Divine Milking System

Chapter 436: 436 | Milk and Stubbornness

I drove. The Charger hummed at seventy-eight miles per hour, and the road climbed along the coast through Carpinteria where avocado orchards ran up the hillsides in neat green rows. The air smelled like salt and citrus, and Jace Monroe, formerly dead man walking, currently living on borrowed milk and a combat system designed by an entity who had apparently failed with twelve other subjects across nine realities, drove a car named Consequence toward a conversation he was not sure he wanted to have.

At the seventeen-minute mark I said, "Question three."

"When I picked you for mentorship, I already knew what you were. The question you actually want to ask is why I picked you despite knowing."

"Fine. Why."

"Because you’re the first person carrying one of these systems who appears capable of not dying from it."

Silence. The road curved, and I took it too fast, and the Charger’s rear end stepped out two inches before the tires caught, and the whole car settled back into its lane like a horse correcting for a rider who got distracted.

"The twelve others," I said.

"I don’t know about twelve. I know about two. The classified paper I mentioned referenced two prior cases documented by IHC researchers in 1987 and 2014. Both subjects presented with the same dimensional frequency. Both demonstrated supernatural growth rates inconsistent with natural ability development. Both died within their first year of manifestation." He paused. "The 1987 case starved. The 2014 case was killed by an entity that appeared to be tracking the frequency specifically."

The old man’s words from the library came back with interest. Someone or something engineered this trap. The Under has been pushing against the dimensional boundaries with increasing force.

"You think something is hunting me," I said.

"That’s question four, and we’re nine minutes short, but I’ll allow it because the answer is simple." Vale turned to look at me, and his mismatched eyes held something that was not amusement or cruelty or the cosmic indifference he usually projected. "I don’t think something is hunting you, Jace. I think something already found you, and the Void Gate was its opening move, and the fact that you walked out instead of being carried out in a bag has changed the calculation for whatever is on the other side of that frequency."

The sign for Santa Barbara appeared at the side of the highway. Twenty-three miles.

"I’m not going to tell you everything," Vale said, and his voice returned to its normal register, the one that sounded like a man discussing lunch plans rather than dimensional conspiracies. "Not because I don’t trust you, though I don’t fully, and not because I think you can’t handle it, though I think it would cause you to do something catastrophically stupid. I’m not telling you everything because I don’t have everything. I have pieces. I’ve had pieces for ten years. And every time I think I’ve assembled enough of them to see the picture, something new happens and the picture changes."

"That sounds convenient."

"It sounds honest, which is more than you’ll get from anyone else who figures out what you are. The IHC will want to study you. The guilds will want to own you. Davenport will want to weaponize you or destroy you depending on which day he calculates the better return. The Under will want to kill you because whatever your patron designed you to become scares something on the other side badly enough that it built a Void Gate around a first-year training exercise."

He put his sunglasses back on and reclined the seat two inches.

"I want to make sure you survive long enough to become the thing they’re afraid of. That’s why I picked you. That’s why I train you until your body breaks and then watch you rebuild it from milk and stubbornness. That’s why I’m driving you to Santa Barbara to meet a man who makes weapons that shouldn’t exist, because eventually you’re going to need one."

I drove in silence for three miles.

"You could have just said that on the first day."

"On the first day you weighed two-forty, you couldn’t run a mile, and you were trying to figure out which girl to seduce first. Context matters."

"I’ve lost thirty-five pounds."

"Congratulations. Your collar still doesn’t hide the bite mark."

Another mile.

"The man in Santa Barbara who makes weapons that shouldn’t exist."

"His name is Kessler. He’s a blacksmith. He’s also the most dangerous civilian in California, and the IHC doesn’t know he exists, and I intend to keep it that way." Vale’s voice carried something I had not heard before, a quality that sat between reverence and warning. "He owes me a favor from 2041 that I’ve been saving for the correct moment. You’re the correct moment."

"What did you do for him in 2041?"

"That would be question five, and we’ve arrived at our exit." He pointed at the off-ramp sign for State Street. "Take the right. Follow it downhill for two miles. When you see a building that looks like it should have been condemned in 1970, park behind it."

I took the exit.

Santa Barbara opened up below us in terracotta and white stucco, mission architecture pressing up against the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other. The streets were cleaner than Ventura, the palm trees taller, the tourists better dressed. Everything here cost more money and tried harder to look like it didn’t.

I followed State Street downhill past galleries, wine bars, and a yoga studio with windows so clean they looked theoretical. Two miles later the neighborhood changed. The boutiques gave way to auto shops, then to a stretch of warehouses backed against a rail line, and then to a building that looked exactly like Vale described.

It was concrete. Two stories. The kind of building that cities keep meaning to demolish and never quite getting around to because the paperwork is more work than the building is worth. No sign. No windows on the ground floor. A single steel door with no handle visible from the outside. Paint that had been red once and was now the color of dried blood mixed with dust.

I parked behind it, next to a white van with no plates and a vintage motorcycle that someone maintained with religious devotion.

Vale got out. He walked to the steel door and put his palm flat against the metal. The air around his hand rippled once, a spatial compression signature I recognized from watching him warp the gym during my training sessions. Something inside the door clicked twice.

It swung inward on its own.

"Don’t touch anything," Vale said. "Don’t comment on anything. Don’t look at the thing on the third shelf."

"What thing on the third shelf?"

"The thing you’re going to want to look at. Don’t."

He walked inside.

I stood in the parking lot next to a car named Consequence, holding a second burger wrapped in wax paper and carrying the knowledge that my mentor had known about the Divine Milking System since the moment I walked into his classroom, had watched me seduce women and steal abilities and burn through lifespan for six weeks without saying a word, and was now leading me into an unmarked building to meet a blacksmith who made weapons that shouldn’t exist.

My phone buzzed. Belle.

Where are you?

I typed: Santa Barbara. With Vale. Can’t explain.

Belle’s response took four seconds.

If he kills you I’m filing a complaint.

I put the phone away and walked through the door.

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