My Scumbag System

"You’d haunt us anyway," I said. "You’ve been haunting me since the balcony."

The dark in Skylar’s corner shifted. Her boots came into the weak light from Jacob’s dashboard glow, crossed at the ankle, both trench knives strapped high on her thighs where the black fabric gave way to skin. She had cut the leg panels short on purpose. Skylar did everything on purpose.

"That was a business transaction."

"You bit me."

"I bill by the hour."

Raphael made a noise like a car engine giving up. "Can we not do this. Please. For like ninety minutes."

"No," Natalia said.

The van hit a pothole and everything in the back lurched. Emi’s kit slid and she caught it with both hands before a single vial moved. She had packed it by weight distribution, heaviest at the base, so it would not tip if we took a corner hard. She had told me about it Tuesday for eleven straight minutes and I had listened to all eleven.

She caught me watching and her cheeks went the color of the inside of a peach.

"I was checking the seals."

"I didn’t say anything."

"You were looking."

"I look at a lot of things."

Natalia’s Ring flared once against my thigh, a spike of cold that went straight through the reinforced weave and made the muscle jump. She did not turn her head. She did not need to. She had learned my tells better than I had, and she used them the way a locksmith uses a bump key.

Six months ago this woman had called me a leech in her own kitchen and meant it in her bones. Now she sat with her shoulder welded to mine in a stolen catering van, purple braid pinned tight against her skull, the front of her combat suit zipped to the throat because Cel had reinforced the collar and Natalia refused to waste good armor on vanity. The suit did not care about her vanity. It fit her like it had been poured on. Every line of her was carved out of eight months of training and pure spite, and I had spent enough hours mapping her by hand to know exactly how the fabric was lying to everyone else in this van.

I was thinking about that instead of the basement.

Give me a break. My body was building an interdimensional door out of my own bones. A man is allowed a hobby.

Your heart rate just climbed four beats, Nel murmured somewhere behind my sternum. The Audience assumes it’s fear. Aphrodite knows better and is currently informing everyone at extremely high volume.

Great. Wonderful. My most humiliating moments were being livestreamed to a pantheon with a betting problem.

𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Soomin was curled against the wall opposite me with her knees drawn up and both silver gauntlets in her lap, thumbing the retractable claws in and out. Snick. Snick. Snick. Her hair had come loose from the pins and hung in pink sheets past her elbows, and she had pulled the sleeves of her undersuit down over her hands twice already, forgetting the gauntlets were in the way.

"Soomin."

She jumped hard enough to knock her head on the panel.

"Sorry! Sorry, I was, um. Sorry."

"Stop apologizing to the wall."

"I wasn’t apologizing to the wall, I was apologizing to you, and also a little to the wall." Her voice dropped. The seashell charm swung against her collarbone as she leaned forward. "She keeps asking about the floor. The Fox. She says it smells like a room where nothing has ever been allowed to die."

Beside me, Natalia went still.

"Ask her what she means," I said.

Soomin’s eyes closed. When they opened, the blue had gone gold at the rim and her voice slid down into that register that had made a Sentinel wet himself in a nightclub.

"I mean exactly that, little king." The Fox stretched Soomin’s spine against the wall and smiled with too many teeth. "Death is a smell. Rot, meat, the sweet part after. Every basement in this ugly city has it. That one doesn’t. Nothing in that room has been permitted to finish."

Maki’s tails tightened around my throat.

"She’s right," Maki said. Her voice had lost the purr. That was worse than any warning Jacob’s sensors could have thrown. "It’s been breathing a long time and it hasn’t exhaled."

"So it’s a fridge," Skylar said. "A big classified fridge. Cool. Love that."

"It is a preservation environment," Isabelle said from the front, without turning around. Her voice came clean through the partition, all crisp consonants and old money. "Which implies specimens. Which implies someone intends to use them. Nakano, when we reach the floor, do not touch anything that appears to be sleeping."

"That eliminates most of my strategy."

"Your strategy is a baseball bat and an inflated sense of destiny."

"It’s undefeated."

"It is unfinished. There is a difference, and one day you will learn it at great personal cost." A pause. "Comms are green. Jacob’s loop is holding. Twenty-two minutes to the terminal."

Emi pressed a rice ball into my hand. She had wrapped each one in its own square of parchment and folded the corners into little points, and the seaweed on this one had a face pressed into it with sesame seeds. The face was smiling. The face had been given eyelashes.

"Emi."

"Eat it."

"It’s looking at me."

"Then it’s watching you eat it." She sat back on her heels and folded her hands in her lap and stared at me until I bit into it, and then her whole face opened up like someone had turned a lamp on behind it. That was the thing about her. You could hand Emi Aoyama a war and she would find one small task inside it that she could do perfectly, and then she would do it, and then she would look at you like she had been given something.

The rice was still warm. She had made them forty minutes ago in a dark kitchen while everyone else was strapping on knives.

"Your channel count went up again," she said, soft, so only I would catch it. "Since the four a.m. sweep. Two secondaries at the left scapula."

"You checked at four."

"I checked at four and I checked again when you came downstairs, because your temperature shifted point three degrees in the hallway and I felt it through the floor." Her hands twisted in her lap. Her nails were bitten. Emi had never bitten her nails in her life. "I’m not going to pretend I didn’t notice things to make you comfortable. That’s not the job."

"What’s the job?"

"Keeping you alive long enough to be annoying at me later."

Natalia laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, low and startled, and she covered it with her hand and glared at the floor of the van like the floor had insulted her.

Emi’s braids swung as she turned. "Was that funny?"

"It was accurate," Natalia said. "Which is worse."