"You can't just decide I'm not scared.""I'm not deciding anything. I'm asking you to eat."Wren pushed the can of beans around with a bent fork instead of eating them. Dax sat across from her on an overturned shelf, elbows on his knees, watching her not eat. The pharmacy had gone quiet around them. Ray was asleep in the back corner, leg propped up, chest moving steady. Priya was somewhere out front, running numbers on a cracked tablet she refused to explain."Forty-eight hours," Wren said. "That's not a lot of time to grow a Class.""No," Dax said. "It's not.""You're supposed to lie to me right now. Tell me it'll be fine.""I don't lie to you. Never have."She set the fork down. In the low light her face looked older than sixteen, the way most kids' faces did now. Nobody got to keep the soft parts of being young. The Grid took those first."What happens if I don't trigger something," she said. "Say it plain. Not the word Ray used."Dax held her eyes. She'd earned plain."They move U

"There's a way to force a trigger. There's just a cost attached, and you're not going to like it."Priya said it flat, no dressing it up, tablet balanced on her knee while Ray slept in the corner and Wren pretended not to listen from three feet away."I'm listening," Dax said."There's a controlled encounter two blocks into Zone 2. Low-tier spawn, capped level, doesn't scale past a certain threshold. People go there specifically to trigger Classes because the danger's real but it's survivable if you know the fight pattern." Priya turned the tablet so he could see a crude hand-drawn map, scratched notes in the margins. "Problem is, it's not free ground. Somebody controls access.""Who.""Guy named Tobias Nkemelu. Goes by Cutter. Sits at seven on the Leaderboard. Runs the encounter like a toll booth, charges supplies or favors to let people in.""Vanguard?""No. Independent. Which means he's not obligated to help us and not obligated to stop us either. He just wants to get paid."Dax ru

"Is she breathing? Somebody tell me she's breathing.""She's breathing." Priya had two fingers pressed to Wren's throat, counting. "Pulse is fast but steady. This is normal. I've seen triggers before, this is what they look like."Dax didn't loosen his grip on her anyway. Wren lay half in his lap, half on the cracked concrete, eyes moving fast under closed lids, whole body twitching every few seconds like she was fighting something in a dream nobody else could see."How long does it usually take?" he asked."Depends on the Class. Simple ones, a minute. Complicated ones—" Priya shrugged. "I watched a guy stay under for almost ten minutes once. Woke up fine. Just took the System a while to sort him."Cutter came down the ramp at an easy pace, hands in his pockets, studying Wren with open curiosity now instead of the bored distance from before."That was a strange spike," he said. "I've run maybe forty of these encounters. Never seen a trigger read that fast right at the edge of the wind

"Back door. Now. Don't argue with me."Dax already had Ray's arm over his shoulder, half-carrying him toward the pharmacy's rear exit while Priya grabbed what supplies she could stuff into a bag in under ten seconds. Wren stood frozen a moment longer, eyes distant, reading something in the air none of the rest of them could see."Wren. Move.""They're not coming straight at us," she said, voice tight with concentration. "Two of the small signatures split off. Going around the block instead. Like they're trying to cut off the back.""Then we go out the side." Dax adjusted his grip on Ray, who bit back a groan and nodded once, jaw set. "How far's the third one?""Close. Really close." Wren's eyes snapped open, panic flickering through the focus for just a second. "It's already at the corner."The pharmacy's side door burst inward before anyone reached it.A Vanguard soldier filled the frame, armor plated in the same faint blue as Marcus's had been, though the level number floating above

"You're actually going to trust him.""I'm not trusting him. I'm using what he gave us." Dax knelt by Ray's leg, checking the stitches Priya had put in two days ago, the wound holding better than expected given everything since. "Those aren't the same thing."Priya paced the length of the pharmacy's back room, arms crossed, tablet forgotten on the counter for once. "He runs purges, Dax. He's the reason half of Zone 3 doesn't exist as a functioning population anymore. And you're ready to walk four Zones on his word alone.""I'm ready to walk four Zones because the alternative is sitting here waiting to find out what Harvest Eligible actually means the hard way." Dax stood, rolling his shoulder where the bite wound from Zone 2 had mostly healed into a dull ache. "You said it yourself. Two people flagged, both gone within a week. We don't have the luxury of skepticism right now.""I'm not saying don't go. I'm saying don't hand him your trust for free. Men like that don't hand out warning