"Now." Marlon’s voice ca in cleanly, redirecting the room without making a scene of it. He looked at with those sharp eyes. "You’ve heard everything between and Callighan. All of it. So it’s your turn." He folded his hands on the table. "Tell exactly what you want from this alliance, and what you’re planning to do about him."
"I’m going to take him down," I said. "Him and his entire group."
"My," Molly said from the counter, the corner of her mouth pulling upward. "Strong words."
"What brought this on?" Marlon asked, studying . "You didn’t roll into Brighton Park this morning with the face of soone running a personal vendetta. Sothing changed."
"Gaspar," I said. "One of Callighan’s people. He attacked the group we left behind when we went to clear the hotel, the people who couldn’t fight, who were sitting sowhere they thought was safe. Mothers. Old people. Kids." I kept my voice level but I could feel the edge underneath it, the one I’d been keeping carefully buried since it happened. "He killed one of ours and took soone important with him when he left."
The reaction moved around the table fast as they all looked shocked and surprised.
Marlon was quiet for a mont. "They attacked you directly?"
"Gaspar did, I don’t know much why though."
Well, I knew it actually, it was because of Wanda, but I preferred to keep her identity and origin secret for now. I an I didn’t even tell Margaret and the others about it but though after Gaspar attempt to take her, they might have so suspicions about her already but Margaret or Martin didn’t ask anything, that was a good news, aning they didn’t care about her origin, and she was part of their community.
"So this is revenge then," Rico said from the back table, raising an eyebrow.
"No," I said, shaking my head. "Nothing that shallow. Revenge is personal and it ends when you feel satisfied. This isn’t that." I looked around the table at all of them. "I want i back, she’s the one they took. And I want this city to actually be livable for my people long term. That doesn’t happen while Callighan and his group are still living around here. Gaspar especially. He’s not just a problem, he’s a threat that compounds everything else around him."
"He is," Marlon said, and the seriousness in his voice confird what I’d already suspected. He knew sothing about Gaspar beyond what most people did.
"So you know about Symbiotes?" Cindy leaned forward. "And Starakians?"
Marlon’s brow lifted. "Symbiotes. Starakians." He repeated both words slowly, testing them. "No. I don’t know those nas."
So he had pieces but not the full picture.
Then his eyes narrowed at , and that asuring look ca back, the one that felt like being assessed from the inside out.
"It sounds like you have considerably more to tell us than I initially assud," he said.
Molly, Maribel, and Rico had all shifted slightly, the sa quiet suspicion moving through each of them in different ways.
"Let ask you sothing first," I said, redirecting. "When you encountered Gaspar, you knew imdiately he wasn’t normal, right?"
"I knew the mont I saw what ca out of him," Marlon said flatly. "Yellow flesh, like tentacles. Protruding from his body. I’ve seen a lot of things in my life that I couldn’t explain but that was in a category by itself."
I stared at him. "You actually t Gaspar? In person?"
"Nearly three months ago. Around the ti he and Callighan first showed up in the area." He paused, sothing working behind his eyes. "But before that encounter, I t soone else. A man, or sothing that looked like a man. He was wounded badly, bleeding in a way that didn’t look right. His skin had this grayish tone." Marlon’s frown deepened, like he was pulling the mory back into focus. "And he had horns."
I turned my head instinctively toward Molly, Rico, and Maribel, checking their faces.
None of them looked surprised. Not even slightly. Which told plenty.
My gaze landed on Maribel and stayed there. She’d acted uncertain and cautious around from the start, like she was still deciding what I was. But she’d known about this. She’d known there were things out there that weren’t human and she’d been sitting on it.
She felt my eyes on her. Her expression went awkward fast.
"I wasn’t sure whether Marlon hadn’t just, I an, the whole thing sounded like he’d hit his head," she said, the words coming out slightly rushed. "But then I saw you and it confird everything so—"
"You didn’t believe ," Marlon said, turning to look at her with a distinctly unimpressed expression.
"How was I supposed to believe you’d t an alien monster and a completely separate alien race on the sa day?!" Maribel shot back, color rising in her face. "That’s not a normal Tuesday, Marlon!"
"In her defense," Molly raised her hand with the calm energy of soone who had stayed out of this particular argunt before, "I was also struggling with it."
