Chapter 256: An Alliance With Kunta [2]

I waited in the dim amber light of the room, leaning against the far wall with my arms crossed while Kunta settled back onto the floor beside Sonny, her fingers moving over the mechanical dog’s plating. The tools around her had dimmed slightly, their glow settling into a steady pulse rather than the frantic flickering from before.

Kunta glanced up at me once, then away, then up again. Her grayish-white skin had taken on a faint, warm flush that I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been paying attention. She seemed to be working up to something, her mouth opening slightly before closing again twice.

“Was she your wife?” She finally asked. “The one who kissed you before leaving.”

“It’s complicated,” I replied ambiguously.

Kunta gave me an openly dissatisfied look—the expression of someone who had expected at least a complete sentence in response and received a bureaucratic non-answer instead.

I almost smiled at it.

“What about this Zakthar?” I asked, turning the conversation neatly before she could press further. “Is he your boyfriend?”

“W—What?! No, he absolutely is not!” Kunta practically launched herself upright, her eyes wide with indignation, her voice jumping a full octave as she denied it with every ounce of energy she had. The flush in her grayish skin deepened into something definitely crimson, spreading from her cheeks all the way to the tips of her ears. Sonny’s mechanical head tilted sideways at the sudden movement, blue eyes blinking.

Her reaction, of course, told me everything her words were trying to bury.

“You like him,” I said, continuing, “but perhaps he doesn’t feel the same way back.”

“That is not what I said!” She snapped, glaring at me with fierce embarrassment.

It’s exactly what I’m reading, I thought, watching the way her hands had frozen over Sonny’s plating, the way she was not looking at me.

I let it go without pushing further.

Instead, I shifted my weight against the wall and let out a quiet exhale. “I understand that feeling, actually,” I said. “There was a girl I loved for most of my school life. She never once noticed me—not the way I wanted her to. She was with someone else the entire time, completely out of reach.”

Something in my posture must have changed as I said it, because the tension in Kunta’s expression softened by degrees.

Even Sonny seemed to shift, his mechanical head rotating toward me with that strange, attentive quality he had.

I glanced down at the dog, mildly distracted. Whatever Kunta had done to him—swapped a component, replaced something internal—the repairs seemed to have taken hold. His movements were smoother now, less erratic, and the twin blue lights serving as his eyes glowed with a steady, warm clarity that hadn’t been there before.

“What happened then?” Kunta asked. The hostility had drained out of it almost entirely, replaced by something openly, almost childishly curious.

“The virus happened,” I said simply. “The one your people released into our world. Somewhere in the chaos and the fear and the running, the distance between us collapsed.” I paused, turning the memory over carefully. “I honestly don’t believe we would have ever become close without it. The ordinary world had too many walls built between us—too much routine, too much comfortable distance. It took the end of everything to strip all of that away.”

I wasn’t going to thank the Starakians for it. That much was certain. But the strange, uncomfortable truth of it sat in my chest regardless—the fact that something catastrophic had given me something irreplaceable.

Kunta looked away when I said it, her jaw tightening slightly.

“Why did you do it?” I asked after a moment.

There was no sharpness in my voice when I said it. No accusation loaded into the question, no anger coiled beneath the words. Just the plain, honest desire of wanting to understand.

Kunta was quiet for a long moment, her fingers resuming their slow movement over Sonny’s plating.

“It was the Supreme King’s decision,” she began. “But the reasoning behind it goes back five thousand years.” She paused, as if deciding how much to give. “When the Shadelings first came to us—what you call the Symbiotes—they did not arrive as parasites in individual hosts. They came as a tide. They swept across our birth planet like a consuming darkness and decimated everything we had built over millennia. Cities. Culture. Generations of our people. Gone.” Her voice remained steady but her hands pressed slightly harder against Sonny’s frame. “A remnant of us escaped. We scattered to other planets, colonized what we could find, tried to rebuild. But the Shadelings followed. They always followed. For thousands of years we were never fully free of them—always being eroded, always losing more ground, more people.”

There was a silence following that before she continued.

“Then the King came, he rallied what remained of us. Gathered the scattered colonies, united them under a single purpose, and declared war—a real war, a coordinated one, not the desperate running we had been doing for centuries. Under him, we became stronger. More organized. The losses slowed and then reversed.” She looked up at me, something complicated moving through her pale eyes. “He is beloved because he delivered something our people had not known for five thousand years. Safety. Growth. The possibility of a future and also of vengeance against them…”

“The Symbiotes you mean?”

She nodded. “Shadelings, Shadoweaters. They are monsters. Whatever form they take inside a host, whatever version of cooperation they present—underneath that, they consume. They alter. They hollow out everything they touch over time.”

