Chapter 255: An Alliance With Kunta [1]

“W…What? The Starakian is still here?” Cindy asked, her voice dropping to a hushed, disbelieving whisper as she hurried up the dark staircase behind me. Her flashlight beam bobbed anxiously with each step, casting long shifting shadows across the walls.

“Yeah,” I nodded. “I’m certain it’s her. I can feel the same presence as before—like static electricity crawling under my skin.”

“But didn’t you tell her to leave?” Cindy pressed, her footsteps quickening to match mine, a note of panic threading through her voice now.

“I did,” I replied grimly. “Let’s just check and assess the situation. Stay behind me, Cindy—and I mean it this time.”

She nodded wordlessly, her expression sharpening into something more alert and serious.

I needed to handle this quickly and quietly. Whatever Kunta was doing up there, every second she remained posed a potential threat to the sixty-plus people sleeping just floors below us. They’d just settled in for what they hoped would be their first real rest in days. The last thing any of them needed was a Starakian incident unfolding directly above their heads.

We bypassed several floors in quick succession, our footsteps muffled against the dusty carpet. When we finally reached the thirteenth floor—the same cramped, grimy room where I’d first discovered Kunta what felt like a lifetime ago—I swept my flashlight through every shadow and corner.

Empty. Just dust motes and the skeletal remains of abandoned furniture.

“She’s not here,” Cindy murmured beside me.

“No,” I agreed, feeling the Symbiote’s awareness tugging me upward like a compass needle. “She’s further up. Much further.”

We climbed.

The higher floors were a different world entirely from the occupied levels below. Dark, oppressive, and heavy with the smell of rot and stagnant air. Broken windows on certain floors allowed the cold night wind to whistle through empty corridors, stirring debris and loose papers in ghostly spirals.

Then we saw the bodies.

Infected—or what remained of them—were scattered across the corridor floor in contorted heaps. I crouched down carefully and brought my flashlight close to the nearest one, examining the wound patterns and the dark, viscous blood still pooling beneath the corpse.

“It’s recent,” I said quietly. “Very recent.”

“Do you think she did this?” Cindy asked from directly behind me.

“Almost certainly,” I replied, straightening and scanning ahead. “She cleared a path through these floors for herself.”

Cindy was quiet for a moment, absorbing that. Then from somewhere far above us, a faint metallic sound drifted down—a clatter, followed by something distinctly mechanical. A whirring, intermittent and struggling.

I knew that sound.

We took the remaining stairs quickly, the Symbiote’s perception sharpening with every floor we gained, guiding me with increasing precision toward the source of that energy signature. Past the twentieth floor and up the final narrow staircase that I suspected few people had climbed in years.

The twenty-first floor.

The last hotel floor of the Whitesun Hotel.

The corridor stretched before us in near total darkness, but at the far end, warm light leaked insistently through a gap in a partially open door—a trembling, amber glow that pulsed faintly, almost organically. I stretched my arm back instinctively, a silent signal for Cindy to stop and hold her position behind me.

I approached the door slowly, controlling my breathing, letting the Symbiote energy gather beneath my skin and pool at my fingertips—ready to trigger the Time Freeze the instant I needed it.

I reached the door, pressed my back against the wall beside it for a half second, then turned and looked inside, flashing my light.

“Sonny, please, just hold still—I’m almost finished, stop wriggling—”

Kunta was kneeling on the floor in the center of the room, her hair hanging loose and disheveled over her face, completely absorbed in whatever she was doing. Her mechanical dog—Sonny—lay on its side before her, its metal panels partially open and sparking fitfully as its legs twitched and kicked against her hands in mechanical protest. A collection of strange, luminescent tools surrounded her in a careful semicircle, casting the room in that warm, pulsing amber light.

I stood in the doorway for a moment, staring at the scene.

I genuinely could not decide whether to be angry or laugh.

“You’re not even attempting to hide yourself, are you?” I said finally.

Kunta’s head snapped up so fast her hair whipped across her face. Her eyes—wide, startled, and luminously pale in the light of her tools—stared at me with pure shock.

“Y—You! You found me?” She stuttered, clutching Sonny protectively to her chest.

