Hidden Class

Chapter Four: First Reclaim

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 SUCCESSFUL.

FRAGMENT ABSORBED: [STRUCTURAL REINFORCEMENT — DAMAGED]

EFFECT: MINOR INCREASE TO PHYSICAL DURABILITY.

FUSION AVAILABLE: [MINOR FIRE RESISTANCE — DAMAGED] + [STRUCTURAL REINFORCEMENT — DAMAGED]

ATTEMPT FUSION?

Kade went very still.

He'd absorbed one fragment before this, back in the warehouse, and the rectangle hadn't offered him anything to do with it beyond store it, a single item sitting in a pocket with nowhere to go. Two fragments, apparently, were a different category of problem, or a different category of opportunity, and the word fusion sat in front of him with a kind of weight the rest of the interface hadn't carried yet.

He thought about the group, thirty five feet ahead now, Halden's voice a fading thread of conversation about pace and safety and tomorrow. He thought about how little time he actually had to stand here and find out what this word meant.

He thought yes anyway.

The two glowing threads in his chest, if that was even the right way to describe something he couldn't see and could only feel, moved toward each other the way water finds the lowest point in an uneven floor, and where they met there was a resistance, brief, like two puzzle pieces that looked like they should fit and needed a firm hand to prove it.

Then they did fit, and something in his chest reorganized itself, and the rectangle blinked into a shape he hadn't seen yet.

FUSION SUCCESSFUL.

NEW ABILITY CREATED: [SCORCHED PLATING] — Minor. Temporary damage resistance to fire and blunt trauma when activated. Duration and potency scale with quality of fused components.

Kade read it three times.

It wasn't much. He understood that immediately, in the same practical way he understood most things, without needing anyone to explain it to him. Minor damage resistance, temporary, built out of two fragments the System itself had flagged as damaged, the sort of ability that would barely register against whatever had carved the black glass tower into the skyline, let alone whatever else was waiting between here and it.

But it hadn't existed forty seconds ago. Nobody had handed it to him. Terrence's level up, the clean, simple arithmetic of killing something and becoming stronger for it, that had a shape everyone understood and respected. This had no shape yet that anyone but Kade could see, built out of two pieces of junk that a Warrior or a Ranger would have walked past without a second look, because a Warrior or a Ranger's rectangle wouldn't have told them those pieces were worth anything at all.

He caught up to the group at a jog, not because he particularly wanted to, but because falling further behind after everything Halden had said that afternoon would have been its own kind of confession.

Nobody asked where he'd been. That was, in its own way, an answer to a question he hadn't asked out loud.

They reached the edge of what used to be a strip mall parking lot as the light kept dropping, the bruised purple of the sky curdling toward something closer to true dark, and Halden called the group to a stop in front of a building that had once sold mattresses, its windows blown out, its sign hanging by one bracket, swinging very slightly though Kade couldn't feel any wind.

"We hole up here for the night," Halden said. "Solid walls, one entrance we can watch, defensible. In the morning we figure out the rest."

The rest, Kade understood, without anyone needing to say it, meant the rest of the conversation from the rest stop. Who moved at what pace. Who the group could afford to keep waiting for.

Inside, the mattress store still had most of its stock, dust covered rectangles of foam stacked against every wall, and there was something almost funny about it, twelve traumatized survivors of the end of the world settling in for the night surrounded by beds nobody could afford before the sky broke and nobody needed to pay for now. Priscilla laughed when she saw it, short and startled, then put her hand over her mouth like she'd embarrassed herself.

They set a watch rotation. Kade wasn't put on it, and understood, again without needing it explained, that this wasn't kindness so much as the group quietly reorganizing itself around the assumption that he wasn't someone whose alertness mattered.

He lay down on one of the mattresses near the back of the store anyway, out of the sightline of the boarded window they were using as a lookout, and closed his eyes, and didn't sleep.

Instead he thought about Scorched Plating. Thought about the way it had built itself, not out of strength but out of things other people had already decided were worthless, damaged, salvageable at best. Thought about the word fusion sitting in the rectangle like a door he hadn't known existed, and wondered, in the specific quiet way he wondered about most things, what else might be behind it, if he just kept picking up what everyone else walked past.

Somewhere near the front of the store, low enough that he wasn't meant to hear it, Halden's voice reached him anyway.

"He's not a bad guy," Halden was saying, to Terrence, in the tone of a man justifying a decision he'd already half made. "I just don't see what he brings. Support classes are supposed to buff people, heal people, something the group can point to. His just picks through trash."

"Maybe that's all it does," Terrence said.

"Maybe," Halden agreed. "But we can't build a plan around maybe. Not out here."

Kade lay still, eyes closed, one hand resting lightly over the place in his chest where two pieces of damaged junk had just become something new, and didn't say a word.

He'd work with what was actually on the floor. He'd figure out the rest on his own, same as he always had.