By the time the warehouse emptied out onto the loading dock, the group had already sorted itself without anyone calling a vote.Kade noticed it the way he noticed most things, a beat late and from the outside. Terrence was at the front, not because anyone had asked him to lead but because a Warrior class and a body built like a doorframe had a way of ending up there on its own. Behind him came the woman he'd saved, and behind her the ones who'd decided, somewhere in the last twenty minutes, that standing close to Terrence was the safest place available. The nineteen year old Mage hovered near the back with his hands shaking, and a heavyset man named Oduya, forklift license same as Terrence, had appointed himself rear guard with a length of pipe he'd pulled off a broken shelf.Nobody had appointed Kade anything. He fell in near the middle, close enough to hear what was being decided, far enough that nobody thought to ask his opinion on it."We can't stay here," Terrence was saying, to

Nothing happened for the first two seconds, long enough that Kade started composing the shape of his own disappointment, the particular flavor of it he'd been tasting on and off since the rectangle first told him what he was.Then the world narrowed.It wasn't pain. He kept expecting pain, some cost to match the size of what he was reaching for, and instead what came was closer to the sensation of putting on glasses after years of not knowing your eyes needed them, a sudden, disorienting clarity that made him realize how much he'd been missing without knowing he was missing it. The luminous pool at the break in the rebar didn't vanish so much as it unspooled, threading up through his fingers, into his palm, up his wrist, and settling somewhere behind his sternum with the same small, private click the fire resistance fragment had made back at the warehouse.His rectangle updated, patient, unbothered by the fact that he'd nearly lost the group thirty feet ahead to check it.RECLAIM SUCC

The street was empty in the specific, ringing way a place is empty right after it stops being full, the kind of quiet that still holds the shape of the noise that used to fill it. Kade stood at the corner for a long moment, listening past his own heartbeat for any sign of which direction the group had gone. There wasn't one. The city had reshaped itself again in the last hour, the way it seemed to do every time he stopped paying attention to a street long enough to trust it, and the block ahead of him branched into three directions that all looked equally unfamiliar, equally wrong. He could have panicked. He noted, almost clinically, that he wasn't panicking, and wondered what that said about him, that the sky had broken and a group of people had unintentionally left him behind on a street full of monsters and the loudest feeling in his chest was something closer to resignation than fear. Work with what's on the floor, he thought, the way he'd thought it every day for six years on

He heard her before he saw her, a voice pitched low and furious, arguing with something that clearly wasn't listening. "Get back, get back—" Kade rounded the corner of a collapsed parking structure and found the source of it: a woman pressed into the angle where a concrete pillar met fallen rebar mesh, bow raised but her draw arm shaking hard enough that Kade could see the tremor from thirty feet away. Blood soaked one leg of her jeans dark from thigh to knee. In front of her, two Chitin Stalkers circled with the patient confidence of predators that had already decided the outcome. She loosed an arrow. It caught one of the things in the shoulder joint, enough to make it stagger but not enough to put it down, and Kade watched her reach for another arrow and come up short, her quiver empty, her face doing the fast, silent arithmetic of someone realizing exactly how much trouble she was in. He didn't think about it as long as he probably should have. SALVAGE: PROXIMITY DETECTIO

They found something worth hitting sooner than either of them expected, which Kade was starting to understand was simply how the world worked now, danger arriving on its own schedule regardless of whether you'd gone looking for it. The parking garage let out onto a stretch of road that used to be a strip of chain restaurants, and it was in the cracked lot of what had once been a burger place that they found the nest, three of the six legged Chitin Stalkers clustered around something Kade didn't let himself look at too closely, the same instinct that had kept him moving past the boar's meal two hours earlier. "Three," Reyna murmured, drawing back into the shadow of a delivery truck's shell, bow already coming up despite the leg she was favoring. "I've got maybe six arrows left. You want to test that ability of yours, this is probably as controlled as it's going to get." "Controlled," Kade repeated, looking at three creatures that had, between the two of them, nearly killed her an hou