My Kaiju Parasite Revived Me, But a Yandere Bought My Streaming Rights
Chapter 146: The Table
Sam had filled in nine boxes on the therapist’s chart by the time Caleb came up the walk.
That meant Sam had been at the rubber ball for more than an hour. It also meant Sam was avoiding something, because the Mercers did not avoid by leaving. They avoided by staying in the same room and putting their hands to work until the room gave up first.
"Sit," the mother said, and put a bowl in front of the chair Sam pushed out. She poured tea, then returned to her end of the table with her book. She did not ask how the clinic had gone. She had stopped asking at the door because she had learned that Caleb told the truth more cleanly when nobody pulled it out of him.
Marcus sat by the window with both hands folded over the cane. His eyes were closed, but he was not asleep. He was doing the thing he did now, saving strength by spending none until the exact second it was needed.
Caleb ate three bites he did not taste. Then he set the spoon down.
"I have to tell you something," he said. "All of you. I should have told you earlier, and the reason I didn’t is starting to sound too much like every reason I hate when other people use it on me. So I’m done using it."
Sam set the rubber ball on the chart.
Caleb turned his good hand over on the table. He had started doing that when he needed to say a thing he could not quite hold.
"I told you the parasite was gone," he said to Sam. "That was true. It went in the chamber. I heal like you now, slow and badly, and this arm is going to take its six weeks whether I complain or not."
He took a breath. "But the parasite wasn’t the only thing in me. Back on Day Eight, before I understood what any of this was, I made a choice. That choice left something silver in me. Mine, not the parasite’s. It has been there ever since, and lately it has been spreading."
He pulled the collar of his shirt down off his shoulder.
The marks ran from his collarbone under the fabric, fine and pale, the color of the statues before they decided what light was allowed to do to them. One thread followed the bone. Another branched at the second rib, where it had not branched a month ago.
His mother had seen the edge near his collar and said nothing, because she said nothing about most things until a person was ready to hear her. She had not seen how far it had gone.
She set her book down.
"There was a night I don’t remember," Caleb said. "I went to sleep in a medical bay and woke up two days later forty floors over the upper sectors. A Defense Force grid team tracked something climbing the outside of that building for nine minutes."
"Then command told them to file it as a malfunction. A sergeant kept the raw data and gave it to me."
The kitchen held still around him.
"For those nine minutes, the most expensive sensors in the city did not read me as human. They did not read me as a known kaiju either. My temperature dropped eleven degrees. My mass went wrong. For forty seconds, the signature split in two."
"Some of that was the Mimic leaving with the key. Some of it was me." Caleb looked at the pale lines on his skin. "I am becoming something, and I do not know what it is yet. I also do not know if it stops."
The old wall clock pressed its little sound into the quiet.
Caleb made himself look at his mother first. She was the one he feared hurting most. A woman who had kept one son breathing through two years of machines should not have to sit at a kitchen table and watch the other one become unreadable under his own skin.
She stood, and Caleb braced for fear, grief, the tiny flinch that would have been worse than either.
His mother came around the table and put her hand flat over the silver on his shoulder. "You’re warm," she said. That was all, and her palm stayed steady.
"When you were small, you came in from the cold running hot. No fever. No sickness. Just you, furious at winter and losing. I used to put my hand here to check anyway." She kept her hand against the marks. "It is the same shoulder. Same chest. Same stubborn boy under it. I am not going to stop knowing my own son because his body learned a language I do not speak yet."
Caleb could not answer. He put his good hand over hers and held it there.
Sam spoke from across the table in the plain, careful voice two years asleep had left him.
"Coming back was not waking up," Sam said. "People call it that because it makes them feel better. Waking up is what happens in the morning. This was building a person out of pieces that did not remember the job. My hands did not know they were hands. I had to teach them. There were weeks I looked at my arm on the blanket and it looked like a stranger had left it there."
He picked up the rubber ball and rolled it slowly in the hand that still sometimes argued with him.
"Everyone kept saying, you’re still you, Sam. I wanted to throw something at them. It did not feel true. It felt like a thing wearing my name while everybody else pretended not to notice."
His mouth moved once, not quite a smile. "The therapy gave me back the hand. What gave me back myself was Mom setting a bowl where she always set it, and Marcus telling the same boring stories like my body had not become a committee."
"And you looked at me like you were waiting for your brother instead of grieving a replacement. The world treated the stranger in the bed like Sam until the stranger got tired and admitted it."
He set the ball down and pushed it toward Caleb.
"Your body’s doing something terrifying. Mine did too. The thing that keeps you you is not whether the body behaves. It’s who keeps setting the bowl down. You have a whole table doing that, so eat the soup before Mom decides transformation is no excuse for wasting food."
Caleb laughed once, rough and wet, and obeyed. Marcus opened his eyes.
"I knew there was something in you the night you came down from that roof," he said. "Not what it was. Not what it meant. Enough to be afraid of it, and enough to tell myself that keeping quiet was protection." His fingers tightened around the cane. "That was cowardice wearing a clean coat. I am sorry."
Caleb looked up, and Marcus held his gaze. "Here is the honest version. The silver is not the parasite. It is not the harvest’s work as I understand it. It is not in Henry’s ledgers, and it is not in any name this family has used for seventy years."
"I do not know what it is. I do not know what it wants, if wanting is even the right word. I have spent weeks afraid that asking you to look at it too closely would wake it faster."
He looked at the mother’s hand still resting over Caleb’s shoulder.
"I am going to stop making fear sound like strategy. We learn it together. Out loud. At this table. That is how this family survives things it does not understand. Badly, usually, but together."
The kitchen went quiet again, but the quiet had weight in it now. Not secrecy. Something held.
Sam nudged the rubber ball against Caleb’s knuckles.
"Ten reps," he said. "Slow. You’re going to hate it. It works."
Caleb squeezed the ball. Pain moved through the arm and settled into the honest category of pain, the kind that meant a thing was healing because someone kept making it work. The silver under his mother’s hand stayed warm. Not friendly. Not safe. But no longer entirely alone.
Later, after the bowls were cleared and Sam had gone upstairs and the mother had returned to her chair, Marcus caught Caleb at the foot of the stairs.
"You did a good thing tonight," he said. "Now hear the hard part. Aldric Voss is going to send for you soon. Inside the week, I think. I can feel it coming like weather in an old break."
"And there is a woman out there who walked my enemy’s dying son out of a clinic smiling. I do not know her. Not knowing her has cost me more sleep than Aldric has in years."
He put his hand on Caleb’s good shoulder, over the warmth where the mother’s hand had been.
"Whatever you are becoming, you are going to need all of yourself soon. Heal the arm. Sleep when the house lets you. And keep your lungs clear."
Caleb stopped on the stair.
"Marek used to say that."
"Henry wrote it in the first ledger," Marcus said. "Marek may have learned it from Aldric, or from the yards, or from surviving long enough to discover that all dead things try to teach the living the same lesson. I do not know. I know this family has been learning how to breathe inside dead things for a hundred years. You come from that, too."
He turned toward his own slow climb. "Sleep, Caleb. Tomorrow will be greedy."