My Scumbag System Chapter 745: The Load-Bearing Wall

"You didn’t know what it was. Nobody did."

Raphael’s fists crackled. "So what do we do."

I looked at the ceiling. There was a water stain shaped like a rabbit with a birth defect and a crack running to the light fixture that had been there since before I moved in. This room had held poker nights and movie nights and seventeen people eating pizza while Jaime explained the spiritual significance of leg day. Bartholomew had traversed every inch of the coffee table with the patience of a creature that had decided eternity was better spent on lettuce than ambition.

"We go to dinner," I said.

Silence.

"My mother invited Seraphina to Sunday dinner. Seraphina said she would bring the second half of the log. I have two days to sit in this house and not fight anything and not train anything and not touch anything that glows, and then I am going to sit at a table with my mother and the woman who runs the country and probably Luka who will want to talk about barbecue sauce, and we are going to have a conversation about four thousand people in jars and my father’s signature on every single one."

"And then," Natalia said.

"And then we decide whether we burn everything down or build something on top of it."

Natalia’s eyes found mine across the room. The white streaks in her hair caught the morning sun through the window behind Raphael, and the Ring pulsed once, a single blue heartbeat that I felt in my sternum where the fifth node sat.

"I hate you," she said, which by this point in our relationship translated roughly to I will follow you into the dark and make it colder when we get there.

"I know."

Emi stood up and walked into the kitchen. I heard the oven door open and close and then the smell of cinnamon hit me like a truck and I realized she had put rolls in to warm before we left for the mission six hours ago, planning ahead for the part where we came home broken and needed something that smelled like a childhood none of us had actually experienced.

She came back with a plate. Eleven rolls in a spiral with glaze dripping off the edges. She set it on the coffee table next to Bartholomew, who investigated the nearest roll with a tentacle and decided against it.

"Eat," Emi said.

"Emi."

"Eat." Her voice did not waver. Her eyes were red and her hands had dried blood on the knuckles from where she had gripped the van floor during my episode and her healing aura was gone for the first time in six hours, drained down to nothing, and she stood there with flour on her cheekbone and said the word like it was a load-bearing wall and the whole house would fall without it.

I ate.

Raphael ate. Natalia ate. Soomin ate two and a half with her eyes closed. Skylar ate one while leaning against the doorframe without changing her expression, which for Skylar constituted a standing ovation. Isabelle consumed a single roll with the poise of someone attending a state dinner, napkin across her knee, and she nodded once at Emi when she finished.

"These are adequate," Isabelle said, which from Isabelle Okoye was a marriage proposal.

The common room filled with the sounds of eating and breathing and the mechanical tick of the grandfather clock and the soft scrape of Bartholomew’s shell against the terrarium glass. Nobody talked about four thousand people in jars. Nobody talked about the maintenance log or the door or the entity that had been saying my name for eighteen years. Nobody talked about Sunday or my father or the fact that I was turning into a Gate.

Soomin fell asleep in the armchair. The Fox retreated so far that her hair went completely pink and her face lost ten years and she looked like what she was, which was a nineteen-year-old girl from a fishing village who had been asked to bite an A-Rank creature’s wrist at five in the morning and said yes.

Raphael left through the back door. I heard the heavy bag start up in the basement thirty seconds later. One point three seconds between impacts. He would be down there for hours. That was fine. That was how Raphael processed things. He hit them until they made sense or broke, and then he hit the pieces.

Isabelle took Soomin’s plate and washed it in the kitchen without being asked. I heard water running and the soft clink of ceramic and then she walked past me with her book and her tea and climbed the stairs without a word.

Skylar poured herself a second glass of whatever she had found in the cabinet. She looked at me over the rim.

"Two days," she said.

"Two days."

"And then dinner with your mother and the president."

"And my father’s signature on four thousand jars."

She drank. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Set the glass on the counter behind her with a click that sounded final.

"I’m going to sleep," she said. "Wake me if something tries to end the world."

She walked past me and her fingers brushed my shoulder. The contact lasted less than a second. No Nectar. No heat. Just skin on fabric and a weight that said I chose you and I’m still choosing you and I’m too tired to say it with words so this is what you get.

Then she was gone.

Emi sat down where Soomin had been and pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them and looked at me with eyes that held no secrets.

"You should sleep," she said.

"I know."

"You won’t."

"Probably not."

Natalia walked to the couch and sat down and took my hand and laced her fingers through mine and pressed her shoulder against my shoulder and breathed. In. Out. Frost on every exhale. The Ring cold against my knuckles. The pendant warm against my chest.

Two days until Sunday.

Two days until my mother set an extra plate for the woman who kept her husband’s victims alive in glass cases and called it mercy.

Two days until I found out whether the man who built me had been building the door or holding it shut.

Maki materialized from my shadow and climbed into my lap in cat form and started purring loud enough to rattle the terrarium.

"Master smells like he needs tuna," she said inside my head.

"I need a lot of things."

"Maki can help with some of them."

"Maki can start by shutting up."