Chapter 318
I hit the floor of my own bedroom like gravity forgot I existed for a second and then remembered all at once.
My knees buckle. My hands slap down on the carpet to catch the rest of me, and something warm and disgusting squelches between my fingers when they land. I don’t have to look to know what it is. I already know exactly what it is, because I can smell it, and the smell alone is enough to make my eyes water worse than the actual escape did.
Gatomon’s the first thing I see when I manage to lift my head, and her ears go flat against her skull so fast it’s almost funny.
“You’re covered.”
“I’m aware.”
BlackGatomon leans in from the doorway, takes one look at me, and makes a face like she’s personally offended on behalf of the carpet. “That’s not just covered. That’s a whole new color.”
“Thank you, BlackGatomon. Very helpful.”
Agumon’s the one who actually gags, hand over his snout, backing up a full step like the smell might follow him if he doesn’t create enough distance fast enough. Gabumon just stares, wide-eyed, not saying anything, the way he does when he genuinely can’t tell if a situation calls for concern or laughter and doesn’t want to pick wrong. Cutemon peeks out from behind Gabumon’s leg, sniffs once, and immediately buries her face against his fur like she regrets making that decision.
I drag myself up off the floor, and every step toward the bathroom leaves a trail that’s going to require its own separate apology to whatever cleaning product I own.
“Numemon,” I say, because somebody’s going to ask eventually and I’d rather get it over with now. “There were, like, thirty of them. Chased me through half of SHIELD’s system throwing this stuff the whole way.”
“Numemon.” BlackGatomon says the name like she’s tasting it, unimpressed. “Rookie-level. Practically harmless.”
“Tell that to my hoodie.”
“At least you smell better than you look.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“It’s not,” Agumon says from somewhere near the window, still keeping his distance, “but I appreciate the confidence.”
I don’t have the energy to fire back. I just keep walking, shed my ruined clothes into a garbage bag I’ll deal with later, and get in the shower before another word gets said.
The water’s too hot at first, and I don’t adjust it. I just stand there and let it burn while pink runs off me in streaks and disappears down the drain, and for a minute my brain does that thing where it just goes quiet, no thoughts, nothing, just heat and water and the slow process of not being covered in monster poo anymore. It’s almost peaceful, right up until it isn’t.
Then my hands stop scrubbing on their own, and I’m just standing there under the spray, and the quiet in my head starts filling back up with everything I spent the last twenty minutes too busy running to actually process.
Digimon were inside SHIELD’s system, real ones, the kind Gatomon named on sight the second she saw them, patrolling a human intelligence agency’s cyberspace like they’d been assigned there. Like it was normal. Like somebody put them there on purpose.
I can hear my partners talking through the door, low enough that I can’t make out words, just the rhythm of it, question and answer, question and answer. They’re trying to figure it out too. That’s something, at least. I’m not the only one who thinks this doesn’t add up.
By the time I shut the water off, I’ve got a towel around my waist and zero new ideas, but the panic’s burned down to something more manageable. Manageable enough to think, anyway.
They’re all still there when I come out, arranged around my room like they’d been holding a meeting without me, which knowing this group, they probably were. I drop onto the edge of my bed and just start talking, because saying it out loud is the only way I’m going to make any sense of it.
“There was a file,” I say. “Encrypted. Couldn’t touch it, didn’t even get close, but it was buried deep enough that whatever’s in there matters. And then the Numemon show up before I can try again.”
“You said they attacked fast.” Gatomon’s sitting straight-backed on the windowsill, tail curled around her feet, the way she gets when she’s actually thinking hard about something instead of just reacting to it. “Like they knew exactly when to move.”
“Yeah. Like something flipped a switch the second I got too close.”
“So they’re guarding it.” BlackGatomon says it flat, like it’s obvious, but there’s an edge underneath the flatness that tells me she’s just as thrown as I am. “Digimon. Guarding a human file. In a human system.”
“That’s the part I can’t get past.” I drag a hand down my face. “Why would SHIELD have Digimon working security? SHIELD doesn’t even officially know Digimon exist, not outside whatever black-budget file they’ve got on me specifically.”
Nobody’s got an answer for that. Agumon opens his mouth like he’s about to try anyway, then closes it again, which tells me even he knows a guess right now isn’t worth much.
The room goes quiet for a second, and it’s not a comfortable quiet.
I promised them I’d do this part alone. Told Gatomon straight to her face, right before I jacked in, that I wasn’t asking anybody else to touch this. And I meant it when I said it, because the whole point was keeping the rest of them out of the blast radius if it went bad.
But this isn’t a blast radius problem anymore. This is a problem that doesn’t make sense from any angle I can look at it from, and the only reason I’ve ever cracked anything like this before is because I wasn’t the only one looking. Gwen catches patterns I miss, and Peter thinks in whole systems where I’m still stuck staring at one broken piece. Jessica’s the worst one, honestly, in a good way, because she asks the question nobody else thought to ask, mostly because she’s not boxed in by whatever assumptions the rest of us walked in with.
Going in alone wasn’t about being strong enough to handle it by myself. It was about not dragging them into something dangerous on my own call. And I still don’t love the idea of dragging them in now, but sitting here trying to puzzle out Digimon-guarded SHIELD files while my partners throw out theories that go nowhere is just failure with extra steps.
“I need to tell them,” I say, mostly to myself, but Gatomon’s ears twitch like she heard the shift in my voice before I even finished the sentence.
“Tell who?”
“Gwen. Peter. Jessica. All of it. The hack, the file, the Numemon, everything.”
BlackGatomon raises an eyebrow ridge at me, the closest thing she’s got to actual eyebrows. “Thought you said you weren’t dragging them in.”
“I did say that.” I reach for my phone off the nightstand, and my hand isn’t quite steady, which annoys me more than it should. “Turns out I was wrong.”
Nobody argues with that. Gatomon just watches me, quiet, the same look she had right before I went in tonight, like she already knew this was where it’d end up and was just waiting for me to catch up.
I open the group chat. My thumb hovers over the keyboard for longer than it should, because once this message goes out there’s no version of tonight where I get to be the guy who handled it solo and clean. I’m about to be the guy who broke a promise three hours after making it.
I type it anyway. Something went wrong tonight. Need to talk, all of us, tomorrow if you can. Found something I don’t understand and I don’t think I can figure it out alone.
I read it twice, delete two words that sound more dramatic than I mean them to, and send it before I can talk myself into softening it any further.
The message sits there on the screen, delivered, unread. My partners are all watching me now instead of talking among themselves, waiting to see what I do next, and honestly I don’t have a next move. There isn’t one. I already did the only thing left to do.
I set the phone face-up on the bed where I can see it the second something changes, lean back against the headboard, and let my eyes close for just a second. Gatomon hops up beside me without a word. The others settle in around the room, quiet now, none of them in any hurry to fill the silence with something that isn’t actually useful.
So we wait, all of us, for whatever comes back.