Chapter 85: Good Day for a Genocide
The blue cube hadn’t made one single sound in six hours.
It stood floor to ceiling across the entire back of my truck, swallowing the dinette, the queen bed, the whole rear third of my rolling house, glowing that same soft, opaque blue it had glowed all night, sealed, silent, and working.
Nia was inside it.
I sat in the middle of the hallway on a folding stool, facing it, the way people sit outside operating theaters, elbows on knees, hands hanging, doing the one job left to me, which was nothing.
I’d been doing it since midnight.
The sun had come up somewhere behind my shoulder while I wasn’t watching, early light crawling in through the mesh on the galley window, laying a warm stripe across a floor I had no memory of it reaching.
On the counter, Tikki held his loaf, chin low, unblinking, eyes fixed on the blue exactly like mine.
He hadn’t slept either.
Neither of us had said anything about it.
Adhesive strips pulled at my cheek and brow every time my jaw moved, gauze wrapped my forearm, my calf, the chewed webbing of my right hand, painkillers and antibiotics doing whatever they were doing underneath all of it.
That was my whole repair job. Gauze, tape, whatever was left in the kit.
The thought of spending anything better on myself never even knocked.
Getting here had eaten the first half of the night.
The Ascender had gone into its Inventory slot right off that highway, wreck and all, then came back out repaired for 24,750 Credits, the system rebuilding my folded ram wedge, a new windshield with fresh mesh over it, the claw holes in the roof and the bonnet sealed, airbags repacked, radiator replaced, all of it itemized like a body shop with a grudge.
Then I drove.
West past the dark bulk of Ferrow Point at a distance, thirty kilometers out from the plant, off the highway, up a dirt trail into forest, then into a clearing I’d picked off the map in another lifetime.
Then I’d opened the Crafting tab to build her a sick bay.
But the Consultant Mode had a better idea.
-Ding!
{
Consultant Mode: Active
Recommended Service: Mobile Surgical Care Package (Single Patient)
Includes: Sterile Field Enclosure, Autonomous Surgical Suite, Transfusion and Fluid Management, Internal Imaging, Post-Operative Monitoring, All Consumables.
Estimated Cost: 49,800 Credits
Estimated Duration: 5-7 Hours
Outcome not guaranteed. No warranty implied.
}
Turns out the thing doesn’t just sell goods, or builds, or consults.
It also sells services.
A whole surgical team in a box, and I’d been sitting on that tab for a week using it to price walls.
"Confirm," I had said, before the quote finished rendering.
The cube swallowed her thirty seconds later, and I’d been on this stool ever since, running the only arithmetic I had left.
Two hundred thousand Credits for the Variant achievement, plus the fifty its corpse paid out, on top of my own forty.
Two hundred and ninety grand.
The most money I have ever held since waking up in this timeline with the System, and the whole pile existed because a seven-foot thing tried to eat my family.
I try not to think too hard about what that says about this economy.
[Fifty grand a Revenant... That’s two hundred and fifty sprinters, in one body... Three thousand of those things would cover the Suppressant... Sure. Except just one of them cost me a truck, my sanity, half my blood, and it still nearly took everything... A million normal ones it is.]
Somewhere around dawn I’d pulled up the other reward, the one the achievement panel had been hiding behind that folded line.
The Inventory flared, ten slots, one of them holding something new.
System Integration Token.
One use. Apply it to anything the Inventory can hold, and the system itself moves in, full interface, full control.
I’d read the description maybe forty times through the night, because the obvious play kept selling itself to me.
Put it on the Ascender. Let the System drive while we slept, keep watch through every camera, slam the brakes before my human eyes ever saw the reason, wake us with an alarm instead of a claw through the roof.
A house that guards its own family.
[...No... One token... One. It’s too precious to burn on an RV... This goes on something with teeth... something military... something that shoots back.]
What exactly, I hadn’t decided.
But I’ll know it when I see it.
And a beat later, the cube flickered.
Once, twice, then the whole field simply stopped existing, no fanfare, no sound, six hours of blue gone between blinks, morning light pouring into the reopened back of my truck.
And I was on my feet before my brain had even filed the order.
Nia lay on the queen bed.
