Chapter 258: An Alliance With Kunta [4]

The long talks with Kunta had stretched well into the night.

They covered a great deal of ground—our plans, the threats we were facing, the resources each side could realistically bring to the arrangement, and the boundaries of what we were willing to offer each other. It wasn’t a comfortable negotiation by any stretch, but it was a productive one. Kunta was sharp and precise when she spoke about things she understood, and she listened—really listened—when we laid out the specifics of our situation. That counted for something.

By the end of it, I found myself believing her. Not completely, not without reservation—the wariness was still there, sitting quietly in the back of my mind like a pilot light that refused to go out. But I believed that she wasn’t going to hurt us. Not unless something went wrong.

The more honest assessment was this: between Kunta and Lucy, it was Lucy who could be dangerous. She was trained, experienced, and deeply embedded in Callighan’s organization. We had to watch over her more than Kunta currently at least in my opinion.

Kunta, by contrast, was a frightened young woman in a foreign world, hiding on the top floor of an abandoned hotel with a mechanical dog and a desperate wish to see someone she loved again. Dangerous in the abstract, yes—Sonny alone represented a threat I hadn’t fully mapped yet, and I had no illusions about what a Starakian could do if pushed into a corner. But as long as Kunta remained stable and committed to the arrangement, Sonny would remain calm. The two of them were a package deal in every sense.

The conversation wound down gradually as exhaustion began asserting itself over everyone in the room.

“I should go check on that woman—Lucy—with the others,” Christopher said finally, punctuating the statement with a long, tired exhale as he pushed himself to his feet. “Just to make sure Martin hasn’t done anything Martin-ish while we’ve been up here.”

“You don’t have to force yourself tonight,” I said. “Get some sleep. She isn’t going anywhere if you tied her up.”

“I’m returning the advice straight back to you, by the way,” Christopher replied, pointing at me without looking. “I’ll just do a quick check and then I’m done. We’re all on the sixth floor tonight, yeah?” He glanced around with a grin that had fatigue softened around its edges.

“That’s the benefit of being the VIPs of this particular hotel,” Sydney said smirking.

Christopher laughed and headed for the doorway, his silhouette disappearing into the dark corridor as his footsteps faded down the stairwell.

“Both of you as well,” Rachel said, turning her attention to Rebecca and Daisy gently. “You need sleep. It’s been a very long night.”

Daisy barely concealed a yawn as Rachel said it, pressing her hand over her mouth with reddened cheeks, clearly running on fumes. Rebecca was faring somewhat better in terms of outward composure, but the signs were there if you knew where to look—the slight puffiness around her eyes, the careful blankness in her expression that she wore when she was working hard to keep something internal from showing. And her eyes were still faintly reddened at the rims.

It didn’t take much analysis to understand what was behind that. Rebecca had been near Mei when everything happened. She was feeling extremely guilty about Mei.

She gave a brief, wordless nod and left without much ceremony, Daisy trailing after her with another barely suppressed yawn.

“So what exactly are we doing about her, then?” Sydney asked once the sound of their footsteps had faded, her gaze settling on Kunta.

“I am not your enemy,” Kunta said, irritation sharpening her voice as she met Sydney’s stare. “You do understand that we have just agreed to help each other? By most definitions, that makes us allies.”

“By most definitions,” Sydney agreed pleasantly.

I looked at Kunta for a moment before speaking.

“Stay here,” I said, keeping my voice calm but serious. “You and Sonny both. Don’t move through the building and don’t let anyone else discover you’re here—not yet. If someone from Margaret’s community comes across a Starakian without any context or preparation, the reaction will not be helpful for anyone. It will create panic, it will consume time we don’t have, and it will slow everything down considerably.”

Kunta held my gaze and nodded.

“I won’t leave,” she said. “I promise. I can remain concealed for extended periods without difficulty—I have no desire to be discovered by strangers any more than you want me to be.” She glanced down at Sonny briefly. “We will stay put.”

“Good,” I said, pushing myself to my feet. “We’ll speak more tomorrow. There’s a great deal more to cover.”

Rachel nodded in quiet agreement and moved toward the door.