Marlon looked at her. "Despite what I showed you?"
"What you showed us was strange, yes. But two separate alien races. On Earth. With no prior warning, no news coverage, no governnt announcent....just suddenly here, apparently always having been here, that’s a significant leap," Molly said, reasonably.
"Wait." Sothing had clicked in my head. I turned to Cindy, cutting across the conversation.
"You think the one he t was Zakthar?" Cindy asked.
My eyes had already gone to the sa place she had. "Has to be."
"Who is Zakthar?" Maribel asked, looking between us.
"Kunta’s boyfriend," Daisy said softly from beside , and then imdiately looked down at the table with a small flush like she hadn’t ant to say it out loud.
"And who is Kunta?" Marlon asked, his gaze dry enough to sand wood.
"Zakthar’s girlfriend," I said.
Marlon stared at .
"Ryan," Cindy said through a laugh, elbowing in the ribs hard enough to make shift sideways. She looked at Marlon with a more cooperative expression. "Kunta is a Starakian. We found her in the city and we’ve been sheltering her. Zakthar, her partner left about three months ago looking for sothing and never ca back. She’s been trying to find out what happened to him ever since."
The table absorbed that in silence for a mont.
Three months ago. The sa window Marlon had encountered a grey-skinned, horned, badly wounded stranger bleeding his way through Atlantic City. The timing wasn’t a coincidence. Nothing in this city felt like a coincidence anymore actually.
"Three months ago," Marlon mumbled, almost to himself. He was staring at a fixed point on the table, turning it over in his head. "The man I found bleeding. That could have been Zakthar."
"It was him," I said. "Almost certainly. What happened after you found him?"
Marlon leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table.
"I heard a commotion a few streets over from the park. Shouting, movent. So I went to check." He paused. "I found him shackled to a street light. Both wrists bound, already bleeding badly, barely conscious. I didn’t know what he was, I just saw soone who’d been restrained and left to suffer, and that was enough to act on. I started trying to work the shackles loose despite he looked not human."
"And then Gaspar showed up," I said.
"Gaspar showed up." Marlon’s expression hardened. "With a group of others. I recognized him straight away as one of Callighan’s, he knew my face too, which told he’d been briefed on who I was. For a mont I thought Callighan had sent him specifically for . But he wasn’t there for . He was there for the shackled man." He stopped. "He had kids with him. No older than you lot. And then I saw what ca out of him—" He didn’t finish the sentence imdiately, like the image was still strange enough to resist being put into words. "Those yellow growths. Flesh-like but wrong. Moving. I’ve been in combat. I’ve seen people die in ways that stay with you. But whatever ca out of Gaspar’s body in that mont, I felt sothing I hadn’t felt in a very long ti."
There was a slight pause.
"I fought my way out. Managed to injure him enough to create a gap and I took it." His jaw tightened. "But I had to leave the shackled man behind. I didn’t have a choice, not a real one but that doesn’t make it sit easier."
"You actually injured Gaspar?" I asked, leaning forward. That part had caught . "He’s a Symbiote Host. That’s not supposed to be easy."
"A Symbiote Host," Molly repeated slowly, her eyes shifting to . "Is that what we’re calling it?"
"It ans he has sothing living inside his body," I said. "Sothing alien. It enhances everything, strength, durability, healing. Makes him significantly harder to put down than a normal person."
"Then how—" Cindy started.
"The shackled man," Marlon said. "He had a weapon laying on the ground, not anything I’d seen before, unusual material, unusual weight. When Gaspar moved toward I got hold of it and used it. Whatever it was made of, it worked." He set his hands flat on the table. "After that I ran, because I’m experienced enough to know when the smart move is to not be sowhere anymore. But the whole encounter has been sitting wrong with for three months because I couldn’t explain any of it."
"Alright," I said, settling back. "Then let explain it. All of it. But I’ll warn you now, it’s a lot, and so of it is going to be difficult to hear."
Everyone at the table looked at . Even Rico, who had been hovering quietly at the back table, had gone still.
"We’re listening," Marlon said.
So I told them.
