Chapter 276: Alliance Talk with Marlon [1]

"Now." Marlon’s voice came in cleanly, redirecting the room without making a scene of it. He looked at me with those sharp eyes. "You’ve heard everything between me and Callighan. All of it. So it’s your turn." He folded his hands on the table. "Tell me exactly what you want from this alliance, and what you’re planning to do about him."

"I’m going to take him down," I said. "Him and his entire group."

"My," Molly said from the counter, the corner of her mouth pulling upward. "Strong words."

"What brought this on?" Marlon asked, studying me. "You didn’t roll into Brighton Park this morning with the face of someone running a personal vendetta. Something changed."

"Gaspar," I said. "One of Callighan’s people. He attacked the group we left behind when we went to clear the hotel, the people who couldn’t fight, who were sitting somewhere they thought was safe. Mothers. Old people. Kids." I kept my voice level but I could feel the edge underneath it, the one I’d been keeping carefully buried since it happened. "He killed one of ours and took someone important with him when he left."

The reaction moved around the table fast as they all looked shocked and surprised.

Marlon was quiet for a moment. "They attacked you directly?"

"Gaspar did, I don’t know much why though."

Well, I knew it actually, it was because of Wanda, but I preferred to keep her identity and origin secret for now. I mean I didn’t even tell Margaret and the others about it but though after Gaspar attempt to take her, they might have some suspicions about her already but Margaret or Martin didn’t ask me anything, that was a good news, meaning they didn’t care about her origin, and she was part of their community.

"So this is revenge then," Rico said from the back table, raising an eyebrow.

"No," I said, shaking my head. "Nothing that shallow. Revenge is personal and it ends when you feel satisfied. This isn’t that." I looked around the table at all of them. "I want Mei back, she’s the one they took. And I want this city to actually be livable for my people long term. That doesn’t happen while Callighan and his group are still living around here. Gaspar especially. He’s not just a problem, he’s a threat that compounds everything else around him."

"He is," Marlon said, and the seriousness in his voice confirmed what I’d already suspected. He knew something about Gaspar beyond what most people did.

"So you know about Symbiotes?" Cindy leaned forward. "And Starakians?"

Marlon’s brow lifted. "Symbiotes. Starakians." He repeated both words slowly, testing them. "No. I don’t know those names."

So he had pieces but not the full picture.

Then his eyes narrowed at me, and that measuring look came back, the one that felt like being assessed from the inside out.

"It sounds like you have considerably more to tell us than I initially assumed," he said.

Molly, Maribel, and Rico had all shifted slightly, the same quiet suspicion moving through each of them in different ways.

"Let me ask you something first," I said, redirecting. "When you encountered Gaspar, you knew immediately he wasn’t normal, right?"

"I knew the moment I saw what came out of him," Marlon said flatly. "Yellow flesh, like tentacles. Protruding from his body. I’ve seen a lot of things in my life that I couldn’t explain but that was in a category by itself."

I stared at him. "You actually met Gaspar? In person?"

"Nearly three months ago. Around the time he and Callighan first showed up in the area." He paused, something working behind his eyes. "But before that encounter, I met someone else. A man, or something that looked like a man. He was wounded badly, bleeding in a way that didn’t look right. His skin had this grayish tone." Marlon’s frown deepened, like he was pulling the memory back into focus. "And he had horns."

I turned my head instinctively toward Molly, Rico, and Maribel, checking their faces.

None of them looked surprised. Not even slightly. Which told me plenty.

My gaze landed on Maribel and stayed there. She’d acted uncertain and cautious around me from the start, like she was still deciding what I was. But she’d known about this. She’d known there were things out there that weren’t human and she’d been sitting on it.

She felt my eyes on her. Her expression went awkward fast.

"I wasn’t sure whether Marlon hadn’t just, I mean, the whole thing sounded like he’d hit his head," she said, the words coming out slightly rushed. "But then I saw you and it confirmed everything so—"

"You didn’t believe me," Marlon said, turning to look at her with a distinctly unimpressed expression.

"How was I supposed to believe you’d met an alien monster and a completely separate alien race on the same day?!" Maribel shot back, color rising in her face. "That’s not a normal Tuesday, Marlon!"