Sydney, however, remained exactly where she was—arms folded across her chest, back against the wall, showing no signs of intending to move.

“I’ll stay,” she said. “I have some questions of my own I want to ask her.”

I stopped and looked at her steadily for a moment. “You’re not going to hit her, are you?”

“Ryan,” Sydney said with an expression of mild offense. “You know me.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I’m asking.”

The ghost of something flickered across Sydney’s face—it might have been amusement, or it might have been sulking, it was honestly difficult to tell with her.

“The dog is dangerous,” I added, glancing at Sonny, who had turned his mechanical head toward me and appeared, to the extent that a mechanical dog could appear to be doing anything, to be staring at me with pointed displeasure. “Be careful around him.”

“I will stay as well then,” Cindy announced from her spot near the wall.

“I told you, I am not going to hit anyone tonight—” Sydney began.

“Yes, yes,” Cindy said, waving a hand dismissively. “We know. We believe you completely.”

Sydney opened her mouth, reconsidered, and closed it again.

I left them there—Cindy settled comfortably near Kunta, Sydney positioned against the far wall with her arms still crossed and her eyes still sharp, and Kunta sitting between them looking slightly awkward.

I stepped out into the corridor and Rachel fell into step beside me as we began descending the long staircase back down to the sixth floor.

“Thank you,” Rachel said after a few floors, her voice quiet in the dark stairwell. “For being patient with her tonight and giving her a chance.”

“No,” I said. “You were right to push back. I was letting my anger at the Starakians as a whole bleed into how I was reading her specifically. That’s not fair and it’s not useful.”

“And yet you’ve always treated Wanda differently,” Rachel observed, a wry smile entering her voice even though I couldn’t fully see her expression in the dim light. “From the very beginning.”

I was quiet for a moment, my hand trailing along the wall as we descended.

“Wanda is half Starakian,” I said finally. “And that idiot has a deeply inconvenient habit of throwing herself toward the most dangerous available outcome at every single opportunity, as if martyrdom is something she finds genuinely appealing.” I exhaled. “I don’t know exactly what it is. Responsibility, maybe. Like if I don’t keep an eye on her, one day I’ll look up and she’ll have sacrificed herself for something and I’ll have to live with the fact that I could have paid more attention.”

“That’s genuinely kind of you, Ryan,” Rachel said softly. “I’m certain she feels it, even if she would never say so out loud.”

“I doubt that very much,” I said, my voice trailing slightly.

Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that she found my involvement irritating—that my concern read to her as interference, my protectiveness as an implication that she couldn’t manage herself. Knowing Wanda, that interpretation was probably closer to the truth.

But I couldn’t bring myself to care how it appeared to her. Not on this particular point.

The way I saw it, stepping back from someone who was actively walking toward their own destruction wasn’t neutrality. It was just a slower kind of abandonment. If you knew—genuinely knew—that someone was carrying thoughts dark enough to end themselves, and you had the ability to be present and pull them back from that edge, what would it mean to simply look away? To decide their autonomy over their choices mattered more than their life?

I thought about it sometimes—those brief, devastating news reports that used to surface on television, almost always about teenagers, of my age. Young people who had been completely alone in whatever they were carrying, surrounded by others who either didn’t know or didn’t ask. I would watch those reports and think, with a helplessness that had nowhere to go, that if I had been there—if anyone had been there—things might have turned out differently. But I hadn’t been there. I could only imagine it, replay a hypothetical in my mind that went nowhere because the ending was already written.

With Wanda, the ending wasn’t written yet.

She wanted to stay. That much was obvious in everything she did and didn’t say—in the way she moved through this world, the way she fought for the people in it, the way she kept choosing to remain here despite every pull toward somewhere else. Her Starakian blood was a biological fact, not an identity. She had nothing with those people except the accident of her parentage. She deserved the right to choose her own story.

“I think,” Rachel said beside me, thoughtful, “that you genuinely don’t understand what kind of influence you have over people. The effect you have without even trying.”

“The effect I have,” I repeated with a short exhale that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I gave you, Cindy, Sydney and Elena Symbiotes. Made all four of you targets for a technologically superior alien civilization that considers you contaminated. If that’s influence, I’m not sure it’s the kind worth celebrating.”

