Chapter 143: Asking for Names
Marcus went through Mia's phone methodically.
He saved four numbers to his own — Mia Nozak, Dana Marsh, Ryan Nozak, and the one he actually needed right now: Karen Hale. Then he handed the phone back to Mia, moved to the window end of the hallway where Ori couldn't hear clearly, and dialed.
Three miles away, in a hotel room on the east side of Heguang District, Karen Hale's phone buzzed against a nightstand.
She and Deacon Tsuda separated reluctantly. Karen pulled the sheet around her shoulders, reached across him for the phone, checked the screen — unknown number — and answered with the particular guardedness of a woman who had learned that unknown numbers usually meant something had gone wrong with Ori.
"Hello? Who is this?"
Her voice was careful. Slightly breathless. Trying to sound more composed than she was.
"Ms. Karen Hale? Ori's mother?"
"Yes. What happened? Is she okay?"
The worry was real. Marcus noted that. Underneath the exhaustion and the guilt and the complicated architecture of a woman who was failing at motherhood in specific ways she was aware of and couldn't stop — underneath all of that, the worry was genuine. That was useful information.
"Ori is fine," Marcus said. "She's drawing. I'm calling because I need to speak with you directly. We're producing a documentary series on single mothers navigating — what I'll call unusual domestic circumstances. We came across your family's situation through public records and some of your social media, the blog you kept during your husband's case. You fit what we're looking for exactly."
In the background, he could hear the specific quality of a hotel room — the slightly processed air, the particular silence of a space rented by the hour.
Across the room from Karen, Deacon Tsuda — folklore academic, affair partner, man who had planted a summoning anchor in Karen's apartment to eliminate a six-year-old he found inconvenient — was sitting on the edge of the bed listening. Marcus could hear the quality of Karen's silence shift as she looked at someone for guidance.
"I appreciate the call, but we're not interested. Thank you—"
"I haven't mentioned the payment yet," Marcus said.
The silence that followed had a different texture.
Tsuda, from across the room, made a small gesture. Let him talk. His eyes, which Karen couldn't see clearly from that angle, had the specific quality of a man doing rapid arithmetic.
"We pay a flat rate of eight hundred dollars a day," Marcus said. "The shoot runs approximately two weeks. We'd front you four thousand dollars today as an advance, transferred directly to your account within the hour, just to confirm your participation."
He'd done the math before dialing. Karen Hale worked checkout at a regional supermarket chain — base wage, no benefits worth mentioning, a schedule that left her perpetually behind on rent and utilities and the specific small expenses that accumulated around a child with Ori's needs. Eight hundred dollars a day was more than she cleared in a week. Two weeks of shooting was six months of financial breathing room.
The silence stretched.
"The filming would take place in your living room only," Marcus continued. "We don't record interactions with Ori directly. Your daughter's face would never appear on camera. Your work schedule, your personal life — none of it. Just you, talking about your experience."
"Hold on," Karen said. The sound of her moving — pulling the sheet tighter, turning away from Tsuda, the slight change in acoustics of someone creating a private half-conversation inside a shared space.
A muffled exchange. Tsuda's voice, too quiet to resolve into words. Then Karen again, clearer:
"Okay. Yes. I can do that."
"Wonderful. I'll need you back at your apartment within two hours to sign the paperwork and process the advance. Can you manage that?"
"Yes. I'll be there."
Marcus ended the call.
He stood in the hallway for a moment, looking at the closed apartment door. Through it: the low sound of Ori singing to herself, the same nursery rhyme on rotation. Egg Kingdom. Egg Kingdom.
He'd needed Karen back in the apartment before the second babysitting session three days from now. More importantly, he needed Tsuda in that apartment — needed to observe the man directly, assess what he actually understood about what he'd planted and what he thought was going to happen when it activated.
People who used supernatural instruments without fully understanding them were a specific and recurring category of problem. They were dangerous in the particular way of someone who had loaded a weapon and set it down in a room and walked away, satisfied that they'd handled something.
He tucked the phone away and went back inside.
Mia was on the couch next to Ori, watching him with the careful attention of someone who had decided to stop being hostile and start being observant instead. She'd made that shift somewhere in the last ten minutes — he could read it in the change of her posture, the way she'd stopped angling her body toward the door.
Marcus crossed to the armchair. Sat. Looked at her directly for the first time since he'd entered.
"Come out here a minute," he said. "I need to ask you something."
"Ask it here."
He glanced at Ori. The child was drawing again — another egg-circle, this one with smaller circles inside it. Satellite eggs. A colony.
"Are you sure?"
Mia followed his gaze to Ori. Held it for a moment. Then she stood up, told Ori she'd be right outside, and followed Marcus into the hallway.
"Where did Karen actually go?"
"Work," Mia said. Then, a beat later, not meeting his eyes: "She said work."
"Do you believe that?"
Mia didn't answer. Which was its own answer.
Marcus stepped forward. He reached out and took hold of the edge of her hoodie, pulling it back to expose her midsection. Not roughly — with the same clinical efficiency he'd have used examining a wound in a field context. Mia flinched back, grabbed for his wrist, but his grip held with the gentle absolute quality of something that wasn't exerting force so much as declining to be moved.
