From Human to Skeleton: Revived with Infinite System Crystals Chapter 744: Jade Lets The Phones Ring

Jade let the first phone ring until Waddell looked ready to throw it through a wall.

The shelter had too many walls already broken. It did not need his help.

The phone buzzed on the cafeteria table beside a clipboard, three cracked beacon stones, and a plastic cup of bloodied gauze. Its screen flashed with a number Jade did not know. Then another phone started. Then one in a soldier's pocket. Then Caleb Morris's phone, still wrapped in a sandwich bag because the screen had blood under the glass.

Within ten seconds, the whole cafeteria sounded like a room full of trapped insects.

Mason Bell covered both ears.

"Make it stop," he said.

Jade wanted to.

Wanting had beco unreliable.

Every ti she wanted sothing too sharply, the white thread under her skin moved. It did not care whether the want was selfish or kind. It cared about pull. It cared about death. It cared about the space between a person still breathing and a person already counted.

She kept both hands flat on the table.

"Nobody answers yet."

Waddell's jaw worked. "If that is ergency traffic, we need to know."

"If it is him, we need to survive knowing."

Kieran stood by the service door with one hand against the fra. Gold light sat under her fingernails, dull and uneven. She had not lowered her guard since the fake responders vanished. Jade had begun to suspect Kieran did not know how to lower it anymore.

"It is bait," Kieran said.

Tyree shifted beside the children. His face looked carved from exhaustion. "Everything is bait today."

"Then we pick which hook goes into us," Jade said.

That shut the room up for almost one full breath.

Caleb Morris ruined it by laughing once. The laugh ca out wrong, more pain than humor. He sat on a blanket near the freezers with his wounded arm tight against his chest.

"Sorry," he said. "That just sounded like sothing a person says before things get worse."

"It is."

"Great."

The phones kept ringing.

Jade looked at the cracked beacon stones. The white skeleton reflection behind her right shoulder had not moved since the last flare. It stood where the cafeteria window should have reflected vending machines and dark sky. Skull turned slightly. Rib cage half lost in static. One hand raised, counting with fingers that were no longer attached to the body everyone missed.

No one else saw it unless Jade touched the thread.

She did not touch the thread.

The first phone stopped ringing.

Then the second.

Then Caleb's screen lit with a video link sent from six different numbers at once.

Waddell said a word that made Mason's older cousin look impressed.

"Language," Jade said.

"Apologies to the children," Waddell said. "No apologies to the day."

Mason lowered one hand from his ear. "Is it the skeleton?"

Jade looked at him.

He was still holding the broken toy dinosaur from the basent. Soone had taped the tail back on with dical tape. It looked ridiculous and brave.

"I do not know yet."

"If it is scary, can you tell before I look?"

That nearly broke her.

She pushed the phone toward Waddell instead.

"You look first."

He did.

His face changed before the video finished loading.

Jade watched him because watching the screen would be easier, and today had punished every easy thing.

Waddell's eyes narrowed. Then his mouth tightened. Then he looked at Jade in a way she hated because it held pity before it held orders.

"Say it," she told him.

"It is Ty's face."

The room inhaled around her.

Jade's fingers pressed into the table. The thread under her skin woke with a slow, interested drag.

Kieran stepped closer. "Do not watch it with the mark open."

"I did not ask for advice."

"I gave it anyway."

"That is becoming a pattern."

"You keep almost dying."

The phones started again, each one now carrying the sa video notification. The sound crawled under Jade's teeth.

Waddell turned the screen toward her.

Smoke. A grocery store. Ty's face.

For half a second, her body believed before her mind could stop it.

There he was.

Human. Bleeding. Hair damp with smoke. Eyes tired in the exact way she had morized during late nights when he pretended work had not chewed him hollow. The face looked older than the last living mory she had of him, but grief was generous. It would accept any change if the face ca back breathing.

Jade's throat closed.

On the screen, he lifted a fallen shelf off a pinned employee.

Soone in the cafeteria whispered, "Oh my God."

Jade did not know who said it. She did not care. The thread cared. The white reflection behind her raised one finger.

Kieran touched Jade's shoulder.

Jade almost struck her.

She stopped because the screen showed blue fire eating the stolen wrist.

Pain crossed Ty's face.

Zunoder's face.

The distinction took effort. Effort saved her.

"Pause it," Jade said.

Waddell paused the video.

The room held Ty's face in smoke.

Jade stared until the ache beca useful.

