I left Cindy to her task and headed upstairs to the last floor.

I knocked once and pushed the door open.

She was on the bed, sitting cross-legged near the center of it with a book open in her lap, the pages held flat by one hand. Sonny was stretched out beside her. The strangest part was how natural it looked. Like a girl and her dog, if you didn’t look too closely at the dog.

She was wearing glasses I hadn’t seen before. Some kind of eyewear that didn’t look like anything manufactured on this planet, slightly too angular, lenses tinted in a way that shifted depending on the angle. Weird, but on her, somehow not surprising.

The moment she registered me in the doorway, the book came down and her whole posture changed. The easy, reading-in-the-afternoon quality of it pulled back and something more guarded moved in to replace it. Her eyes cut briefly to Sonny.

"You don’t need to do that every time," I said.

"You are a Symbiote Host," she said, as though that explained everything. And maybe for her it did.

I wondered briefly, not for the first time, what she’d do if she found out I wasn’t just any Symbiote Host. If she knew the full shape of what Dullahan was, and what it made me. Whether that particular piece of information would end this fragile, functional working arrangement we had, or whether it would send Sonny straight at me before I’d finished the sentence.

Probably better not to test that.

"I’m also the only person with a real shot at getting your boyfriend back," I said.

The wariness cracked apart and something much more flustered rushed in to fill the space, color flooding her face, her expression cycling through about four different reactions in the span of two seconds.

"Zak is not my boyfriend!" She snapped, the volume climbing sharply enough that Sonny’s head shifted a fraction on the mattress.

"Right," I said wanting to roll my eyes.

The more she screamed that, the more I was convinced she was in love with him. And here everyone around me told that I was dense.

"Anyway. I wanted to say thank you for lending us Sonny. It helps more than you probably realize."

The flush lingered but she pulled herself back into something more composed, lifting her chin slightly. "I am doing it to get Zak returned to me. Nothing more."

"I know," I said. "But you still chose cooperation over the alternative, and that matters." I glanced at Sonny. "We’re going to need him to watch someone else for a bit, if that’s alright. Different job, same idea."

She didn’t argue. Just watched me with those slightly-too-sharp eyes of hers.

"If Zak is not returned to me," she said with a sharp look. "I will order Sonny to attack you."

It was hard to find her threatening honestly...

"Understood," I said, because it was. "But if you actually want Zak back, actually want him back, not just cooperating at the minimum, you’re going to have to do a bit more than loan us the dog."

Her eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

I turned and looked at the Bi-Core Matrix Box sitting in the corner of the room.

"Starakian Technologies," I said, nodding toward it. "Can it do anything useful against Gaspar? He’s a Symbiote Host. Is there anything in there that changes that equation for us?"

Kunta followed my gaze to the Box, then looked back at me. "That Matrix is not built for offensive purposes," she said.

"Then what’s it for?"

She shifted slightly on the bed. "Support. It projects a dome over a defined area, range is adjustable. Inside that dome, it functions as a universal translator, registers every living thing that crosses the boundary and sends a signal, and—" she paused for just a moment — "it also emits a dissuasion frequency. Specifically calibrated to repel Symbiotes and Biot-based organisms. What you call Infected."

I stared at her.

She watched me process it with an expression that was almost patient.

The translator function alone would have been remarkable. The sensor capability, the perimeter awareness, all of it would have been genuinely useful by any standard we were currently operating at. But that last part. A field that actively pushed back against Symbiotes and Infected both, covering an entire zone, running continuously from a box the size of luggage.

These people were operating on a completely different level. The gap between their technology and ours wasn’t a gap, it was a canyon, and we were standing at the bottom of it looking up.

I set the thought aside and focused.

"If we deployed it around the hotel," I said, working through it, "spread the dome out as far as it’ll reach, would it hit us too? The people living inside the perimeter?"

Kunta smiled, and there was something a little too pleased about it. "Of course it would," she said. "The dissuasion frequency does not distinguish between Symbiotes it’s protecting and Symbiotes it’s dissuading. Anyone with a Symbiote bond inside the dome would find it, uncomfortable. Painful, if prolonged." She tilted her head, the smile holding. "If living is something you’d like to continue doing, I would not recommend deploying it."

"Useless technology," I said.

The smile vanished. "What did you just say?!"

