about as often as an eclipse.

"Nine months ago I would have paid money to watch you die," she said into my hairline.

"I remember. You were very vocal about it."

"Shut up." Her hand tightened. "You are going to sit at your mother’s table on Sunday and let that woman put a folder on it and you are not going to be alone in that room."

"I know."

"I am going to be holding your hand under the table like a coward."

"You are going to be holding my hand on top of the table," I said, "because Luka’s going to be there and I’ve decided I’m done with the coward version."

She lifted her head and looked at me and her face did a thing I did not have a name for, and then she kissed my forehead, which from Natalia Kuzmina is roughly equivalent to a state funeral.

"Isabelle," she said, not looking away from me. "Are we clean."

"We are clean." Isabelle’s voice came from the front, cool as a marble bench. "The loop closed on schedule. The dock log shows a catering inspection that lasted nineteen minutes and left. There is no record of six people on Sublevel Ten and there is certainly no record of Sublevel Eleven, because Sublevel Eleven does not exist." A pause. "I would like it noted that I said the words does not exist about a room I watched you all walk out of, and that I am going to have a drink about it later."

"Noted."

"Also noted," Isabelle said, "is that President Vance let us leave."

Nobody had anything for that.

She was right and it sat in the van with us the whole way to the ferry. The most powerful woman in Valoria had stood in a room full of her family’s worst decision and watched me walk up her stairs with her data in Jacob’s drive and her secret in my chest, and she had not lifted a finger, and she had made a dinner reservation.

I have been handled before. I know what it feels like from the inside. It feels exactly like winning.

Nel came up somewhere over the water, and she came up wrong. No preamble. No commentary about ratings.

Satori.

"What."

The maintenance log Jacob extracted has finished parsing. There are four thousand one hundred and nine entries spanning twenty-three years, two months, and eleven days. Each entry includes a subject designation, an integration percentage at time of arrest, and an authorization signature.

"And you’re going to tell me all four thousand have the same signature."

They do.

"Whose."

Nel did not answer for two full seconds, and Nel has never in seven months needed two seconds for anything.

"Nel."

I want you to understand that I have no clearance on this. I am telling you because you did not open the door.

"Whose signature."

Jacob’s voice broke into the comm at the same time, high and shredded, and I heard the exact sound of a nineteen year old boy running a name through a database and finding it.

"Satori." He was crying. "Satori, the signature, it’s, the handwriting matched an archived sample from the Prometheus proposal, the countersignature, the one from eighteen years ago, it’s the same hand, it’s the same hand on all of them."

I sat up. Emi’s hands slid off my chest.

"Say it."

"K. Nakano," Jacob said. "Every entry. Every tank. Twenty-three years."

The ferry engine turned over under the floor.

"And the last one," I said.

"Tuesday." He said it very small. "Tuesday, oh five hundred, subject designation blank, integration percentage blank, authorization K. Nakano."

Three days ago.

Three days ago, at five in the morning, while I was asleep in a house on a volcanic rock in the ocean and something came in through my window and read me like a scroll and turned the construction up four hundred percent, my father was in a basement under the Apex Tower signing a form.

Which meant the cabin in the mountains was a set.

Which meant the man who cried when he told me he was proud of who I had become had driven down from that cabin, walked into the most surveilled building in the country, past Seraphina Vance’s people and Seraphina Vance’s Aspect and Seraphina Vance’s eleven years of Friday visits, and signed his name on a line under four thousand one hundred and eight other times he had signed it.

Which meant he could get in whenever he wanted.

Which meant the door had never been the problem.

Maki went stiff on my shoulder. Natalia’s Ring had stopped glowing entirely, which is worse than the alternative.

"Sunday," she said.

"Sunday," I said.

I looked out the window at the water and the island coming up out of it, and I started laughing, because the alternative was screaming and I had an audience.

"Somebody call my mother," I said. "Tell her to set an extra place."