The rival scavenger's name turned out to be Marcus, and the two weeks since the Underdrift delve had turned him, gradually, into something between a colleague and a friendly rival, the two of them trading notes over shared meals about what their respective classes could and couldn't do, comparing fusion results the way other survivors compared kill counts."You're still ahead of me," Marcus admitted, over a meal in the Compact's communal hall, a converted bank lobby that had become the settlement's closest thing to a town square. "Whatever you're doing with combat fusion, I haven't cracked that yet. Mine still needs downtime between fusions. Yours just seems to happen.""I don't think it's supposed to work the way it's working for me," Kade admitted, which had become, over the past two weeks, something close to a running joke between them, the two bottom tier classes quietly discovering they weren't quite as bottom tier as advertised.The interruption came from Wren, jogging across th

The summons came the next morning, delivered by a runner who found Kade mid-shift in the sorting warehouse and told him, with the flat efficiency of someone repeating instructions verbatim, that Marion Steel wanted him at the training yard within the hour, no explanation offered beyond that.He found her waiting there, alone this time, no Wren for containment, no witnesses beyond the two of them and a crate sitting closed in the dirt at her feet."You've made quite an impression these last three weeks," Marion said, without preamble, her tone carrying none of the warmth or hostility Kade might have braced for, just the same flat, cataloguing assessment she brought to everything. "A boar solo kill. Stalker packs cleared. A major grade fusion off a single rare component. People are starting to use the word unprecedented, which is a word I don't love hearing applied to a class the tutorial ranks bottom tier.""I can't help what the tutorial got wrong," Kade said, careful, watching her."

The council chamber had once been a bank's boardroom, long table still intact, and by the time Kade and Reyna reached the administrative building, the argument inside had clearly been running long enough to fray.They weren't let in. A guard at the door, apologetic but firm, told them council sessions stayed closed regardless of who was waiting outside, and Reyna's jaw tightened at that, but she didn't push past him, not yet, choosing instead to plant herself in the corridor within earshot of the raised voices leaking through the chamber's door."—unverified anomaly sitting on a class we don't understand, granted full standing on delve teams that carry real people's lives—" Deacon's voice, carrying clearly enough that the guard didn't bother pretending not to hear it either."—results speak for themselves, Deacon, I watched him solve a problem three trained specialists couldn't—" Marion, sharper than Kade had heard her."Results from a man whose registration timestamp predates the Gat

Kade didn't sleep that night. He sat instead on the roof of the converted bank building, the highest point inside the Compact's walls he could reach without drawing attention, and watched the bruised, wrong-colored sky do whatever it did instead of turning properly dark, and turned the manifest's circled line over and over in his mind until the words stopped looking like words at all.Subject monitoring active. K. Ferris assigned proximity.Reyna found him there an hour before dawn, climbing the fire escape without asking permission, and settled beside him without saying anything for a long while, the two of them sitting in a silence that had stopped needing to be filled the way it once had."You're not going to sleep tonight, are you," she said eventually, not really a question."Don't see how," Kade admitted. "Every time I close my eyes I see that line. Assigned proximity. Like I was a piece of equipment somebody was tracking, not a person doing a job." He looked down at his own han

Dawn, such as it was, arrived the color of a fresh bruise, the sky doing its slow, half-hearted approximation of morning light while the six of them assembled at the Compact's eastern gate with packs checked twice and weapons checked a third time for good measure."Last chance to turn back," Wren said, shouldering her own pack, scanning the group with the particular assessment of someone who'd led enough expeditions to know exactly which faces belonged to first-timers and which had already learned what the world outside the wall actually cost. "Once we're past the retail district's edge, we're in territory nobody's mapped properly. Rift zone doesn't follow rules. I need everyone here understanding that before we take a single step past the fence."Nobody turned back. Kade hadn't expected anyone to, watching the small group settle into a loose formation, Wren at the front, Halden and Terrence's absence a strange gap he still felt even knowing they were needed on the wall, Reyna at his