Born to devour

Chapter 7: His Father's Badge

"Storage units in sector four are being cleared for GRA infrastructure expansion. Residents with outstanding rental agreements have thirty days to retrieve belongings or forfeit them to processing."

The notice has been pinned to the board outside my building for two weeks. I read it every morning on my way out and every evening coming back and I have been telling myself it is not urgent because the unit belonged to my father and my father is dead and there is nothing in it worth retrieving.

That is what I have been telling myself.

The rent situation makes a liar of me by Thursday.

---

The storage facility sits in the outer ring of the zone. Squat, functional, built to last because nobody has time to build things twice in a post-Rift city. I get there after dark because the attendant who checks credentials leaves at seven and the one who replaces him is more interested in the screen in his booth than the camera feeds.

I know this because I spent three months running deliveries to this district and I paid attention to things most people do not bother paying attention to.

My father's key has been on my keyring for three years. The only thing of his I kept on my person. I have never let myself ask why until now.

Unit 114 opens on the first try.

---

The unit smells like sealed air and dust and something underneath both that I recognize without being able to name. One overhead bulb. Pale yellow light over boxes stacked against the left wall, labeled in my father's handwriting. Utilities. Documents. Personal. A folded tarp over something large in the back corner.

I go through the boxes methodically.

The utilities boxes have exactly what the label promises. Old bills, maintenance receipts, warranty documents for appliances he bought before I was born. The documents box holds tax records going back fifteen years, my birth certificate, his employment records from the city infrastructure maintenance division.

I stop at the employment records.

Clean. Thorough. Twelve years of performance reviews, salary adjustments, project assignments. The kind of paper trail that takes effort to build. The kind that exists because someone built it deliberately.

I put the folder down and move to the personal box.

Photographs. A watch that stopped working. Letters from someone whose name I do not recognize. A small wooden box with nothing inside it. At the bottom, underneath a folded jacket that still smells faintly like him, is the case.

---

Metal. Brushed grey. The kind of case built for one specific purpose: protecting something from everything else. No label. The lock on the front is not a standard residential model.

It is a GRA-issue security lock.

I have carried equipment cases sealed with these on support runs. I know what they look like. I know what they mean.

I do not have a key for this one.

My multitool takes four minutes and one broken implement to crack it open.

Inside, set into a foam cutout shaped exactly for it, is a GRA hunter badge.

I pick it up.

My father's name is on it. His photograph. A face I know better than my own because I spent seventeen years watching it across breakfast tables and the quiet of evenings when neither of us had anything to say.

The rank reads: Senior Field Operative, Division Seven.

I have run enough support jobs to know every standard hunter rank in the GRA classification system.

Senior Field Operative is not one of them.

Division Seven does not appear in any public documentation I have ever read.

The clearance level printed below the rank is a number I do not have a reference for. I know it is not a number that belongs to a man who spent his career managing city infrastructure projects.

I turn the badge over.

On the back, stamped in ink that has faded but not disappeared: Project Axiom. Active clearance. Authorized signatory: Director Level.

I put the badge down on the floor.

I sit.

---

My father retired. That is what I was told. He left the field before I was born, took a civilian position, raised me alone, and died three years ago in a Rift accident. Wrong place, wrong time. I identified his body. I arranged the service. I went back to an apartment that still had his coffee mug in the sink and I washed it and I got on with things because getting on with things was the only available option.

None of that happened to a civilian.

The foam cutout shows no wear at the edges. The lock was functional. Someone maintained this. Someone kept it ready.

I think about the employment records in the documents box. Twelve years of paper trail for a career that did not happen. The kind of history that takes effort to build for a reason.

My father was not a retired hunter living a quiet life. He was something specific enough to require Division Seven clearance, a rank that does not exist in public records, and authorization signed at director level.

And three years ago he died in what I was told was a civilian accident.

I sit on the floor for a long time.

I do not call Reina.

This is mine first. Whatever it becomes after I have sat with it long enough to understand it, right now it belongs to me. I need to hold it alone before I hand it to anyone else's analysis, even analysis I trust.

The photograph on the badge looks back at me. My father's face, younger than I ever knew him, already carrying something in his expression I always read as tiredness.

I am reading it differently now.

He knew what he was doing. Whatever he built, whatever he hid, whatever Division Seven was and whatever Project Axiom was: he knew. He sat across breakfast tables from me for seventeen years and he knew and he said nothing.

I put the badge in the case. I put the case in my bag. I fold the jacket back the way I found it, close the box, turn off the light, lock the unit, and walk out into the dark.

---

The zone is quiet at this hour. Street lighting, distant traffic, the hum of the GRA monitoring station three blocks north that runs around the clock because Rifts do not keep business hours.

I walk home with the case in my bag and his face in my head and a lie I cannot yet map the edges of pressing against the inside of my chest.

The interface has been quiet the entire time I was in the unit. No pulses. No notifications. Nothing. It has been sitting in the background the way it sits when there is nothing for it to respond to.

Two blocks from my building it activates.

Not an alert. Not the combat brightness from last night. Something quieter. A single notification appearing without any trigger I can identify. White text on deep space black.

I stop walking.

I read it.

*[Relevant data detected. Integration pending.]*

I stand under the street light and read it again.

The system has responded to beasts, combat, consume events, bond activity, and contextual questions. It has never once sent me something without a cause I could point to.

Relevant data. Not new data. Not external. Relevant.

It read something from the badge. Or from my memory of what was on the badge. Or from the specific combination of a rank designation and a project name and a clearance level that meant nothing to me but means something to whatever is running in the dark behind my eyes.

It has been waiting for this moment.

Waiting, possibly, since before I was born.

I close the notification. I start walking. The badge is in my bag and the system is running something in the background it has not yet decided to show me.

I do not call Reina.

Not tonight.