Dawn was wrong.
Not the color — although that was wrong too, the sky still holding that bruised purple-red from the night, bleeding into orange at the horizon like a wound going septic. It was the quality of the light. Too sharp. Every edge in the city cranked to maximum contrast until my teeth ached. Broken glass on Dearborn caught the first light and scattered it into rainbows that looked intentional, like the apocalypse had hired a lighting designer.
I kept walking south. Left arm throbbing where the Gutter Hound had gotten me, jacket sleeve stiff with drying blood. My ribs complained every time I breathed too deep. The split knuckles had stopped bleeding but hadn't stopped hurting, and I was holding my hands half-open because closing them all the way pulled at the skin.
Hands still shaking. I kept them in my jacket pockets so I wouldn't have to look at them.
The city told the story in pieces. A car wrapped around a light pole on State, driver's door open, no driver. A delivery truck jackknifed across Harrison with its cargo doors swinging. A shoe in the gutter, just the one, which was worse than a pair. No people. Not yet. They were inside, or underground, or dead. I didn't know which option I was hoping for, so I stopped thinking about it.
A body on the sidewalk outside a shuttered restaurant. Face down. The smell hit me before I processed what I was looking at — copper and something sweet and wrong underneath.
I crossed the street to avoid it. Told myself I was taking the faster route. My legs had gone wrong, this jerky too-fast stride that wanted to be a run but didn't have permission. Every shadow with weight to it could be another Hound. Every storm drain I passed made my jaw lock.
> *[Tutorial Protection Remaining: 00:31:04]*
Half an hour. After that, whatever invisible cushion the system had thrown over me vanished and every hit landed full. I picked up the pace.
---
Two Gutter Hounds found me on 18th, a block into Pilsen.
They crawled out from under a taco truck. The one I'd bought lunch from a hundred times, the one with the cracked bumper sticker that said Honk If You Love Carnitas. The Hounds were smaller than the pack behind The Strand. Leaner. Same hairless grey skin, same too-wide mouths, same wet mechanical buzzing that turned my stomach.
The first one lunged.
My body moved before my brain caught up. [Cross-Counter] fired. The skill was faster the second time, cleaner, like a groove my reflexes had cut during the first fight and were now falling into on their own. I slipped the lunge, caught the thing's momentum against its own weight, and drove my elbow down into the base of its skull. Impact. Crack. Done.
Hands shaking worse now. The good kind, the adrenaline kind, but I couldn't tell the difference anymore.
The second one hesitated. Smart. I grabbed a chunk of broken curb and threw it. Not technique. Just a rock and good aim. It caught the Hound mid-turn and sent it tumbling into the gutter. I closed the distance and drove my boot into its neck before it could scramble up.
I crouched there for a second afterward, breathing too hard for a fight that short. The street was quiet. A car alarm had been going off somewhere to the east when I'd entered Pilsen and now it wasn't. I didn't want to think about why it had stopped.
Two cores. I pocketed them without looking.
Three blocks further south. My apartment. Was.
The building had partially collapsed. The air tasted like plaster dust and old pipes. Upper floors pancaked onto the lower ones in a geometry that didn't make sense. No fire. No impact crater. A building that had stood for eighty years deciding, in the same hour the sky changed, that it was done. The front wall of my third-floor unit was open to the sky like a dollhouse with the panel removed. I could see my kitchen. The counter. The coffee maker, somehow still standing on a floor that tilted fifteen degrees.
Everything I owned was in there. Seven identical black t-shirts. My training gloves. A photo of Mom that I kept in the nightstand even though I had a digital copy because I was twenty-six years old and still kept a photo of my mother in a drawer.
A fist closed inside my chest. Not grief. More like a drawer slamming shut. Everything before this moment, on one side. Me, on the other.
"Cool," I said to nobody. "Didn't need any of that stuff anyway."
Voice cracked on anyway. Kept walking before I could hear it echo.
Behind me, the coffee maker fell off the counter. I heard it shatter from the street.
---
The bodega on Ashland was intact.
The windows were dark and the door was locked, but locked in a from-the-inside way, not a nobody's-home way. The air near the entrance smelled like cardboard and stale chips — enclosed space, sealed up tight. Through the glass I could see the barricade: shelving units dragged across the entrance, bags of rice stacked like sandbags, a mop handle threaded through the door handles. Someone was alive in there and had watched enough movies to know the basics.
I knocked.
Nothing.
I knocked again. "Not a monster. Monsters don't knock."
A pause. Then, from inside: "That's... exactly what a smart monster would say."
The voice was young. Male. Shaking. Through the glass I saw movement in the back. Someone crouched behind the register counter, half-hidden by a display of chips. Green windbreaker. Delivery backpack still strapped on.
"I'm bleeding and I'm tired and I don't have the energy to eat you," I said. "My name's Jake. I'm a bouncer at The Strand in River North, or I was, before the sky went stupid. Can I come in?"
More silence. Then the sound of shelves scraping linoleum. The mop handle slid free. The door cracked open just enough to show a round face, wide brown eyes, and the absolute worst attempt at looking calm I'd ever seen.
