Chapter 294: Zakthar

The Golden Nugget had always carried a certain kind of tension, the low, humming kind that came with too many armed people living on top of each other in a world that had stopped making sense. But this was different. This was the kind of tension that had a shape to it, that sat in the corners of every room and behind every pair of eyes.

Someone had gotten in.

In the middle of the night, with dozens of armed men under the same roof, an intruder had walked through the Golden Nugget like it was nothing. He’d taken the Nexon Battery, their Nexon Battery and he’d taken Lucy. Their commander. He’d slipped back out into the dark before anyone had fully understood what was happening, and by the time the alarm went up and the search parties fanned out through the building and the surrounding streets, there was nothing to find. Just empty hallways and the memory of footsteps.

It had happened so fast. So impossibly, humiliatingly fast.

When the dust settled and everyone had gathered and the full picture finally assembled itself in their heads, a heavy silence fell over the group. Nobody spoke for a long moment. Nobody quite knew what to say when the answer to how did we let this happen was staring them all in the face and none of them wanted to be the one to say it out loud.

They couldn’t keep something like this quiet. Callighan had to be told.

And he had been.

By the next day, he was already in Atlantic City.

He didn’t come here often, rarely, in fact. He’d handed this place to Lucy because he trusted her to run it without needing his hand on her shoulder. She was good at it. Better than most. All he’d asked of her was to keep the pressure on the Boardwalk Community, keep grinding them down week by week until they cracked and handed over Marlon. It was a slow game and Callighan was patient enough to play it. He’d been watching, waiting, studying the rhythms of the place from a distance while the right moment took its time arriving.

Things had been moving in the right direction, too. They’d gotten their hands on Zakthar not long ago, a Starakian, some kind of alien with a sharp mind for technology, or so Gaspar had said. Callighan wasn’t sentimental about the man, but he wasn’t stupid either. Useful was useful. He’d kept Zakthar chained outside of Brigantine as a precaution, the last thing he wanted was an alien inside his walls drawing attention from whatever else might come looking for it. Gaspar had been clear enough about what the Starakians were, what they’d done, what kind of chaos followed them around. Callighan kept that in mind.

But recently he’d finally found a purpose for Zakthar. He’d put him to work on a specific device, given him what he needed, and things had been moving along smoothly.

Until now.

Lucy, one of the few people he actually trusted, one of the few he’d kept close through everything had been taken. Right out from under the noses of every armed man in the building. Callighan’s face said everything his mouth didn’t as he covered the distance to the hotel entrance in long, unhurried strides. Not rushing. He never rushed. But every step carried a weight that the men watching from the windows and doorways felt in their chests before he’d even walked through the door.

The lobby had a small crowd waiting in it. Men standing around with their hands at their sides and their jaws set.

"Callighan." The word moved through the room in a ripple as he entered, heads dipping in greeting one after another.

He didn’t return it. He stopped in the middle of the lobby and let his gaze move across their faces slowly.

"What happened?" His voice was flat and cold as a slab of concrete.

Silence fell until one man stepped forward, visibly steeling himself, shoulders drawn in like he was bracing for impact.

"It... it was a kid, I think. He knocked me out. I saw him before he did it, he must be the one who took the battery and Lucy. He, uh..." The man swallowed. "He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Maybe a little older, but not by much—"

"And he knocked you out." Callighan repeated.

The man’s fists clenched at his sides. His face went red. Around him, a few of the others exchanged looks, the kind that weren’t quite smirks but were close enough to sting.

"Lucy is trained," Callighan continued. "A kid you could barely describe managed to take her*as well?"

"From what I saw... from a distance... yeah, it looked that way," another man offered, nodding carefully.

Callighan looked at him for a moment. Then back to the first.

"What did he look like?"

The man opened his mouth. Closed it. "He came fast, Callighan, I... I didn’t get a long look at him—"

Callighan said nothing. That was somehow worse than anything he could have said.

"He wasn’t alone either," someone else spoke up quickly, like filling the silence might help. "There was another one outside drawing our attention, that’s why we didn’t catch on to what was happening until it was—"

"I don’t care about your excuses." Callighan cut him off coldly.

He was still for a moment. His hands, clasped behind his back, tightened slightly. His eyes moved across the room one more time, not reading faces so much as filing them away.

"Where is the Starakian," he asked.

"Here... we moved him to a different room, just as a precaution after everything that happened..." A man near the back straightened up and gestured toward the hallway. "Follow me, Callighan."

He turned and led the way without waiting to see if Callighan would follow. He would. And the rest of them stood there in the lobby and let themselves breathe again now that his back was to them.