“Of course I found you!” I said, stepping into the room and letting the full weight of my irritation enter my voice. “You’re making enough noise to wake us all! You were practically broadcasting your location!”

Kunta winced, gritting her teeth in frustration—though whether at me or at herself, I couldn’t quite tell.

“Damn it all…” She muttered darkly, hunching her shoulders. “I forgot how acute a Symbiote’s perception becomes with a compatible host. I completely miscalculated the detection radius—”

“What part of ’leave this building’ was unclear to you?” I asked, crossing the remaining distance and looking down at her. “My entire group is living just floors below us. Children, elderly people, survivors who’ve been through hell. And you’re up here doing whatever this is with your dog—” I gestured at the tools and the sparking dog, “—in a room you haven’t bothered to conceal yourself in.”

“Sonny isn’t a dog!” Kunta snapped reflexively, hugging the mechanical creature with fierce protectiveness. “He’s a precision-engineered companion unit and he deserves more respect than—”

“So you’re a Starakian.”

Cindy’s voice came quietly from behind me. I turned to find that she’d ignored my demand to stay back and had stepped into the doorway, her flashlight lowered as she studied Kunta with unconcealed fascination. Her eyes moved slowly over tunique features as Starakians from Kunta, grayish pale skin and horns.

Kunta immediately tensed, drawing Sonny closer and watching Cindy with undisguised wariness.

“She looks so young, Ryan,” Cindy said softly, almost to herself. “She can’t be much older than Rebecca, can she?”

“She’s a Starakian,” I reminded her. “For all we know she could be several thousand years old beneath that face. Don’t let appearances mislead you.”

“You extraordinarily impolite human Symbiote host!” Kunta erupted, shooting to her feet with surprising swiftness and directing a fierce glare at me. “I am not that old! I would appreciate some basic courtesy!”

“That was genuinely one of the more inventive insults I’ve ever received,” I muttered under my breath.

Cindy tilted her head, still staring at Kunta carefully, her expression thoughtful rather than afraid. “She doesn’t seem particularly threatening, Ryan. She just seems…” She searched for the right word, “…frustrated, maybe lost.”

“Don’t let that fool you,” I said. “She’s Starakian, and the last time we met properly, she was in the process of planning something that could have gotten all of us killed.”

“We were not planning to kill anyone!” Kunta shot back loudly.

“Forcibly extracting a Symbiote from a living host—a process with an extremely high likelihood of killing the host in the process—makes you a murderer,” I said, meeting her gaze coldly. “Whatever your intentions are, whatever justifications you’ve constructed in your mind, the outcome speaks for itself.”

The words landed heavily. Kunta’s fierce expression wavered, crumbling slightly at the edges. Her mouth opened, then closed again. She looked away, jaw tight, and said nothing for a long moment.

“Ryan, really?” Cindy asked quietly, turning to look at me with something complicated in her expression.

“She admitted it herself,” I replied simply.

Kunta’s hands tightened around Sonny’s frame. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its sharp edge and dropped to something quieter and more strained.

“We were trying to help you,” she said slowly. “The Symbiotes inside your bodies are parasitic—they change you, shape you, consume parts of who you are over time. Would you genuinely rather spend the rest of your lives with foreign entities living inside you, altering everything you are?” Her gaze shifted to Cindy suddenly, eyes narrowing with sharp recognition. “Wait—she’s also a host? Another one? How many Symbiote hosts does your group actually have?”

“What, compiling a detailed list now?” I replied coolly. “Planning to circle back for all of us once you make your escape with your mechanical dog?”

“I don’t want to kill anyone!”

She shouted out loudly.

When she looked up again, her eyes were glistening. Actual tears tracked silently down her cheeks, catching the amber glow of her tools.

I stopped.

“Ryan…” Cindy said softly beside me, giving me a disapproving look.

I grumbled under my breath.

Kunta pressed the back of her hand to her cheek roughly, as though annoyed at herself for the display of emotion.

“I just…” Her voice came out fragile now. “I just want to see Zakthar again. That’s all I want. Once I find him—once I know he’s safe—I promise we’ll leave. Sonny and I will go and we won’t come near your people again…”

The words dissolved into the dusty silence of the room.

