System Reboot

Chapter Seven: What the Board Doesn't Show

"You're not sleeping. I can hear you not sleeping from over here."

Dax opened his eyes. Priya sat across the pharmacy floor, tablet glowing faint blue against her face, Ray still out cold in the corner and Wren curled up near the door with her new Class settling into her like a low hum Dax could almost feel from a few feet away.

"Just thinking," he said.

"About the word."

"About the word."

Priya set the tablet down, rubbing at her eyes. She'd been at it for hours, digging through every scrap of System data she'd scavenged off dead HUDs and cracked terminals since the Reset, cross-referencing notification logs, hunting for a single match to the term that had come through Wren's trigger.

"Nothing," she said. "Not one hit. I've got logs from forty-some players, going back months. Harvest doesn't appear anywhere. Not in Class notifications, not in Zone alerts, not in the System's public documentation, which barely exists anyway."

"So it's rare."

"So it's either brand new, or it's never meant to be seen by anyone below a certain level." Priya leaned back against the shelving, arms crossed. "I keep thinking about that countdown you mentioned. The one you saw on that corpse's HUD a few weeks back."

"I told you about that?"

"You talk in your sleep sometimes. Not full sentences. Just enough."

Dax didn't remember saying it out loud, but he didn't doubt her either. Three weeks ago, clearing a body out of a collapsed apartment block, he'd caught a flicker of the dead man's HUD still cycling for a few seconds after the heart stopped, some numbers ghosting across it he hadn't understood. A countdown. No label. No context. Just numbers falling, and then nothing.

"You think they're connected," he said. "The countdown and the Harvest word."

"I think it's a strange coincidence if they're not." Priya picked the tablet back up, thumb hovering over the screen. "High-ranked players get a Leaderboard. Maybe high-ranked players also get to see things the rest of us don't. A countdown only visible past a certain threshold. A word that only shows up if the System's decided you're worth flagging for something."

"Flagging for what, though. That's the part I can't make sense of."

"Neither can I. Not yet."

Across the room, Wren stirred, sitting up slowly, rubbing at her eyes the way she used to before she'd had a Class weighing on her attention every waking second. She caught the tail end of the conversation and didn't pretend she hadn't.

"Maybe it's not a bad word," she said quietly. "Maybe I'm just reading it wrong. Panicking over one line out of a whole notification."

"Maybe," Dax said, not believing it, not wanting to hand her false comfort either.

His own HUD chimed, soft, unrelated to any of it, a simple time marker ticking down in the corner where it always sat now.

[Audit Deadline: 41 Hours Remaining]

Forty-one hours. Wren had her Class now, which should have solved the immediate problem, should have taken her off whatever list the Vanguard was building. Should have. Dax didn't trust "should have" anymore. Not with Marcus running this particular sweep personally.

"Even with the trigger," he said, thinking out loud, "we don't actually know if it clears her. Marcus said Unranked with no trigger event get flagged. She's got one now. But I don't know if the audit updates in real time or if it's already logged her as a problem before the fight even happened."

"Only one way to find out," Priya said. "Ask."

"Ask who? Marcus?"

"Unless you know another Vanguard officer personally."

Dax didn't. That was the whole problem, hadn't ever stopped being the problem since the moment Marcus's name showed up locked at the top of the Leaderboard six months ago. Every road back to safety for people like Wren seemed to run straight through a man who genuinely believed shipping the vulnerable off to die was the kindest math available.

Ray shifted in the corner, coming awake with a groan, testing the leg Priya had stitched back together the day before.

"Heard some of that," he mumbled. "Harvest talk. You want my two cents?"

"Go ahead," Dax said.

"Heard that word before. Once. Guy passing through a few months back, half out of his mind, kept saying the Grid wasn't testing us. Said it was sorting us. Said something was coming to collect whoever made the cut." Ray winced, shifting his weight. "Everybody figured he'd cracked. Zone stress does that to people. But he wasn't wrong about the word, apparently."

"Where'd he go?" Priya asked. "This guy."

"Zone 6, last I heard. There's a group out there, calls itself the Hollow Choir. Half cult, half survivors, worship the Reset like it's scripture instead of a disaster. If anybody's been chewing on the word Harvest longer than us, my money's on them."

Dax filed that away, another thread in a knot that kept getting more tangled instead of less.

"That's four Zones from here," Priya said. "We don't have time to chase cult rumors with forty-one hours on the audit clock."

"No," Dax agreed. "Not yet. First we deal with what's in front of us."

A sound cut through the pharmacy before anyone could respond, sharp and mechanical, unmistakable once you'd heard it a few times. A Vanguard signal flare, close, maybe two blocks out, the kind fired to mark a position for a follow-up team.

Wren was on her feet fast, the new Class already working, eyes gone distant and focused the way they had in the garage.

"Threat sense," she said, voice tight. "I can feel them. Three signatures, moving toward us. No—" She frowned harder, concentrating. "Four. There's a fourth one further back. Bigger. Higher level than the others by a lot."

"Marcus," Dax said, already reaching for his jacket.

"I can't tell names, just size," Wren said. "But it's big. Bigger than anything else out there right now."

Priya was already packing the tablet away, Ray struggling upright despite the leg, every instinct in the room shifting into the particular gear survival demanded whenever the Grid decided to test people again.

"They're not due for the audit for another forty-one hours," Priya said. "Why would they move now?"

Dax didn't have an answer. He only had a bad feeling settling into his chest, heavy and familiar, the same feeling he used to get right before a mission went sideways in a war that had ended in name only, replaced now by a different war with worse rules.

"Get her out the back," he said. "Whatever this is, it's not the audit. It's something else. And I don't think we're ready for it."