Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 956: Supportive Family

”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.

”...”

But she didn’t, because these were her people and she had never once made them guess.

”...Yes,” she nodded weakly.

The room did not take it the way a room takes news. It took it the way a room takes weather coming. Doug set his pen down. The humor went out of Nyx’s face and did not come back, and Vespera turned her head.

”He wants to talk,” Luna said. ”He...”

Then she stopped, because that was the end of what she knew.

Luna stood in the middle of her family with her brother’s name in front of her, thirty middle fingers already sent and the block sitting right there underneath his message.

She did not tell anybody in that room what she was going to do about it.

Including herself.

The quiet went unfilled, which was a first for this particular room.

Luna stood in the middle of it with the thread still open in her vision, and she was not looking at any of them. She was looking at Kaiden, and she did not stop looking at Kaiden, because he was the only one in that room she was actually talking to.

Ms. Rook read it first, and moved.

She squared her pages against the table, slid them into her folio, and stood. ”We will resume at nine,” she announced to the table at large, which was generous of her, considering that nine o’clock was now less than eight hours away.

Doug gathered his forms into both arms and, for once in his documented career, walked out without finishing a sentence. The two staffers who had been keeping minutes at the far end followed him out with their tablets hugged to their chests, and the last one through eased the door shut the way people close doors in hospitals.

Then it was family, and nobody else.

”I already answered him,” Luna said. ”Thirty middle fingers. It was therapeutic.”

A few of them smiled at that, carefully. Nobody laughed.

”That part was easy.” Her thumb worked against the side of her finger, back and forth. ”But there’s a block option under his name too. One press and he’s out of my life, permanently. No more chances, no more ambushes at midnight, nothing, ever.” The thumb stopped. ”I’ve been trying to press it since before Rook stood up. I just... can’t.”

”Then give it here.” Alice didn’t even sit up in her chair. ”I’ll press it for you, and we can all go to sleep.”

She meant it completely, which was the most Alice thing about it.

”...You can’t take over someone else’s private messages in the awakened interface,” Aria informed the little sister.

”You also shouldn’t be able to fuse with your big brother and become a higher existence. This sounds more likely to work.” She wasn’t an easy one to shake.

”Or we take the meeting,” Calypso offered, and her grin spread slow and happy. ”All of us together. If the boy truly wants to talk, we sit him down and we listen. And if it’s a trap...”

”We can’t do that.”

Aria said it quietly, and everyone heard the difference in her voice before they understood the words. She had her hands folded in her lap, and she was looking at Luna with open sorrow.

”And we can’t ignore what he’s living in, either. You remember what he said when we met him? He had to bring you over or he’d be in trouble... And somehow he’s escaped jail since? All of this is so strange...”

”...” Luna’s fists tightened, but she said nothing as Aria continued.

”People in such circumstances rarely send messages their...” She selected the next word very carefully, very gently, ”Superiors haven’t approved first. So that message is theirs as much as his, I fear, and we should be honest about who they are.”

Bastet was quick to join, fully in agreement with the Moon Valkyrie. ”The annoying answer is that we know almost nothing. They have no official standing, no faces, no records, and they are invisible in a world where everything is carefully recorded. And the one time they touched you people, they made a brother try to kidnap his own little sister.”

No one interrupted her. Even Calypso’s grin had folded itself away.

Aria nodded. ”That was when you were a rookie nobody had heard of. Look at what you are now. Look at what we all are. There isn’t a guild or a government on this planet that isn’t hungry to own us, and these people have already shown us how they collect.”

Her hands tightened in her lap.

”Whatever you were worth to them back then, you are worth a million times more tonight. If we walk you into a meeting they arranged, we might be delivering the exact prize they sent him to fetch.”

None of it came out of her easily. Aria had spent her whole life being a big sister, and every sentence sounded like it was costing her.

”Aria is right.” Bastet’s tail had gone still along the arm of her chair, which in its own language was a shout. ”Patient creatures are the dangerous ones. When something has waited this long before extending a hand, the invitation is part of the hunt. I am sorry, Luna.”

”I can’t blindly hate him.” Alexandra spoke up from her spot by the glass, small and steady. ”Although I can’t speak like I know the circumstances well enough... He was a good brother once, right?”