Callighan followed the man through the lobby and up the stairs, climbing floor by floor until they reached the top. The upper level of the Golden Nugget was a different world from the dim, gun-heavy floors below, a wide open entertaining space that had probably felt like luxury once, back when luxury still meant something. A large swimming pool sat at the outdoors terrace. Lounge chairs, a bar, a tiled terrace that looked out over the city, all of it frozen mid-party, abandoned in the middle of a night that never ended.

They moved through it without stopping, crossing to the far end of the floor and into the lobby that ran along the interior. The man led him past a row of closed doors until they reached one near the back, a smaller room, the kind that might have been a private lounge or a kids’ playroom back in the hotel’s working days. He pulled a key from his belt, worked the lock, and pushed the door open.

Callighan stepped inside.

The room was dim, quietly cluttered with the odds and ends of hasty relocation, a couch pushed against one wall, a few scattered items that hadn’t been properly arranged so much as dumped. His eyes moved across it once before settling on the figure near the far end.

The young man was on the floor. Not on the couch he’d presumably been given, but leaned back against it, sitting on the bare ground with his legs stretched out in front of him, staring at the wall like it owed him something. He was wearing a t-shirt several sizes too large, whoever had picked it out hadn’t bothered checking the fit, hanging loose off one shoulder, the hem falling nearly to his thighs. His pants were similarly ill-fitting, though with him it was harder to tell whether they were the wrong size or whether he was simply built that lean. His shoes were on but the laces were untied, trailing against the floor like an afterthought.

He didn’t look up right away. He seemed like someone who had learned to take his time with things that didn’t deserve urgency.

Then Callighan’s footsteps crossed the threshold and the young man’s head turned slowly, until his face came fully into view.

No matter how many times Callighan had seen it, there was still something that made him pause, not fear, but just stillness that comes from looking at something your brain has to work slightly harder than usual to process. Because Zakthar looked almost human. Almost. And it was the almost that got you every time.

The skin was the first thing, a grayish white, even in tone, not quite the color of anything living that belonged on this earth. Small horns rose from his head, subtle but there, pushing up through hair that fell in a natural shade of light green that no dye job could’ve replicated. His eyes were green too, a deep and vivid green, slightly different in shape from what you’d expect but no less sharp for it.

He had been staring at the wall. Now he was staring at Callighan.

"I noticed it from my room," Zakthar said first. "The electricity cut out. All at once." He tilted his head slightly. "A Nexon Battery I installed doesn’t just drain overnight, even in weeks, not the way I set it up. Which means someone either unplugged it, broke it, or you lost it." He paused. "I’m guessing you lost it judging from the other’s tense expression and the absence of Lucy."

"A man came last night," Callighan said, taking one step forward. Just one. "He took the battery and one of my people. Walked in and walked back out again almost without resistance." He let that sit for a beat. "He isn’t one of your kind, by any chance?"

Zakthar was quiet for a moment, thinking, or doing a convincing impression of it.

"No," he said finally. "If he were Starakian, he would have come for me. That would’ve been the priority."

"Maybe he did," Callaghan replied.

"Or maybe he didn’t find me," Zakthar said.

Callighan looked at him for a long moment. Then he crossed the room in a few strides until he was standing directly in front of him, close enough that Zakthar would have to crane his neck to hold eye contact from the floor. He looked down at him calmly.

"Don’t test my patience," he said quietly. "You’re intelligent enough to know what people like Gaspar are capable of. It wouldn’t take him long to find his way to your companion."

Zakthar’s jaw tightened, something shifting behind those green eyes that hadn’t been there a second ago.

They shouldn’t have known about Kunta, that had been a failure Zakthar still hadn’t entirely forgiven himself for. But Gaspar had found it out quickly. The man was clearly a Symbiote Host with experience and knowledge.

They didn’t know exactly where she was but Zakthar knew better than most what Symbiotes were capable of when they decided to look for something. And underneath all of it was the fear he carried quietly and constantly: that Kunta, stubborn and loyal as she was, would come looking for him on her own and walk straight into something she couldn’t walk back out of.

They had disobeyed their superior to come here. They had no backup. No allies. No one who even knew where they were. Zakthar had no moves left except forward.

He pushed himself up from the floor, standing fully, and when he spoke his voice had an edge to it that was half anger and half something more vulnerable, and pleading.

"Don’t touch her. You promised...you said nothing would happen to either of us."

"And you have my word," Callighan said. "But my word holds up only as long as yours does." His gaze shifted sideways, just briefly, just enough toward the Tri-Core Matrix Box sitting against the wall. Gaspar had stolen it. Callighan had paid it little mind at first, until he’d learned what was inside it. Or rather, what one particular stone inside it was capable of. That was when his attention had settled on it and stayed.

Zakthar followed the look. His eyes rested on the box for a moment, then dropped to the floor.

The silence stretched long.

Then Zakthar looked back up at him gritting his teeth.

"I’ll do it."

He said and raised his gaze.

"I’ll build the Screamer."