The thing that had been a person moved like a skipped stone not fast, exactly. Absent, then present, then absent, occupying each point in space as if it had simply stopped bothering with the ones in between.
Kazuki's first three attempts to intercept it failed for the same reason: he was watching where it had just been.
"It's not moving," Rina called, dragging Darius back against the far wall, out of the geometry of wherever the thing might choose to exist next. "It's choosing. There's no trajectory to read."
"Then stop reading trajectory." Her own voice again, only now it was advice instead of observation the same lesson she'd been drilling into him for weeks, in a gym that felt like it belonged to a different war. *Stop predicting the path. Predict the want.*
Kazuki closed his eyes.
It felt insane, standing in a dark print shop with something inhuman blinking in and out of existence eight feet away, to close his eyes on purpose. He did it anyway. The suit didn't need them. It hadn't needed them in a while.
*What does it want.*
Not where. Want.
The answer arrived the way the Core's answers always arrived now not a picture, a certainty, dropped into him whole: it wanted the same thing every one of Vaunt's numbers wanted. It wanted to stop skipping. More than it wanted to hurt anyone in this room, it wanted to exist in one moment for longer than a fraction of a second something it clearly hadn't been able to do for however many years Vaunt had kept it alive to prove a point.
Kazuki opened his eyes and didn't move toward where it was.
He moved toward where it would want to be, if it could only choose once.
"Aeva. The floor. All of it, this time. Not a dip a well."
"That'll pull the ceiling down with it."
"Do it anyway."
She didn't argue. The disc in her hand went from a pulse to something closer to a held breath, and the entire floor of the print shop tilted toward a single point the way water tilts toward a drain gentle at first, then not gentle at all, gravity stacking on itself until even the dust in the air started drawing inward.
The thing skipped once more and for the first time all night, it had nowhere else to go that wasn't further into the well.
It landed. Both feet, for almost two full seconds longer, Kazuki understood with a lurch of something that wasn't triumph, than it had probably stood still in years.
Up close, in the failing light, he could see the restraints properly. Not cable. Surgical staples, dozens of them, holding together a body that had been opened and closed so many times the skin had stopped healing into anything resembling skin. A face that might once have been ordinary, twenty or thirty years old, was now mostly scar tissue and a single working eye and that eye found Kazuki's and held it, aware, for the entire two seconds it had.
It didn't attack.
It reached toward him instead, slow, deliberate, the way a drowning man reaches for anything at all.
Behind them, Darius made a sound that wasn't a cough this time.
"Marcus." His voice had gone somewhere Kazuki had never heard it go not weak. Wrecked. "That's no. He's been dead sixty years where I'm from. I watched him die. I watched Vaunt let him die on a table because the numbers stopped being interesting." He was on his feet before Rina could stop him, swaying, reaching the edge of the well. "Kazuki. Don't kill it. Please. Whatever it takes. Don't."
Kazuki looked at the reaching hand. At the one working eye. At two full seconds of stillness this thing had clearly been begging the universe for since before Kazuki was born.
He caught the hand instead of breaking it.
The gravity well held for exactly as long as it needed to. Then the specimen Marcus, if Darius was right, and Kazuki had no reason left tonight to assume anyone was lying about anything went still in a different way. Not skipping. Not flickering.
Just unconscious, for the first time in what might have been years, held upright only by Kazuki's grip and Aeva's failing, exhausted gravity.
"We're not leaving him here," Kazuki said.
Nobody argued that either.
Behind them, in the dark, Aeva's tablet lit up once more, unprompted, and Vaunt's voice came through it a final time that night — quieter now, and for the first time since the call began, not entirely steady.
"Interesting," he said. "That's not in any of my prior data at all."
[To Be Continued...]