My Kaiju Parasite Revived Me, But a Yandere Bought My Streaming Rights

The apartment building was three blocks from the freight rail and one block from the night market.

Caleb had paid the rent on the fourteenth-floor unit for six years. He had never been inside it. He had not stood on this street in nineteen years. The night market was the same. The freight rail was the same. The smell of grilled fish from the stall on the corner was the same, and the man at the stall was older but it was the same man.

It was four-twelve in the morning.

Elara’s car was parked across the intersection with the lights off. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

Iris was in the lobby pretending to read a newspaper that had not been printed in five years.

The watcher’s car was where she had said it would be. Black sedan, two doors down, parking lights on. Caleb walked past it on the opposite sidewalk and did not look in the window.

He went into the building.

He took the stairs.

The fourteenth floor smelled like cooking oil and old paint.

Apartment 1407.

He had a key on his ring he had never used. He had been carrying it for six years. He had the key copied at a hardware store when he signed the lease, and he had put it on his ring, and he had never come.

The door opened without sound.

The hall was dark. A lamp on a side table glowed faint yellow. There was a coat rack by the door with two coats on it. A winter parka and a long gray raincoat. The raincoat was not the coat.

He moved down the hall.

The hall closet was where Marcus had said it would be.

He opened it.

There were six coats inside. Five of them were coats his mother had worn within the last decade. He could tell by the dust pattern on the shoulders. The sixth was at the back, on a wooden hanger, wrapped in dry-cleaning plastic that had yellowed.

He took it down.

He pulled the plastic off.

It was a navy wool coat, calf-length, with a single black button at the throat. The lining was a darker navy silk, intact except for a hand-stitched seam along the inside of the left lapel where the silk had been cut and resewn very neatly.

He folded the coat over his arm.

A light came on at the end of the hall.

He stopped.

His mother stood in the doorway of the bedroom in a robe and slippers and the same haircut she had worn in the only photograph he had of her.

They faced each other from opposite ends of the hall until she said his name.

"Mom," he answered.

Her hand stayed on the bedroom doorframe. "How long have you been in the apartment?"

"Four minutes," Caleb said. "I came to take something."

"Is it something I would have given you?"

"I don’t know."

Her attention moved to the coat over his arm and stayed there.

"Your father bought me that coat," she said. "Before you were born. I never wore it. He told me to keep it. He said one day you would come for it and that I should let you."

"He told you that?"

"He told me a lot of things I have not let myself think about for nineteen years. Take the coat. Don’t tell me what’s in it."

"Okay."

"Caleb," she said. "He’s alive, isn’t he?"

Caleb didn’t answer. She nodded once.

"Don’t tell me when. Don’t tell me where. If he wanted me to know, he would have come himself. Take the coat. Go."

He went to the door.

At the door he stopped.

"Mom."

"Don’t say it. If you say it you’ll come back for the rest of it and I am not ready for the rest of it. Take the coat and go."

He went.

In the stairwell on the eleventh floor he stopped and leaned against the wall and breathed for a minute.

His ribs were burning under the manual override harness.

He breathed until they stopped.

Then he went down the stairs.

Iris was still in the lobby.

She folded the newspaper and gave him the length of the lobby before rising from the chair.

The watcher’s car was still in its spot.

The driver was a man in his fifties with a thin face and a thermos in his hand. He saw Caleb come out of the building and answered by taking a slow drink.

Caleb crossed the intersection to Elara’s car.

He got in the passenger side.

Elara was already on her comm.

"He took her picture coming out of the building," she said. "He didn’t take yours. He took your mother’s. He’s not here for you. He’s here for her."

"Who is he?"

"I’ll know by noon." She put the car in gear but kept it at the curb.

"Caleb," she said. "Did she see you? Did she know who you were?"

"Yes."

Elara watched the watcher’s car in the rearview mirror.

"That’s not going to make tomorrow easier."

"It wasn’t going to be easy."

She pulled away from the curb.

The seam on the inside of the lapel held a single sheet of folded paper, wax-sealed at the corners. Caleb worked it free on the drive back. His hands were steady. The wax cracked clean.

The paper had a list of seven names.

Six of them were marked.

The seventh was his.

The Hacker’s office was on the forty-second floor of a building Caleb had passed under a thousand times and never raised his eyes to.

She met him at the elevator.

He had seen her face once, in the rank-up ceremony. He had not seen her standing four feet away from him with no helmet between them and no broadcast filter on her voice. She was wearing a charcoal suit. Her hair was pulled back. Her left hand was bare and the right hand was gloved. She was thirty-seven years old, and age seemed to move across her face depending on which tired line or unguarded angle reached him first.

"Caleb."

"Kimmely."

"Come inside."

The office was one room. A long desk. Six monitors. A small couch. A coffee table with two mugs on it, both empty, both used. A photograph in a frame on the desk. Caleb couldn’t see what was in it from this angle.

She closed the door behind him and left it unlocked. The forty-second floor had its own ways of keeping people out.