A kaiju ate me alive. I felt my ribs go one at a time. 

Then something in the dark of its gut decided I was not finished.

It started my heart with a hand that was not mine, and I walked out of the corpse on my own two feet, the only person who ever has. That was the night she bought the rights to whatever I had become.

One screen. One subscriber. The screen is my life, live and uncut. 

The subscriber is her, and she pays whatever it costs to keep the feed running: every fight, every wound, every hour I lose to the thing growing up the inside of my spine. 

When I run, the money finds me. When I bleed, the bid climbs.

The Defense Force has me filed as a contaminant. 

The corporations want me as their next headliner. 

She understood the part both of them missed: the stronger the parasite makes me, the less of me is left.

Every night, behind one glowing screen, the woman who calls herself my sponsor watches me turn into the thing that killed me. She has never once looked away.

Sam took one look at the cuff readout when they got home and went quiet, and the quiet told Caleb the number before the wall did.


"Fifty-one," Sam said. He wrote it without ceremony, wiped the forty-three away, put fifty-one in its place. "You went to the coast at forty-three. You came back at fifty-one. Eight points for a man you couldn't even save."


He capped the pencil. "Pasco cost twelve and you carried a person out for it. Halden cost eight and you carried out nothing but the hole where a person used to be."


"I don't have a clean read on why the empty one cost less spread, but I'll tell you the part the cuff did pick up, and you're not going to like it."


"The control number didn't move." Sam pointed at the second figure, the one climbing alongside the spread all along, the measure of how much of the silver Caleb could aim.


Chapter 170 - The Cost of an Empty Room