She struggled. The worn cotton of the hoodie tore along the seam at the hem with a sound like tape being pulled from a surface.
Three parallel marks across her left side. Old scarring, raised and silvered at the edges, running diagonally from her lower ribs toward her hip. Each one approximately eight inches long. The specific pattern of a claw strike that had been partially blocked — the outer two marks shallower than the center one, where something had gotten through her guard before she'd managed to interrupt it.
Marcus released her.
Mia yanked the torn hoodie closed with both hands and put her back against the hallway wall, watching him the way a person watched something they'd decided wasn't going to attack them but hadn't fully committed to that assessment yet.
"That's from an exorcism attempt," Marcus said. Not a question. "Two years ago, based on the healing stage. And the medical consequences from that incident — you were told they were permanent."
Mia's expression — the specific performance of someone who had been managing their reaction to a thing for a long time and was suddenly managing it in front of someone who already knew — shifted. The defensive energy left first. What was underneath it was quieter and older.
She didn't confirm it. She didn't have to.
"You want children," Marcus said.
Something moved across her face. The particular grief of someone who had made peace with a loss in a way that wasn't quite peace, that was more accurately the absence of fighting.
"Of course I do," she said quietly. "Kids are — they're the most honest thing there is. They haven't learned yet to be anything other than exactly what they are. They trust you completely even when they shouldn't." She stopped. Looked at the wall. "They always believe you. Even when you're lying to them."
She said the last part to herself more than to him.
Marcus recognized the shape of what she was describing. Ori had been trusting the Hollow Caller completely. Had offered it crackers and songs and the specific open-hearted companionship of a child who had decided this was safe. She hadn't been deceived about what the entity was — she'd known it took her father, held that fact, and chosen its company anyway because it was present in a way the adults around her weren't.
Children always believe you. Even the wrong things.
"The injury doesn't have to be permanent," Marcus said.
Mia looked at him.
"There are methods your sister's practice doesn't use. Not because they don't exist — because Dana's approach is built around a specific framework, and these methods sit outside that framework. What was damaged can be restored. Partially, at minimum. Possibly completely."
Mia stared at him for a long moment. The expression moved through several phases — hope, skepticism, the specific anger of someone who had been given false hope before and had learned to be suspicious of it — and settled on something he recognized as the particular stillness of a person deciding whether they could afford to believe something.
"Dana couldn't do anything," she said carefully.
"Dana is exceptional at what she does," Marcus said. "What she does has limits. I'm operating from a different set of resources."
He turned toward the stairs.
"Karen will be back in two hours. I'm going out to handle the paperwork end of things. Stay with Ori. Don't touch the talisman on the cabinet." He paused. "Don't let anyone else touch it either."
"Wait—" Mia pushed off the wall. "You said you could fix it. You said possibly completely. What does that mean? What's the catch? What do you want from me?"
Marcus considered how much to give her.
The full answer was layered. He wanted access to the Marsh bloodline's specific sensitivity mechanic — the ability, present in both sisters but more developed in Dana, to read the supernatural contamination on a person through physical contact. In Dana's hands it was a diagnostic tool of considerable precision. In Mia's, it was cruder, less trained, but the underlying architecture was identical.
He wanted to study that architecture. Whether that required healing her injuries or simply working alongside her was still a variable. But the healing was real — the vampire serum he'd developed from the entity material in the previous world had demonstrated significant regenerative properties on tissue damage of exactly this category. Whether it would restore full reproductive function was genuinely uncertain. It might. The possibly completely had been accurate.
What he didn't want was for Mia to make her choices about Ori and the warehouse ritual from the same place she'd been making them — from guilt, from the specific grief of someone who had decided she owed children something because she couldn't have one of her own.
That emotional architecture was what Ryan Nozak was going to exploit in three days, not deliberately, not cruelly, but with the complete sincerity of a man who loved her and was completely wrong about what was happening in that warehouse.
If Mia was making her choices from a different place — from actual capability, actual understanding — the outcome of the ritual changed.
That was the catch. That was the entire play.
"I want your help with something," Marcus said. "Over the next few weeks. Specific assistance, specific situations. Not dangerous — not to you, not directly. I'll explain as we go."
"That's not a real answer."
"It's the answer I have right now," he said. "You can decide when you have more information."
He started down the stairs.
Behind him, Mia called after him: "You didn't tell me your name. You gave Dana your name. Not me."
Marcus paused on the landing.
"Victor Ozaki," he said. "But you can call me Marcus."
He hadn't planned to say that. It had come out with the specific quality of something that arrived before the decision to say it — the name surfacing from underneath the body's identity the way his real capabilities had surfaced from underneath the body's physical limitations.
He kept walking.
Behind the apartment door, muffled and cheerful and completely unconscious of everything happening around her, Ori was still singing.
Egg Kingdom. Egg Kingdom.
The colony of satellite eggs she'd drawn was going to tell him something important, he was certain of it. He just needed more time with it.
Seventy-two hours. Karen back in two. Tsuda arriving shortly after.
Time to see what Deacon Tsuda actually understood about what he'd set in motion.
(End of Chapter)
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