Clean. That hit first, before anything else, cleaner than I’d seen her since the billboard, the blood gone from her hair, dressed in a white hospital gown with soft lines of bandage showing at the collar and shoulder, a drip line running into her left arm, three small monitors standing quiet watch beside the mattress on the kitchen counters with her numbers moving slow and green across them.
Her chest rose steady, and fell just as steadily.
Both eyes were still bruised, still swollen, but her nose had been set while I sat out here, and her face had gone loose in a way I hadn’t seen in days.
She was asleep. Actually asleep.
And before I could get one word out-
-Ding!
{
Patient Report: Nia
Status: Stable.
Procedures Completed: Surgical repair, three penetrating lacerations, right shoulder and chest; arterial repair and transfusion, 2.1 liters; right brachial nerve and tendon reconstruction; nasal fracture reduction; orbital and cheekbone fracture stabilization; dental repair ×3; wound debridement and closure, left shoulder bite site
Prognosis: Full recovery of right arm function expected. Rest mandated, 72 hours minimum.
Second Strain Progression: 30%
Conversion becomes irreversible at 80%.
Progression rate: Indeterminate. Projection declined.
Billing Notice: Final cost exceeded estimate by 20,000 Credits. Balance adjusted automatically.
Remaining Balance: 63,950 Credits
Advisory: Medical estimates are aspirational. This is standard industry practice.
}
A laugh came out of me with no strength in it at all, half a breath through my ruined nose.
[Twenty grand over, deducted without asking, plus a lecture... Never change, you extortionate bastard...]
But still... Thirty percent.
I stood there and made myself hold that number the way you hold a hot pan, because it cut both directions at once.
Thirty meant seventy still hers.
Thirty also meant the thing had eaten a third of the way through her on the way here, on no schedule, with the system itself refusing to guess the rest.
Fifty percentage points between her and gone.
A hundred and fifty million between me and stopping it.
"System. Buy me an Accelerated Healing Stim."
-Ding!
{Order Complete.
- 100,000 Credits.}
The injector arrived in my palm, matte black, one raised button, the same simple little design as every other miracle this thing has ever sold me, while most of my Variant money walked out the door behind it.
[There goes the reward money...] I turned it over in my fingers once.
Didn’t mind though.
Couldn’t have minded less, honestly, because when it mattered, the money was actually there.
[This won’t feed the virus in her, right?]
-Ding!
{No.}
[...Good talk.]
I crossed to the bed on quiet feet, looked down at her sleeping face with all its fading damage, damage with my name on most of it, then reached out with the gauze-wrapped hand and stroked the line of her chin once, soft, with my thumb.
She didn’t stir.
"Gonna fix this," I told her, barely out loud. "Gonna fix everything..."
I pressed the injector to her upper arm, clicked the button, and watched five seconds of compound run in, and every cut and fracture and torn nerve in her body quietly shifted into fast-forward.
Then I straightened, set her pistol on the shelf beside the bed where her left hand would find it, turned around, and didn’t let myself look back.
Tikki sat up on the counter as I came level with him.
"Not gonna lie to you..." I said, stopping in front of that small, serious face, scratching once between his ears. "Besides, you already know the whole thing. I’m going to kill a lot of Infected... and a lot of people. It’ll be dangerous too... so how about you stay here and watch over Nia?"
He looked past me.
At her, sleeping in the morning light with her monitors ticking green, for one long second.
Then he looked back at me, flowed off the counter onto my shoulder, slid down into the pocket, and turned his face to the door.
While a grin pulled at the adhesive strips on my cheek before I even realized.
"Yeah... Figured."
I pushed the door open and stepped down into the clearing.
Cold, clean October morning, dirt trail running off through the trees, frost still holding in the shadows, the whole world scrubbed bright.
All of it slightly wrong at the edges, because all of it sat behind a faint curved sheen.
The tent arced over the entire clearing, my truck, the ground, twenty meters of grass in every direction, one enormous transparent membrane anchored into the earth on ribs I could barely see, 31,500 Credits of engineering rated to shrug off everything a dying reactor thirty kilometers east could ever push this far.
From inside, it was nearly invisible.
From outside, no amount of radiation was getting through it.
I crossed the grass to the airlock, cycled the inner flap, then the outer, and stepped through into the open where the October wind finally reached me, sharp and cold, carrying nothing at all except pine and morning.
"Good day for a genocide, isn’t it?" I squinted up at a flawless blue sky.
"Mea."