System Reboot

Chapter Six: Classification

"Is she breathing? Somebody tell me she's breathing."

"She's breathing." Priya had two fingers pressed to Wren's throat, counting. "Pulse is fast but steady. This is normal. I've seen triggers before, this is what they look like."

Dax didn't loosen his grip on her anyway. Wren lay half in his lap, half on the cracked concrete, eyes moving fast under closed lids, whole body twitching every few seconds like she was fighting something in a dream nobody else could see.

"How long does it usually take?" he asked.

"Depends on the Class. Simple ones, a minute. Complicated ones—" Priya shrugged. "I watched a guy stay under for almost ten minutes once. Woke up fine. Just took the System a while to sort him."

Cutter came down the ramp at an easy pace, hands in his pockets, studying Wren with open curiosity now instead of the bored distance from before.

"That was a strange spike," he said. "I've run maybe forty of these encounters. Never seen a trigger read that fast right at the edge of the window. Almost missed it."

"Meaning what?" Dax asked.

"Meaning I don't know. Could be nothing. Could mean the System had her flagged for something before she ever walked in here." Cutter crouched down a few feet away, careful not to crowd them. "You said she's been Unranked six months, active combat exposure the whole time, no trigger. That's already unusual. Then she triggers in the last three seconds of the window instead of the first thirty. System doesn't usually cut it that close unless something's weighing the decision."

"Weighing it how?"

"No idea. Above my pay grade. I just run the toll booth."

Wren's eyes snapped open.

She sucked in a breath like she'd been underwater, whole body arching once before going still, staring up at the cracked ceiling with an expression Dax couldn't quite read. Not fear. Something closer to confusion.

"Hey." Dax kept his voice low, steady. "You're okay. You're back."

"I saw numbers," Wren said, voice hoarse. "So many numbers. Like the whole world had a second layer under it I couldn't see before, and now I can."

"That's the Class settling in," Priya said gently. "Give it a second. What's your notification say?"

Wren blinked, gaze going distant as she read something only she could see.

Her face changed slowly. Confusion first. Then something sharper.

"It says..." She swallowed. "It says Warden. Class: Warden. Threat Sense, active. Zone Stability Reading, active." She frowned harder. "There's more. A line I don't understand."

"Read it out," Dax said.

"Harvest Eligibility: Confirmed." Wren's voice cracked slightly on the last word. "What does that mean? What's a Harvest?"

The word landed in the room and sat there, heavy, nobody rushing to fill the silence after it.

Priya's face had gone carefully blank, the look of someone doing math she didn't like the answer to.

"I've never seen that term," she said slowly. "Not in any Class notification. Not once, and I've read hundreds of these off other people."

"Me neither," Cutter said, and for the first time since they'd met him, all the easy humor had drained clean out of his voice. "That's not standard System language. That's something else."

"Something else like what?" Dax asked.

"I don't know. And I don't like not knowing things about the System that decides whether I wake up tomorrow." Cutter stood, backing up a step, some old instinct clearly telling him to put distance between himself and whatever had just happened. "You should get her somewhere quiet. Let the Class settle proper before you go poking at that notification again."

Wren pushed herself up onto her elbows, still pale, still shaking slightly from whatever the trigger had put her through. Her eyes found Dax's, searching his face for an answer he didn't have.

"Is it bad?" she asked. "The word. Harvest. Is that a bad word?"

Dax thought about Marcus. About the Leaderboard glowing steady in the corner of every survivor's vision, about a countdown he'd only ever glimpsed once, ghosted faint on a corpse's dying HUD in a fight three weeks back, numbers he hadn't understood then and understood even less now.

"I don't know yet," he said, which was the truth, and he'd promised her a while back that he wouldn't lie. "But we're going to find out. Together."

"Warden's a good Class, at least," Priya said, trying for something lighter, some small mercy in the middle of the moment. "Threat sense and Zone stability reading, that's rare. Support and awareness combined, not pure combat. Explains why the System waited. It wasn't looking for a fighter. It was looking for someone who could read the board."

"Read it for what?" Wren asked.

Nobody answered that one.

Dax helped her up slowly, keeping a hand under her arm until he was sure her legs would hold. She was steadier than he expected, some new strength already settling into her frame the way it always did after a first trigger, the body catching up fast to whatever the System had decided about it.

His own HUD flickered once, small and easy to miss.

[Companion Class Registered: Warden — W. Castellan]

[Party Bonus Available]

He dismissed it without reading further, mind still stuck on one word sitting heavy behind his eyes.

Harvest.

He'd need Priya digging into every scrap of System data she could find. He'd need to know if that word existed anywhere else, in any other notification, on any other survivor's sheet, or if Wren was the only person on the Grid who'd ever seen it.

Forty-four hours left on the audit clock, and now a second countdown sitting somewhere underneath it that nobody had a number for yet.

Cutter walked them back up toward the garage entrance, quieter than before, glancing back at Wren more than once like he was recalculating something about her the whole way.

At the top of the ramp, he stopped.

"For what it's worth," he said. "You didn't hear that word from me. And if I were you, I wouldn't say it out loud where a Vanguard scout might catch it. Words like that have a way of getting people relocated a lot faster than an audit ever could."

He didn't wait for a response before disappearing back toward the garage's upper level, leaving the four of them standing at the edge of Zone 2 with a new Class, a new word, and considerably less certainty than they'd walked in with.