"I'm Danny," he said. "I was delivering pad thai."
He held up a thermal delivery bag. It was still warm.
"That pad thai's been sitting there for an hour and it's still warm?"
"Forty-seven minutes. I've been counting." He looked at the bag, then at me, then back at the bag. "The system or whatever — is that normal? Is warm pad thai a system thing? Because nothing else is normal so maybe pad thai lasting forever is just — is that how it works now?"
Danny Lim. Nineteen, maybe. Shaking. Delivery backpack still strapped on, the logo from an app that no longer existed peeling at the corners. Bike cleats on his shoes. The kind of build that came from years of moving fast and never lifting heavy. He was terrified and he'd built a barricade out of grocery supplies and he hadn't run.
My hands stopped shaking. I didn't notice until they already had.
"Can I have some?" I said.
Danny blinked. "You — yeah. Yeah, dude, of course. It's pad thai. There's plenty. Sit — here, sit down. You're bleeding. You know you're bleeding, right? Should I — I don't have bandages but I have paper towels and there's hand sanitizer by the register which, okay, that's going to hurt, but it's better than nothing?"
He didn't stop talking for the next five minutes. The words were a pressure valve, every sentence that came out was a sentence of fear that didn't stay in. Lukewarm pad thai with bloody knuckles while Danny explained that his phone had died, his bike had gotten crushed by a creature with "way too many legs, dude, WAY too many," and his parents were in Albany Park which was "not that far, like thirty minutes by bike, except my bike is — yeah."
He trailed off. Looked at the counter.
"Are your parents okay?" I asked.
"I don't know." Simple. Honest. The run-on stopped for that. "I can't — there's no phones. There's nothing."
Nothing helpful to say. I handed him back the pad thai container.
"So." Danny wiped his hands on his joggers. "You've got one of those, right? The — the stat screen thing?"
"Yeah."
"Can I see yours? Mine's — I don't really get it. It looks like a video game menu except it's real and that makes it significantly less fun."
The blue-white display materialized in my field of vision when I pulled it up. Same too-crisp lettering, same patient hovering. I'd been avoiding looking at it.
> *+============================+*
> *| JAKE CORWIN |*
> *| Level: 2 |*
> *| Class: NONE |*
> *+============================+*
> *| STR: 11 VIT: 10 |*
> *| AGI: 13 END: 10 |*
> *| PER: 13 WIL: 8 |*
> *| INT: 10 LCK: 7 |*
> *+============================+*
> *| Active Skills: 1/8 |*
> *| Stat Points: 6 |*
> *+============================+*
Class: NONE. Thanks for that. Very encouraging.
"Okay, so —" Danny leaned over like he could read my screen, which he couldn't. "What's it say? What level? What are your stats? Are they good? Mine says AGI fourteen which I think is good because I'm fast but I don't know what the scale IS—"
"Agility fourteen?" That stopped me. My AGI was thirteen, and I had thirteen years of combat training pulling it up. Danny was a bike courier. "That's... high."
"Is it? I have this thing called Sprint? It just showed up when I was running from the — from the dog things. I was on my bike and they were behind me and then I wasn't on my bike anymore but I was still going the same speed? On foot? Which was terrifying and cool in roughly equal measure."
[Sprint (F)]. A movement skill, activated under threat. A bike courier gets a speed skill. A fighter gets a counter skill. Two data points wasn't a pattern, but it was starting to look like one.
None of that came out of my mouth. What I said was: "Yeah, fourteen's pretty good."
Danny sat back. Some of the shaking had stopped. His knee was still bouncing, his fingers still tapping the counter in a rhythm that wasn't quite music, but the worst of it had drained out. Talking helped. Having someone to talk to helped more.
"So what do we do?" he asked.
Good question. I had absolutely no idea. But Danny was looking at me like I was supposed to have the answer, so I looked at the room instead of at him and let my brain do the thing it does when someone throws a combination I haven't seen before: read, assess, react.
The bodega was intact but not defensible for more than a few hours. The protein bars and canned goods on the shelves were a resource. My apartment was gone. Danny's family was on the other side of the city. Dawn was happening outside and the light still wasn't right and deep in the direction of the Loop, a sound tore through the air.
Bigger than a Gutter Hound. Those buzzed. This was full-throated, bass-heavy, vibrating in your chest cavity before your ears processed it. Danny went still. The real kind of still, where the energy shut off and the animal underneath stopped everything nonessential.
"Danny."
"Yeah."
"That's far away."
"Yeah."
"We're going to stay here until full light. Check supplies. Figure out next moves. Okay?"
He nodded. Reached for his backpack and pulled it into his lap like a stuffed animal. He'd tell me its name was Gerald later. Right now he just held on.
The stat screen floated in front of me. Six unallocated points. WIL at eight. Luck at seven. The universe, confirming numerically what I'd always suspected.
Screen closed. Counter at my back. Everything hurt. A nineteen-year-old delivery kid was trusting me to know what to do next, which was hilarious because I absolutely did not.
But I was faster now. Stronger. The system had handed me a report card and for once the grades weren't terrible. I'd take it.
The roar came again. Closer, or louder, or both.
I started planning.