”...” Luna could only nod.

Alexandra smiled at her, small and sorry.

”I gotten myself into something that sounds awfully similar once, and for as long as he owned my contract I did things that weren’t me.” Her hand had found the seam of her sleeve and was working it. She stopped there, and then she made herself finish it anyway. ”You aren’t free in that position. Not even when you think you’re the one choosing.”

She let out a breath. ”It’s just that Aria and Bastet are right about all the rest. Getting him out of there can’t start with you walking into a dark room he chooses.”

Nyx had crossed the floor somewhere in the middle of all that, without any announcement, and she skipped every argument on the table. She pulled Luna into a hug instead, both arms and all the way in, and the smallest member of the family disappeared into it.

Luna scoffed as the infamous milk jugs settled their full weight on her, somewhere around the collarbone. ”...Are you trying to push me into the ground?” she whispered, and there was not much fight anywhere in it. ”I’m not a nail for you to hammer...”

Nyx only hugged her tighter. ”You’re sleeping in my arms tonight,” she said, with none of the usual song in it. ”And you can call me anything you want. Fatty, pink bimbo, Nutella addict. Whatever makes you happy.”

The scoff came back stronger, which from Luna was close to gratitude. ”Why would sleeping with you make me happy...?” she murmured. ”Besides, I can already call you anything I want, any day I want, so...”

Nyx closed her eyes for a moment, and it took everything she had not to say the obvious thing back.

Luna’s hands had come up at some point regardless, holding on to the back of Nyx’s top, and nobody in that family was rude enough to mention it.

Kaiden had leaned against the map table through all of it and let them talk, because every word had needed saying and none of it had needed him. Now he straightened.

”Luna.”

She looked up at him.

His voice stayed level and warm. ”What do you want to do?”

Luna had an answer for everything, at any hour, under any amount of fire. The family watched her open her mouth on reflex, and watched nothing come out, and the silence that followed was its own kind of answer.

”I don’t know.” It came out small. ”I genuinely don’t know, Kai...”

Her eyes had gone wet, and she was furious at them about it, and that was the most heartbreaking part: watching her fight her own face and lose. Her jaw worked once. She got a hand up to cover it, and it did not help, and she gave up on the hand.

Kaiden pushed off the table, crossed to her, and set his hand on top of her head.

”Then don’t know for a while,” he said.

Luna leaned forward until her forehead landed against his chest, and stayed there.

”...Okay,” she managed.

...

Two states away, in the building whose windows had been boarded from the inside, Theodore Aster sat on the end of his cot and looked at thirty middle fingers.

He had not moved in a long time. At some point he had laughed, one broken sound, because it was so exactly her, and then he had put his face in his hands and stayed that way until the floor creaked behind him.

”Well, lad?” Viktor Thorne asked from the doorway. He had arrived quietly, and he did not come closer.

”Thirty middle fingers.” Theodore said it into his hands, and something cracked in the middle of it that was almost a laugh.

”Thirty of them,” Viktor repeated, in the tone other men used for sunsets. ”Ever met a gal you loved but she had other thoughts?”

”... No. I was busy.”

”Heh,” Viktor chuckled, shaking his head. Then patted the boy’s shoulder. ”Then you don’t know what indifference looks like. Let me tell you. Indifference is silence. Indifference is a dead thread and a block notice.”

Theodore lifted his head slowly.

”So tell me. Can you still write to her?”

Theodore’s eyes went to a point in the air that only he could see, to words no other person in the world could read, and if Viktor minded that, nothing on his face said so. ”...Yeah. She didn’t block me.”

”There it is, then. A closed door sends you nothing. A closed door doesn’t count to thirty.”

Theodore looked up at him with his eyes rimmed red and a terrible new thing in them, hope. ”What do I do now?”

”You tell me,” Viktor smiled and turned to leave. ”She’s not my sister.”

He closed the door gently behind him on his way out. In the corridor, Olga was waiting with her tablet already lit.

”Contact established,” Viktor told her, and the wedding-guest warmth was gone out of his voice entirely. ”Her reply came in seconds. Have them mark the channel as live, and tell everyone to be patient with the next step.”

Olga adjusted her glasses and typed.

Through the door behind them, muffled, they could hear the boy crying again. It sounded relieved.