Hidden Class

Chapter eight:Reyna

He heard her before he saw her, a voice pitched low and furious, arguing with something that clearly wasn't listening.

"Get back, get back—"

Kade rounded the corner of a collapsed parking structure and found the source of it: a woman pressed into the angle where a concrete pillar met fallen rebar mesh, bow raised but her draw arm shaking hard enough that Kade could see the tremor from thirty feet away. Blood soaked one leg of her jeans dark from thigh to knee. In front of her, two Chitin Stalkers circled with the patient confidence of predators that had already decided the outcome.

She loosed an arrow. It caught one of the things in the shoulder joint, enough to make it stagger but not enough to put it down, and Kade watched her reach for another arrow and come up short, her quiver empty, her face doing the fast, silent arithmetic of someone realizing exactly how much trouble she was in.

He didn't think about it as long as he probably should have.

SALVAGE: PROXIMITY DETECTION ACTIVE. TARGET ANALYSIS AVAILABLE.

TARGET: CHITIN STALKER (MINOR THREAT) x2.

ESTIMATED COMBAT VIABILITY: LOW FOR SOLO ENGAGEMENT AGAINST MULTIPLE TARGETS.

Low. Same warning as the boar, except this time there were two of them, and a stranger pinned against a pillar with an empty quiver and a leg that wasn't going to let her run.

Kade thought, briefly, unkindly, of Halden's voice from the rest stop. We can't build a plan around maybe. Then he picked up a chunk of broken concrete the size of a fist, because it was the nearest thing on the floor and he'd never once needed more than that to start with, and threw it hard at the nearer of the two stalkers.

It caught the thing across its too-many-jointed hind leg, not enough to hurt it, more than enough to turn its attention away from the cornered woman and toward the new, moving target that had just announced itself from the open ground behind it.

"Hey!" Kade shouted, mostly because shouting felt like the sort of thing that ought to accompany throwing rocks at monsters, and backed up fast as both stalkers reoriented on him instead, faster than he'd expected, low bodies covering ground in that same stuttering, wrong rhythm he remembered from the warehouse loading dock.

He didn't have Scorched Plating ready. He'd used it once already and the rectangle hadn't told him yet whether it needed time to recharge or whether he'd simply been too rattled in the moment to check, and there wasn't time now to find out either way. What he had was distance, and a length of pipe he'd picked up somewhere in the last hour and never gotten around to discarding, and the specific, stubborn refusal to die two blocks from a fight he'd already survived once that day.

The first stalker reached him fast. He swung the pipe wide, more instinct than skill, and caught it across the head hard enough to knock it sideways, buying himself half a second he used to put a pillar between himself and the second one.

"Don't just stand there!" he shouted, not looking back, not sure if the woman could even stand, "throw something, anything—"

Something came flying past his shoulder a heartbeat later, an actual arrow this time, apparently found or scavenged from somewhere near her, and it caught the second stalker in the eye socket with an accuracy that told Kade whoever she was, her draw arm shaking or not, she knew exactly what she was doing with a bow when she had ammunition to work with.

The stalker went down thrashing. The first one, the one Kade had hit with the pipe, came at him again, and this time he didn't try to be clever about it, just planted his feet the way he had against the boar and swung with everything the last hour of adrenaline had left in him.

It wasn't a clean kill. It took three more swings, each one worse than the last, his shoulder screaming from the strain, before the thing finally stopped moving, and by the time it dissolved into ash Kade was breathing so hard the edges of his vision had gone faintly gray.

SALVAGE TRIGGERED. FRAGMENT AVAILABLE: [CHITIN RESILIENCE — MINOR]. RECLAIM?

Yes, he thought, distracted, already moving toward the woman still pressed against the pillar, and felt the fragment settle in without breaking his stride.

"You're hit," he said, crouching in front of her, taking in the blood soaking her jeans properly for the first time. It wasn't shallow. Deep enough that she'd been rationing her weight onto the uninjured leg without seeming to notice she was doing it.

"I'm aware," she said, through gritted teeth, and there was an edge in her voice that had nothing to do with the pain and everything to do with pride, the specific defensiveness of someone who didn't like being seen needing help. "Thanks for the assist. Who are you?"

"Kade." He looked at the wound, then back up at her face, cataloguing without meaning to, the same patient way his rectangle catalogued everything else. Dark hair pulled back in a braid that had mostly come undone, a face set hard against pain, eyes that were doing their own fast assessment of him in return, weighing exactly how much of a threat or an asset he represented. "You're bleeding a lot for it to just be aware. Let me look."

"I'm fine."

"You're not." He said it without heat, the same flat, practical tone he'd use describing a shipment that hadn't arrived on schedule. "I'm not asking to be nice. I'm asking because if that keeps bleeding at this rate you're not walking anywhere, and neither of us wants to still be sitting here when the next one of those things shows up."

Something in her face shifted, not trust exactly, but a recalculation, the recognition of someone deciding a stranger's bluntness was more useful right now than his manners. She let him look. The wound was ugly, a deep gash along her outer thigh, but Kade had spent enough shifts around warehouse injuries to know it wasn't as bad as the blood made it look, no artery, nothing severed, just deep and messy and in urgent need of something to stop the bleeding before it became worse than it currently was.

"What's your class?" she asked, while he worked, tearing a strip from his shirt to press against the wound. It wasn't idle curiosity. He could hear the calculation running underneath it, the same one every survivor since the sky broke seemed to run on instinct now, sorting people into useful and not.

"Scavenger," he said, and waited for the look.

It came, right on schedule, the small flicker of reassessment, though to her credit she didn't laugh, didn't say anything close to rough draw. "I've heard of that one. Bottom of the list, right? No offense."

"None taken. It's accurate, as far as anyone's bothered to test it."

"You just killed two Chitin Stalkers with a pipe and a rock," she said, flat, like she was double-checking her own memory of the last two minutes. "That's not nothing, for bottom of the list."

"I got lucky." It wasn't entirely true, and he knew it wasn't entirely true even as he said it, six for six sitting quiet and unmentioned behind his ribs, but it was easier to say than the alternative, and he'd learned, in the last day and a half, exactly how quickly people's opinions turned when a man built out of things they'd decided were trash started looking like he might not be trash after all.

"Sure," she said, not quite believing him, watching him tie off the makeshift bandage with hands that had clearly done this kind of work before. "Reyna," she added, after a moment, like she'd decided, on balance, that he'd earned the introduction. "Voss. Reyna Voss."

"Kade Ferris." He sat back on his heels, checking the bandage held, watching the dark stain on the fabric slow rather than spread. "You were alone out here?"

"Was with a group," she said, and something closed off behind her eyes when she said it, quick and practiced, the specific shutter of someone who'd already learned not to talk too much about what had happened to the people who used to be with her. "Not anymore."

Kade thought about a street that had been full of voices an hour before he rounded a corner and found it empty, and didn't push.

"Mine too," he said instead, which was answer enough, and something passed between them in the silence that followed, not quite kinship, but close enough to it that when he offered his hand to help her up, she took it without hesitating the way she had over almost everything else since he'd rounded the corner into her fight.

"Where were you headed?" she asked, testing weight gingerly on the injured leg, wincing but holding.

"Downhill," Kade said. "Best plan I've got. Water tends to end up where people end up."

Reyna looked at him for a long moment, something considering in her expression, the last of her skepticism not gone but folded away somewhere she could pull it back out later if she needed it.

"Guess I'm headed downhill too, then," she said, and let him take some of her weight as they started walking.