“That entirely depends on your perspective,” Rachel said, exasperated. “From mine—and I am sure from theirs—you saved our lives. The Symbiotes didn’t happen to us. They happened for us, in the circumstances we were in.”

“Maybe,” I said, conceding the point partially. “But we still don’t fully understand what carrying a Symbiote does to a person over years. Over decades.” I was thinking of Emily as I said it—the way she had looked the last time I’d seen her, the wrongness in her eyes, the way her entire bearing had shifted into something I almost didn’t recognize. Whatever the Symbiote was doing inside her, it wasn’t purely beneficial. The changes it made didn’t stop at the surface. “We don’t know yet what the cost actually is.”

“Then we’ll face that cost when it presents itself,” Rachel said. “We deal with what’s in front of us. We always have.”

“Yeah…”

We reached the sixth floor not long after, emerging from the stairwell into the corridor with its long row of closed and partially open doors. At the far end, a warm rectangle of flashlight glow spilled out from beneath a door—Rebecca and Daisy’s room, if I had to guess. Their voices carried faintly through the gap, too low to make out words but clearly awake, clearly still processing whatever the night had left them with.

I stopped in front of a room near the end of the corridor—chosen for its proximity to both the upward and downward stairwells. If something happened in the night and required fast movement in either direction, I wanted the shortest possible distance between sleep and action.

I pushed the door open and swept my flashlight beam through the interior.

Empty. Dusty. A chair tipped onto its side near the window, the curtains hanging crookedly from a broken rail, the surface of every piece of furniture covered in a fine layer of settled grey. The bed, at least, appeared structurally sound—the mattress sagging slightly in the middle but recognizably a bed, which placed it in an entirely different category of comfort from what we’d been sleeping on for the past several days.

I didn’t have the energy to clean it. I barely had the energy to form the thought of cleaning it. Whatever the room looked like in the morning, I would deal with it in the morning.

“Goodnight, Ryan,” Rachel said softly from the corridor behind me.

I turned and caught her arm gently before she could step away.

“Before you go,” I said, and paused for a moment, finding the right words. “Earlier—when I told everyone to stay behind. The way I said it, the tone I used.” I met her eyes directly. “I think I was too harsh. Toward you specifically. And I’m sorry for that.”

Rachel looked at me with mild surprise, as if she had already filed the incident away and wasn’t expecting me to surface it again.

“I wasn’t trying to give orders,” I continued. “It wasn’t about authority or thinking I knew better. It was just—the idea of any of you getting hurt because of a decision I made. It took over everything else.”

Rachel held my gaze for a quiet moment, something soft and complex moving through her expression. Then she stepped closer, tilted her face upward, and pressed her lips gently to mine.

I wrapped my arms around her waist without thinking, pulling her in, and kissed her back slowly.

“Hmmh~”

It lasted a few unhurried seconds, my hands settling against the curve of her back, her fingers finding their way to my collar.

Rachel pulled back just slightly, enough to look at me properly.

“You’re forgiven,” she said.

I smiled and kissed her again, drawing her closer this time, my lips moving from hers to the soft line of her jaw and then to her neck, feeling the warmth of her skin against my mouth.

“Haah~” A small, breathy sound escaped her, almost involuntary, and she tilted her head slightly despite herself. “Ryan~…”

Her hands pressed lightly against my chest, not quite pushing, not quite pulling—somewhere in the uncertain middle ground between protest and invitation.

“Ryan…haa…wait—” She pulled back just enough to glance past my shoulder into the open corridor, her cheeks flushed deep with color, eyes wide with a mixture of embarrassment and something warmer underneath it. “Someone might see us—hear us—”

I held her gaze, a slow smile pulling at my lips.

“Then we’ll be quick about it,” I said simply.

Rachel stared at me for a half second.

Then the embarrassment in her expression tipped over into something else entirely, and she nodded.

I smiled, slipped one arm around her waist and lifted her lightly off the ground, stepping backward through the open door with her in my arms. With my free hand holding the flashlight, I caught the door and swung it shut behind us, the latch clicking softly into place. I found the chain lock by touch in the darkness and slid it home.

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