My Scumbag System Chapter 750: Sit for Forty

I finished the eggs.

She watched me do it like she was supervising a hostage negotiation, and when the plate was empty she took it to the sink and washed it herself instead of leaving it for whoever came down next. That was the thing about Natalia. She’d threaten to freeze your organs and then wash your dishes in the same ten minutes.

"Sit there," she said. "Do not move."

"I’ve been sitting for four minutes."

"Sit for forty."

She left the kitchen. I heard her go up the stairs, heard the third step creak the way it always did, heard a door open and shut.

Then I was alone with the burnt coffee smell and three thousand six hundred and ninety seven red dots burned into the inside of my skull.

I want to be clear about something. I’ve been called a lot of things over two lives. Scumbag. Leech. Anomaly. Stray Dog. A yakuza captain once called me a rabid animal that learned to wear pants, which I thought was fair. None of it ever landed anywhere important, because I decided a long time ago that other people’s opinions were weather. You dress for it and move on.

But knowing my father cracked reality open three thousand times because he wanted a cleaner data set?

That one stuck. That one went in and stayed in and started building a nest.

Nel didn’t say anything. Hadn’t said anything since the basement. Which was its own answer, honestly, and I hated how much I’d started relying on a cosmic gambling addiction with a voice to tell me when I was screwing up.

"Coward," I said out loud, to nobody.

The fridge hummed.

Great talk.

By ten in the morning Onyx House had remembered how to be loud, which was mostly Jaime’s fault.

He came down the stairs in shorts and nothing else and immediately began a monologue about how his lats had been speaking to him all night, whispering of great trials ahead, and did I know that Sakura had once written an entire album while recovering from a torn rotator cuff, and that pain was simply the body’s way of applying for a promotion.

"Jaime."

"Yes."

"Put on a shirt."

"The shirt restricts the message."

Marco arrived with a laundry basket and a face that said he’d been up longer than he’d admit, and he shoved a folded shirt into Jaime’s chest without stopping. Jaime put it on. He did not stop talking, but he put it on, which meant Marco had cracked a code the rest of us never would.

Hikari came off the last four steps in a single jump and landed on the carpet with both feet, which shook Bartholomew’s terrarium hard enough that the snail withdrew half an inch in what I can only describe as judgment.

"Where were you," she said. Not a question. An accusation with legs. "You went somewhere. Isabelle texted at six and told everybody to leave the house and I had to sit in the greenhouse with Monica for two hours and Monica talked to a fern about drainage."

"It was a very good conversation," Monica said from the doorway. She had Ferdinand in one arm and Copernicus in the other and copper leaves shimmering like someone had spilled a sunset. "Ferdinand has opinions about the eastern gutters."

"He’s a plant."

"He’s a plant with opinions."

Juan was on the couch. I have no idea when he got there. Juan existed the way weather existed, and asking questions about it just made you look stupid.

"You look bad," he said without opening his eyes.

"Thanks."

"Not insulting you. Diagnostic." He shifted, and one arm flopped off the cushion. "You’ve got the face guys get when the math comes out wrong and they already spent the money."

Sometimes I forgot Juan was the smartest person in the building.

Then I remembered why I usually forgot, because he immediately fell asleep again mid-sentence.

Emi came down at ten fifteen with the notebook.

She’d changed. Pink shorts had become gray leggings and the oversized shirt had become an oversized cardigan, and her sapphire hair was down instead of braided which meant she’d slept hard enough to not care. The two strands at the front stuck up like antennae and twitched when she spotted me, and I watched her whole body reorganize itself into medical professional in the space of one step.

"Sit."

"I am sitting."

"Sit on the couch. The chair has bad angles."

I moved to the couch. Juan didn’t wake up. Emi sat down beside me and flipped the notebook open and I saw her handwriting filling four pages, all of it in blue pen, all of it timestamped to the minute.

"Shirt up."

"You could ask nicer."

"I could ask nicer if you were nicer to your own ribcage." She said it flatly, and then immediately turned scarlet, because she’d said something with an edge and Emi Aoyama had not yet made peace with having edges. "I mean. Please. Shirt. Up. Thank you."

I pulled it up.

Her hands went flat to my sternum and the green came out of her palms and slid under my skin, and for a second I lost the ability to think about doors or fathers or four thousand people breathing in amber light, because Emi’s aura felt like sitting in a warm car in winter.

She counted under her breath.

Then she stopped counting.

"What," I said.

"Thirty four." She didn’t move. "Still thirty four. And fifty five secondaries, no change since two in the morning."

"Is that good."

"It’s the first time in five days the number hasn’t gone up." Her voice cracked in the middle of the sentence and she pushed straight through it. "It stopped when we left that room. It stopped and it stayed stopped. Which means it’s not a disease, it’s a response, and if it’s a response then it has a trigger, and if it has a trigger then you can avoid the trigger, and if you can avoid the trigger then you don’t have to."