Chapter 334: A Scavenging Mission for Zakthar

Mei walked back with Tommy at the same unhurried pace they’d left with, like the last twenty minutes had been exactly what it looked like on the surface and nothing more. She kept her eyes forward, expression neutral, the picture of someone who’d simply needed a few minutes away from the group.

Tommy, for his part, was holding himself together reasonably well. She could feel the questions building up behind his silence, the need to know more, to get the full story, to have something concrete to grab onto. But he kept it reined in. Swallowed it down and kept walking. Maybe he understood, on some level, that now wasn’t the time. Or maybe he just needed a moment to figure out what he even wanted to ask first.

Either way, he held himself back. That was enough for now.

The yard had mostly settled back into its usual low, listless rhythm by the time they returned. A few people were still lingering, talking in quiet clusters or just sitting. Nobody paid them much attention.

Keith materialized at Mei’s side almost immediately, falling into step beside her like he’d been watching the path back the whole time.

"So?" He asked under his breath.

"I talked to him about Ryan," Mei replied. "And that Emily could be helped."

"And?" Keith pressed. "Did he agree to help us?"

"I didn’t tell him about the plan."

Keith’s brow dropped. "Why not? That was the whole, it was the perfect chance, Mei."

"Was it?" She glanced at him sideways. "We can’t be certain he’ll cooperate yet. I told him Ryan could save Emily. That’s enough for now. What happens next depends on whether he decides to trust us or not. We share the plan after that, not before."

Keith chewed on that for a second, then let out a breath and nodded, eyes drifting over to where Tommy had settled back into his usual spot, that complicated, faraway expression sitting on his face.

"Alright, yeah. You’re not wrong," he admitted. "I don’t think he’s a bad guy. But he’s been around Gaspar long enough that the fear might’ve gotten into him whether he knows it or not."

"Are you afraid of Gaspar?" Mei asked.

Keith’s answer came without hesitation. "No. I just accepted a long time ago that he’s a monster. That’s different from being scared of one."

He looked at her then, something shifting in his expression. "What about you? You told me that Ryan’s a Symbiote host too. Does that not scare you at all?"

"No," she said simply.

She turned it over as she said it and found that it was true, no qualifications needed. She’d seen Ryan do things that had no business being done by anything human. She’d watched him from close enough that there was no softening it, no telling herself she hadn’t seen what she’d seen. And yet the fear had never really taken hold. Maybe because she’d also seen everything else, his human side which was stronger than his Symbiote Host side.

He was nothing like Gaspar. They were both Symbiote hosts and that was roughly where the comparison ended.

"I guess after being with his group that long you just accepted it," Keith said. "Like Gaspar. That he’s a monster."

Mei opened her mouth and then didn’t say what she was going to say. The irritation was there but it had nowhere clean to land, because stripped of the harshness of the word, he wasn’t wrong. Ryan was, by any reasonable definition, a monster. And maybe that was exactly it — maybe she’d just lived alongside that reality long enough that it had stopped feeling like a revelation and started feeling like weather. Just something that was true about the world she was living in now.

She said nothing.

"Anyway," Keith muttered, dragging his gaze away from Tommy, "let’s hope he doesn’t sit on this too long."

He was clearly impatient to get back to his older sister.

Mei watched him for a moment. Then made her decision.

"Your sister is with Ryan," she said.

Keith went completely still.

"...What?"

"She was the hostage Ryan was supposed to exchange for me at the Golden Nugget," Mei said, keeping her voice even. "The exchange didn’t go through."

She’d suspected it first, piecing it together from fragments and half-heard conversations. Then she’d heard Callighan’s men talking and the guess had become a fact.

"You... are you serious?!" Keith turned on her fully, and whatever composure he had left evaporated in an instant. His hands came up and closed around her shoulders, eyes wide. "Is she okay?! I mean... will she be okay?!"

"Probably," Mei said, holding steady under the grip. "They don’t kill people without reason. And she’s a valuable hostage. That keeps her protected for now."

"Then why didn’t they just bring her?!" Keith’s hands tightened. "Why didn’t they exchange her and take you back?! What happened?!"

Mei went quiet for a moment.

She wanted to know that too. She’d turned it over more times than she could count and kept arriving at the same blank wall. Why hadn’t Ryan brought Lucy? What had gone wrong on that end?

She didn’t have an answer.