"Useless," I said again, flatly. "Right now, in practical terms, for what we need, useless. The dome coverage is interesting. The translation is interesting. The sensor function is genuinely useful. But the dissuasion frequency is a problem that cancels out everything else, so." I shrugged. "Useless."

"That is an incredibly advanced piece of—"

"Can you disable just that part?" I asked.

She stopped.

"The frequency specifically," I said. "Turn off the dissuasion signal, keep the rest of the functions running. Is that possible?"

The question seemed to catch her genuinely off guard. She was quiet for a moment, something working behind her eyes, not reluctance, more like she was running through the actual technical feasibility of it in real time.

"Zakthar could do it," she said eventually, carefully.

I looked at her. "What can you even do?"

It came out a bit more bluntly than I’d intended. The look on her face told me she’d received it exactly as bluntly as it had come out.

"I...I can try to do it myself!" she said, glaring at me. "I am not completely without technical knowledge, you know!"

"Good," I said. "Thank you." I turned toward the door.

"Wait."

Something sailed through the air toward me. I turned and caught it, a reflex, automatic, and looked down at what was sitting in my palm.

A silver sphere. Small, smooth, heavier than it looked, with the same not-quite-right quality that all their tech carried. Not dangerous-looking, but the things that didn’t look dangerous usually deserved the most attention.

"If you can get close enough to Gaspar," Kunta said, "throw that at him. It releases a compound on contact with atmosphere. It won’t kill him, but it’ll lock him up, full paralysis, temporary."

I looked up at her. "Seriously?"

She met my eyes evenly. "Did you believe we would come to an unknown world without preparing for the possibility of encountering hostile Symbiote activity?"

Fair point.

"Do you have anything else like this?" I asked, turning the sphere over in my fingers carefully. "Other things that could help against him?"

Her expression shifted, just slightly, just enough. Something dimmed in it.

"Zakthar had the rest," she said. "He carried the majority of the specialized equipment. Which means it is likely that Gaspar now has access to it."

I let that sit for a second.

So not only did Gaspar have Zakthar, he potentially had an inventory of alien anti-Symbiote technology that he’d had God knows how long to go through and figure out. The thought was really unpleasant.

I closed my hand around the sphere and pushed the rest of the calculation aside for later. Later was when I could afford to think about it. Right now I had what I had.

And what I had was still better than nothing.

"Thank you," I said, and I meant it more than the last time I’d said it.

I pocketed the sphere and left.

I moved to the next room along the corridor and knocked once, knuckles light against the door.

"Yeah."

I opened the door and stepped inside.

Mark was at the small desk they’d managed to drag into the room at some point, sitting with his back mostly to me, glasses on, one hand moving across the open pages of his notebook. The desk was a quiet disaster of organized intent. Papers stacked with a logic only he could follow. Something mechanical and half-disassembled pushed to one corner to make room for the working space. The Nexon Battery sitting to the side, its faint indicator light casting a pale glow across the desk surface.

I glanced at the notebook. The open page was dense with it, equations running in clusters, notations branching off in two directions at once, diagrams sketched with the specific confidence of someone who didn’t need to think about the drawing to do it right. I looked at it for maybe three seconds before I felt something behind my eyes begin to quietly protest.

"Looks like you’re working hard," I said.

"I am," he replied, not looking up, pen still moving. "And as you can see, you’re bothering me." He tilted his head slightly toward the Nexon Battery as he said it.

I laughed a little hearing his annoyed and bothered tone.

There he was. The real Mark, the one that existed underneath the shock and the grief and the dead-eyed stillness that Jackson Township had left behind in him. Irritable. Focused. Slightly contemptuous of interruptions. Alive in the way that meant his mind was running again, pulling at problems, looking for purchase on something useful. The grumpiness wasn’t a bad sign. The grumpiness meant he was back.

He hadn’t fully recovered, I wasn’t naive enough to think a wound like that closed cleanly or quickly. What Jackson Township had taken from him wasn’t the kind of thing that came back whole. But sitting here, pen in hand, equations spreading across the page, there was something forward-facing in his posture that hadn’t been there before. A direction and a motivation.

It felt good to see him like that again.

I just stood there for one more second, taking it in, and then I pulled the door closed behind me as I stepped back into the corridor.

The latch clicked softly.

"Now," I said to nobody in particular, already moving toward the stairs.

"Sydney."

I headed down, out through the hotel entrance, and stepped outside into the open air.