Chapter 264: Discussion With Mark

Mark and I hadn’t really spoken—not properly—since Jackson Township fell.

In the aftermath, when the surviving members of our group had found each other in the chaos and the grief, I had reached him briefly. Said what you say when you’re relieved someone is still breathing. He had responded in kind, still in his sharp and impolite tone but that tone had told me everything I needed to know about the conversation we weren’t yet ready to have.

I’d let it go. There had been too much else demanding attention, and Mark wasn’t the kind of man you could push into a conversation before he was ready for it. You could only make yourself available and wait.

Besides it wasn’t like I was faring mentally any better to comfort him. Jasmine’s death was still today hitting me hard after all.

But I’d thought about it. About what it must mean to be Mark in the days following Jackson Township’s fall. He’d been born in that town—not simply lived there, but born there, grown there, built himself there across decades. And when the crisis came, he had applied everything he had to keeping it standing. The electrical grills reinforcing the Municipal Office had been his work—his ingenuity, his hands, his refusal to accept that the resources available were insufficient for the job that needed doing. He had looked at scraps and salvage and wiring that wasn’t designed for any of this and built something that had held for months against forces that should have overwhelmed it.

And then an Enhanced Infected had walked through all of it like it wasn’t there.

The losses that day had been catastrophic. Nearly half of the people who had sheltered in that Municipal Office, who had trusted in the walls that Mark had helped fortify—gone. Some of them had to have been people he’d known for years. People from the town he’d spent his life in.

There were too many reasons for a man to be heartbroken after all of that to untangle any single one. I’d stopped trying and simply accepted the totality of it.

I approached him quietly across the morning street, letting my footsteps announce me before I spoke.

He was standing at the edge of the cleared perimeter, one forearm resting on the hood of a stationary vehicle with a loose unselfconscious posture. The cigarette between his fingers had burned down to a great length.

The smell hit me before I was fully alongside him.

"How much have you smoked since you woke up this morning?" I asked, stopping just behind his shoulder.

"You’re here, brat," Mark said, without turning. "You only just wake up?"

"Long day yesterday," I said. "Needed the sleep."

"As did everyone," he replied.

A moment passed in which we both watched the activity at the perimeter without commenting on it.

"I saw what happened to that black-haired girl," Mark said then, his voice dropping slightly. "Last night when it all came apart. Watched the whole thing from back with the others." He took a long drag and exhaled through his nose. "Can’t believe creatures like that actually exist in this world. I mean—I’d heard things, had my suspicions—but seeing it with your own eyes is different."

"Nothing could have been done," I said. "Not by anyone there. It wasn’t a failure of response or courage. It simply couldn’t have been stopped by the means we had available."

"Nothing could have been done," Mark repeated, and the dryness in his tone was not directed at me specifically—more at the phrase itself, at the helplessness it represented. He turned his head slightly and looked at me from the side. "We can’t do much against whatever these things actually are, can we. And I’m fairly sure at this point that you know a great deal more than you’ve been letting on."

Clearly sarcastic.

He had enough of secrets.

Well, he’d earned that. He’d earned it months ago.

"Got a spare cigarette?" I asked.

Mark reached into his jacket pocket without ceremony and produced the pack, shaking one loose and holding it out. He passed me the lighter when I took it, and I cupped my hands against the faint morning breeze to shield the flame while I lit it.

Before taking the first drag I did a careful sweep behind me—making sure the area was clear, that neither Rachel nor Cindy had followed me out or were standing within sightline. Christopher and Sydney I was less concerned about. They already knew. Christopher had caught me once and said nothing, and Sydney had found out through her own particular brand of aggressive observation and had treated it as exclusive intelligence to be wielded selectively rather than broadly announced.

Rachel and Cindy were a different calculation. They noticed things, and they cared—and in the specific way that people who care can sometimes transform concern into pressure without meaning to. I didn’t want to have the conversation about the habit right now.

Mark caught the careful glance behind me and let out a short, genuine laugh.

"Pretty impressive that you’ve managed to keep it hidden this long," he said.

"Christopher and Sydney know," I admitted, drawing in the first drag and exhaling slowly. "They’ve kept quiet about it. Rachel and Cindy probably have suspicions—Cindy especially notices things she doesn’t say out loud. But I think they’ve decided I must be going through something difficult and haven’t pushed it."

"Which means they care about you a great deal," Mark said. "At your age I would have given a great deal to have that kind of company giving a damn about my habits."

"At my age," I said, glancing at him, "I’d guess you were spending most of your time in a garage somewhere doing something inadvisable with whatever electrical components you could get your hands on."

Mark made a sound that was almost—not quite, but almost—a laugh.

I’d guessed correctly.

I looked back toward the hotel and saw Cindy emerging from the entrance with Christopher just behind her. Toward Lucy, most likely—checking in on the prisoner, making sure the overnight situation hadn’t developed in any uncomfortable directions.

"Walk with me a bit," I said, resting my hand briefly on Mark’s shoulder.

