Chapter 699 | I Do Not Pay For Leverage I Already Own

Chapter 699: 699 | I Do Not Pay For Leverage I Already Own

The second heartbeat under my sternum gave one slow thud against my ribs.

I pressed the heel of my hand into the center of my chest, right over the Halloran crest on my jacket, and held it there until the pressure eased. For half a second the air in my lungs tasted like copper and old river water, the way it had in the blue void, when something ancient had looked at me through shallow water and decided I wasn’t done yet.

The System chimed.

It wasn’t the brassy fanfare it used when I pulled a Gold ticket, and it wasn’t the clinical tone of a Defiance update. It was one clean note behind my eyes, landing at the exact moment the digital sign on the shelter ticked from 14 MIN to 13 MIN.

Blue brackets unfolded across the dark street in front of me, framing the barred window of a check-cashing place that had gone under in the first year of the Accord.

??? MAIN QUEST GENERATED?

?QUEST TITLE: The Shed Ledger?

?CLASSIFICATION: Main Storyline: District Seven?

?SUMMARY: For at least forty-eight months, an unlicensed procurement network operating out of the Verano Eastside has been acquiring biological material shed by juvenile Branded Aspect-bearers. The local distribution point has been identified as Leonard Kask, proprietor of Eastside Pawn. The terminal buyer, operational purpose, and connection to the multi-Aspect construct designated NEXO remain unverified.?

?PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: Identify and confirm the principal buyer operating behind the Rourke Street procurement line.?

?SECONDARY OBJECTIVE: Secure Dralun’s blue spiral notebook and cross-reference the three deceased juveniles against the last four years of IHC incident archives.?

?TIME LIMIT: 28 Days?

?REWARD: 4,000 Scumbag Points, 1x Platinum Gacha Pull Ticket, Unlock: District Seven Infrastructure (Tier I)?

?FAILURE PENALTY: None.?

I stopped breathing.

My eyes went down to the bottom line of the box, back up to the header, and down to the bottom line again. Over my head the sign clicked to 12 MIN. Down the block a stray dog trotted out from behind the tire shop with the defaced Radiant mural, sniffed a fast-food bag in the gutter and kept going.

Failure Penalty: None.

"Hey," I said out loud.

The empty street didn’t answer. The check-cashing window just threw my own pale face back at me through the translucent blue text, dirty-blond hair sticking up the way it always did, amber eyes too bright in the sodium light.

"You missed a line," I told the air.

The brackets pulsed once. A second, smaller box slid out from under the main window, unfolding with the unhurried motion the System only used when it was about to say something it had been saving up.

?I did not miss a line.?

"Main quests have penalties." My voice sounded flat inside the three-sided plexiglass box of the shelter. "The first one threatened to take half my dick off. The registration one threatened me with a federal cell. The dome didn’t even bother with a threat, because the twelve-foot horror was already standing in the room. You don’t hand out four thousand points and a Platinum ticket with a ’no big deal if you skip it’ stapled on."

?The incentive architecture of this System is designed to ensure Host compliance when the Host’s natural inclinations diverge from operational necessity.?

The text came out one word at a time in neat white letters, without any of the usual smugness.

?When the Host was instructed to initiate physical contact with Heroine Sloane Fitzgerald in the first week, a coercive mechanism was required because the Host was a coward with ten-point baseline attributes who would have spent the next ninety days apologizing to kitchen appliances. When the Host was instructed to integrate the Fitzgerald household, a seventy-two-hour timer and relationship-termination penalty were applied because the Host’s vestigial moral framework would have otherwise selected self-sabotage.?

"Thanks for the recap," I muttered. "Skip to the part where you explain the blank space."

?You are sitting on a bus bench on Halverson Avenue at 12:48 AM on a Monday, Lukas.?

The System almost never used my name inside the commentary brackets. Seeing it typed out in that clean sans-serif sent a cold prickle down the back of my neck, the same static that had climbed my spine outside the Crucible doors three seconds before the lights went out.

?You have been awake for nineteen hours. You have a five-mile conditioning run with Instructor Steele in five hours and twelve minutes. Your left shoulder still carries a two-percent range-of-motion deficit from a joint capsule tear you sustained two months ago while intercepting lethal black fire with your spine.?

The second box grew by two lines.

?And before I generated that window, you were already opening a notes file on your telephone to organize an investigation into a man who buys baby teeth from poor mothers.?

I looked down at my phone. The screen had dimmed, but the white rectangle of the notes app was still there. Kask. Eastside Pawn. 9 traces.

My thumb was hovering over the keyboard.

?Coercion is an expenditure of system resources.?

?I do not pay for leverage I already own. You saw the five-year-old boy in the green dinosaur sweatshirt. You saw the bone in his apartment door. You looked at the nine signatures on that card in the clinic, and your pulse remained above ninety-four beats per minute for forty-one minutes afterward. If I deleted this quest from your queue right now and awarded you zero points for its completion, what would you do this afternoon when you return to this district??

I didn’t answer.

I didn’t have to. We both knew what I was going to do this afternoon. I was going to walk into Lin’s and eat whatever Grandma Lin shoved across the counter at me, then go upstairs to the room with the knocking radiator and wait for Dralun’s Oregon contact to call back. And if she didn’t call back, I was going to put on the bone-white mask at midnight, go back to Rourke Street and tear Leonard Kask’s back office apart until I found out who was paying him three hundred dollars for a splintered door with a five-year-old’s spur stuck in the wood.