The PR prep room at five-forty in the morning was lit by the kind of fluorescent tube the human eye was not designed to be looked at by.

Caleb sat in the catalog chair. He had been in the chair for nine minutes.

Tali was kneeling at his right hip with a soldering iron and a piece of equipment absent from every Seventh Division parts inventory.

"Hold still," she said. "If I crook this line, your right thigh sensor will pick up a heart rate from your femoral artery and your left rib sensor will pick up a heart rate from somewhere else, and I won’t be able to tell which one to listen to."

"Where’s the other heart rate coming from."

"That’s the wrong question, Mercer."

"Right. Sorry."

"You ask better questions when you’re scared. You should be scared today."

"I’m scared today."

"Good. Hold still."

The private channel ticked once behind his ear.

[Unknown User: he is in the chat queue. handle KETTLE-KEEPER. pinned to slot four on the moderator panel. sarna has no reason to flag it. keep it that way.]

He tapped a single click on his molar to acknowledge.

[Unknown User: tali’s tracker pings to me, not to your division. if you go off-script in the studio your suit talks to me. don’t be cute on camera.]

[Caleb: i never am.]

[Unknown User: you were last night.]

He let himself almost smile.

Tali sat back on her heels and surveyed her work. From outside the lining, the patch she had soldered along the inside seam vanished into the suit. She had braided three filaments through the existing pulse-reader array in a way that turned the array into a transmitter without the transmitter showing up on a diagnostic sweep.

"You’re going to keep your hand off your hip for the next three hours," Tali said. "If you scratch through this, I have to do it again, and I will charge you for the solder."

"How much for the solder."

"More than you earn for the slot."

-----

Sarna pushed through the door at five-fifty-eight.

She had a fresh tablet and a fresh blazer and the kind of professional smile that meant her bonus had increased between yesterday’s slot and this one.

"Mercer. You’re an asset. The bid bracket closed at premium tier across the board. We have an unprecedented engagement projection. The board’s showing pre-stream interest at sixty thousand viewers, which is a number I haven’t seen on a sponsor slot in the four years I’ve worked this desk. Tali, are we good."

"You’re good."

"Wonderful. Mercer, you remember the rules from yesterday."

"I smile at the soft questions. I don’t answer the hard ones. If anyone asks about the bracelet, you handle it."

"And we’re going to address one specific super-chat today, because the handle that paid for it yesterday is back in the queue, and the bid he placed for slot four was generous enough that the producer wants you to acknowledge his contribution. Smile. Make eye contact with the lens. Say the word *kettle* if you can do it without making a face. Can you do it without making a face."

"I can do it without making a face."

"That’s what I needed to hear."

She tapped the tablet.

The lights came up.

-----

[STREAM LIVE / VIEWERS: 62,000 / CLIMBING]

[PUBLIC SYNC RATE: 1.2% / LOCALIZED OUTPUT: HELD]

The number was already higher than it had been at the same point in yesterday’s slot.

Sarna opened the broadcast the same way she had opened it the day before, except the polish was harder. She introduced him with the line about the rank-up. She asked the line about the squad. She asked the line about the gala. He answered the lines about all three.

The viewer count crossed a hundred thousand at the two-minute mark.

She opened the chat.

[GunnerFan: he came back]

[TitanSlayer: pipe guy lives]

[RedLine: shoulder check?]

[A_Mitsurugi: you embarrassed her family. apologize.]

The pinned super-chat dropped onto his visor at exactly four minutes into the slot.

[Sponsor: KETTLE-KEEPER / Donation: 100,000 cr]

[Question: when you finally meet me, mercer, are you going to bring a knife or a question?]

The pulse-reader along his lining went warm under Tali’s solder.

Sarna’s professional smile flickered for one frame and then locked back into place. She had been prepped to address the handle. She knew the donation amount because the donation amount was attached to her bonus pool. The question itself sailed past her.

"That’s an extremely generous donation, KETTLE-KEEPER. The kettle theme continues, I see. Mercer, do you want to take this one?"

He looked at the lens.

