28 - Pet

The wheels sliced through gravel and crumbling asphalt as Kai twisted the throttle, his body leaning low against the wind. The forest had long fallen behind them, replaced by long stretches of road, steel fences laced with moss, and the rising skeleton of Earth's post-collapse cities.

Behind him, Seren held tightly onto his waist, her voice rising in an uncontrollable laugh as they zoomed down the cracked road. "Faster! Faster, Kai!"

He smirked. "We're already one pothole from flying, you maniac."

But she just laughed louder, wind whipping through her golden hair like fire trailing behind them. Her joy felt contagious.

For a moment, he forgot the Rifts, the parasites, the scars on his back, and the pressure in his skull.

For a moment, he wasn't alone.

---

It took hours, but finally, the spires of Heiligenstadt came into view. No floating skyships or arcologies—just reinforced housing stacks, flickering neon boards, and a constant low hum of generators keeping the grid alive. Smoke curled from far-off districts, and digital banners fluttered across buildings showing the face of Vanguard patrols and Rift warnings.

Kai slowed the bike as they pulled into a narrow alley, coming to a stop in front of a rusted metal garage with a hand-painted sign: "MILO'S BIKE RENTAL – Don't Crash It, Don't Keep It."

I think I'll die!

Milo stepped out of the shade with a wrench in hand, chewing on something foul and spitting it out when he saw Kai.

"You little parasite spawn," the man growled. "You were supposed to return that bike four days ago!"

Kai winced. "I was saving a kingdom?"

Milo crossed his arms. "That's the best you've got?"

Seren stepped forward, brushing her hair back and smiling with all the grace of a born noble. "He did save a princess, actually."

Milo looked between her and Kai, sighed, and waved a hand. "Fine, just don't do it again. I had a tracker installed anyway, figured you'd show up eventually."

As Kai handed over the keys, Seren leaned closer to the bike's handlebars, inspecting them with curious fingers.

"This is incredible," she whispered. "Is it a mechanical horse? How does it work? It doesn't eat anything."

Kai chuckled. "I'll teach you the basics later. Right now, you'll want to see this."

---

The apartment complex wasn't much—concrete, rebar, rusted guard rails. But to Kai, it was home. Third floor, end unit. Door with three locks. He pushed it open, the air stale but clean enough. The scent of dried herbs, old oil, and sterilized bandages clung to the walls.

Seren gasped. "This is your domain?"

"It's small, but it's safe," Kai said, dropping his bag and collapsing onto the cot.

She stepped around the room like it was a museum—poking his ration stash, running fingers along a broken Gene Scanner prototype, holding up a cracked mirror to look at her reflection.

"I love it," she said.

"You love a ten-square-meter hovel with no water heater?"

She turned and smiled. "Because it's yours."

Kai blinked.

"…You're weird."

She shrugged. "You brought me to another world and saved me. I'm allowed to be weird."

He let out a tired laugh and leaned back against the cot. He'd returned. And soon, he'd face the Institute again.

As the sun dipped behind the rusted skyline, Kai stepped into his apartment—and froze.

Click clack click clack.

A tiny shape was perched on top of his laptop, hammering at the keys with freakishly nimble limbs, a mechanical headset dangling loosely over what passed for its head.

The creature's chitin shimmered with oil-black sheen, and two glowing blue eyes flicked up with annoyance.

A voice, nasal and full of ego, echoed from a tiny speaker built into its thorax.

"You're back?" it hissed. "I enjoyed when you weren't. Why are you here?"

Kai sighed and shut the door with his foot. "Nice to see you too, Manny."

Manny—the Heloxian micro-form variant that claimed to be a post-evolutional genius—hopped down from the laptop and skittered across the table.

"I was halfway through optimizing your parasite's metabolic pattern loops," Manny grumbled. "Then you show up, dragging some surface-world waif into our lab."

Seren blinked twice. "That... thing is talking."

Kai scratched the back of his head. "Yeah. Uh... this is Manny."

She narrowed her eyes. "Who is Manny?"

Kai looked at her deadpan. "My... pet. Yes. My pet."

"I am not a pet!" Manny screeched, antennae flailing. "I am a Heloxian-class Cognivore with a triple helix brain lattice! I was bred to interface with Hive Matrices and manage evolutionary lattices across dimension-locked strata. You—are a bipedal meatbag with bad hair!"

Seren gasped and covered her mouth, half-laughing, half-horrified. "He's rude!"

Kai rubbed his temple. "He's always like this."

"I have standards!" Manny said, climbing onto a stack of books. "And you've been gone for six Earth days, so I updated your neural battle log, rerouted your scanner's junk filters, recalibrated your gene storage compression—and guess what? I still didn't miss you!"

Kai dropped his bag next to the desk and collapsed into the chair. "Did you fix the Rift signature logger?"

Manny flipped his middle leg in a vague gesture of superiority. "Obviously. I even coded a Rift-thread trace to locate instabilities within a 50-kilometer radius. But do I get appreciation? No. I get saddled with her."

He pointed dramatically at Seren, who only waved at him with regal elegance. "Hello, little one."

Manny let out a mechanical gag. "Ugh. She's polite. Kill me."

Kai chuckled.

Seren leaned closer. "Do you have a name, creature?"

