Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 939: Weeping in the Dark

The palace was still quiet in layers when Kaiden slipped out of bed, except this time all the layers were asleep.

His body had decided that four hours of rest was plenty, and arguing with it had never once worked. Luna didn’t stir when he lifted her arm off his ribs. Aria did, tracking him through one half-open eye all the way to the door before concluding that he could be trusted to exist unsupervised, and was asleep again before the latch clicked.

The plan was nothing much. Ten minutes in the cold air of the training grounds, maybe a slow lap of the outer corridor before the crews clocked in up top and the day started demanding things from him.

The plan died in the hallway, because the kitchen light was on.

It was a few minutes past five. Alexandra rose earlier than anyone in the house, and even she wouldn’t be up for another hour. Kaiden drifted closer on quiet feet, running through the short list of people who would raid a kitchen at this hour, and stopped in the doorway when he recognized the silhouette hunched at the waffle station.

Alice.

Alice, who guarded her morning sleep like territory, was sitting at her station in her pajamas at five in the morning, and the sight was wrong enough that her name almost left him right there.

Then he heard it.

A small, wet, hiccupping sound, muffled behind both hands, followed by another one that broke in the middle.

She was sobbing, alone, in the dark half of the kitchen, curled small over the counter with her hands pressed to her face. Her clipboard lay on the tile where it had fallen.

"Alice."

She jolted so hard the stool scraped, spun toward him with her face blotchy and her mismatched eyes swollen, and swiped one hand through the empty air in front of her, quick and guilty, closing something only she could see.

"Big brother." Her voice cracked on the second word.

"What’s wrong?" he asked softly.

Her throat wobbled before she managed, "The results landed."

He moved closer, slow, and stopped an arm’s length away. "The test?"

"Last night." She scrubbed at her face with her pajama sleeve, which accomplished nothing, because more kept coming.

"The lab couldn’t do it. The normal one. It kept failing, eleven times, big brother, I broke their instruments. Twice. They opened a file on me in the complications department, I have a case number, and then they wrote a letter asking me to please never send them anything again, so I..."

A hiccup cut her off, and she breathed through it. "So I hired the other kind. An awakened agency, they have a geneticist whose skill reads blood, I paid the rush fee. I paid three rush fees. And last night it came."

"What did it say?"

She didn’t answer. She raised a shaking hand instead and traced the gesture that brought it back. He watched his little sister, who laminated recipe cards and graded waffles on a clipboard, stare at a point in the air only she could see, like the words there might bite her.

"Read it to me," he said gently. "If you can."

"Full..." She got that far and stopped. Started over. "Full-sibling relationship." A breath. "Excluded."

The word sat in the dark kitchen with nowhere to go.

"Half-sibling relationship." Her voice was dragging each word out by force now, wet and small. "Consistent with... consistent with the data."

She shut it away with one sharp gesture and pressed both hands over her mouth, and for a moment the only sounds were the refrigerator’s hum and her breathing going to pieces behind her fingers.

"I had plans," she said through them. "I had plans for both. If it came back stranger, there’s a folder, I made a folder, ninety pages, it’s laminated, there were tabs, I color-coded the..." She lost the sentence, hunted for it, gave up. "And if it came back full, then fine. Fine! Then I’d still be your sister. Your whole sister. The only one."

Her breath hitched and she shoved it back down.

"Selena threw hers away, so the word was mine, it was just mine, nobody else alive got to say it. I could have lived on that. I was going to live on that."

"Alice..."

"But it’s neither!" It came out as a wail she strangled down to a hiss halfway through, one guilty glance toward the hallway and the sleeping house beyond it. "Still your sister, so everything stays forbidden, but only half. Half. Who is half? What do I even do with half? I-"

Kaiden crossed the last of the distance and gathered her off the stool.

He asked nothing and corrected nothing, just folded his little sister into his arms mid-sentence, and she came apart the moment they closed, both fists knotting into his shirt, her face buried against his chest, her whole small frame shaking with the kind of crying she would deny until her dying day and would permit no witness except him.

