Hidden Class

Chapter Two: What the Floor Decides

By the time the warehouse emptied out onto the loading dock, the group had already sorted itself without anyone calling a vote.

Kade noticed it the way he noticed most things, a beat late and from the outside. Terrence was at the front, not because anyone had asked him to lead but because a Warrior class and a body built like a doorframe had a way of ending up there on its own. Behind him came the woman he'd saved, and behind her the ones who'd decided, somewhere in the last twenty minutes, that standing close to Terrence was the safest place available. The nineteen year old Mage hovered near the back with his hands shaking, and a heavyset man named Oduya, forklift license same as Terrence, had appointed himself rear guard with a length of pipe he'd pulled off a broken shelf.

Nobody had appointed Kade anything. He fell in near the middle, close enough to hear what was being decided, far enough that nobody thought to ask his opinion on it.

"We can't stay here," Terrence was saying, to nobody and everybody. "No power, no working phones, and that thing came through the loading dock, which means there's more where it came from."

"Where do we even go?" This from the fish microwave woman, whose name Kade had learned in the last hour was Priscilla, mostly because she kept saying it to reassure herself, like repeating your own name was a spell against the sky being the wrong color. "The city, maybe? Somewhere with people?"

"Somewhere with a working street would be nice," Oduya muttered, and nobody laughed, but a couple of people made the sound people make when they want to laugh and can't.

Kade looked past them at what used to be the parking lot. The asphalt had cracked in long veins radiating out from a point near the fence line, like something enormous had punched the ground from underneath, and beyond the fence the skyline that used to be familiar, three grain elevators and the water tower with the town's name peeling off in blue paint, was gone, replaced by shapes that didn't belong to any skyline. A tower of black glass that hadn't been there yesterday. Something that might have been a bridge, if bridges could hang in the air with nothing supporting either end.

"There," Terrence said, pointing at a gap in the fence where a section had buckled outward. "We move as a group. Nobody wanders off."

Nobody looked at Kade when he said it, but Kade understood who it was aimed at anyway. He'd felt it building since the rectangle had hovered in front of his face and said the word Scavenger loud enough for the people nearest him to hear. It wasn't hostility. It would have been easier if it was hostility, something he could push back against. It was worse. It was the specific, practical calculus of people deciding, in a situation where every resource might mean the difference between living and not, how much of their attention a person was worth.

Kade had never once been worth very much of anyone's attention. He'd made his peace with that a long time before the sky opened.

They moved through the gap in the fence in a loose column, Terrence and Oduya at the edges, the rest clustered in the middle like something instinctive was already telling them where the safest place to stand was. Kade walked near the back, a few steps behind the Mage kid, whose name turned out to be Andrew, and who kept looking over his shoulder every few seconds like he expected the ground itself to open up next.

"You're the Scavenger guy," Andrew said, not quite a question, the first time anyone had spoken directly to Kade since the warehouse.

"Yeah."

"That's rough." Andrew said it the way you'd say it about a diagnosis, sympathetic and relieved it wasn't happening to you. "I looked it up. Bottom tier, right? Like actually bottom, not just, I don't know, not great."

"Something like that."

"Sorry, man." Andrew didn't sound like he meant it, not because he was cruel but because sorry was easy to say and cost nothing, and he had his own rectangle to worry about, his own class to figure out how to survive with. Kade didn't hold it against him. There wasn't room, in a day like this one, to hold much of anything against anyone.

They walked for twenty minutes before the second monster found them.

It came out of what used to be a drainage culvert, low and fast, more insect than dog this time, six legs moving in a rhythm that made Kade's stomach turn just watching it close the distance. Terrence turned to meet it, Oduya already swinging his pipe toward the flank, and for a few seconds the group's collective attention narrowed to a single point of violence happening thirty feet away.

Kade's rectangle flickered at the edge of his vision, quiet, easy to miss.

SALVAGE: PROXIMITY DETECTION ACTIVE. NO RECOVERABLE MATERIAL PRESENT.

