Chapter 105: Every Word of It True
*/Nikki’s First Person POV/*
Nobody said a word while I brought her in.
The whole living room stood lit up at half past two in the morning, every panoramic pane around it taped black exactly the way I’d ordered before leaving.
The litter floated ahead of me across all that light with the drip bag swaying on its stand and three monitors ticking their slow green ticks into the silence.
Four people stood between the sofa and the bar, and not one of them was breathing right.
Nora had both hands pressed over her mouth. Leo stood behind her with his jaw working but nothing coming out of it. Kara had gone perfectly still by the staircase with her arms folded tight, holding herself together at the elbows.
And their eyes kept jumping between the litter and my face, back and forth, over and over, unable to settle on which one was worse.
[Fair...]
Because nobody comes home two days early from a supply run carrying good news, and everybody in that room had finished that math the moment my voice came through the radio.
Nia’s father stood nearest the ward, and he stared at the litter coming toward him as though he had already imagined this moment so many times that the real thing felt like a memory.
I walked past at his shoulder, as though I was a stranger, levitating beside me a litter with monitors and a drip, my cheeks hollow, medical tape running up through one eyebrow, my eyes bloodshot.
[...No wonder they can’t settle on which of us to stare at.]
Then I passed him, and the moment I did, he jolted.
His whole body snapped out of that stillness at once, glasses slipping down his nose, and he was suddenly moving, fast, around me to the ward beneath the stairs, hitting the vestibule release, powering the interior lights, dragging the examination cart clear, prepping the far gurney with both hands shaking so hard the rails rattled under them.
Shaking, and never once stopping.
I set the litter down on the near gurney and unclamped the straps one by one, then wrapped her in that held tension running out from the spot between my eyebrows, softer than hands, and lifted her the few centimeters off the litter and laid her over onto the gurney her father had prepared, while he stood pressed back against the storage cabinets with his teeth gritted, eyes on his daughter.
He had not looked at me once since I came down that helicopter.
Not on the balcony, not across the living room, and not now, standing close enough that I could hear his breathing go.
I re-hung the drip and reconnected the leads, and the monitor picked her back up and started ticking again, slow and green and even.
And his eyes went over her instead, one dressing at a time, the arm, the shoulder, the face, every wrap of it clean and white and not one of them needing changing, and I watched a trauma surgeon’s hands arrive at the worst diagnosis a man like him can reach.
There was nothing left for him to do.
"She’s stable," I said softly. "The System did everything that needed doing... The drip’s got sedatives in it. Her body just needs another day or two of rest."
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need me to tell him. The monitors had already told him. The clean dressings had already told him.
"I’ve also given her an accelerated healing stim... it speeds recovery by ninety percent. She’ll be back on her feet in under a week."
And the man nodded.
One small, trembling nod, aimed at nothing, and it was the first time since I’d landed that he acknowledged I existed at all.
I let out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding and walked out through the seal.
Tikki stood at the observation panel with his front paws up on the frame, looking in at her, and he stayed there one second longer before dropping down and falling in beside my boots without a sound.
"We ran into a Revenant," I said to the other three, who were waiting exactly where I’d left them. "At the truck stop."
And the word did all its own work, because Kara had made every single person in this penthouse study her notes until they could recite them, and I watched it land on each of them in turn, Nora’s breath catching behind her hands, Leo’s face going grey, Kara’s arms tightening one notch further.
"Nia got hurt. I patched her up with the System... everything’s treated, she’s stable, and with the stim she’ll heal completely inside a week... She just needs to sleep. And honestly, so do I. I haven’t slept since we left."
[Every word of it true... Not one bit of it honest.]
"Morning..." I said, before the questions could form up. "Everything in the morning. All of it, I promise. Where we went, what happened..."
My eyes flicked toward the taped panes on the balcony side, where the sound of rotors had hung barely minutes ago over a machine that no longer existed anywhere outside my Inventory. "...how we got home. Every question you’ve got."
Nora’s mouth had already opened, and closed again, while Leo crossed the room instead, and put a hand on my shoulder, and squeezed it once.
"I’m just glad you’re back, man," he said quietly. "Both of you."
And that landed harder than any question in the room would have, because I’d walked in with answers ready for questions, and he hadn’t asked me one.
But Kara was looking at me.
Not at the tape on my cheek or the state of my collar. At me, at whatever sat underneath all of it, reading my face the exact way she has read it since the first semester of university, quiet and thorough, and I felt that look go over me and find no place to land, sliding, searching, coming back with nothing in its hands while a small crease formed between her brows.
"...Get some sleep, Nikki," was all she said, and it came out quieter than she’d meant it to.
"Planning on it..."
[She’s worried about Nia.] I turned for my room. [Of course she is...]
Tikki followed me in, and I pushed the door shut behind us, and then I sat down on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees and my boots still on, because that mattress had a pull to it, and I knew with complete certainty that the moment my back touched it, I was gone until noon.
So I sat, and I watched my own house through the inside of my skull.
Thirty meters of Awareness held all of it. The three of them still standing in the living room light, close together, the shapes of talking passing between them with no sound attached. Then the ward seal opening, and the old man coming out to them, and the huddle turning toward him, and the talking going on, longer, and gentler.
Then Nora and Leo detaching from it, up the staircase, along the open corridor, to their room.
Then I felt the old man lowering himself onto the sofa alone, directly across from the ward’s glass, his back curving over his knees and staying there.
Kara, still on her feet, still by the stairs.
And before she moved anywhere at all, I pulled it in.
All of it, the whole house, drawn back in through the spot between my eyebrows until the world was just this room, one cat, one bed I couldn’t lie on, and one thing left to do that was harder than the lake.
"System... paper and a pen."
-Ding!
{Order complete.
-4 Credits.}
The notepad landed in my hand, cheap and yellow and eighty pages, and I sat with the blank first page on my knee for a long time.
Because everything had to fit on it.
The bite... The number living inside her right now with no clock attached to it. The price of the thing that stops it, where the count stood, and what I did to a third of my country to get it there. And at the bottom, in a field authority nobody gets to vote on, the order that sends them all west without me.
And one page that had to carry it all.
Tikki hopped up beside me and sat down against my thigh, ears forward at the blank page like a supervisor with concerns about a deadline.
"Mea."
"Yeah, yeah..." I rolled the pen once between my fingers. "Working on it..."
Then I clicked the pen and wrote the nightmare that’d haunt their dreams right alongside instructions on what to do next, how to escape west, and what to expect.
And honestly, it didn’t take long.
Honestly... the whole thing also felt like a joke.
Not the main objective. I need those credits. But this ’letter’.
And before I could spiral any further down that particular rabbit hole-
-Knock-!-Knock-!
"W-who is it?"
"It’s me..." Came Kara’s voice softly through the door.