Chapter 291: Margaret, Martin and Clara meeting Kunta

Sydney had done her best. That much was fair to say.

She’d gone to Margaret and Martin herself, and explained the situation.

Margaret had listened with the patient, slightly pained expression she reserved for conversations where she needed more than was being given. Martin had crossed his arms about forty seconds in and kept them there. Clara, who hadn’t been summoned but had appeared as well, also listened. She was also a Senior of the community so Sydney didn’t min.

Thankfully Rachel later joined.

Rachel didn’t make a production of it. She just started talking, from the beginning, in the order that made sense, at the pace a person needed rather than the pace a story moved. She didn’t skip things and she didn’t inflate them. Twenty minutes later the three of them weren’t experts but they weren’t confused either, which was more than Sydney had managed in twice the time.

"Right," Sydney said, standing up. "Now that everyone’s caught up — we’re going upstairs. Try not to scream when you see her. It’s embarrassing for everyone."

"Who screams?" Martin said.

"You’d be surprised."

"Just take us up," he said.

They took the stairs to the top floor and went to the room at the end. Mark was inside, crouching beside the Nexon Battery with a focused, private intensity.

He’d been asking Kunta questions for the better part of an hour, from the sound of it, and Kunta had been answering them patiently but sometimes even she felt overwhelmed by his questions.

Clara stopped in the doorway.

"Why is Mark here?"

Sydney opened her mouth.

"You forgot," Rachel said.

"I was going to say I forgot."

Mark still hadn’t looked up. "They told you too?"

"Somewhat," Martin said, stepping into the room. His eyes had gone to Kunta immediately, and they stayed there. He looked for a few seconds. "So that’s her."

"She looks so young," Margaret said, quiet, beside him.

"Humanoid, mostly," Clara added, tilting her head. "The skin’s different, and the horns, but everything else is—"

"I can hear you," Kunta said.

"I know," Clara chuckled.

Kunta looked at the ceiling and grumbled. "That gray-eyed man told me this was a secret. That I was to stay quiet, stay here, stay out of sight." She brought her eyes back down across the room. "And yet. Every day more people."

"These three run things downstairs," Rachel said, calm, reasonable. "They’re responsible for everyone sleeping below this floor. What happens up here is their concern whether we tell them about it or not—we’d just be leaving them to figure it out without the context."

"It concerns everyone in the city," Kunta said. "That doesn’t mean I need to be on display."

"Nobody’s displaying you."

Kunta’s eyes moved to Sydney, who was clearly trying to decide where to sit and had landed on the edge of the bed, arms folded, with an amused smile.. "She thinks I’m an enemy."

Sydney tilted her head. "I asked a fair question."

"You accused my entire species."

"Your species’ biotechnology turned most of the world’s population into something that eats people," Sydney said, without heat. "That’s not an accusation, that’s just what happened. I’m not saying you personally loaded the gun. I’m saying the gun came from your side."

Kunta’s mouth closed. The response she’d been forming clearly didn’t survive contact with the honest shape of it, and she let it go, which said more than if she’d argued.

Margaret crossed the room.

She stopped in front of Kunta and looked at her without judgment and a gentle smile.

"Kunta," she said. "That’s right?"

"Yes."

"I heard you’re trying to find someone. Your boyfriend?"

"H..He’s not my boyfriend! He’s my companion. We came here together. He’s—" She caught herself. "He’s a mission partner."

"Sure," Sydney said, grinning now.

"I don’t know what you’re implying."

"I’m not implying anything."

"You are definitely implying something!"

Clara looked at her, then back at the others, then at Kunta again. "Are we certain she isn’t just a person with face paint and a very committed costume?"

"I have never been more certain of anything," Sydney said.

"Are you mocking me?" Kunta asked.

"I would never."

Martin made a sound. It might have been a laugh, suppressed into something more dignified before it got fully out. He uncrossed his arms—the first time since he’d come in—and looked at Kunta with an expression that had lost most of its guardedness somewhere in the last two minutes. "She’s more like us than I expected," he said, mostly to himself.

That was what it did to a person. All three of them had come up here knowing what Kunta was, knowing what her people had set loose in the world, understanding in abstract terms the scale of what had been taken. And all three of them were now standing in a room with someone who turned pink when teased and glared when laughed at and clearly had feelings she was actively refusing to name out loud. The gap between those two things was impossible to maintain cleanly. It didn’t make what happened to the world smaller. It just made the person in front of them harder to hold responsible for it.

