The System Hunted Me,So I Became It's Nightmare

CHAPTER 2

The collapse chased Kael through the last forty meters of the facility like a living thing, with slabs of ceiling slamming down behind his heels and a roaring cloud of concrete dust swallowing the corridor whole, and he threw himself into the ventilation shaft on the east wall without any plan beyond getting his body through a space that was barely wide enough for his shoulders. The metal tore his jacket and scraped the skin from his elbows while he hauled himself forward on his forearms, the black object digging into his ribs through the lining of his coat, and when the shaft finally spat him out into a crumbling stairwell choked with smoke, he climbed the last flight on legs that no longer felt like they belonged to him and came out into the gray light of a ruined street just as the entire building folded in on itself behind him with a sound like the world clearing its throat.

He lay on his back in the rubble and breathed, a long, ragged, grateful breath that tasted of dust and old blood, and it was only when he turned his head that he saw the mess he had left behind him. The street was full of people who had been powerful ten minutes ago and were now staring at their own hands as if they had been replaced with someone else's. Dorian sat on the curb with his face in his palms, the two brothers who did the heavy lifting were arguing in cracked whispers about whether the blackout had been a monster skill or a System fault, and several hundred meters down the road a patrol of Ironhaven hunters in matching gray armor were hauling an injured comrade out of a ditch while shouting into radios that did nothing but hiss. Whatever the black object had done in those three seconds, it had left a trail of confusion and bruises across half the district, and Kael realized with a slow drop in his stomach that every person in sight was too distracted to notice the one man who had walked out of a dungeon nobody should have survived.

He did the only sensible thing and pulled his hood low, tucked the object deeper inside his jacket, and slipped away along the broken wall of a collapsed pharmacy, moving in the shadow of the debris until the voices behind him faded. He did not know what he was carrying, and he did not want to find out in the open, but one thing was already clear to him with the quiet certainty that had kept him alive for seven years: people who lost their powers for three seconds would spend a great deal of effort finding out why, and a man who had lost nothing because he had nothing to lose would eventually make a very interesting answer.

The road back to Ironhaven took nearly two hours on foot, through a landscape of burned-out cars and buildings gutted to their steel skeletons, past stretches of cracked highway where the weeds had grown waist high and the wind carried the smell of rain and rust. Kael had walked that road so many times he could have done it blind, and normally he used the hours to count what he owned and what he owed, but today his mind kept circling back to the message that had floated in front of him in the dungeon. The System had used his name, and it had sounded afraid of him, and no matter how many times he told himself that a machine could not feel anything, the memory of those trembling letters kept crawling under his skin.

Then the walls of the city rose out of the haze, and the thought was swept away by the old familiar feeling of walking back into a place that had never wanted him.

Ironhaven had been a port city once, and the System had remade it into a fortress, with walls sixty meters high built from the wreckage of three neighboring towns and crowned with glowing blue towers that scanned every approach. Inside those walls the wealthy System users lived in clean apartments with working lights and real glass, and they ate meat that came from guarded farms and drank water that had been filtered twice. Outside the inner walls, in the sprawl of tin roofs and patched concrete that everyone called the Gutter, thousands of people with weak Systems or no Systems at all packed themselves into rooms the size of closets and fought each other for the scraps the city allowed through its gates. Kael had been born in a different New York and a different life, but he had lived in the Gutter for six years, and he knew every crooked alley of it the way a man knows the scars on his own hands.

The checkpoint at the Gutter gate was busier than usual, because word of the strange blackout had already spread and every guard on duty looked jumpy and furious in the same breath. A long line of scavengers and day laborers shuffled forward under the humming blue scanners, each one pausing for a second beneath the light so that a panel above the arch could flash their name, level, and permissions, and Kael felt his pulse quicken when he joined the line, because the scanners had been his lifelong humiliation and tonight they might become something worse. When his turn came he stepped under the light the way he always did, and the panel above the arch stayed blank, then blinked twice and displayed the single word it had shown him a thousand times before, which was UNREGISTERED. The guard on duty, a thick-necked man named Hobb who had spat at Kael's feet on three separate occasions, glanced at the screen and sneered without even looking up. "Go on, Blank. Try not to catch anything on your way in."

Kael walked through, grateful for once to be beneath their notice, and kept his face carefully dull until the gate was far behind him. The Gutter folded around him in a wave of noise and smoke and cooking oil, with vendors shouting over pots of gray stew, children chasing each other through puddles that smelled of chemicals, and a preacher on a crate wailing that the System was a god who punished the weak for their sins. He ducked through the crowd with his head down, bought a bruised apple for a copper chip, and climbed the stairs of a sagging tenement to the bunk he rented from a widow named Mrs. Okafor, where he finally sat on the thin mattress and let his shaking hands rest on his knees.

His arm needed stitching, and he did it himself with a needle and thread from a kit he kept under the floorboard, biting down on a rag while he sewed the long cut closed. It took three tries to get the thread through his skin, and when it was done he sat there sweating and light-headed, staring at the bag of antibiotics he had managed to save, which was supposed to be worth enough to cover a month of rent and a week of real food. He had nearly died for it, and he had nearly died twice over for something else, and the second thing was sitting on the blanket beside him now, dark and quiet in the weak light from the window.

He turned it over in his fingers for the first time since leaving the dungeon. It was about the size of his palm, cool and smooth like river stone though it was clearly metal, and the strange lines on its surface seemed to shift when he was not looking at them directly, as if they were written in a language that rearranged itself whenever it was read. He pressed his thumb against the largest line and felt a faint hum travel up his arm, steady and patient, like the purr of an animal that had finally found a warm place to sleep, and for a moment the noise of the street outside seemed to fade until all he could hear was his own slow breathing. Then someone pounded on the door hard enough to rattle the hinges, and he shoved the object under his pillow and reached for the knife beside his bed with his heart in his throat.

It was only Mrs. Okafor, red-eyed and wrapped in a shawl, holding a crumpled paper in her fist. "They are putting up notices all over the district," she said, breathless from the stairs. "Commander Voss has ordered a citywide investigation into what he is calling a terrorist attack on the Directorate's dungeon forecasting network, and every building has to open its rooms to inspection by tomorrow night." She pressed the paper into his hands, and Kael unfolded it to find an official seal, a threat of public execution for anyone caught sheltering the culprits, and a line near the bottom that made his stomach turn cold. It said that any person who had been present in the Northern Medical Ruins during the incident was ordered to report to the enforcement office immediately for questioning, and that anyone who failed to appear would be treated as an accomplice.

"I heard the whole thing from the neighbors," she added, lowering her voice and glancing over her shoulder at the empty stairwell. "A man from your crew came to the gate an hour ago, shouting to every guard he could find about how the unregistered one stayed behind in the dungeon and never came out." She looked at him for a long moment, and there was something in her wrinkled face that was not quite fear and not quite pity, but closer to the look of someone who had finally understood a joke the world had been telling for years. "They are looking for you, Kael. And I don't think it is because they want to thank you for surviving."

He thanked her, and he meant it, and when the door closed behind her he stood in the middle of the little room listening to the footsteps fade down the stairs while the object under his pillow gave a single warm pulse, as though it had heard every word. By the time he pulled his bag from under the bed and began packing the few things he owned, the first siren was already wailing across the rooftops of the Gutter, and somewhere beyond the walls of the inner city, in a tower of glass and steel where the lights never went out, a man who ruled thousands of lives with the flick of a hand was turning to his officers to give the order that would put Kael Draven's face on every screen in Ironhaven before the sun came up.