System Reboot

Chapter One: What's Left Standing

"Don't you dare close your eyes on me."

Dax pressed both hands against the wound and leaned his whole weight into it. Blood pushed up between his fingers anyway. Warm. Too much of it.

"Feels like sleeping," the man under him mumbled. "Just for a minute."

"No minutes. Look at me."

The man's eyes rolled back toward Dax's face. Good. That was something.

Above them, the pharmacy ceiling groaned. A shelf of vitamin bottles slid sideways and hung there, stuck at an angle no ceiling should allow. The Grid did that now. Gravity picked favorites. Dax had learned not to trust a floor just because it looked flat.

"Talk to me," Dax said. "Name. Anything."

"Corwin. Ray Corwin."

"Ray. You're not dying in a pharmacy. Too stupid a place for it."

A weak laugh turned into a cough. Blood on his teeth, not a lot. Lung wasn't hit. Just the leg, and the leg was bad enough.

Dax's HUD flickered at the corner of his vision, the way it always did when a body dropped past some threshold only the System cared about.

[Host Effect Triggered: Attrition Tank — Threshold Endurance]

[+2 CON]

[Damage Buffer Regenerating: 34%]

Not his blood. His body still logged it like it was.

That was the joke of his class. Half the Grid thought Attrition Tank meant he took hits for other people and got nothing back but bruises. Wrong. He got stronger every time he should've broken and didn't. Simple, once you understood it. Ugly, but simple.

"Belt," he said. "Priya, the belt."

A pair of boots slid to a stop beside him. Priya Osei already had the tourniquet out before he finished the word.

"You said belt like I don't know what a leg wound looks like." She wrapped it fast, hands steady, mouth not. "I've done four of these this week."

"Four's a lot."

"Zone's getting worse. You noticed that, right? Or are you too busy being everyone's personal sandbag."

"Somebody has to be."

She cinched the tourniquet tight. Ray hissed, then went quiet, breathing easier. Color already climbing back into his face.

"There," Priya said. "He'll live. You, on the other hand, look like a man who forgot he's allowed to dodge things."

Dax sat back on his heels. His shirt was soaked through, sticking cold against his ribs where a piece of shelving had caught him earlier. He hadn't noticed until now. That was the other joke of his class. Pain showed up late, after the System had already logged the damage and paid him for it.

"Dodging's not really the build," he said.

"No kidding."

Behind Priya, in the doorway, a smaller shape stood with a crowbar held like she meant it. Wren. Sixteen years old, elbows sharp as the crowbar itself, watching the street instead of the wounded man on the floor, which was exactly the right call and exactly why Dax let her keep watch instead of sending her off somewhere "safe." There wasn't a safe anywhere left worth sending her to.

"Clear," Wren said. "For now."

"For now's all we get," Dax said.

He pushed himself up. His knees told him about it. Thirty-eight years old and none of those years had been gentle, and the Reset hadn't exactly softened things. Six months since the sky opened up and rewrote the rules of the world like it was bored with the old ones. Six months of gravity doing whatever it wanted, of monsters climbing out of places that used to just be alleyways, of a number stamped over every living head that told you, and everyone around you, exactly how dangerous you were.

Dax's own number sat low. Embarrassingly low, if you asked the wrong people, and plenty of them asked.

He didn't check the Leaderboard often. Tonight he did, because Ray had mentioned something before the bleeding started, a name that made Dax's stomach drop before his brain caught up with why.

He blinked the interface open.

GRID LEADERBOARD — LIVE

#1 — M. REYES — LV 61

The letters sat there like they'd been waiting for him.

Marcus.

Dax hadn't said that name out loud in six months, not since the last time he'd said it into a radio in a country neither of them talked about anymore, screaming it while he pressed both hands into a wound that should've killed the kid twice over. Marcus had lived because Dax refused to let him stop breathing. That had been the whole job, back then. Keep him breathing. Keep everyone breathing.

Now Marcus sat at the top of a scoreboard built out of the end of the world, and everyone in three Zones either worshipped his name or ran from it.

"You went somewhere," Priya said, watching him.

"Just tired."

"You're a bad liar for a guy who's kept this many people alive."

Ray shifted on the floor, testing the leg, wincing. "Vanguard's coming through tomorrow," he said, voice thin but steady now. "Heard it from a runner. Audit sweep. They're checking Unranked status. Whole block."

The word landed in the room like a dropped weight.

Unranked. No Class. No level. No number at all, which on the Grid didn't mean safe, it meant expendable. Dax's eyes went straight to Wren, still in the doorway, crowbar loose in her hand now.

She hadn't triggered a Class. Not once. Not in six months of fighting beside people twice her size and half her nerve.

"Audit sweep means what," Dax said, though he already knew.

"Means you level in forty-eight hours or you get relocated," Ray said. "Relocated" was the word people used instead of the true one, because the true one was easier to survive if nobody said it out loud.

Priya's jaw tightened. Wren didn't move at all, which was worse than if she had.

Dax looked back down at the Leaderboard, at the name sitting on top of it like it had earned the right to judge the rest of them.

#1 — M. REYES — LV 61

"Who's running the sweep," Dax said. "Which officer."

Ray hesitated, and that hesitation told Dax everything before the answer came.

"Reyes himself," Ray said. "He's doing this one personally."

The shelf above them groaned again, and this time nobody bothered to look up. Some things mattered more than a building deciding whether to fall.

Dax stood there a moment longer, blood drying stiff on his hands, and understood with total clarity that in less than two days, he was going to be standing across from Marcus Reyes for the first time since the war. Not as the man who'd saved his life.

As the thing standing between Marcus and a girl with a crowbar who hadn't earned a number yet.

He didn't know which version of Marcus was going to show up.

He wasn't sure Marcus knew either.