"Who knows," she said, and let her eyes drop pointedly to where his hands were still locked around her shoulders.

Keith followed her gaze.

"O... oh!" He let go like he’d touched something hot, taking a half step back, color rising in his face. "Sorry! Sorry, I didn’t—"

He looked away, rubbing the back of his neck, the embarrassment written all over him in a way that was almost endearing if Mei was in the mood to find anything endearing right now.

She wasn’t, particularly. But she let it go.

They kept talking, nothing important, just filling the silence the way you do when there’s nothing left to do but wait until they were called out to return.

Then a woman’s voice cut across it.

"Hey, Tommy. Bring your ass."

Tommy blinked out of whatever fog he’d been sitting in and pushed himself up. "Oh — yeah." He nodded once and headed off without another word, leaving whatever remained of his thoughts behind him on the concrete.

Mei watched him go, face unreadable.

"He’s not going to say anything, right?" Keith asked beside her, his voice dropping low. The nervous edge in it was hard to miss. "Like — he won’t just go and—"

"Keep your negative thoughts to yourself," Mei said.

Keith shut up also agreeing.

°°°

The building they used for meetings was a squat, unremarkable thing a few streets over, the kind of place that had probably been somebody’s community center or storage unit before all of this. Now it smelled like damp concrete and cigarette smoke and too many people who didn’t have anywhere better to be.

Tommy pushed through the door and found the others already assembled inside. Callighan was at the far end in quiet discussion with Romero, their voices too low to catch from across the room. The rest were scattered around, waiting.

"There he is," Liam said, turning with that easy smile of his that Tommy had never quite trusted.

"What is it this time?" Tommy asked, keeping his voice neutral.

"Another scavenging run," Liam replied.

Tommy exhaled through his nose. Of course it was.

Ever since Callighan had figured out that Tommy and Liam were former high schoolers and not hardened criminals, he’d been slotting them into the lighter work, scavenging supply runs, mostly. Safer than the alternative, Tommy knew that. Didn’t make it feel like any less of a leash.

He glanced toward Callighan and Romero, something tight settling in his gut even before he knew the details.

"What are we actually going for?" He muttered to Liam, leaning in slightly.

Liam kept his voice down. "Zakthar put in a list. Supplies, specific parts, the whole thing. It’s for a weapon, something to take down the Boardwalk. The stuff we need is in Atlantic City."

Tommy stared at him.

"Atlantic City." He said it back slowly, making sure he’d heard correctly. "You’re serious. We’re going into Atlantic City. Where we have enemies on every corner who will shoot us on sight if they figure out we’re with Callighan."

"Can you stop doing that?" Liam said, the smile dropping slightly. "The whining. Every time."

"I’m not whining, I’m pointing out that we could actually die," Tommy said, keeping his voice low with some effort.

"Once we get what Zakthar needs and he builds whatever he’s building, Callighan promised we’re done. No more fighting, no more running around." Liam looked at him with something that was probably meant to be reassurance. "That’s worth one run."

Tommy clenched his jaw. Done fighting. Sure. At the cost of whatever the Boardwalk was going to lose when that weapon went off. He didn’t say it. There wasn’t a point.

"You coming or not?" Liam asked.

Tommy thought about it for a second.

Going outside was an opportunity. More space to breathe, more room to think. After what Mei had just dropped on him, he needed both. Maybe the open air and the distance from this place would help him sort out what was actually going on in his head.

"Yeah," he said. "I’m coming."

"Good. Romero’s leading."

Tommy’s expression curdled. "You’re joking."

"He’s capable—"

"He’s a psycho," Tommy said whispering. Romero was everything wrong with what had crawled out of the prisons when the world fell apart. The man practically vibrated with the need to hurt something. He wasn’t as theatrical as Williams had been but that almost made it worse, at least Williams was predictable in his chaos. Romero was quieter about it, which meant you never quite knew when it was coming.

"He’s on our side and someone needs to lead," Liam said.

Tommy wanted to say that being on their side didn’t make a rabid dog less of a rabid dog. He kept it behind his teeth, let out a long slow breath, and let it go.

Across the room, Callighan’s voice rose just slightly above the low murmur of the space.

"Be careful. Don’t get involved in anything unnecessary." It came out seriously but also sternly.

Romero’s response was a wide smile. The kind that had nothing behind it except appetite.

"I got this," he said.

Tommy sighed seeing that.

He really had a bad feeling about this.