My Scumbag System

I sat there for a long time after Maki said that.

Not because the words themselves were complicated. They were simple. Direct. The kind of thing a three-hundred-year-old murder cat says when she has run out of ways to be horny about the situation and has to settle for being honest instead.

I will sit in front of it.

Nothing will get through.

I reached back and scratched behind her ears without thinking, and her purr dropped into a register that shook the bench. The basement lights hummed above us, and outside and upstairs the house was waking up, seventeen people pulling themselves from sleep because the sun had ideas about their schedules, and none of them knew that the guy who made their roster, kissed their healer, and beat their instructor in a sparring match nine weeks ago was turning into the architectural equivalent of a hole in the wall of reality.

Fun morning.

"Maki."

"Mm."

"If anything comes through while I’m not home, you protect Natalia first."

Her purr stuttered. Restarted. "The purple one bites."

"She does."

"I like the blue one better."

"I know. Natalia first."

A pause. Then her tails tightened around my waist and her chin pressed harder into my shoulder, and the warmth coming off her body was enough to make the cold spots where Natalia’s fingerprints sat on my chest feel twice as sharp.

"Fine," Maki said. "But you owe me the good tuna. Harbor market. Whole fish. I pick."

"Deal."

She kissed my neck once, fast, teeth included, then dissolved into shadow and was gone.

I pulled my shirt over my head. The fabric caught on the pendant chain and I had to work it free, and when the silver teardrop settled against my sternum again I could feel Natalia through it. Not words. Not emotion. A pressure, like a hand flat on the other side of a wall, letting me know the wall was thin and she was still standing there.

I closed my eyes.

Thirty-one primary channels. Forty-four secondary. A lattice pattern growing in my body that matched the formation topology of an artificial Gate built beneath a daycare by someone with my father’s research and a willingness to use it on children. Something had visited my room at three forty-one in the morning and accelerated the construction by four hundred percent, and Nel did not know what it was, and Apollo had not signed off on it, and the only person who might have an answer was sitting in Seraphina Vance’s interrogation facility getting her fingernails removed by people in charcoal suits.

And I had three days of bed rest before I could punch anything about it.

I picked up the bat. It felt lighter than it used to. That should have been comforting and it was not.

At nine hundred hours I went to Braxton’s office and told him I would follow his seventy-two-hour rule. He looked at me for eleven seconds without blinking, which is his personal record in my experience, and then nodded once and told me to close the door on the way out.

"Miller."

He stopped with his lighter halfway to the synth-cigarette.

"Thanks," I said. "For not making me explain more."

He put the lighter back in his pocket. The cigarette stayed unlit. "Kid. The day you explain more is the day I know you’re actually in trouble." He waved me off. "Go eat something. You look like someone microwaved a corpse and dressed it in Academy clothes."

Charming as always.

By ten the common room had turned into Natalia’s war room. She had cleared the coffee table, pushed the couch back, and spread four datapads across the surface with a holographic projection hovering above the center like a luminous tumor. Isabelle sat in her wingback with a fresh cup of tea, watching the proceedings with the detached interest of a queen observing gladiators warm up. Jacob crouched on the floor with a screwdriver, doing something obscene to a piece of hardware he swore was a backup drive and not stolen property. Marco leaned against the kitchen doorframe eating a protein bar the size of his forearm, and beside him Malachi stood so still you could have used him as a coat rack.

Natalia did not look up when I entered. She held one hand over the projection, her telekinesis rotating the three-dimensional wireframe of the Apex Tower like she was inspecting a diamond for flaws, and with the other hand she was writing notes on a physical pad of paper, because Natalia Kuzmina in planning mode trusts digital devices about as far as she can throw them, which is actually quite far but that is beside the point.

"Sit down," she said. "Don’t touch anything."

I sat.

Emi appeared at my elbow with a bowl of rice and grilled fish and a protein shake and three of the onigiri with motivational sesame seed faces and a glass of water and what I think was a multivitamin. She placed each item in front of me with surgical attention and then stood behind my chair with her hands on my shoulders, and her healing aura seeped through the fabric of my shirt and into the muscles beneath, and it felt like being wrapped in a warm blanket after sleeping on concrete for a year.

"Eat," she said.

"You’re worse than my mother."

"Your mother called thirty minutes ago and told me to make sure you eat. So technically I’m exactly as bad as your mother and we are collaborating."

I ate.

Over the next six hours, Natalia rebuilt every formation from scratch. The original entry plan had me at the vanguard with a four-person support shell. The new plan put Raphael at the front and me in the center of the formation, flanked by Skylar and Natalia herself, with Emi at my back and Soomin ranging ahead as advance scout. The change in architecture was not subtle and nobody in the room missed its implications. I was no longer the spearhead. I was the payload.

Natalia never said the word vulnerable. She never said the word liability. She just rearranged the board until the pieces told the story she wanted, and the story was: nothing touches him.

Raphael came down at noon and Natalia showed him the new formation without context. He studied the wireframe for nine seconds, then looked at me, then back at the wireframe.

"I’m carrying you out if it goes bad."

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