Divine Milking System

Chapter 434: 434 | Still Working On It

The old man reached us before I reached the car.

Hector had the kind of face that looked like California had been using it as a cutting board for thirty years. Deep grooves, sun damage that no healer would touch because the damage had opinions about being removed, and eyes that were still sharp enough to make me straighten up without thinking about it. His cane was wood with a brass ferrule, and the hand wrapped around it had two fingers missing on the right side, ring and pinky, the stumps healed smooth and old.

"You’re the burger kid," he said, and his voice came out of his chest like an engine turning over in cold weather. "My granddaughter showed me the clip. Forty-one million views. You know how many views my best fishing video got?"

"I don’t, sir."

"Twelve. And three of them were me checking if the upload worked."

He laughed at his own joke with full commitment, shoulders shaking, cane tapping the boardwalk planks. Vale leaned against the Charger and watched with the patience of someone who had heard this exact laugh in this exact spot enough times to predict the duration.

"Hector," Vale said. "We’re on a schedule."

"You’re on a schedule. I’m retired. Retired people don’t have schedules, they have hobbies and opinions." Hector turned back to me and jabbed the cane toward my chest without touching it. "You were in the gate. The one on the news."

"Yes, sir."

"You killed the thing at the end. The big one."

"With help."

"Bullshit. I watched the footage from the body cams. The Davenport girl’s camera caught it. You went gold and you ripped its heart out with your bare hand, and your feet were off the ground for the last second and a half because whatever you did launched you upward at the point of contact." He tapped the cane once. "I’ve seen one other person do something like that. In 2033."

I looked at Vale.

Vale looked at the ocean.

"It was a gate outside of Oxnard," Hector said, settling into the story like a man lowering himself into a favorite chair. "C-rank, forest biome, standard clearance op. I was forty-seven. Still Gold, still mobile, still dumb enough to think I knew what I was doing."

"Hector."

"Shut up, Vale, the boy needs context." He pointed the cane at a bench near the pier railing and walked toward it without checking whether I would follow. I followed, because the alternative involved standing beside a man who had known about my hunger problem since orientation and chose to say nothing about it for six weeks. Sitting with Hector felt safer, which said something deeply wrong about my current ability to assess risk.

Hector sat. I sat beside him. The bench faced the water, and the gulls overhead were fighting over something that might have been a fish or might have been a churro wrapper, it was hard to tell from the violence.

"The gate had a secondary core," Hector said. "Nobody knew. Sensors didn’t catch it. Sound familiar?"

"Very."

"We went in with six. Standard Gold squad, twenty years of combined field time, two of us were married to each other. First core went down in forty minutes, clean kill, textbook. Then the ground opened."

He paused and looked at his hand, the one missing the fingers, and flexed what remained.

"Something came up from underneath. Not from the trees, not from the canopy, from the earth itself. Like the gate had grown a spine and decided to fight back. It was bigger than anything in the bestiary. Bigger than anything we’d trained for. And it was smart, Jace. Smart the way people are smart. It looked at our formation and it found the medic."

I said nothing.

"Killed her in the first eight seconds. My wife. Rosa. She was standing twelve feet from me and I watched it happen and I could not cross twelve feet fast enough." His voice did not crack. It had done its cracking years ago, and what remained was bedrock. "I lost the fingers getting two of the others out. The creature took my knees on the way through the exit threshold, one swipe, both sides, same motion. Three of us walked out. Three didn’t. The sensors had been wrong, or somebody had fed them bad data, or the gate itself had changed between the scan and the entry, and nobody could tell us which."

A gull landed on the pier railing and screamed at us, which felt appropriate.

"Vale found me six months after that. I was living above this shack, not cooking, barely eating, and my daughter was running the counter because I couldn’t stand long enough to flip a burger." Hector looked at me with those sharp old eyes. "He didn’t offer to buy the place. Not then. He came in, ate a burger, said three sentences, and left."

"What were the three sentences?"

"The gate was engineered. The sensor data was manipulated. And somebody wanted to see what happened when a Gold squad hit something they couldn’t beat."

The pier creaked beneath us in the afternoon wind. I could hear Vale behind us, leaning against the Charger, saying nothing, being insufferable at a professional level.

"Did he tell you who?" I asked.

"No."

"Did he ever tell you who?"

"No."

"Did you ask?"

"Every time I saw him for the next four years. You want to know what he said?"

I already knew. I could feel the shape of the answer before Hector gave it to me, because I had been living inside the same evasion for six weeks, spoken in different registers by the same man, and the words changed but the geometry never did.

"He said he was still working on it," Hector said. "Every single time. Still working on it. Like the question was a project he’d get around to when the funding came through."

I looked back at the Charger. Vale had his phone out now, scrolling through something with one thumb while the Pacific breeze moved his silver hair in ways that should have required a cinematographer. He caught me looking and gave me a two-finger wave that communicated nothing useful.

"You think the same thing happened to us," I said.

"I think the same thing keeps happening," Hector said. "And I think he collects people it happens to, and I think he has a theory about why, and I think he will not tell you that theory until he’s ready, and I think ready might be never, and I think that’s the most dangerous thing about him."

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