He filed it away. Interesting that the ability was already running, unprompted, scanning a fight he wasn't part of. He hadn't asked it to do that. He hadn't asked it to do much of anything since the warehouse, and it kept doing things anyway, small and quiet, the way water finds the low points in a floor without being told to.

The fight ended fast, Terrence's blade catching the thing across what might have been its throat, and it went down twitching, the same gray ash the first one had left, drifting up and away in the wrong colored light before it had a chance to fully settle.

LEVEL UP, Terrence's rectangle announced again, and this time a few people actually cheered, quiet and exhausted, but real.

Kade watched the ash scatter faster than the last time, caught by a wind that smelled like ozone and wet concrete, and understood, with the specific, unhappy clarity of a man watching an opportunity close, that Reclaim needed proximity, and needed time, and he had neither, standing at the back of a group that had already decided he wasn't the kind of person worth waiting for.

Nobody suggested pausing so he could try. Nobody thought to ask if he could.

He didn't ask either.

They kept walking. The black glass tower grew larger against the bruised sky the longer they moved toward it, not because anyone had chosen it as a destination but because it was the only fixed point visible in a horizon that otherwise refused to hold still, buildings that flickered between familiar and wrong depending on which direction you looked from, streets that dead ended into walls that hadn't existed that morning.

By the time they stopped to rest, crouched behind the burned out shell of a delivery truck two blocks from where the warehouse used to define the edge of the industrial district, the sun, or whatever was standing in for the sun now, had dropped low enough to turn the bruised sky the color of an infection setting in.

"We should keep moving," Terrence said, though nobody moved. Everyone was tired in the specific, hollowed out way that came from an adrenaline crash nobody had ever had to survive before that day.

"We should figure out who can actually fight," Oduya said, and there it was, out loud, the thing everyone had already been thinking since the parking lot. "Because if that's the pace we're going at, we're not going to make it far. We need to know what we've got."

One by one people said their classes out loud, some of them proud, some of them scared, all of them looking around at each other with the particular hunger of people trying to figure out where they stood on a ladder that hadn't existed twenty four hours ago. Ranger. Warrior. Healer, from a woman near the front who got a genuine, relieved round of quiet applause, because a Healer meant something concrete and useful in a way most of the other classes only implied. Mage, again, from Andrew, who still looked like he might be sick.

When it came around to Kade, there was a pause before he answered, just long enough that he understood the question wasn't really being asked of him so much as about him.

"Scavenger," he said anyway, because lying about it would only have delayed the same conversation to a worse moment.

The quiet that followed wasn't cruel. It was, again, worse than cruel. It was the sound of a group doing math, and Kade watching the answer arrive on their faces before anyone said it out loud.

"Look," Terrence said, not unkindly, crouching down so he was closer to eye level, which somehow made it worse. "I'm not saying we leave anybody. But we're going to hit worse than that six legged thing before this is over, and when we do, everybody needs to be able to pull their weight. You said your class doesn't fight."

"It doesn't fight," Kade agreed. "It's built for something else."

"What else?"

Kade thought about the fragment sitting somewhere under his ribs, minor fire resistance, damaged, salvageable, and thought about how little that would mean to a group already deciding how much of its attention he was worth.

"I'm still figuring that out," he said, which was true, and which landed, he could see it land, as a non-answer, the kind of thing a person says when they don't have anything better to offer.

Terrence nodded slowly, the nod of a man closing a subject rather than resolving it, and stood back up.

"We'll figure it out as we go," he said, to the group, not really to Kade. "For now, everybody stays close. Nobody gets left behind."

It was a kind thing to say. Kade noted, quietly, the way he noted most things, that kind things said out loud in front of a group didn't always survive contact with the group's actual instincts once the group got tired, or scared, or ran out of time to wait for the person walking slowest at the back.

He didn't say that out loud either.

He just kept walking, when they started walking again, a few steps behind Andrew, watching the black glass tower grow larger against a sky that had stopped being any color that made sense, and let his rectangle run quietly in the background, cataloguing, cataloguing, cataloguing, waiting for the moment it would finally have something worth catching.