My Scumbag System Chapter 744: Someone Was in the Walls

The ferry docked at six forty-seven. Malachi parked the van behind Onyx House at six fifty-three. I walked through the back door at six fifty-five on legs that worked because Emi had spent forty minutes holding them together with green light and spite, and the common room hit me like a wall of sound and body heat and the unmistakable smell of Jaime’s protein shake, which he had blended with what appeared to be an entire banana and something that might have been motor oil.

"SATORI." Jaime materialized shirtless from behind the kitchen island. "The muscles spoke of your return. Sakura herself could not have predicted a more glorious entrance. Your deltoids carry the weight of a thousand sunrises."

"Jaime."

"Yes, my king."

"I need you to go upstairs and stay there for approximately two hours."

"The muscles understand the need for solitude after great battle. I will do push-ups in your honor." He was already moving toward the stairs. "One thousand, for the glory of your triceps."

Marco caught my arm on the way past the couch. He did not say anything. He looked at my face and then at Emi’s face behind me and then at Natalia’s face behind Emi, and he let go and touched Malachi’s elbow and the two of them disappeared up the stairs without making a sound.

Hikari was not in the common room. Juan was not on the couch. The house had emptied itself in the six minutes between Isabelle’s text and our arrival, which meant Isabelle had sent a second message I was not copied on, and every single person in Onyx House had read it and chosen to vanish without being asked.

Isabelle stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed and her spear leaning against the wall behind her.

"I told them you needed the room," she said.

"What did you tell them about why."

"I told them you looked like someone had opened you up and rearranged the furniture and forgot to put the drawers back." She uncrossed her arms. "Which is true."

I sat down on the couch hard enough that the springs complained. Bartholomew’s terrarium caught the morning light on the coffee table, and the snail was doing his morning lap around the perimeter with the dedication of an athlete who would never die and never needed to hurry.

Natalia locked the front door. Skylar locked the back. Emi sat beside me and put her hand on my thigh and let the aura go, just enough to keep the worst of the nausea tamped down. Soomin took the armchair across from me and pulled her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them, the Fox quiet behind her eyes, the seashell charm dangling between her collarbones.

Raphael leaned against the wall by the window. He had not let go of the energy in his hands since the van. Gold light seeped between his knuckles like something alive.

"So," Skylar said from the kitchen doorframe, a position she had claimed through consistent territorial behavior over four months. "Your father has been filling jars with people for twenty-three years."

"Yeah."

"In a basement that does not exist."

"Yeah."

"Under the woman who promised to protect you."

"Yeah."

"And the woman who promised to protect you has been visiting those jars every Friday for eleven years."

"Yeah."

"And neither of them told you."

"No."

Skylar reached into the cabinet behind her and produced a bottle of something amber. She poured two fingers into a glass that had previously contained orange juice and drank it in a single swallow.

"Cool. That’s super normal. I’m going to need another one of these."

Natalia had not sat down. She stood at the edge of the room with her arms folded and her Ring throwing sparks against her hip bone. The frost trail she left from the front door to her current position had already begun to evaporate, leaving dark wet streaks on the hardwood like footprints from something that had walked out of a freezer.

"Jacob," she said. "Time."

Jacob’s voice came through the comm unit on the coffee table, tinny and running hot. "Working. The maintenance log is eleven terabytes compressed. I’ve got the signature verification done, that’s the K. Nakano confirmation on all four thousand one hundred and nine entries. The subject designations use a coding system I’ve never seen before. Some of them are alphanumeric, standard. But after entry two thousand something, they switch to what looks like coordinate pairs. Latitude and longitude. The subjects aren’t people anymore. They’re locations."

"Locations of what."

"I don’t know yet. I need three hours and something that isn’t this laptop."

Isabelle set a cup of tea on the coffee table next to Bartholomew. The snail investigated the warmth and changed direction.

"He’s cataloguing Gates," Isabelle said. Everyone looked at her. She picked up her own tea and blew across the surface. "He spent twenty-three years filling tanks with failed integration subjects, and at some point he stopped collecting people and started collecting coordinates. The simplest answer is that he mapped every artificial Gate he ever opened and logged the location alongside the corresponding test result."

"Which means the log is a map," Natalia said.

"Which means the log is a weapon," Isabelle said. "Whoever holds a complete record of artificially generated Gate locations controls the proof that Gates can be manufactured. The VHC’s entire political structure rests on the fiction that Gates are natural phenomena. Four thousand coordinate pairs destroy that fiction."

Emi’s hand tightened on my leg. Her aura flickered green against my sweatpants and I felt the channel count holding steady at thirty-nine and fifty-five, which was where it had frozen when we left the building. The room was the accelerant. The lattice stopped growing the moment we cleared the elevator shaft. My body was a transmitter and the basement was the receiver and proximity made the construction sprint.

Which meant my father had known, the whole time, that putting me in that room would push the lattice closer to completion. Which meant the cabin in the mountains and the tears and the photograph and the speech about pride were all staging for one outcome: getting me into a basement so my body would finish building what he designed it to build.

And he had been down there on Tuesday. Signing forms. While something came through my window and cranked the construction speed.

"Soomin," I said.

She looked up from her knees with blue eyes that flickered gold at the edges.

"Tuesday night. You said the Fox was restless."

"She wouldn’t stop pacing." Soomin’s voice was small and sorry, the way it got when she thought she had done something wrong by existing. "She kept saying someone was in the walls. I thought she meant the plumbing because Malachi flushed a toilet at two in the morning and sometimes the pipes make the Fox angry."

"It wasn’t the plumbing."

"No." Soomin pressed her face into her knees. "I’m sorry. I should have told you."