"In her defense," Molly raised her hand with the calm energy of someone who had stayed out of this particular argument before, "I was also struggling with it."

Marlon looked at her. "Despite what I showed you?"

"What you showed us was strange, yes. But two separate alien races. On Earth. With no prior warning, no news coverage, no government announcement....just suddenly here, apparently always having been here, that’s a significant leap," Molly said, reasonably.

"Wait." Something had clicked in my head. I turned to Cindy, cutting across the conversation.

"You think the one he met was Zakthar?" Cindy asked.

My eyes had already gone to the same place she had. "Has to be."

"Who is Zakthar?" Maribel asked, looking between us.

"Kunta’s boyfriend," Daisy said softly from beside me, and then immediately looked down at the table with a small flush like she hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

"And who is Kunta?" Marlon asked, his gaze dry enough to sand wood.

"Zakthar’s girlfriend," I said.

Marlon stared at me.

"Ryan," Cindy said through a laugh, elbowing me in the ribs hard enough to make me shift sideways. She looked at Marlon with a more cooperative expression. "Kunta is a Starakian. We found her in the city and we’ve been sheltering her. Zakthar, her partner left about three months ago looking for something and never came back. She’s been trying to find out what happened to him ever since."

The table absorbed that in silence for a moment.

Three months ago. The same window Marlon had encountered a grey-skinned, horned, badly wounded stranger bleeding his way through Atlantic City. The timing wasn’t a coincidence. Nothing in this city felt like a coincidence anymore actually.

"Three months ago," Marlon mumbled, almost to himself. He was staring at a fixed point on the table, turning it over in his head. "The man I found bleeding. That could have been Zakthar."

"It was him," I said. "Almost certainly. What happened after you found him?"

Marlon leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table.

"I heard a commotion a few streets over from the park. Shouting, movement. So I went to check." He paused. "I found him shackled to a street light. Both wrists bound, already bleeding badly, barely conscious. I didn’t know what he was, I just saw someone who’d been restrained and left to suffer, and that was enough to act on. I started trying to work the shackles loose despite he looked not human."

"And then Gaspar showed up," I said.

"Gaspar showed up." Marlon’s expression hardened. "With a group of others. I recognized him straight away as one of Callighan’s, he knew my face too, which told me he’d been briefed on who I was. For a moment I thought Callighan had sent him specifically for me. But he wasn’t there for me. He was there for the shackled man." He stopped. "He had kids with him. No older than you lot. And then I saw what came out of him—" He didn’t finish the sentence immediately, like the image was still strange enough to resist being put into words. "Those yellow growths. Flesh-like but wrong. Moving. I’ve been in combat. I’ve seen people die in ways that stay with you. But whatever came out of Gaspar’s body in that moment, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a very long time."

There was a slight pause.

"I fought my way out. Managed to injure him enough to create a gap and I took it." His jaw tightened. "But I had to leave the shackled man behind. I didn’t have a choice, not a real one but that doesn’t make it sit easier."

"You actually injured Gaspar?" I asked, leaning forward. That part had caught me. "He’s a Symbiote Host. That’s not supposed to be easy."

"A Symbiote Host," Molly repeated slowly, her eyes shifting to me. "Is that what we’re calling it?"

"It means he has something living inside his body," I said. "Something alien. It enhances everything, strength, durability, healing. Makes him significantly harder to put down than a normal person."

"Then how—" Cindy started.

"The shackled man," Marlon said. "He had a weapon laying on the ground, not anything I’d seen before, unusual material, unusual weight. When Gaspar moved toward me I got hold of it and used it. Whatever it was made of, it worked." He set his hands flat on the table. "After that I ran, because I’m experienced enough to know when the smart move is to not be somewhere anymore. But the whole encounter has been sitting wrong with me for three months because I couldn’t explain any of it."

"Alright," I said, settling back. "Then let me explain it. All of it. But I’ll warn you now, it’s a lot, and some of it is going to be difficult to hear."

Everyone at the table looked at me. Even Rico, who had been hovering quietly at the back table, had gone still.

"We’re listening," Marlon said.

So I told them.