“From where I’m standing,” I said quietly, “your people are the monsters in this story.”

Kunta didn’t flinch at that, but she didn’t dismiss it either.

“Zakthar and I didn’t agree with the methods,” she said finally. “We weren’t alone in that, but we were far outnumbered. The ones who voted in favor, the ones who drove the decision—they weren’t abstract ideologues. They were people who had watched their families be destroyed by Shadelings. People who had lost children, parents, entire communities. When you have suffered that kind of loss across generations, the moral calculus becomes…different.” She exhaled slowly. “The King gave them a weapon and a direction, and they followed because following felt like finally being able to do something after five thousand years of only running and grieving.”

“So humanity simply had the misfortune of hosting Symbiotes,” I said.

“Every planet the Shadelings have taken root in becomes a target,” she confirmed. “We use biological agents to neutralize the Symbiote population—clearing the infestation, as the King frames it. We make contact beforehand with select individuals on each world, offer arrangements, ensure a portion of the population is preserved.”

I see now…

The VIPs. The ones who had vanished before the first outbreak even began—who had disappeared from positions of power and influence with suspicious, almost prophetic timing. I had wondered about them from the very beginning, that small fraction of humanity who seemed to have known what was coming.

So they had been approached. Offered survival in exchange for cooperation or silence or both.

“And we’re meant to be grateful for that?” I asked, sarcastically.. “A thousand people preserved. Billions discarded. And we should consider ourselves fortunate that your King’s arithmetic included us at all?”

Here’s the expanded and enhanced ending of your Chapter:

***

Did he genuinely believe that preserving a fraction of the population absolved his people of the rest? That keeping a thousand alive while billions died in fear and confusion and agony somehow placed the Starakians on a different moral plane than the very creatures they claimed to be fighting?

Kunta fell completely silent at my words, offering nothing in return. No defense, no counter-argument, no carefully constructed justification. Just silence.

“I don’t know enough about the Symbiotes to make a full comparison,” I continued, keeping my voice level and measured rather than letting the anger beneath it take over. “But look at yourselves honestly. You aren’t different from them. The only meaningful distinction I can say is that the Symbiotes come at us directly, they’re at least honest about what they are. Your people attack from a distance, release a biological weapon, and watch entire civilizations collapse from the safety of orbit without ever having to look your victims in the eye. If anything, that’s worse.”

She didn’t respond to that either. She just lowered her face slowly, her silver hair falling forward to curtain her expression from view.

Sonny, operating with the instinctive emotional intelligence of something that was unmistakably a dog regardless of its construction, shifted his mechanical body and pressed his head gently against Kunta’s side. The gesture was so naturally canine, so immediately recognizable, that it was almost disarming.

Several minutes passed in quiet. I remained where I was, and Kunta remained where she was, and the room held its uncomfortable silence between us until the sound of footsteps on the staircase announced the others arriving.

By others, I meant everyone.

Cindy came through the door first, followed closely by Christopher, Rachel, Sydney, Rebecca, and Daisy filing in one after another, their flashlight beams sweeping across the room before settling. The space suddenly felt considerably smaller with all of them in it.

I did a quick mental count and noticed the absence immediately.

Ivy wasn’t there.

I frowned internally at that. Now that I thought about it properly, I hadn’t actually seen Ivy since we’d returned to the hotel. She and Mei had shared a room back in Jackson Township, had been genuinely close in the quiet, understated way that Ivy approached everything. The news about Mei’s capture must have hit her harder than I’d accounted for.

I made a mental note to check on her as soon as this was handled.

But for now—

“So this is a Starakian?” Sydney spoke first, predictably, stepping forward with her arms crossed and examining Kunta. “You cannot be serious. How in the world did we actually lose to this race? That’s genuinely embarrassing for humanity.”

“W…What?!” Kunta’s head snapped up, outrage flaring immediately across her features as she glared at Sydney with wide, affronted eyes.

“It wasn’t them directly, Sydney,” Christopher interjected with a patient sigh, rubbing the back of his neck. “It was the virus. They didn’t fight us face to face.”

“No,” I said, drawing everyone’s attention. “What killed us was our own people.”

A beat of quiet fell over the room at my tone.

“It was true after all,” I continued, looking at each of them in turn. “The confirmation came from her. The leaders—the ones at the very top of every major government, every seat of power, they didn’t disappear because they were overwhelmed or caught off guard. They made deals with the Starakians in advance. They negotiated their own survival and the survival of whoever they chose to bring with them, and then they stepped aside and let it happen.”

They all fell silent hearing that.

It was a betrayal. The most total and absolute kind—the people entrusted with the survival of billions choosing instead to preserve themselves and call it pragmatism. The people who had died out there, devoured and transformed and hunted through the streets of cities they’d spent their entire lives building—they’d never been given a choice. They’d never been told what was coming or offered the chance to fight or flee or simply say goodbye to someone they loved.

