My Scumbag System

The ferry took an hour and eight minutes. Nobody talked for the first forty.

I stood at the rail with Maki draped across my shoulders, watching the island shrink behind us. The Crucible’s rim caught the early light and threw it back, that big volcanic scar where I had put Julian Valerius on his knees in front of twenty thousand people, where Reyna had told me to stop holding back and then broken her own arm proving she meant it. Somewhere on the mainland, three hundred miles of coast away, Reyna was probably awake and running stairs and texting me things she would deny later.

She is currently doing pull-ups and has checked her phone six times, Nel offered.

"Not helping."

I never claimed to help. I claimed to narrate.

The lattice moved.

That was the part I had not told anyone, not Natalia in her room with her thirty-seven pages, not Emi with her paper logs, not even Nel because Nel already knew and had not brought it up. The channels did not just grow. They oriented. Every time I turned, some part of the thing being assembled inside my chest adjusted itself, the way a compass needle drags itself back to north no matter how you shake the case.

And the direction it wanted was west.

Toward the Apex Tower. Toward the floor that did not exist on any blueprint in Valoria.

The door in me was trying to line up with something on the other end.

"You’re doing the thing," Natalia said behind me.

"Which thing."

"The one where your face goes blank and your jaw locks and you decide not to tell me something." She stepped up beside me and put both hands on the rail. Her Ring frosted the metal in a ring three inches out from each palm. "Say it now. Not in the elevator. Not when we’re standing on a floor with no exit and you finally decide honesty is convenient."

Salt wind pulled loose strands of purple across her mouth. She did not brush them away.

"It’s pointing," I said.

Her hands did not move. Her voice came out level.

"Pointing."

"The lattice. It reorients when I move. West. Every time." I watched a gull drop toward the water and pull up empty. "I noticed Wednesday. I thought I was imagining it. I checked it forty times yesterday with my eyes closed and a compass app and Maki spinning me in circles in the garden like an idiot."

"You did look very stupid," Maki confirmed.

Natalia was silent long enough that I turned my head.

She was not crying. Natalia Kuzmina did not cry on ferries. But the white streaks in her hair had lit up along the temple, that faint phosphor glow the Covenant threw when she stopped bothering to hold anything in, and her knuckles had gone the color of bone on the rail.

"It knows where it wants to open," she said.

"Yes."

"And we are driving it there."

"Yes."

She turned. She grabbed the front of my suit with both fists and pulled me down until our foreheads knocked together hard enough to hurt, and the cold coming off her went straight through the reinforced weave into my chest, into that fifth node under my sternum where it pushed back like two magnets refusing each other.

"Then we go faster," she said. "We go in, we find what’s down there, we take it, and we are out before it finishes lining up. Forty minutes. Isabelle’s clock. Not one second past."

"And if it lines up early?"

"Then I freeze you from the inside out and Raphael carries a very cold, very stupid man up eleven flights of stairs." Her thumb pressed against the node. Her mouth was inches from mine and the pendant between us had gone hot enough to sting. "I told you I would not be the person who kills you. I meant it. I will be the person who slams you shut."

I kissed her.

She made a sound against my mouth like she had been holding it since the basement two nights ago, and her fingers went from my collar to my hair, and the Nectar came up through the contact and lit her all the way down. Her hips came off the rail. My hand found the small of her back and pulled, and the suit did nothing to hide the shape of her against me, all that trained muscle and all that heat, the cold coming off her Ring warring with whatever furnace my body had installed while I slept.

She bit my lower lip and pulled away with it and let it go.

"That’s it," she said. Her voice had gone rough. "That’s all you get until we’re home."

"You started it."

"I finished it. Learn the difference."

From the doorway to the passenger cabin, Skylar exhaled a lungful of clove smoke into the wind.

"Twelve minutes," she said. "Also there’s a man in the wheelhouse who has now filmed forty seconds of that, and I’ve already taken his phone, so nobody thank me."

The mainland came up out of the haze. Glass and steel and holographic ad panels running Hunter rankings in forty-foot letters, and above all of it, punching a hole in the low cloud, the Apex Tower. One hundred and forty-six floors of the most watched building on the continent, with Seraphina Vance somewhere near the crown of it, drinking tea out of a cup that cost more than my mother made in a month.

And eleven floors under the ground, past ten that were on the plans, something that had never been allowed to finish dying.

The van was waiting at the terminal with the engine running. Jacob had swapped plates twice on the way over.

"Pine Street service entrance," Isabelle said as we loaded. "Loading dock four is closed for a scheduled inspection that Jacob invented on Tuesday. The dock supervisor’s badge was cloned from a coffee shop reader in the Financial District. He will notice nothing for three days."

𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

"I felt bad about it," Jacob said. "I sent him a gift card. Anonymously. From a bakery. I don’t know why I said that out loud."

"Because you’re spiraling," Skylar said. "Keep driving."

We went in through dock four at seven eleven in the morning, six of us in black, walking like we were supposed to be there. That was the whole trick. Nobody stops a person who is bored. I had learned that in another life, in another city, from men who had all died badly and taught me everything anyway.

Service corridor. Freight elevator. Sublevel Three.

Jacob’s loop caught the moment the doors closed and the sensor feed on floors nine through eleven began politely lying to everyone.

Sublevel Ten smelled like nothing at all.

That was the first thing that was wrong. Every basement has a smell. Concrete, damp, old cleaning solution, the ghost of a burst pipe from nine years ago. This floor had been scrubbed down to zero, and the air moved through it with a temperature so even that my skin could not find a gradient anywhere.

Raphael stopped at the end of the corridor. His knuckles crackled gold.

"There’s nothing here."

"Correct," Isabelle said in our ears. "Sublevel Ten is a records annex. It is the deepest floor on every schematic in existence. There is no stairwell. There is no shaft. There is one hundred and forty meters of bedrock beneath your feet."

Soomin crouched and put both palms flat on the tile. Her eyes went gold at the edges and stayed.

"No," she whispered. "No, there’s four meters, then a gap, then air. Big air. And there’s something in it, and it’s looking up."

I took the Key out.

The bronze had gone warm past comfortable, and the symbols on the shank had stopped moving entirely. All of them pointed straight down through the floor between my boots.

Natalia’s Ring flared. Emi’s aura came up green along the walls. Skylar’s smoke began to seep out along the baseboards in the first thin layer of twelve.

I knelt, and pressed the Key to the tile.