He straightened from his lean against the vehicle and fell into step beside me without asking where we were going, which was, I thought, very Mark.

We moved away from the cluster of people around the hotel entrance, following the cleared street a short distance until the ambient noise of the group activity faded to a comfortable background murmur behind us.

"I want to tell you everything," I said, drawing another slow drag. "Not the partial version I gave you before, not the edited summary—everything. The full picture, from the beginning. I’m warning you now, some of it is going to sound deeply unreasonable, and I need you to not have a cardiac event in the middle of the street."

"I have survived five decades on this earth and most of it wasn’t easy," Mark said flatly. "I’m considerably harder to rattle than you seem to think, brat."

"Alright," I said. "Don’t say I didn’t warn you."

And I started talking.

I laid it out from the foundation—the Symbiotes, what they actually were rather than the vague categorization of threat. Then the Starakians—their civilization, their history, their five-thousand-year war against the Shadelings, the Supreme King and how his leadership had transformed a scattered and hunted people into something capable of wiping inhabited worlds clean. The biological weapons. The deals made with selected human leaders in advance of the outbreak—the quiet agreements that had allowed certain people to vanish to safety before the first infected appeared, while billions were left without warning or recourse.

I told him about Dullahan. I gave him the shape of it without every intimate detail—there were things that were mine and other people’s that didn’t need to be handed over wholesale—but the structure of what Dullahan was, what the bond meant, what I had been carrying since before I could form conscious memories.

I told him about Kunta and Zakthar. About the Tri Core Matrix and what Gaspar now held in his hands. About what that meant for the confrontation that was coming, whether we sought it out or waited for it to find us.

He walked beside me through all of it, smoking steadily, occasionally asking precise, targeted questions that told me he was processing rather than simply absorbing. The questions were good ones as expected of him.

Ten minutes by the time I finished. Perhaps slightly more.

The cigarette had long since burned down to nothing between my fingers.

I stopped walking and looked at him.

Mark was quiet for a long moment, staring at the middle distance ahead of us with his hands in his jacket pockets and the last of his own cigarette reduced to a stub that he’d forgotten to dispose of.

Then he spoke finally.

"Well."

He took the stub from between his lips, looked at it briefly, and dropped it to the asphalt.

"That explains a considerable number of things," he said.

"I’d wager your brain had already connected most of the dots long before today," I said, watching his face.

Mark let out a short, quiet chuckle.

"I had my theories," he admitted. "Kept revising them as new information presented itself. Never landed on anything quite as comprehensive as what you just described, but the broad shape of it—something behind all of this, something organized, something that had been in motion long before the first infected appeared on any news broadcast—" He shook his head slowly. "That part didn’t surprise me. It never had the texture of an accident."

"No," I agreed. "It wasn’t."

A beat passed between us.

"What does surprise me," Mark said, his voice shifting into something drier and more reflective, "is that a group of teenagers showed up at my place and asked me to build flamethrowers to fight what turned out to be the product of a technologically superior alien civilization." He paused. "And I said yes. And then I built them."

"In fairness," I said, "we didn’t fully understand what we were dealing with at the time either."

"That," Mark said, "makes it both better and significantly worse, depending on which angle you approach it from."

"The flamethrowers worked," I said. "That’s what matters. They saved us—genuinely, in ways that nothing else could have at that moment. What you built saved lives, Mark. Whatever the circumstances were that led to the request."

He was quiet for a moment, absorbing that.

"I suppose they did," he said at last.

I let the silence sit for a moment before I spoke again.

"I know it’s been hard, Mark," I said. "Not just recently—since the beginning. Since before Jackson Township fell, if I’m being honest about it." I looked at him rather than at the street. "You put everything you had into that place. You were born there and you built something real there and you watched it come apart in a single day despite everything you did to prevent it. And the people you lost—" I paused, choosing the next words carefully. "There’s no formula for that. There’s no version of it that becomes reasonable or fair no matter how long you sit with it."

Mark said nothing. But he was listening.

"We’ve all lost things we’re not going to get back," I continued. "Important people. Parts of ourselves that aren’t coming back either. That’s real and I’m not going to tell you it isn’t." I let a moment pass. "But I am not submitting to any of it. I am not lying down and accepting that this is where the story ends—for this group, for the people in that hotel behind us, for anyone still fighting to make something out of what’s left." I held his gaze when he turned to look at me. "So I’m asking you. Not as a request for labor, not because I need something from you right now. I’m asking because your answer matters to me. What about you, Mark? Are you still in this?"

Mark looked at me for a long moment.

Then the corner of his mouth moved.

"You really do have a way with words, kid," he said. "Annoying habit." He exhaled slowly through his nose. "But yes. I’m with you."

I smiled.

"Good," I said. "Because I have something I need to show you that is going to make everything you built in Jackson Township look like a science fair project."

Mark scoffed quick to offended when it came to his inventions as expected. "That is a considerable claim."

I laughed.

"Are you ready," I asked him, "to get your hands on some genuine alien technology?"

He smirked.

"Sure I am."