They had simply been left to die like livestocks.

Maybe resistance against a technologically superior civilization would have been impossible regardless. Maybe the outcome would have been the same. But those people deserved the chance to meet it on their feet.

“What’s that thing sitting next to her?” Sydney asked after a moment. She was squinting at Sonny with renewed suspicion. “Is that supposed to be a dog?”

“He is not a dog!” Kunta erupted, clutching Sonny protectively closer with both arms.

“Wow,” Sydney observed, genuine amusement breaking through her studied contempt. “She gets worked up easily, doesn’t she?”

“She has no right to be getting worked up about anything,” Christopher said flatly, his gaze fixed on Kunta with undisguised hostility.

“Both of you, calm down,” Rachel said with a tired exhale, moving slightly forward into the room.

Toward the back of the group, Rebecca and Daisy had positioned themselves closer to the doorway, their flashlights held close to their chests. Daisy’s eyes moved uncertainly between Kunta’s alien features—the faint luminescent patterning, the small curved horns, the inhuman pallor of her skin—and the rest of us. Rebecca was doing better at concealing her unease, but it was there in the careful stillness of her posture.

“If either of you need to step out, that’s fine,” I said to them.

“I can handle this,” Rebecca said quietly.

I’d expected something sharper from her—a clipped retort, maybe a defensive glare. Instead her voice came out small and careful, stripped of its usual self-possession. She had never quite spoken to me in that register before. I filed it away without commenting.

“I…I can too!” Daisy added quickly beside her, straightening slightly.

“There is nothing to be frightened of,” Cindy said reassuringly, gesturing toward Kunta with open hands. “She’s just a girl. She doesn’t look like a monster and she isn’t one. I think if everyone just takes a breath, we can have an actual conversation.”

“Cindy is right,” Rachel said, smiling at Kunta. “She doesn’t seem malicious. Scared, maybe. I think there’s room for some kind of arrangement that benefits everyone.”

“Both of you are being dangerously charitable,” Sydney said, clicking her tongue. “I’d like to point out that she literally has horns. Small ones, yes, but horns. Like the demons in every religious text humanity has ever produced.” She paused. “What if we’ve been getting visits from Starakians for thousands of years and that’s where the whole mythology came from? What if she’s an actual biblical demon?”

“A biblical demon with a mechanical dog,” Cindy said flatly.

“The dog makes it weirder, not better,” Sydney replied.

I glanced at Kunta during this exchange and found her pressed slightly back, Sonny held tightly against her chest, her eyes moving rapidly across the group assembled before her with the overwhelmed wariness of someone who had expected a conversation and received an audience instead. She was trying to track all of them simultaneously and clearly finding it difficult. Maybe she felt just threatened because of our numbers after all.

“Alright, everyone settle down,” I said. “This is Kunta. She arrived with another Starakian named Zakthar, and there is a strong possibility that Zakthar is currently in the same location as Mei. That makes her valuable to us and makes us valuable to her. We’re going to explore what that looks like.”

Well, Mei was definitely not in that hotel but I was going to make sure Kunta would help us to get her back even if I had to lie.

“And what about the strong possibility of her driving a knife into our backs the moment she has what she needs?” Sydney asked, not relinquishing her skepticism, her sharp gaze fixed on Kunta.

“We keep eyes on her at all times,” I said simply. “And for now, she needs us far more than we need her. That’s sufficient leverage. Her love is in Callighan’s hands after all.”

“Oh lover?” Sydney grinned hearing that. “Interesting…”

Kunta’s complexion flooded crimson.

“H…He is not my lover!” she snapped, her voice climbing with mortified indignation.

“A Starakian tsundere,” Christopher mumbled beside Sydney, his expression caught somewhere between disbelief and unwilling fascination. “I genuinely did not see that coming.”

“Don’t encourage that line of conversation,” Cindy said, delivering a firm punch to Christopher’s arm without even looking at him.

I left them to their commentary and crossed the room, pulling a dusty chair from against the wall and positioning it directly across from Kunta. I sat down and leaned forward slightly, resting my forearms on my knees, bringing myself closer to her eye level. She watched me approach with cautious attention, her grip on Sonny loosening incrementally as I settled.

My gaze moved briefly to the Dual Matrix Core sitting on the floor beside her tools, then back to her face.

“If we’re going to cooperate meaningfully,” I said, keeping my voice calm and serious, “then we need to understand each other properly. What each side can offer and what each side needs. So let’s start there.” I held her gaze. “Tell us what you can actually give us. What does working with a Starakian get us that we don’t already have?”

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