Chapter 2 Tutorial: RUN

Ayana POV

My ears were ringing.

A thin high note, a kettle three rooms away. I was on one knee with my palm flat on the kerb and the panel still hanging in front of my face, still reading LEVEL UP OR DIE.

It didn't blink. It waited.

The street came back in pieces. A car alarm. A woman screaming a name. Glass going over and settling. The bus behind me had stopped with one wheel up on the kerb, headlights on, and nobody inside it moving.

The laughing woman from before was laughing again. Same pitch. Same nothing behind it. She hadn't stopped - she'd just started up where the freeze left her.

I got up. My legs worked. First surprise of the day.

The crowd hadn't picked a direction yet.

That was the thing I noticed before the panic. Two hundred people in the road and not one of them running anywhere - just shoving, turning, shoving again, like water looking for a drain. The crush of bodies pushed me off the pavement and into the road and back again.

A man went down in front of me. Somebody stepped on his hand. He shouted and the crowd went over him.

I got to the wall and put my back against it.

That's when the second panel arrived.

TUTORIAL QUEST: RUN

REACH A SHELTER NODE BEFORE THE COUNTDOWN ENDS.

00:04:59

Underneath it, the city drew itself.

A mini-map unfolded in the corner of my vision - grey grid, my street, the alley, the car park, everything where it should be. My position sat in the middle of it as a small white dot. Behind the shop, a fire escape ran down the back of the building into the alley.

SHELTER NODE MARKED. DISTANCE: 340M.

The teenager was still standing there.

Same spot, same open mouth, four metres from the wall. The countdown in front of his face was dropping and he wasn't reading it. He was watching the sky.

"Hey." I caught his sleeve. "You have four minutes."

He looked at me as though I'd spoken another language.

"There's a countdown. Look at it."

"I don't-"

"You don't what? You don't care? You don't believe it?" I pulled his sleeve harder. "Move your feet."

He pulled his arm back and turned his face up to the sky again.

I left him.

That's the part I'll keep. I left him.

He got eleven steps of nothing. Then the static came off him - grey lines crawling up his legs and arms, faster than a burn - and he made a sound like a radio losing a station, and there was nothing on the pavement where he'd stood except his shoes.

The crowd around him shifted and kept moving. Nobody had seen it. Or nobody wanted to.

00:01:31.

The mini-map redrew itself.

The white marker lifted off the alley and jumped two streets east, landing on the roof of the car park. The grey grid shifted with it. My dot didn't move.

Then the marker glitched - a half-second stutter, like the billboard - and came back. It pinged, once, softly, as though it were being helpful.

I looked at the map. The map looked right. Streets in the right place, my dot in the right place, distances that made sense. It was the pin that was lying, and it was lying inside a picture that told me to trust it.

He was across the road, at the corner by the fire door. Hands in his pockets, watching the alley, not the sky.

I crossed the street to him.

"Don't follow the marker," he said, before I'd opened my mouth.

"It's testing who follows."

That got me a look. Flat grey eyes, no warmth, reading me the way I read a route.

"Twelve seconds," he said. "It corrects every twelve seconds."

"Which one's the real node?"

"Neither." He nodded down the pavement. A man in a delivery jacket was sprinting into the alley with his phone up, chasing his own pin. "He comes back out in a minute. Or he doesn't."

"What's at the car park?"

"Nothing."

"You're sure."

"I'm sure. There's a fourth option." He started walking. "You counted the intervals. On the sound. Nobody counts the intervals."

"You haven't told me your name."

"Later."

The city rendered.

The alley ahead stuttered - one frame, two - and the far end of it was no longer the far end. A seam of fog stood across the street, grey-white and motionless, the world cut off at the edge of a page.

Same at the top of Marrow Street. Same past the overpass. The crowd found its drain all at once and went for it.

Grid lines shimmered along the pavement, faint and pale, holding a second before they vanished.

"What is that?"

"Border. We're in a Zone." He didn't slow. "The fog's the wall."

"And past it?"

"That's the part nobody in this Zone finds out today."

The car park. Up the ramp, two at a time. I followed because I had nothing better and the numbers were in my teeth.

The marker pinged. Back at the alley. Out of reach.

"Fourth option," I said. Breath coming hard. "You promised."

"Say the quest back to me."

"What?"

"The wording. All of it."

REACH A SHELTER NODE BEFORE THE COUNTDOWN ENDS.

"Reach," I said.

"Reach," he repeated. "Not enter. Not touch. Reach."

I looked past him along the second level and saw what I should have seen straight away. The car park was open-sided. At the far end a maintenance ledge ran two feet below the shop roof, and the shop roof ran directly over the alley.

Twenty feet across. Two feet down. Nothing between.

"Reach," I said again, and it came out almost as a laugh.

He was already moving. This time I was ahead of him.

I went across the ledge at a run, landed badly, felt my wrist complain. Then I was on the gravel and at the edge of the shop roof with the alley below me.

Narrow. Dark. The white marker sat in the middle of it, alone.

I lay down and put my arm out into the air.

00:00:09.

My hand closed on the marker and the marker closed on my hand, cold and solid, a doorknob attached to nothing.

OBJECTIVE COMPLETE. SHELTER NODE REACHED. PARTY STATUS: 1 OF 2.

The fog at the end of the alley stopped moving. The countdown cleared. The mini-map folded away.

I turned round.

He wasn't on the ledge behind me. He wasn't on the ramp. The alley below was empty, and the side street was empty, and the crowd was gone.

Where his name should have been, the System had written one word.

TETHERED.

NEW OBJECTIVE: FIND YOUR PARTY MEMBER. LOCATION: UNKNOWN.

I lay there four seconds with my wrist throbbing and my breath going, and did the only thing I'm good at.

I read the panel.

Find your party member. Location unknown. Not rescue. Not reach. Find. The System hadn't given me a direction, which meant it wanted me to ask for one - and every direction it had given me so far had been a lie with a twelve-second heartbeat.

So I didn't ask.

Behind me, the fog at the mouth of the side street was moving. When the countdown cleared, the alley fog stopped. The other one hadn't. It was closer than it had been.

I got up off the gravel, put my back to the marker that had lied to me twice, and picked the one direction the System hadn't offered: north, along the roofs, toward the tower where the exits were.

The mini-map unfolded again without being asked.

PARTY MEMBER LOCATED. DISTANCE: 12M.

Twelve metres. Straight down. Into the alley I had just been lying over, where there was nothing but wet tarmac and a dropped phone face down and still lit.

The fog came over the edge of the roof behind me.

I took the fire escape down anyway.