The System Eats First

Chapter Six: Nine Out of Nine

"Define disappear."

Wes said it quiet, but it cut through the plaza anyway, sharp enough that Priya's whole group went still around them.

"I mean gone." Priya pulled her laptop bag around to her front, hands already moving to unzip it out of habit, though there was nothing left in there that would explain any of this. "Not dead-gone, not a body left behind gone. I watched two of them hit their level milestone and then just weren't in the group anymore ten minutes later. Nobody saw them leave. Nobody heard anything. They were there, and then there was an empty space where they'd been standing."

"Could've wandered off. People panic, people run."

"I thought that too. First time." Priya's voice had the flat, careful tone of someone repeating an argument they'd already had with themselves a dozen times and lost. "Second time I was standing three feet away and I still didn't see it happen. One second mid-sentence. Next second, gone, like someone had erased a word out of a page and the sentence just closed back up around the hole."

Frank had gone very still beside Wes, listening hard, and Rosa's hand had drifted to the fire extinguisher again without her seeming to notice she'd done it.

"How many people total in your group when you started," Wes asked.

"Fourteen." Priya glanced past him at the eight standing behind her, jaw tight. "Now it's this."

Nobody said anything for a second. The dead streetlights creaked faintly overhead in air that didn't move, and somewhere far off in the tunnels a sound rolled through like distant thunder, low enough to feel in the ground more than hear.

"Wes."

A voice from the back of Priya's group, low and even, and Wes turned to find Okafor stepping out from behind two younger survivors, wrapped knuckles from the gym now wrapped in a torn strip of someone's shirt instead, a long piece of rebar held loose in one hand like it weighed nothing.

"You're alive." Wes felt that same crack of relief he'd felt seeing Priya, though Okafor took it differently, just a short nod, like relief was a thing he'd rationed a long time ago and wasn't going to spend more of it than necessary.

"Barely, same as everyone." Okafor's eyes went to Frank, to Rosa, cataloguing them the way Wes imagined he'd once catalogued a room full of strangers before deciding who to trust with his back. "You picked up people. Good. People who travel alone down here don't travel long."

"You said that like you already knew that before today."

Something crossed Okafor's face, brief, gone before Wes could read it fully. "I said it because it's true of any bad place. You didn't need me to have seen this exact bad place before to know it."

It wasn't really an answer. Wes filed it next to everything else he was filing today, the pile getting too tall to keep track of.

Rosa stepped closer, studying Okafor with the same wary look she'd given the whole plaza since they'd arrived in it. "You move like someone who's done this before. Not the falling-through-a-hole-in-reality part. The staying-calm-while-it-happens part."

"I was a soldier once." Okafor said it simply, no pride in it, no shame either, just a fact laid flat on the table between them. "A long time ago, a different war. Staying calm is a skill like any other. You practice it enough years, it stops leaving even when the reason for it changes shape."

"And has the reason changed shape before? For you?"

Okafor held her gaze a beat too long before answering, which was its own kind of answer. "Ask me again when we are somewhere safer to hear the answer."

"Priya's been tracking something," Wes said instead, because there were more urgent fires than the one Okafor was clearly trying not to talk about. "People leveling up fast, then vanishing. Nine for nine."

Okafor's face didn't change, but something in his stillness did, a held breath instead of a relaxed one. "Show me the pattern."

Priya walked him through it fast, low-voiced, numbers and timestamps she'd apparently been keeping in her head this whole time because there was nowhere else to keep them. Okafor listened without interrupting, and when she finished he was quiet long enough that the silence itself became an answer.

"It fits," he said finally.

"Fits what."

"Something I don't have proof of yet either. Only pattern." He looked at Wes directly now, and there was something old and tired behind his eyes that Wes hadn't seen in him back at the gym, not even once, not in three years of nodding hello on the street. "We should not stand in the open discussing it. Sound travels strange down here, and I would rather it not travel to whoever, or whatever, is listening."

They moved to the shelter of a half-collapsed storefront at the plaza's edge, glass long gone from its windows, shelves inside tipped and empty. Frank sat heavily against the counter, and Wes crouched to check him again, pulse steady now, color holding.

"How's the level count," Wes asked him, mostly out of habit, the question feeling almost normal now, which was its own small horror.

Frank blinked at something only he could see. "Level 2. Went up while we were resting in that gold room. Didn't even do anything to earn it. Panel just said passive recovery counted." He said it slow, like the words were only now landing with their full weight. "That's the thing that room was doing, isn't it. Ticking me up toward whatever nine other people got ticked up toward."

Nobody answered him, because nobody had an answer that wasn't going to make it worse.

"We stop resting in the gold rooms, then," Rosa said, too fast, too certain, grasping for a rule simple enough to hold onto. "We stop taking the passive XP. Problem solved."

"Maybe." Priya didn't sound like she believed it either. "Or maybe it doesn't matter how you get the XP, only that you get it. I don't have enough data to know which. That's the part that scares me more than the disappearing, honestly. Not knowing the actual rule yet."

Wes looked at Frank's face, gray under the panel's faint light, doing math the old man clearly didn't want to say out loud. Level 2. Whatever nine for nine meant, Frank was already inside the number now, whether he'd asked for it or not.

"Then we find the rule," Wes said. "Before it finds us."

Okafor made a low sound, not quite agreement, not quite doubt. "Rules like this one are not usually found. They are usually paid for."

"Paid for how." Wes's voice sharpened despite himself. "You keep saying things like that and stopping halfway through them. If you know something, say it. We're past the point where half a warning helps anybody."

"I don't know it. Not the way you mean." Okafor's jaw worked once, like he was deciding how much to hand over. "I know the shape of a thing that has taken people slowly before, in pieces, in ways that feel fair right up until they stop feeling fair at all. That is not the same as knowing this thing. I would rather tell you nothing than tell you a guess dressed up as a fact and get someone killed on the strength of my being wrong."

It wasn't comfort. It wasn't even really an answer. But it was more honest than most of what the panel had told any of them since they'd woken up down here, and Wes decided, for now, that honesty about not knowing was worth more than a confident lie.

Okafor turned toward the storefront's broken window, scanning the dark plaza beyond it out of old habit, soldier's eyes even now. "We should move while we still—"

He stopped.

Across the plaza, one of Priya's group, a thin young man who'd been leaning against a dead streetlight not thirty seconds ago, wasn't leaning against it anymore.

The space where he'd been standing was just empty. No sound. No struggle. No sign anything had happened at all, except that a person who had been there was now simply not, and the streetlight kept standing exactly the way it had before, indifferent, like it had never held anyone's weight against it in the first place.