He thought about the kettle base on the white tape strip on the Hacker’s workbench, and the slab in the photograph, and the thing in the cell six floors under this building. He thought about a man who was sitting somewhere right now drinking from a different kettle and watching his face on a screen.

He gave the answer the Hacker had told him to give.

"I’ll bring both," Caleb said into the lens. "If you ever stop hiding behind a sponsor handle, I’ll be happy to use either one."

The chat scroll exploded.

The viewer count crossed a hundred and forty thousand.

Sarna’s smile broke into something that was almost a real reaction. She covered it by leaning toward the lens.

"Bold answer from our Rank C, audience. Let’s see if our sponsor wants to follow that up. Kettle-Keeper, the floor is open."

The pinned chat sat on his visor for two seconds.

Then the studio PA blared.

The sound was neither music sting nor sponsor jingle.

The Defense Force priority alert tone hit in three descending notes, the one every citizen in the city had learned by the age of four to listen for and the one every recruit had learned to mobilize against by their second week of orientation.

Sarna’s head snapped toward the corner of the room where the PA speaker sat above the door.

The pinned super-chat from KETTLE-KEEPER scrolled out of the slot at the same moment the alert hit.

The handle’s bid had been withdrawn.

The viewer count, instead of dropping, doubled in nine seconds.

[STREAM LIVE / VIEWERS: 287,000 / SYNCED TO PUBLIC INCURSION FEED]

[COMBAT TELEMETRY: PUBLIC SAFE MODE]

Sarna had been a professional for four years. She made the pivot in under two seconds.

"Audience, we’re switching to the priority broadcast. Caleb Mercer is being deployed live. Stay with us."

-----

Iris’s voice was already in his ear by the time he was out of the chair.

"Seventh, mobilize. Sector Two transit hub. Class-5 Drudger, single emergent, rupture confirmed four minutes ago. Civilian evac in progress. First Division has perimeter. Mercer’s squad on primary engagement. Briefing on transit. Move."

He moved.

Iharu met him at the elevator with his gear already locked in. The redhead had not slept; Caleb knew it by the chip in his front tooth catching the corridor lights wrong. The kind of dry alert that came from being awake for the back end of someone else’s night.

"Six in the morning," Iharu said. "The day starts before the coffee."

"You sleep at all?"

"I had a feeling."

"What kind of feeling?"

"The kind where I check my magazines twice."

Hiro caught them in the staging corridor. The kid’s hands were steady. The steadiness was new, and Caleb chose to note it without commenting on it.

"Caleb. Left or right flank when we deploy. Tell me now and I will hold it."

"You take the rear with Tali on overwatch. Iharu and I move primary."

"Rear with Tali. Got it."

That was the steadiest Hiro had ever sounded going into a deployment.

-----

Kikaru came through on a First Division side-channel as the transport lifted.

"Mercer. My division has the cordon. We have three blocks of civilians inside the rupture radius and we aren’t getting them all out before you arrive. Don’t break containment. Don’t engage the perimeter. Your kill window is the central concourse and the central concourse only."

"Copy."

"And Mercer."

"Go ahead."

"Whoever timed your broadcast to this incursion is not somebody I want sitting in my division’s bid bracket. Get me a piece of the creature for the lab if you can."

The channel cut.

Iharu raised both eyebrows over his helmet.

"She’s flirting now?"

"She’s working."

"Sure she is."

The transport hit ninety knots over Sector Three rooftops. The transit briefing scrolled across the inside of Caleb’s visor in the priority blue text that meant the Defense Force was not asking him to read it but did expect him to have read it before he hit the ground.

[CLASS-5 DRUDGER. SINGLE EMERGENT. RUPTURE LOCATION: SECTOR TWO TRANSIT HUB, MAIN CONCOURSE. RUPTURE SIZE: ANOMALOUS, SMALLER THAN STANDARD CLASS-5 EMERGENCE BY 40 PERCENT.]

[BEHAVIOR PATTERN: ANOMALOUS. CREATURE IS MOVING IN A STRAIGHT LINE NORTHWEST. NOT FORAGING. NOT TERRITORIAL.]

The transport banked. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

Tali’s voice on the squad channel.