"It’s more complicated than it seems," Rachel said, nodding. "Kunta didn’t make the decisions that led to this, and untangling that is a longer conversation." She paused. "What matters now is the immediate situation. She came here with her companion—Zakthar. The two of them came to help to track the most dangerous Symbiotes and pull them out of circulation before they caused more damage. That was the plan." She glanced briefly at Kunta. "Zakthar went out and didn’t come back. When Ryan went looking for Mei, he found out Zakthar is being held by Callaihan’s people. And so by Gaspar."

"Gaspar," Martin repeated said, gritting his teeth. "The same one who got Patrick."

"Yeah," Sydney said. The grin was entirely gone. "He’s been with Callighan the whole time."

Martin said nothing else. Margaret’s hand found his arm briefly—not to settle him, just to be there—and he exhaled through his nose, long and slow. His hands didn’t fully open, but they stopped being fists.

Mark had risen from his position by the battery during all of this, taking in the conversation without involving himself in it. He brushed his hands on his trousers, looked at Kunta steadily.

"I’ve been going over this thing for an hour," he said, nodding back toward the battery. "The engineering is precise. Too precise for a weapon—weapons built to harm are built differently. Cruder. This was built to do something specific and controlled." He paused. "Somebody misused it, or adapted it for something it wasn’t made for. Either way, this wasn’t designed to do what it did here."

Kunta held his gaze for a long moment.

"No," she said. "It wasn’t. As I’ve been saying since the beginning — it’s a battery. That’s what it is. That’s what it was built to be."

"A battery that powered this entire hotel building," Rachel said. "According to Ryan."

The three newcomers looked at each other.

"The whole building?" Martin asked shocked.

Rachel nodded, smiling.

"Every floor," she confirmed. "Zakthar may have set it up maybe forced to do it. Ryan and Christopher saw the hotel with light."

Clara looked at the battery, then at Kunta, then back at the battery.

"If we can figure out how Zakthar made it work," Rachel continued, turning to Mark, "we could potentially get electricity back. For the whole building, maybe further."

Mark had gone still in the way he went still when his brain was already several steps ahead of the conversation. He looked at the battery thoughtfully. "I’ll need time with it," he said. "Real time, not interrupted time. But yes, if the principle is what I think it is, there’s something workable here." A slight smirk crossed his face. "This is a very interesting piece of work."

Kunta made a sound in her throat. "You won’t replicate what Zak did," she said, arms folding across her chest. "Not even close."

Mark picked up the battery casing and tucked it under his arm.

"We will see that little girl."

"You’re leaving?" Rachel asked.

"Taking the next room, don’t worry, I am staying in this floor," he said, already moving toward the door. "I can’t think in here." He glanced back, a brief, dry look at Kunta and then at the small mechanical figure perched near her. "That girl and her little mechanical dog are distracting."

"Sonny is not a dog!" Kunta let out.

"Four legs, moves around on its own, follows you everywhere," Mark said, not breaking stride. "Draw your own conclusions."

The door closed behind him.

"How many times—" Kunta started.

"At least four today," Sydney said, working her pinky finger around her ear with exaggerated suffering. "You say it the same way every time too, like volume is going to change his mind."

"Because you all keep saying the wrong thing!"

"We say what we see," Sydney said simply.

Kunta pulled Sonny onto her lap and stroked the top of its head while she glared at her.

Margaret, Martin and Clara had been watching this exchange with the synchronized silence of people who had been about to say something and had collectively decided against it. All three of them were looking at Sonny with expressions that said, quite plainly and without malice, mechanical do*.

"If anyone has questions," Rachel said, smoothly redirecting the room, "now is the time. We shouldn’t all be sitting on the top floor indefinitely, people downstairs will notice."

Martin looked at Margaret. "You don’t have anything?"

Margaret thought briefly and shook her head, a small smile answering the question before she did. "I trust Ryan’s judgment. That’s enough for me." She turned and let her eyes rest on Kunta for a moment ,gently, without any of the weight or assessment the others had brought to the same look. "And she’s just a child. She’s not going to hurt any of us."

The room went slightly quieter.

Kunta had gone very still.

Her lips had parted slightly, clearly dumbfounded and caught off guard by the elders woman’s words, her cheeks heating slightly.

Margaret left without fanfare, the door clicking softly behind her.

Several seconds passed.

"Kunta," Sydney called softly dumbfounded. "Are you embarrassed?"

Kunta’s chin came up. "S...shut up!"

"You went pink," Sydney said. "From one sentence. From one nice thing one older woman said to you."

"I said shut up!"

"I’m not making fun of you, I’m I’m trying to understand the mechanism here, because you’ve been fairly resistant to everything else today and then Margaret says twelve words and you—"

"Shut up, Sydney!"

"Heard that guys, I got an alien call my name," Sydney grinned at the Rachel, Clara and Martin who had an exasperated look on their faces.