He puffed his tiny thorax. "Manny."

"Short for?"

"Manifold Auxiliary Neuro-Nexus Insecr."

"Oh," she said sweetly. "That's adorable."

"IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ADORABLE!"

---

As Kai dug into ration packets and booted up his interface screen, Seren sat beside him on the cot, watching the city lights blink through the window.

Manny had retreated back to the laptop muttering threats against mammals and "romantic idiots," but Kai didn't care.

He had plans to make.

The Wolfram Institute wouldn't wait.

---

The sun was barely out. The air still clung with the chill of dawn, windows fogged, the streets of Heiligenstadt just beginning to hum.

Kai blinked blearily, rolled over, and—

"Wah—!"

Seren was there. On his bed. Clutching his arm like a stuffed animal.

"I—didn't I tell her to sleep below!?" he whispered sharply, pulling his hand free from under her cheek.

A perfectly folded mattress lay untouched beneath the bed, right where he explicitly told her to stay.

She stirred in her sleep, then rolled over and wrapped both arms around his waist, nuzzling into him with a satisfied sigh.

This is insane.

I fought through a spider warzone, outwitted a spider king, nuked a castle—and this is still the scariest situation I've been in this week.

Gingerly, he peeled her arm off, tucked a blanket around her, and rolled out of bed with the stealth of a jungle cat.

---

Half an hour later, Kai was walking through the darker veins of the city. The part with rusted ducts and peeling neon, where the light barely reached and the shadows had teeth.

He ducked into a narrow alley. A figure was already there, leaning against a broken vending machine.

"You Ottokai?" the man asked, face half-hidden under a hood.

Kai nodded. "Yeah."

The guy passed him a sealed envelope and a thin silver chip drive. "Custom identity, student background, residence cross-checks, and the academic certs you asked for. Took some tweaking. Not every day I get requests to forge nobility into commoner status."

Kai checked the documents. ID cards. Digital birth records. Exam scores. Even fake emergency contact numbers. All of it forged with perfect surface-level data routing. The name stamped clearly at the top:

Seren Eisenmark

Place of Birth: Birkenshade

Citizenship Level: Registered

Academic History: Transferred Student

He handed the dealer a credstick. "€1000. As promised."

The man weighed it with a nod, then disappeared into the back streets like fog in a drainpipe.

Kai tucked the documents into his jacket and turned back.

This should work. They'll cross-check it at the Wolfram gates, but unless they run a deep neural scan, it'll pass.

The documents were forged, the ID chip programmed, and Seren's identity was locked in tight. Kai could've gone back to the apartment, called it a day, and started prepping for Wolfram.

But no.

Seren wanted to explore.

"Come onnnn," she'd whined, pressing her face against the window and fogging up the glass, "You said Earth was full of lights and food and sounds and—what do you mean we're staying in all day?"

So now here they were. Downtown Heiligenstadt. Bright lights, shifting screens, hovercars that zipped across the glass-strung skyline like fireflies. Seren looked like a kid in a candy store—except this kid had a noble's grace and the kind of curiosity that broke castle windows.

Kai had passed by a gene trader stall on the way.

He opened his inventory tab and selected half the gene scraps from the spider rift. No rares, just commons. Still—he got a clean €10,000 for the lot. Enough for the day's budget and then some.

"Common-grade gene biomass?" the dealer asked through the Gene Scanner. "Did you just clean out an F-rift single-handed?"

"Something like that," Kai said.

The rest—the junk materials, low-tier glands and chitin—he just dumped into Manny's crafting bin. The little Heloxian squealed with glee from his charging pod.

"This'll keep me busy for days! Oooh, polykera plating! I've been meaning to reinforce the sublayer ducts!"

"Yeah, yeah, just don't blow up the apartment again."

---

The day spiraled into a blur.

They ate fried skewers from a street cart run by a retired GeneDevourer who claimed his seasoning was parasite-based.

They rode a panoramic rail that hovered around the city's edge, with Seren's face pressed to the glass the whole time.

They explored VR arcades where Seren got dizzy flying a fighter jet through an alien moon.

They visited a park where synthetic birds flitted around AI-maintained trees, and Seren sat in the grass barefoot, whispering to pigeons like they were magical beasts.

Kai didn't say much. He mostly walked behind her, sipping soda and watching her reactions.

She grew up in a castle built into a cliffside. Her "marketplace" was probably a marble hall with six vendors and velvet banners. Now she's in a place where vending machines sing at you, and every street smells like five different cuisines.

It's a lot.

They even took a selfie. Seren insisted. She held the camera, stood way too close, and grinned like someone discovering sugar for the first time.

Kai blinked in the picture, eyes half-closed, soda still in his hand.

"Perfect," she said, beaming. "We look like secret lovers!"

"…Sure," Kai muttered.

---

That night, back in the apartment, Seren collapsed face-first into the couch. Her boots were kicked off, her coat half-draped over the edge.

Kai opened the window, letting the city breeze in. Neon reflections danced along the walls.

Tomorrow, Wolfram Institute.

"Hey, Kai…" Seren murmured sleepily.

"Yeah?"

"…Thank you."

He looked back.

She was already out cold, arm dangling off the sofa like a rag doll.

Kai smiled faintly. Then turned off the light.