"Caleb. The rupture is smaller than it should be. The drudger is bigger than the rupture. Something pulled it through a hole that wasn’t sized for it."

"That’s not how a Class-5 walks."

"Yeah. That’s why I told you."

-----

They hit the concourse on the south rail at six-eighteen.

The drudger was thirty yards ahead of them.

It was a Class-5, the standard model: armored quadruped, head-down posture, twin grinding mandibles, fused-plate shoulders heavy enough to break through a building wall by mistake. Caleb had read about them. He had not seen one this close.

The creature ignored the food kiosks the civilians had abandoned along the concourse wall. It ignored the last evacuees fleeing up the broken escalator. It walked, in a straight line, northwest, at a pace that suggested it had been told where to go.

Caleb tracked the line of its march back over his shoulder.

The line ran straight through the south wall of the Seventh Division compound.

Iharu saw the same thing.

"Tell me that’s not pointed at the basement."

"It’s pointed at the basement."

"At the floor."

"At the floor with the cell."

"For the love of everything, Caleb."

"On me. Now."

-----

They moved.

Iharu opened from the south with the scatter-gun, hammering kinetic slugs into the drudger’s right rear leg to break its momentum. The plate held; the joint buckled. The drudger’s stride faltered for the first time since it had come through the rupture. It turned, slow, to address them.

Caleb closed under its turn.

The standard manual on a Class-5 was the throat plate. The throat plate on this one was scarred. He could see it from twenty feet away. Someone had hit it before in a way the manual called impossible, because Class-5 Drudgers died from throat plate breaches and this one had kept walking.

He went for the inside of the front knee instead.

Phase-dagger up under the joint. Wrist twist. The synovial sac gave the way the synovial sac always gave. Black fluid sprayed up to his elbow.

The drudger went down on its right side.

It stayed silent.

The silence hooked into Caleb’s spine and stayed there. The Class-5 manual specified that drudgers, on incapacitation, produced an aggression-response vocalization at a hundred and twelve decibels. This drudger lay on its side and breathed and watched him.

Tali’s voice in his ear, fast now.

"Caleb. Do not let it die yet. The mark. The mark, Caleb. Look at the second plate above the collapsed knee."

He looked.

The interlocked spiral pair was pressed into the plate above the knee. Same vocabulary as the kettle base. Same vocabulary as the side of Sample R-9-Omega. Same vocabulary as the slab in the photograph from eighteen years ago.

Not engraved on the surface.

Grown into it.

Caleb crouched next to the drudger’s head. The creature watched him. He had the unsettling impression that the watching was not the creature’s. The watching was someone else’s, borrowed through the creature’s eye.

He kept the thought off the public broadcast.

He pressed the heel of his glove against the mark on the plate.

The mark was warm.

His ribs, low on the left, warmed in answer.

The public overlay stayed clean.

Sync rate: one point two.

The private channel under it trembled once and went black, as if someone had put a hand over the true number before the audience could read it.

-----

The Defense Force kill team came through the south rail four minutes later. They put a controlled round through the drudger’s central nervous system and tagged the carcass for biological retrieval. Kikaru’s First Division perimeter held. The civilian count finished at zero casualties, which was the line every commander wanted in front of the cameras.

The viewer count finished at three hundred and twelve thousand.

The Hacker’s voice came through on the private channel as Caleb stripped his gloves off behind the cordon.

"He pulled the bid ninety seconds before the alert tone."

"He knew."

"He set the appointment."

"For the drudger."

"For us. The drudger was the reply. He sent a knock. The thing in the cell answered. The thing in the cell pulled a Class-5 through a hole too small for it and pointed it at the door."

"Why like this. On a public feed."

"Because he wanted you on a camera with three hundred thousand viewers when the answer arrived. He wanted everyone to see that the kaiju know how to come when they are called."

Caleb looked at the drudger’s body.

The mark on the plate above the knee was still warm to the touch.

His own ribs were still warm in answer.

He thought, in the quiet at the back of his head where he kept homeless thoughts, about the eleven other marks on the side of the thing in the cell.

Three of those marks now had a piece of the world pressed to them.

Eight were waiting.

Yet.