I started at the beginning, the real beginning, not the version most survivors had pieced together from rumor and guesswork. The Infected Virus wasn’t a natural outbreak. It wasn’t a lab accident or an act of human terrorism. It was a biological weapon, engineered and deployed by the Starakians, a space-faring civilization so advanced and so old that the word superior barely covered it. A race that had spent centuries conquering worlds, assimilating what was useful and dismantling what wasn’t.
Their reason for targeting Earth wasn’t us, specifically. It was what was hiding among us. The Shadelings, what we’d taken to calling Symbiotes were the Starakians’ oldest enemies. A parasitic species that had nearly driven the Starakians to extinction five thousands years ago before the tide had turned, and now the Starakians had been hunting them across the galaxy for generations, following their trail from world to world. Wherever the Shadelings took refuge inside a host population, the Starakians introduced the virus. A weapon designed to destabilize, to flush the Shadelings out into the open by collapsing the civilization they were sheltering inside.
Earth had simply been next on the list.
And the reason we’d been so unprepared, why there had been no warning, no evacuation plan, no coordinated global response despite the fact that governnts had resources and intelligence networks and years of contingency planning was because there had been a deal. A quiet one, made far above the level of anything the public would ever have heard about. A small number of people in positions of power in each country had been offered continued survival in exchange for their silence and cooperation. They’d taken the offer. And they’d kept it, right up until the morning the virus hit, at which point they’d simply disappeared to wherever they’d been promised they were going.
They had known. They had always known. And they had chosen themselves.
I watched the room as I talked. Maribel’s hands slowly closing into fists on the table. Molly’s expression going carefully, quietly blank. Rico behind , blinking like a man whose brain had hit a wall it wasn’t designed to handle.
When I finished there was a silence that lasted a genuinely long ti.
"I can’t believe it," Maribel said at last, her voice lower than usual and stripped of its usual edge. She was staring at her own hands on the table. "They just....they abandoned everyone. All of it, every speech, every promise, every, it was all nothing. The mont sothing real showed up they folded and ran." She looked up, and there was sothing in her expression that was rawer than anger. "They left us all to die."
"Pretty words on television," Molly said, chuckling. "The mont real danger arrives, you see what people are actually made of."
Behind , Rico looked like a man whose internal wiring had experienced a significant fault. He was staring at the middle of the table with the glazed expression of soone whose brain had accepted too many new facts in too short a period of ti and had quietly requested a mont to sort through them.
"Are you a Symbiote Host?"
Marlon’s voice cut straight through the silence, direct and even. His eyes were fixed on .
I’d been expecting it. The mont I’d finished explaining, I’d known that question was thirty seconds behind at most. The math wasn’t difficult to do, strange abilities, impossible fight in the park, a group that could clear an entire hotel in a single afternoon.
"Yes," I said. No hesitation.
"What?" Molly’s composure slipped, just for a second. She straightened up from the counter, genuine shock moving across her face.
"That explains a considerable amount," Rico said slowly from behind, narrowing his eyes at .
"So the attack on your previous location—" Marlon started, his eyes sharpening as he connected the thread.
"The Starakians," I said. "They tracked the Symbiote signal. That’s what they do."
"Which ans your presence is what brought the attack down on your people," Rico said. His voice wasn’t cruel about it, more like he was working through a logical sequence out loud and had arrived at an uncomfortable answer. "Doesn’t it?"
"Rico." Maribel shot him a glare.
"I’m stating facts," he said, shrugging.
"So is this," Cindy said pleasantly, tilting her head toward him with a smile. "Is Marlon responsible for every person Callighan has killed inside your community? Because Callighan ca here for him."
Rico opened his mouth.
Then closed it.
"I an... that’s not!" He started.
"Really?" Cindy tilted her head the other direction, the smile not moving. "Because from where I’m sitting, both situations are the sa. Soone powerful targeting a location because of one specific person. You’d call one of them responsible and not the other?"
The silence that followed was really awkward for Rico.
"She got you clean, Rico," Molly said laughing.
Rico groaned and leaned back, looking at the ceiling with the expression of a man accepting his losses.
"So," I said, letting a small smile settle on my face as I looked across the table at Marlon. "Now that you understand the full picture, do you see why I told you that with involved, your chances of actually taking Callighan down go from possible to probable?"
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