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.

East Array printed an injury report seven minutes before anybody bled.


The paper came through warm and crooked. Soma caught it before the strip curled under the receiver cabinet.


He tore the clock from its nail and laid it face down.


"Nobody corrects a clock," he said. "Write what yours says and keep it yours."


Five Array operators marked paper. Their watches disagreed by eleven seconds. The receiver map disagreed by seventy-two years, seven minutes, and a weather season that did not exist on any local calendar.


Kestrel remained on the Cairo line. Wind rasped against her microphone.


"I have the northern bearing," she said. "No language yet. It keeps offering a picture."


The East Array screen filled from the bottom.


Chapter 291 - Seven Minutes From Now