The emergency lights turned red while Kael Draven was still stuffing antibiotics into his jacket, and the whole underground corridor began to pulse like an open wound, which was how he knew the easy job he had been promised was a lie.Dorian, the team leader, was staring at something Kael could not see, a floating blue panel that every other person on Earth could read and that had never once appeared in front of him in seven years. The color drained from Dorian's broad face as he read it, and when he finally spoke his voice cracked down the middle. "Dungeon awakening, Rank C, and the whole level seals in ninety seconds, so everybody move right now." Kael was already running with them, hugging the wall and counting the doors the way he always did, because he had learned in the first week of the apocalypse that the people who reached a narrow exit first were the only ones who lived to complain about it.He reached the bottom of the stairwell just as Dorian turned to count heads, and the

Kael left the tenement through the window, because the front stairs were already filling with the heavy boots of enforcement officers going door to door, and he dropped onto the sagging awning of the noodle stall below with his bag over one shoulder and the black object pressed against his chest. The awning tore under his weight and dumped him into a puddle of dishwater, which earned him a furious shout from the stall owner and one very long second of terror, but nobody in the Gutter looked twice at a man covered in filth running away from trouble, because half the district ran from trouble on any ordinary night. He pulled his hood low, took the narrowest alley he knew, and followed it downhill toward the only place in Ironhaven where a man with no System and something unexplainable in his jacket could hope to find a buyer before sunrise.The Black Market had no sign and no fixed address, only a rusted maintenance hatch behind a butcher's yard that opened onto a long concrete stairway

Kael made up his mind the way he made up most of his decisions, which was all at once and without any real certainty that it was a good one, and by the time the black truck rolled out of the depot with its taillights smearing red through the smoke he was already running along the edge of the rooftop with his bag banging against his hip. The vehicle slowed at the first corner to let a patrol cross, and he leapt from the roof onto the top of a stack of rusted shipping crates, then dropped to the street, slid across the wet asphalt on his heels, and caught the rear bumper with both hands just as the driver pressed the accelerator. His stitched arm screamed at him when the truck lurched forward, and for a few seconds he simply hung there with his boots dragging over the road, nearly blinded by exhaust, until he managed to hook one leg over a steel bracket beneath the chassis and haul himself into the narrow gap above the rear axle, where the hot metal burned through his jacket and the noi