The System Gave Me A Dead God

Chapter 11: The Call I Didn't Make

Rourke's text was still sitting unread on his phone when he finally found the nerve to open it, propped against his own kitchen counter at four in the morning with his ribs taped up as well as he could manage alone.

**Riverside pier just lit up my board with two DOA and a third in critical. That anywhere near you tonight?**

He'd sat with that question for eleven minutes before she'd sent a second one.

**I already know the answer. Call me before this gets worse than it already is.**

He called her.

She picked up on the first ring, which told him more about how little she'd slept than anything she said in the first thirty seconds.

"Start talking," Rourke said, no greeting, no procedure, just the flat exhaustion of someone who'd been awake since the last time she'd seen him. "And skip the part where you tell me you weren't there."

"I was there." Ezra pressed his free hand against the counter to keep it from shaking. "They ambushed me. Four of them. I didn't go looking for a fight, I got a text telling me to show up or they'd find me somewhere less private."

"And you went. Alone. After I specifically told you—"

"I know what you told me."

The silence on the line went on long enough that Ezra checked the screen to make sure the call hadn't dropped.

"Two of them are dead," Rourke said finally, quieter now, careful in a way that scared him more than the anger would have. "Not injured. Not incapacitated. Dead, Kade, in ways my scene techs are telling me don't match anything in your Skill inventory, which as of this morning is exactly one entry long. You want to explain that to me, or should I let the Guild's forensic division explain it to both of us in a room you don't get to leave?"

Ezra closed his eyes. Beside him, in the quiet of his own kitchen, Vaelgrith said nothing at all, which felt like its own kind of answer.

"I don't fully know what happened," Ezra said, and it was the truest thing he'd told her since the plaza. "I lost time. I woke up and it was already over."

"You lost time."

"Yes."

"That's not a defense that plays well in a Guild hearing."

"I'm not giving you a defense. I'm telling you the truth, because you're the only person in this whole mess who's actually asked for it instead of a price for it." He heard his own voice crack on the last word and didn't try to hide it.

"I didn't want anyone dead tonight. I wanted to survive. Those turned out to be the same thing and I didn't get a vote in which."

Rourke was quiet again, longer this time, and when she finally spoke the edge had gone out of her voice, replaced by something more tired than angry.

"The Guild's convening an anomaly review in two days," she said. "Full panel, not just me. They're going to want a controlled assessment. Combat simulation, Ability testing, the works, under supervision this time, not out on a pier where I find out about it after the fact from a body count."

"And if I say no?"

"Then the Classification Anomalous flag stops being a flag and starts being a warrant, and I won't be the one standing between you and containment anymore, because I will have run out of report language that makes you sound like anything other than a threat that's already killed four people in three days." She exhaled, sharp, frustrated at something that didn't sound entirely aimed at him.

"I don't think you're a monster, Kade. I think you're in over your head and too stubborn to say so. But I can't keep spending my own credibility proving that to people who've never met you if you keep handing them bodies to argue with instead."

Ezra looked down at his own hands on the counter, steadier now than they'd been an hour ago, and thought about the memory that had surfaced after the second kill, a city that wasn't Meridian, a voice giving orders in a language he half understood without ever learning it.

"Two days," he said. "I'll be there."

"You'd better be. And Kade." Her voice dropped, quieter, almost gentler than anything she'd said to him yet. "Whatever's happening to you, whatever's making you lose time in the middle of a fight, that's not a footnote. That's the actual problem. Fix that before the review, or there won't be a version of this where I can still help you."

She hung up before he could answer, and Ezra stood alone in his kitchen at four in the morning with a taped ribcage, a countdown he hadn't asked for, and a god's silence pressing against the inside of his skull that felt, for the first time, less like menace and more like something closer to shame.

"You heard all that," Ezra said finally.

*I did.*

"You have anything to say about losing time? About what happens in the parts I can't remember?"

*I have a great deal to say about it.* Vaelgrith's voice had none of its usual dry amusement left in it. *None of it will make the next two days easier, and some of it you are not ready to hear. But I will tell you this much, because you have earned at least this much honesty tonight.*

Ezra waited, heart beating too loud in the quiet kitchen.

*The parts you cannot remember are not gaps,* the voice said. *They are choices. Mine, when yours would have gotten you killed. Every one of them makes the next one easier for me to make without asking first. If you want that to stop, Ezra, you are going to need to become strong enough that I never have reason to make it again.*

"And if I can't?"

*Then two days from now, you will be sitting in front of a Guild panel asking them to trust a man who cannot honestly promise them whose hands he'll be fighting with the next time someone tries to kill him.*

Ezra didn't have an answer for that. He didn't think there was one, not yet, not with seven names still left on a list that the System had already promised him only got harder from here.