Chapter 700 | A Parameter of Zero

Chapter 700: 700 | A Parameter of Zero

Mateo had set his plastic triceratops on Dralun’s knee like a kid paying tribute to a king. Carmen had sewn felt spikes onto a discount hoodie at two in the morning so her son wouldn’t feel like a freak walking into a converted bank.

And three kids from Dralun’s blue notebook were already dead.

"You’re a real piece of work," I told the blue glass. "You know that?"

The System answered with its favorite line from my first week in this body.

?I am your situation.?

?Though I will note, for the record, that you are currently experiencing a spike in cortisol because I declined to threaten you with genital reduction. If you would prefer I reinstate the fifty-percent anatomical penalty for nostalgic purposes, the parameter can be adjusted.?

"Touch that parameter and I’ll find out whether a System can get thrown off a bridge."

?Noted. The parameter will remain at zero. Route 31 is approaching from the east. Your transfer window at Verano Central is seven minutes if the driver does not stop for the red light at Fourth. I recommend boarding.?

The brackets snapped shut.

Down the street, two wide headlights swung around the corner past the barbershop and caught the wet tram tracks set into the middle of Halverson. The bus hissed up to the curb, and its folding doors banged open on a smell of hot rubber and damp wool coats.

I stood, shoved my phone into my jacket and climbed the three steps.

It was the same night driver I always got, the guy who never looked up from his dispatch tablet. I tapped my student pass on the reader anyway, walked half the empty aisle and dropped into a window seat four rows from the back. The bus lurched forward before my weight had settled.

Lin’s slid past outside the scratched glass, dark windows and the neon sign with its missing letters. Above it, on the second floor, the office window was a yellow square, with Ophelia’s bat stickers taped to the frame in tidy rows.

Dralun was up there right now, probably sunk in the battered chair that groaned under his tail, staring at a phone that hadn’t rung in eleven years.

I do not pay for leverage I already own.

I leaned my forehead on the cold window and watched the Eastside streetlights smear into orange ribbons as the bus picked up speed toward the river.

For six months the deal in my head had been simple. It was ugly, and morally bankrupt enough that I couldn’t look at Marcus and Reina’s photo without feeling like a squatter in their dead kid’s skin, but it was simple. The System was the landlord and I was the tenant behind on rent. It pointed at a girl or a conference room full of people who could ruin my life, then held a gun to my head until I danced the way it liked. Every time I did something sleazy, every time I lied to Sloane by leaving something out or watched a Temptation Gauge tick up while someone cried into my shirt, I got to tell myself the alternative was a Penalty Quest or a debuff that would get me killed.

It was a great excuse. I’d gotten a lot of mileage out of it.

Now the landlord had looked me in the eye, taken the gun off the table and said, Go ahead. Do whatever you want. I already know who you are.

The bus hit the expansion joint at the foot of the bridge. Steel trusses rose on both sides and chopped the river into fast black-and-silver slices. Across the water, the Strand’s high-rises were still lit at one in the morning, forty-story billboards for Sovereign and Prominence and Mantle Recovery Gel glowing against the low clouds like fake moons.

I didn’t care about the four thousand points. I had seventeen thousand sitting in the bank doing nothing. I didn’t much care about the Platinum ticket either, not with my active slots already full of things that made Dravid squint at me in hallways and made Vivienne Cross trail me like a cat watching a mouse hole.

If the System had offered me minus five hundred points and a slap in the face, I’d still be going back to Rourke Street.

In another life that nobody on this bus would ever know about, I had known guys like Leonard Kask. Every bad neighborhood in every world has one. He sits behind thick glass in a room that smells like old brass and desperation, weighs other people’s lives on a little digital scale, and pays forty cents on the dollar because he knows the person across the counter doesn’t have the gas to drive to a better shop.

Here, in the world of capes and cereal boxes and quarterly approval ratings, the guy behind the glass bought wedding rings and granddad’s Seiko like anyone else. He also bought pieces of five-year-olds and shipped them up the chain to whoever sat at the top of it. And if the knot in my gut was right, that might be whoever built the white thing that broke Cole Dravid’s ribs in the same dome where Imara Steele’s arm burned black.

My right hand closed into a fist on my thigh. The reinforced knuckles of the Halloran field gloves creaked.

"Yeah," I whispered to the window. "Okay."

If the System wanted to sit back and watch me work for free, it could pull up a chair.

My phone vibrated once against my ribs.

I pulled it out, expecting Sloane’s three-minute check-in timer to have run out early.

It wasn’t Sloane. It was an unsaved number with a 503 area code, Portland maybe, or somewhere else up the coast, forwarded from Dralun’s ancient flip phone with no message attached. Under the contact card sat one line of blocky all-caps text from the dragon himself.

Dralun: OREGON TALKED. KASK MOVES THE BOXES ON FRIDAYS. DON’T DO ANYTHING STUPID BEFORE THURSDAY.

I stared at the screen while the bus rolled off the bridge into the bright concrete of the Verano Central transfer bay.

Then I typed back.

Lukas: define stupid.

His reply landed before the doors finished opening.

Dralun: YOU.