Because underneath the folders and the tabs and the campaign she’d been running since she was old enough to run one, this was real.

Alice had grown up in a house where warmth was a rounding error, and the single thing she had carried out of it intact, the one title no committee could grant and no rival could take, was his sister. The Conduit reconstruction had remade her, and somewhere in the remaking it had quietly taken a bite out of the only possession she had ever wanted to own.

The result meant nothing to him. The timestamp did. She had been sitting on this since last night, alone, in the dark, and the plan had clearly been to handle it without him ever finding out. They were going to have words about that later.

He held her instead, one hand cradling the back of her two-toned head, his chin resting on her hair, and let her empty it all out into his shirt while the waffle iron sat cold and nothing beyond the kitchen doorway made a sound.

It took a while, but he had nowhere better to be.

When the shaking had worn down to hiccups, she spoke into his chest, so quietly he almost missed it.

"It’s the only thing that’s mine." A wet breath. "Being your sister. Aria gets your arm, and Nyx gets your contracts, and the whole world gets your name now, and that was fine, I let them have all of it, because I had the one thing none of them can ever have." Her forehead pressed harder into his chest. "And it got smaller."

He let that sit for a moment, then spoke into her hair, quiet and certain.

"That result measured what the reconstruction rewrote. That’s all it did. It doesn’t say one word about who our parents are, because nothing can change that. Same mother. Same father. Same brother."

"But the numbers..."

"Was the girl at the waffle stand my sister?"

Alice went still against him.

"The one who got honey on my sleeve and made me promise we’d go back," he continued. "Was she my whole sister, or half of one?"

"...Whole," came the tiny, wet answer.

"Then that’s the answer, and no machine anywhere gets to argue with you about it. You’re my little sister. All of you. Every strand of that ridiculous hair, whichever color it decides to be."

He felt her hiccup a laugh into his chest, and tightened his arms.

They stayed like that a while longer, her breathing slowly evening out against him, the house quiet above their heads.

"One thing does puzzle me," he said eventually, into her hair, with no accusation anywhere in it. "A sibling panel needs two samples. I never gave one."

The snuffling paused. A long, tactical silence unfolded against his chest.

"You weren’t using the old toothbrush," she mumbled.

"You went through my trash."

"For science." She sniffled, and a little of the chin came back into her voice. "And I keep some of your hair. For emergencies. It’s labeled."

"Labeled."

"Naturally."

He decided it was far too early in the morning for that conversation, and kept holding her.

Silence, warm and snuffling. Then, from somewhere around his sternum, small and testing:

"Big brother."

"Hm."

"If the numbers say I’m only half your sister now, then statistically speaking, the taboo-"

"No." He didn’t stop smoothing her hair when he said it, and there was no edge anywhere in it.

"Half no?"

"Alice... I’m sor-"

"Hmph. Don’t even finish that sentence, stupid big brother." The hmph was watery, and she burrowed closer instead of pulling away, which told him exactly how much of it was performance.

"..." He let her hang on for another minute, and then he set her back on the stool, brushed the hair out of her wet lashes with his thumb, and stood.

Alice watched with dawning confusion as her big brother walked around the station, surveyed her domain with his hands on his hips, and took the apron off its hook. It was hers, pale yellow, a strawberry embroidered on the pocket, sized for a girl approaching adulthood. On Kaiden it tied like a bib.

"What are you doing?" she asked, voice still thick.

"A big brother’s job."

"What’s that? I’m not in danger."

"A big brother has more than one sacred duty. Protecting his little sister is one, but ensuring she’s happy is another."

"Hmph..." Alice scoffed again, but her eyes were dancing with joy now as he picked up the laminated recipe card, the one titled BIG BROTHER STANDARD in her handwriting, revision twelve.

"You’ve made me waffles every morning. Now it’s my turn. Sit there and be the customer."

"But that’s my station."