Divine Milking System

Chapter 438: 438 | A Graft on a Human Substrate

I looked at Vale.

Vale had picked up a wrench from a bench and was examining it with the focus of a man who had removed himself entirely from the situation.

"This is the favor," I said. "This is what you drove me here for. To get taken apart by your ex."

"I never said the favor was for you," Vale said, not looking up from the wrench. "I said Kessler owes me. Kessler is going to make you something. Yumi runs the forge. This is how it works."

"You said the man in Santa Barbara."

"I said a man. Then I stopped saying anything, and you filled in the gaps, and the gaps were wrong, which is a recurring problem for you." He set the wrench down. "Yumi’s father is Kessler. Yumi is better than Kessler. Kessler retired to a boat in Ensenada three years ago and left the forge to her. She’s the one who makes weapons that shouldn’t exist. I let you assume it was an old man because it’s funnier this way."

"Everything with you is funnier this way."

"That’s the only reason I’m still alive."

Yumi’s fingers were still hovering an inch from my face.

She was watching me with those neon eyes and a grin that had too many teeth in it, and I understood, in the specific way you understand things about people who have been around Vale, that she and Dominic Vale had been a matched set once. That whatever chaos ran through him ran through her too, tuned to a different frequency, aimed at metal and mana instead of space and consequence.

Vale’s roster of exes was starting to feel less like a coincidence and more like a pattern. Frankie could punch through engine blocks and threw spatulas hard enough to embed them in wood. Yumi built weapons the government didn’t know existed and wanted to strap me to a table. I was beginning to suspect that Dominic Vale only dated women who could kill him, which either said something deeply concerning about his psychology or something deeply concerning about mine, since I was collecting the same type at a rate that would make an actuary weep.

"Fine," I said, and stepped forward into her hand.

Her fingers landed on my jaw.

And her whole body went still.

The delight on her face shifted into something else, something more careful, her neon eyes going wide and then narrowing as she pressed her palm flat against the side of my neck and just felt whatever it was she was feeling. Her thumb moved once against my pulse. Her lips parted.

"Oh," she said. Very quietly. "Oh, that’s not an artifact. That’s a graft. Someone grafted a divine-class system onto a human substrate and it took, it actually took, it’s threaded through your entire mana architecture like it grew there, and it’s not just running, it’s feeding, I can feel the drain, there’s a countdown baked into your dimensional signature, you’re dying, you’re dying right now, how long do you have?"

"Seven days," I said. "Give or take."

"Seven days." She pulled her hand back like she’d touched a stove, then immediately put it back. "And you spend those seven days doing what? Training with Dominic, who I promise is trying to kill you even when he says he isn’t, and going into Void Gates, and how do you not die, what refills the counter, what’s the mechanism, because a graft this hungry should have consumed you in the first week, you should be dust, you should be a cautionary tale in a classified paper, and instead you’re standing in my workshop with a heartbeat like a hummingbird and a hickey the size of Rhode Island on your neck."

Vale made a sound that was almost a laugh.

"The mechanism," Yumi repeated, and her eyes narrowed further, and I watched her put it together, watched the pieces click behind those neon green eyes, watched her look at the hickey and then at my face and then back at Vale. "The activation frequency spikes near certain people. The graft feeds on something. Something intimate. Something that requires proximity and contact and probably a lot more than contact." She grinned again, wider this time. "You feed on women. Some kind of essence extraction. That’s why the drain resets. That’s why you have a harem, and don’t deny it, Dominic told me you have a harem, he sent me a text at two in the morning that just said ’the kid has a harem, going to lose my mind’ and then didn’t explain for six weeks, which is very on brand."

"You told her about my harem," I said to Vale.

"I tell Yumi everything," Vale said. "She just doesn’t listen to most of it. She only listened to the harem part because it was interesting."

"Everything else you say is either lies or math," Yumi said. "The harem part had human elements."

She still had her hand on my neck.

Her thumb was still moving against my pulse, slow, absent, like she’d forgotten it was there, and her eyes had gone unfocused in the way people’s eyes go when they’re solving a problem three layers deeper than the conversation.

"Seven days," she said again. "And you came to me to get a weapon."

"I came because Vale said I needed one and wouldn’t tell me anything else, which I’m starting to think is the only setting he has."

"It is." She finally took her hand off my neck, and I felt the absence of it like a dropped call. "It’s the only setting he has. He collects broken people and points them at problems and refuses to explain the problems until it’s too late to back out. He did it to me. He did it to Frankie. He’s doing it to you."

She stepped back and looked at me properly, up and down, the way you look at a car you’re thinking about buying. "The difference is that you’re the first one he’s collected who’s actually interesting to me, because you’re the first one carrying something I’ve only ever read about."

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