Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 955: A New Message

It stood alone in the middle of the gravel with its lamps still in it, canvas walls breathing in the wind off the hills, and the family found their way back to it one by one without anyone calling a meeting. Doug was inside, finishing one last filing at the old table, and he made them all wait for it, because records had continuity or they had nothing.

For all intents and purposes, Eclipse was born in there.

The first roster had been signed on that table, Scarlet had been processed at it while four hundred strangers howled outside, and the routing-sheet night had burned through every one of those lamps until ten the next morning.

”Viking funeral,” Luna proposed. ”We torch it and push it into the crater. Warriors get sent off, that’s the rule.”

Calypso hefted the axe she had absolutely not needed to bring. ”One clean swing. It would feel no pain.”

”No,” Vespera said.

One word, and the funeral was cancelled.

”We’re not burning our first headquarters.” Kaiden ran a hand down the line nearest him, then nodded at the crew waiting by the stakes. ”I say we pack it and crate it. Knowing ourselves, we’ll need it again by winter.”

The tent came down in minutes. It had taken less time to raise than any wall on the property, and it had carried more weight than all of them.

It went into storage folded and labeled, in a crate whose specifications Doug wrote personally.

The lot looked wrong without it. Everyone privately agreed, nobody said so, and Alexandra stayed at the mess hall window a moment longer than she needed to, watching the pale rectangle it left behind in the gravel.

...

That night Kaiden sat in his office with the lights half down and a coffee going cold on the giant desk, and let himself enjoy it, because he had earned that much.

Below the window the compound glowed. Dorm windows in rows, the perimeter lights, the mess hall still lit where the kitchen staff were mapping their new kingdom. No canvas anywhere on the lot. A guild with a roof over all of it.

The message backlog scrolled past on the monitor, the usual parade of sponsors, journalists, and government departments, and somewhere in the middle of it he stopped on a channel he had not opened in far too long.

Emily, Leia, and Sarah.

Three names that had been running his chat since the chat was small enough to run.

They had moderated millions of screaming fangirls and seething haters for the love of the game, taken shifts nobody thanked them for, and when the Maximilian machine came for the Sinners in the worst week of their existence, those three had stood at the front of the community and held it together.

He still owed them a meal.

The promise had survived a competition, a cosmic horror, and a guild filing by now, and it was getting embarrassing.

The compound had a roof now. The kitchen worked.

He typed the invitation himself, all three names on it, and sent it while the coffee was still technically warm.

Ten minutes later Ms. Rook added three nondisclosure agreements to the thread without being asked.

One minute after that, Alexandra informed him that she would be cooking, and it had not been phrased as a question.

Kaiden put his feet up on the desk, looked over at the folding chair holding down its corner, and grinned at nothing in particular.

...

In a basement on the other side of the screen, a notification chimed.

Leia read the message once, put both hands over her mouth, and read it again through her fingers. The scream that followed went up through the floorboards, through her brother’s bedroom, and out into a quiet street that had done nothing to deserve it.

”SHUT UP, LEIA!” The banging on the ceiling was practiced. ”SOME OF US NEED SLEEP TO FUNCTION AS HUMAN BEINGS!”

”I’M HAVING DINNER WITH KAIDEN GREY!!”

Silence.

Then, muffled, and considerably less hostile: ”...Can you get me an autograph?”

...

Two states away, that same night, in a building whose windows had been boarded from the inside since before the apocalypse, a man sat on the end of a cot with an unsent message hanging open in front of him and read the same fourteen words for the tenth time.

He had written it long, first. Thirty paragraphs, everything he’d been thinking about since the prison and the months after it, and he had wiped all of it because he could hear exactly how she’d react to it.

What was left in the window now was short enough to be true.

’Luna. It’s me. I know I have no right to ask. Can we talk?’

Theodore Aster looked at his sister’s name at the head of the thread, and his hands shook in his lap with nothing in them to hold, and every part of him that still wanted to be her brother was in the room with him.

He sent it.

”There he goes,” Viktor Thorne said from the doorway behind him, warm as a friend at a wedding. ”Good job, lad.”

He had been standing there a while. Theodore hadn’t noticed him arrive, and turned around with his eyes wet and grateful, because the man had told him it was alright to reach out, that family was family, that a person should be allowed to fix what he broke.

Viktor put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it, then looked down at the top of the boy’s head, and what was on his face was appetite.

...

Down in the war room the meeting had run past midnight, and Luna was mid-sentence about domain overlap when her interface chimed.

She stopped talking.

The rest of it ran on for a second and a half without her: Nyx finishing her counterpoint, Bastet agreeing with it, Doug asking Vespera about lease terms. Then all of it drained out of the room as they registered, one by one, that the loudest person in the family had gone quiet standing up.

She was looking at the name on the message.

Nobody in that room had heard her say it out loud in months, and every single one of them knew it on sight anyway.

Two things arrived in her, and they were not the same size.

The first was that she wanted to put her brother through a wall, and then through whatever was behind it, and she wanted him awake for every second of it.

He had tried to take her out of her own life and hand her to the people he was in debt to, because the Blood Pact treated its people better when they brought in family of their own blood. None of the time since had made that part of it any smaller.

The second was smaller and got there first. Some stupid piece of her had lit up at the sight of his name before the rest of her could catch it and kill it, because before any of this there had been the two of them and nobody else, the last two Asters in the world, and she had been the small one.

A few words that could have been typed by anybody, and they had still walked straight through every wall she had put up since the night he came for her.

She hated that piece of herself so much she could taste it.

Her answer was already being written, because she had written it months ago and kept it loaded: a column of middle fingers, thirty of them, no words anywhere in it, since words would have meant she’d sat down and thought about him.

Send.

She clicked it.

Then her eyes moved. Under the thread the interface kept its own tidy little option.

Block Theodore Aster.

One press, and he would be gone out of her world for good.

”Luna,” Kaiden said. ”Something wrong?”

She looked up at him.

She could lie to every person in that room and be believed.

Or she could tell them the truth.

”...”