I started at the beginning, the real beginning, not the version most survivors had pieced together from rumor and guesswork. The Infected Virus wasn’t a natural outbreak. It wasn’t a lab accident or an act of human terrorism. It was a biological weapon, engineered and deployed by the Starakians, a space-faring civilization so advanced and so old that the word superior barely covered it. A race that had spent centuries conquering worlds, assimilating what was useful and dismantling what wasn’t.

Their reason for targeting Earth wasn’t us, specifically. It was what was hiding among us. The Shadelings, what we’d taken to calling Symbiotes were the Starakians’ oldest enemies. A parasitic species that had nearly driven the Starakians to extinction five thousands years ago before the tide had turned, and now the Starakians had been hunting them across the galaxy for generations, following their trail from world to world. Wherever the Shadelings took refuge inside a host population, the Starakians introduced the virus. A weapon designed to destabilize, to flush the Shadelings out into the open by collapsing the civilization they were sheltering inside.

Earth had simply been next on the list.

And the reason we’d been so unprepared, why there had been no warning, no evacuation plan, no coordinated global response despite the fact that governments had resources and intelligence networks and years of contingency planning was because there had been a deal. A quiet one, made far above the level of anything the public would ever have heard about. A small number of people in positions of power in each country had been offered continued survival in exchange for their silence and cooperation. They’d taken the offer. And they’d kept it, right up until the morning the virus hit, at which point they’d simply disappeared to wherever they’d been promised they were going.

They had known. They had always known. And they had chosen themselves.

I watched the room as I talked. Maribel’s hands slowly closing into fists on the table. Molly’s expression going carefully, quietly blank. Rico behind me, blinking like a man whose brain had hit a wall it wasn’t designed to handle.

When I finished there was a silence that lasted a genuinely long time.

"I can’t believe it," Maribel said at last, her voice lower than usual and stripped of its usual edge. She was staring at her own hands on the table. "They just....they abandoned everyone. All of it, every speech, every promise, every, it was all nothing. The moment something real showed up they folded and ran." She looked up, and there was something in her expression that was rawer than anger. "They left us all to die."

"Pretty words on television," Molly said, chuckling. "The moment real danger arrives, you see what people are actually made of."

Behind me, Rico looked like a man whose internal wiring had experienced a significant fault. He was staring at the middle of the table with the glazed expression of someone whose brain had accepted too many new facts in too short a period of time and had quietly requested a moment to sort through them.

"Are you a Symbiote Host?"

Marlon’s voice cut straight through the silence, direct and even. His eyes were fixed on me.

I’d been expecting it. The moment I’d finished explaining, I’d known that question was thirty seconds behind me at most. The math wasn’t difficult to do, strange abilities, impossible fight in the park, a group that could clear an entire hotel in a single afternoon.

"Yes," I said. No hesitation.

"What?" Molly’s composure slipped, just for a second. She straightened up from the counter, genuine shock moving across her face.

"That explains a considerable amount," Rico said slowly from behind, narrowing his eyes at me.

"So the attack on your previous location—" Marlon started, his eyes sharpening as he connected the thread.

"The Starakians," I said. "They tracked the Symbiote signal. That’s what they do."

"Which means your presence is what brought the attack down on your people," Rico said. His voice wasn’t cruel about it, more like he was working through a logical sequence out loud and had arrived at an uncomfortable answer. "Doesn’t it?"

"Rico." Maribel shot him a glare.

"I’m stating facts," he said, shrugging.

"So is this," Cindy said pleasantly, tilting her head toward him with a smile. "Is Marlon responsible for every person Callighan has killed inside your community? Because Callighan came here for him."

Rico opened his mouth.

Then closed it.

"I mean... that’s not!" He started.

"Really?" Cindy tilted her head the other direction, the smile not moving. "Because from where I’m sitting, both situations are the same. Someone powerful targeting a location because of one specific person. You’d call one of them responsible and not the other?"

The silence that followed was really awkward for Rico.

"She got you clean, Rico," Molly said laughing.

Rico groaned and leaned back, looking at the ceiling with the expression of a man accepting his losses.

"So," I said, letting a small smile settle on my face as I looked across the table at Marlon. "Now that you understand the full picture, do you see why I told you that with me involved, your chances of actually taking Callighan down go from possible to probable?"