"Play the audio from the last ten seconds."

Waddell did.

The voice ca through the phone speaker, rough from smoke and perfectly wrong.

"I am trying to get back what was taken."

Mason looked from the phone to Jade. "Is that a lie?"

"Yes."

"But he saved them."

"Yes."

Mason frowned, angry now in the simple way only children were allowed to be when adults made the world stupid. "Then what do we call that?"

Jade looked at the boy. She could have said manipulation. She could have said stolen behavior. She could have said Zunoder had learned that rcy worked better when fild.

Those were correct answers.

They were not good enough.

"We call it dangerous," Jade said.

Mason accepted that slowly.

Caleb shifted against the blanket. "People are going to believe it."

"So will."

"A lot will."

"Yes."

The thread under Jade's skin tightened. The skeleton reflection in the window turned its skull toward the phone. For one mont, Jade saw the video through the mark: not pixels, but claims. Every view a small thread. Every replay a hand raised toward the wrong face. Not worship. Not loyalty. Recognition.

Recognition had weight.

Zunoder had found a way to make Earth help carry him.

Jade pulled her hand back from the table before the white thread could touch the phone.

"Turn them off."

Waddell stared. "All of them?"

"All phones in this room go dark. Now."

The soldiers moved faster than the civilians. That almost made Jade smile. Training sotis beat curiosity. Not often, but sotis.

Caleb held his phone tight. "What if people need us?"

"They need us alive and thinking."

"My cousin is out there."

"Then write his na down." Jade pushed the clipboard toward him. "We make a list. We do not let a video decide who gets our blood pressure."

He looked furious.

Good. Furious people were still present.

Kieran leaned near Jade, voice low. "The clip is already spreading."

"I know."

"You cannot beat a face with silence."

"I am not trying to."

"Then what are you doing?"

Jade looked at the paused video one last ti before Waddell powered the phone down. Ty's face stayed there in smoke, kind and damaged and stolen. Her heart wanted to crawl through the screen and drag him ho by the shirt collar. The mark wanted to make that possible, which was how Jade knew it would kill soone.

"He made people watch him save strangers," Jade said. "So we answer by saving ours."

Waddell nodded once. "dical rotation resus."

"And witness rotation," Jade said. "Two adults per phone station outside the main room. No children watching clips. No one shares anything without writing who sent it, what it shows, and whether it asks for action."

Tyree gave her a tired look. "That sounds like howork."

"It is howork with fewer corpses."

Mason raised his dinosaur. "Can I help?"

"Yes." Jade took a strip of tape from the table and placed it beside him. "You are in charge of dinosaur repair and telling when adults sound stupid."

Mason considered the promotion.

"Adults sound stupid a lot."

"Then you are busy."

The first real laugh in the room ca from sowhere near the freezers. It did not last, but it happened.

The white thread loosened by one breath.

Jade felt it. So did the reflection. The skeleton in the window lowered its counting hand.

Kieran noticed Jade's shoulders change. "Protecting the living steadies it."

"Do not say that like you discovered it."

"I observed it."

"Observe quieter."

Kieran almost smiled. Almost.

Then one phone rang again.

Waddell's official line carried a different tone, sharp and governnt-clean.

He looked at the display.

"Director Caelin."

Jade held out her hand.

Waddell did not give her the phone.

"Jade."

"I said nobody answers until we choose the hook. I choose this one."

He handed it over.

Jade answered on speaker.

Director Caelin did not waste greeting on anyone. "Tell the video is fake."

Jade looked at the dead screen on the table where Ty's face had been.

"The rescue is real."

Silence.

Then Caelin said, "That is the worst possible answer."

"I know."

"Is the man Ty?"

Every adult in the cafeteria looked at her. Caleb. Waddell. Tyree. Kieran. Soldiers. Civilians. The children pretended not to listen and failed.

Jade breathed around the mark.

"No."

The thread stayed still.

Caelin's voice hardened. "Can you prove that?"

Jade looked at Mason's taped dinosaur, Caleb's wrapped phone, the nas on the clipboard, and the white skeleton reflection waiting in the glass.

"Not with a speech."

"Then with what?"

Jade stood.

Pain moved behind her right eye, sharp enough to put black spots in the cafeteria lights. She did not reach for the table. Kieran moved as if to help. Jade gave her a look and Kieran stopped, because Kieran was learning.

"With the next thing he does wrong," Jade said.

Outside, every silent phone in the hall began vibrating against the floor at once.