Hidden Class

Chapter 3: The Math of Who Stays

Chapter Three: The Math of Who Stays

The man who would later apologize to him, who would eventually mean it, was the one who first said, out loud, that Kade was a problem.

His name was Halden Cho. He'd been part of the group since the warehouse floor, quiet in a way Kade had mistaken for shyness, one of the forklift crew who kept to himself and didn't say much beyond what the job required. It turned out his quiet wasn't shyness. It was the particular stillness of a man taking stock, and once the group had walked far enough that the black glass tower filled a third of the horizon, Halden stopped being quiet.

"We're too slow," he said, at the second rest stop, crouched with the others in the lee of a collapsed pedestrian bridge. His class had come back Warrior too, same as Terrence, and something about having two of them in the group had started to shift the group's center of gravity without anyone announcing it. "We've covered maybe a mile in two hours. At this rate we're still in the open when it gets fully dark, and I don't want to find out what's worse than what we've already seen, in the dark, in the open."

"What do you want to do, leave people?" Priscilla's voice cracked on the word leave, sharp enough that a couple of people flinched.

"I want to figure out why we're slow," Halden said, even, reasonable, the tone of a man who'd clearly decided reasonable was the register that would get him listened to. "And then fix it."

Nobody said anything for a second. Kade, sitting a few feet outside the main cluster of the group the way he'd been sitting at every stop since the warehouse, understood before anyone else said it out loud where this was going, because he'd been the reason for at least two of the stops already, hanging back to let his rectangle finish scanning a patch of wreckage that never produced anything, catching up a minute or two later than everyone else.

"It's not about blaming anybody," Halden said, and looked, for the first time since he'd started talking, directly at Kade. "But some of us are carrying weight the group doesn't need to carry right now. I'm not saying leave anyone behind forever. I'm saying maybe some people are better off finding their own pace, somewhere safer, and catching up when things aren't moving at a survival sprint."

"That's leaving people," Priscilla said again, quieter this time, like she already knew she'd lost the argument.

"It's triage," Halden said. "I didn't invent it. It's just true. A group is only as fast as its slowest member, and out here, slow gets people killed. All of us, not just the slow ones."

Kade watched Terrence's face while Halden talked, watched the way Terrence, who twenty minutes ago had crouched down and told Kade nobody would be left behind, now looked at the ground instead of at anyone in particular, the specific look of a man who agreed with an argument he didn't want to be the one making.

"He hasn't slowed us down," Andrew said, unexpectedly, from where he sat hugging his knees a few feet from Kade. It was the first time the kid had defended anyone since the warehouse, and his voice shook doing it. "I mean. Not really. Not more than the rest of us stopping to catch our breath."

"He's stopped four times to poke at garbage," Halden said, not unkindly, just factually, the way you'd describe weather. "I get that's his class. I'm not saying it's his fault. I'm saying it's a fact, and facts are what's going to get the rest of us through tonight or not."

Kade could have said something. He turned the shape of several answers over in his head while the group's attention hovered on the edge of turning to him, testing each one for whether it would actually change anything. My ability needs proximity and time, and I haven't asked anyone to wait, I've been catching up on my own. True, and also exactly the kind of true that wouldn't matter to a group already doing the math Halden had just put into words for them. I found a fragment back at the warehouse. It might be worth something. Also true, and also nothing he could prove, not yet, not in a way that would outweigh four stops and a class ranked bottom tier by a community that had decided, in less than a day, that bottom tier meant worthless.

So he said nothing, and the nothing did more work than anything he could have said would have done, because a man defending himself sounds like a man with something to prove, and a man staying quiet, in a moment like that, reads as a man who already knows the answer.

"He's right there," Priscilla said, meaning Kade, meaning the fact that this conversation was happening a few feet from the person it was about, and something in her voice suggested she thought that should embarrass someone.

"I know he's right there," Halden said, and had the decency, at least, to look uncomfortable saying it. "I'm not trying to be cruel about it. I just think we should be honest with each other, because the alternative is pretending everything's fine until it isn't, and then it's too late to do anything but bury people."

Nobody argued with that. Kade watched the group's silence do what Halden's argument alone hadn't quite managed, settle into something closer to consensus, not cruelty exactly, just the particular exhaustion of people who'd rather agree with an uncomfortable plan than keep debating it while the light kept dropping and the sky kept being the wrong color.

"We're not leaving him tonight," Terrence said finally, which was as close to defending Kade as anyone was willing to get. "We'll reassess in the morning. If we find somewhere safer to hole up, maybe it makes sense to split into groups that move at different paces. That's not the same as abandoning anyone."

It was, Kade thought, exactly the same as abandoning anyone, just spread out over a few more hours and dressed in language soft enough that nobody in the group would have to feel the weight of the decision they'd already made.

He didn't say that either.

What he did was wait until the group started moving again, then hang back the way he'd been hanging back all day, and this time, when his rectangle flickered at the edge of a piece of wreckage nobody else had bothered to look at twice, a snapped length of rebar with something faintly luminous pooled at the break, he didn't hurry to catch up before checking it.

SALVAGE TRIGGERED. RECOVERABLE MATERIAL DETECTED. PROXIMITY SUFFICIENT. INITIATE RECLAIM?

He looked up. The group was thirty feet ahead now, Halden's voice carrying back to him in fragments, discussing pace, discussing the tower, discussing a version of tomorrow that had already quietly stopped including him in its plans.

Kade crouched down next to the rebar, closed his hand around the luminous pool at the break, and thought, deliberately, the way you'd turn a key you weren't sure would fit the lock: yes.