I looked at her for a long moment—this alien girl kneeling on the floor of an abandoned hotel at the top of the world, clutching a broken mechanical dog and crying over someone she’d lost. The anger I’d carried all the way up twenty-one flights of stairs began to diminish already.

I understood that feeling more than I wanted to admit.

The ache of missing someone. Right now I was missing Mei, Elena and Alisha too.

Grief had a universal language, it seemed. Even across species.

And right now, Kunta looked almost indistinguishable from any exhausted, frightened young woman who had simply lost someone she loved.

Cindy caught my eye from the side. She was silently asking me to lower my guard—to stop approaching this like a confrontation and start approaching it like a human being. The same look Rachel gave me when she thought I was being unnecessarily hard on her.

Just like Rachel, Cindy had a tendency toward softness that occasionally frustrated me a little bit, especially toward Starakians.

But standing here in this dusty, silent room at the top of the world, watching a girl cry over someone she’d lost, I was beginning to think that softness might occasionally be the smarter instinct.

“I might know where your companion Zakthar is,” I said.

Kunta’s head snapped up from the floor, her tear-streaked face transformed instantly by shock.

“W—What?” She asked. “You—how would you—”

“Do you really want to see him that badly?” I asked her.

“I—Yes! Yes, I want to see him, of course I do—” She started, then seemed to catch herself, forcing her voice to steady. “I want to see him more than anything.”

“Then you’ll have to cooperate with us,” I said.

The hope in her expression shifted, caution moving across her features like a cloud passing over the sun. Her eyes narrowed slightly, suddenly again behind the tears.

“Cooperate…” She repeated slowly, the word turning over in her mouth. “What does that mean exactly?”

“You were so motivated and eager to kill all of us,” I reminded her, crossing my arms. “Willing to risk our lives without hesitation for your mission. But now that I’m offering you an actual path back to your precious companion, you’re suddenly wary of a simple agreement?”

Something flickered across her face at that—guilt, perhaps, or the recognition that I had a point she couldn’t comfortably argue with.

“I—I’ll cooperate! Just tell me what you want!” She said, pushing herself to her feet, Sonny tucked protectively under one arm while giving me a mechanical glare…

“Information,” I said. “And the use of that Starakian mind of yours when we need it. Your companion Zakthar—he’s being held prisoner by a hostile group of humans in this region. They have a Symbiote Host working with them, a particularly dangerous one, and that makes reaching Zakthar through conventional means extremely difficult for us. We need another angle.”

Kunta’s expression cycled rapidly through several emotions as she processed this but at the end it hardened.

“I’ll help,” she said, standing straighter. “Whatever you need—I’ll help.”

“I’d very much like to believe that,” I replied evenly. “But you’ll understand why it’s difficult to take your word at face value. I told you clearly to leave this hotel. You agreed and then proceeded to climb to the top floor and set up what appears to be a small workshop.” I gestured at her spread of glowing tools. “Your track record for keeping agreements isn’t exactly impressive so far.”

Kunta opened her mouth, then closed it again.

“I…” She hesitated, her grip tightening on Sonny’s frame. “I couldn’t just leave. Not with nowhere to go.” Her voice dropped again. “If I wander the streets out there and the others find me—they won’t ask questions. They’ll assume I’ve been compromised or that I’ve defected, and they’ll eliminate me on the spot.” She swallowed. “I have nowhere safe to go. I just…needed somewhere to stay while I figured out my next move.”

“Ryan,” Cindy said softly from beside me, stepping slightly forward. “Come on. Look at her. She doesn’t seem bad—not genuinely. Whatever she came here to do before, this is different. She has nowhere to go and people hunting her down. We have a large building with more than enough space.” She paused. “We could let her stay here, keep her on the upper floors, away from the others. She hides, we keep her safe, and she helps us when we need her. It’s a fair arrangement.”

I looked at Cindy for a long, quiet moment and I exhaled slowly through my nose.

“Call the others here,” I said.

Cindy’s face broke into a warm, bright smile. Before I could say anything else, she rose up on her toes and pressed a quick, soft kiss to my lips, then turned and disappeared through the doorway.

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