My Scumbag System Chapter 747: The Rabbit with the Birth Defect

"I’m a very refined animal."

Her door closed.

Downstairs the heavy bag was still going. One point three seconds. Raphael was going to hit that thing until his knuckles split and then he was going to wrap them and hit it more, because Raphael did not have words for what four thousand people in jars did to him and this was the closest thing he owned.

I let him have it.

My room was too quiet. I sat on the edge of the futon with the bat across my knees and the Key in my palm and waited for my body to feel like mine again.

It didn’t.

Nel. Talk to me.

The interface came up in that soft blue that had stopped being comforting somewhere around month four.

She sounded tired. I hadn’t known she could sound tired.

Why did you lock me out.

Two seconds. She never took two seconds.

Nel. Who blocked it.

Nothing.

She went silent. Not the theatrical silence she used when she wanted a reaction. The other kind. The kind where a door closes somewhere above you and you hear the bolt slide and you understand that the conversation was never yours to have.

I sat with that for a while.

Then I called my mother.

She picked up on the second ring, which meant she’d been holding the phone.

"You’re alive."

"Hi, Mom."

"Don’t hi Mom me." Pots moved in the background. She was cooking at seven forty in the morning, which meant she had not slept, which meant she had known something before I called. "Luka came home from shift at four and I made him eggs and I couldn’t eat any of them. Do you know how strange that is. I have never in my life not been able to eat eggs."

"Mom."

"So talk."

I looked at the water stain on the ceiling. The rabbit with the birth defect. It had been there when I moved into this room as a fat kid with a hate blog and a body I hadn’t earned, and it was still there now that I was a walking door with six women and a cat and a divine gambling problem attached to me.

"I need you to set an extra place on Sunday," I said.

The pots stopped.

"For who."

"Seraphina Vance."

She didn’t say anything. In the silence I heard Luka’s voice from another room, muffled, asking about coffee, and my mother’s hand covering the phone, and then her voice again, closer, lower, stripped down to the thing underneath.

"She invited herself," I said. "In a basement. Under her own building. Standing in front of four thousand people in glass tanks who have been kept alive for twenty three years because she was twenty one and scared and couldn’t bring herself to finish it."

The breath she took was long.

"Kenji," she said.

Not a question. My father’s name, said flat, the way you say the name of a storm that already took the roof off.

"His signature’s on every single one," I said. "Four thousand one hundred nine entries. Twenty three years, two months, eleven days. The most recent one is Tuesday morning. Five a.m. He drove down from wherever he’s been hiding, walked past every security protocol Seraphina Vance built, and signed a form."

"Tuesday," she said.

"Yeah."

"Tuesday at five in the morning I woke up," she said. "For no reason. Nothing woke me. I sat up in bed and I couldn’t breathe right and I thought it was a dream I couldn’t remember, and I went downstairs and drank water and sat at the kitchen table until the sun came up." Her voice did not shake. That was somehow worse. "Twenty three years, Satori. Twenty three years I have not been able to remember one single thing about that room and my body still keeps the appointment."

Something ugly moved through my chest, and it wasn’t the lattice.

"Set the plate," she said.

"Mom, she runs the country."

"I know what she runs." A drawer opened. Closed. "I have a set of dishes I don’t use because they were my grandmother’s and I’m scared of them. I’m going to use them Sunday. And that woman is going to sit at my table and look at me and explain why she kept your father’s mistakes breathing in jars instead of letting them rest, and then she’s going to eat my food, and then she’s going to tell me where my husband is."

"He’s not your husband."

"He was when he did it," she said, and the line went quiet in a way that had teeth.

I sat there with the phone against my ear and my free hand around the grip tape of a bat that had killed an A-Rank, a god, and Julian Valerius’s dignity.

"I’ll be there at five," I said. "Natalia’s coming."

"Obviously Natalia’s coming."

"She’s going to hold my hand at the table. Not under it."

A pause. Then a sound I hadn’t expected, small and wet and almost a laugh.

"Good," my mother said. "Bring the blue one, too. The one who bakes. I like her."

"Emi."

"Emi. And tell your cat she is not eating off my counter again."

The line clicked dead.

I put the phone down on the futon and stared at the wall for approximately eleven seconds before Maki poured herself out of my shadow, went human halfway through the motion, and landed across my lap wearing absolutely nothing but the expression of someone who had heard the whole call.

"Master’s mother is terrifying," she said.

"Get dressed."

"No." She stretched. Her spine did something a spine shouldn’t do, and her twin tails swept across the futon and knocked the Key onto the floor. "Master is cold inside. Maki is warm outside. This is efficient allocation of resources."

"You’ve been listening to Akari."

"Akari explained tax structures to me for forty minutes." She curled up, chin on my sternum, gold eyes on mine with those vertical pupils blown wide. "Maki understood none of it and enjoyed all of it."