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

CHAPTER 3

Kael left the tenement through the window, because the front stairs were already filling with the heavy boots of enforcement officers going door to door, and he dropped onto the sagging awning of the noodle stall below with his bag over one shoulder and the black object pressed against his chest. The awning tore under his weight and dumped him into a puddle of dishwater, which earned him a furious shout from the stall owner and one very long second of terror, but nobody in the Gutter looked twice at a man covered in filth running away from trouble, because half the district ran from trouble on any ordinary night. He pulled his hood low, took the narrowest alley he knew, and followed it downhill toward the only place in Ironhaven where a man with no System and something unexplainable in his jacket could hope to find a buyer before sunrise.

The Black Market had no sign and no fixed address, only a rusted maintenance hatch behind a butcher's yard that opened onto a long concrete stairway descending into the old subway tunnels, and Kael had used it often enough that the guard at the bottom, a bored woman with a shaved head and a cigarette stub tucked behind her ear, only grunted and held out her palm for the entrance chip. He paid her with the last of his coppers and stepped into a world of low arches and swinging lanterns, where hundreds of people haggled over tables crowded with dungeon fragments, monster teeth, stolen skill scrolls, and glass jars of glowing liquid that probably should not have been legal to own. The air was thick with incense and machine oil and the sour smell of too many bodies, and somewhere under all of it a man was singing an old pre-System song in a voice so broken it made Kael's chest ache for reasons he did not have time to examine.

He wound through the crowd toward a stall near the far end of the platform, a crooked booth lit by a single green lamp, where an appraiser named Pell sat hunched over a battered scanning device that he swore could identify anything in the known world. Pell was a gaunt, twitchy man in his fifties with ink-stained fingers and an eye that had been replaced by a cheap System implant, and he had cheated Kael at least four times over the years, though always by small amounts, which in the Gutter counted as a kind of friendship. He looked up when Kael arrived, took in the torn jacket and the stitched arm and the exhausted eyes, and let out a low whistle. "You look like you walked out of a war, Blank. If you've brought me more cracked batteries, I'm not interested, and if you've brought me trouble, I'm even less interested."

"I brought you something that's worth more than both," Kael said, and set the black object on the counter between them.

Pell's smile faded the moment he really looked at it. He leaned forward, pushed the lens of his implant up against the metal, and began to mutter under his breath in the low, rapid voice of a man calculating prices, but the muttering slowed and then stopped altogether as he turned the thing over with his fingertips. "I've never seen this alloy," he said finally, in a very different tone, and he pulled his scanner closer with hands that had started to tremble. "Where did you get it?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters a great deal if it's what I'm starting to think it is." He passed the scanner over the object and the green lamp flickered, and then the screen on the device went completely white and filled with a long string of characters that Kael could not read but that made Pell's face go slack with confusion. Error messages scrolled in rapid succession, then the device let out a shrill electronic whine and shut itself down with a puff of acrid smoke, leaving a faint burning smell in the damp tunnel air. Pell stared at the dead machine for a long moment, then tried a second scanner from under the counter, and a third, and each of them failed in a slightly different way, one displaying a screen of pure static, one repeating the word NULL until it froze, and the last one simply refusing to power on whenever the object sat within a meter of it.

"That's impossible," Pell whispered, and sweat was shining on his forehead now. "Everything that exists has a signature. The System sees everything. It sees the rocks in the ground and the water in the pipes and the dirt under my fingernails. If something can't be scanned, it means the System has decided that thing doesn't exist, and I have never in my life seen the System decide that about anything except you."

The words landed harder than Kael expected, and he found himself looking down at the object with a new, uneasy kind of recognition, because he had spent seven years being the thing the System could not see, and now he had found something that shared that strange kind of absence. He almost told Pell about the message in the dungeon, about the trembling letters that had said his name, but he swallowed it, because a man who talked too much in the Black Market tended to wake up with fewer teeth. Instead he asked, in the flattest voice he could manage, "How much would someone pay for it?"

"Nobody will pay for it," Pell said, and for the first time since Kael had known him, the old appraiser looked genuinely afraid. "Nobody in their right mind would take it into their stall, because the Directorate monitors every object that passes through these tunnels, and an item the System can't classify is exactly the sort of thing that brings enforcement down on a whole district. You have to get it out of here, Kael, right now, tonight, before one of my customers finds a reason to sell the information about it."

Kael was already reaching for the object when a stranger's voice spoke softly at his shoulder. "Don't touch it with your bare hand again. At least not until you understand what it does to the people holding it."

He spun with his hand on the knife in his belt, and found himself facing a young woman in a long gray coat, with sharp dark eyes, ink smudged on the side of one hand, and a satchel that she clutched against her hip with the kind of care people usually saved for babies. She might have been twenty-seven, with black hair pulled back in a hasty knot and dark circles under her eyes that suggested she had not slept properly in weeks, and she stood half in the shadow of the next stall as though she had been listening for a long time. Pell recoiled so fast he knocked over his own stool. "Stay away from me, Solis. I told you last time, I don't want any part of your research."

"You don't have to," the woman said, without taking her eyes off Kael. "I'm not here for you." She stepped closer, and Kael noticed that her gaze kept dropping to the object on the counter with a hunger she was clearly trying to hide, the look of a person who had been searching for something so long that she no longer quite believed it was real. "My name is Nyra Solis, and until eight months ago I was an analyst at the Central Evaluation Bureau. I studied people whose attributes changed in ways the System could not explain, and I have seen reports about objects exactly like that one in the files of seventeen missing persons."

"Missing persons," Kael repeated, and felt something cold begin to spread beneath his ribs.

"People who touched something the System could not read, and vanished within days." She lowered her voice until it was barely louder than the lanterns hissing in their brackets. "Their records were deleted, their apartments were cleaned out, and every witness I tracked down either forgot them or refused to talk. But you touched one of these things two hours ago and you are standing here talking to me, and that has never happened before." She drew a long breath, and her eyes lifted to meet his with a steady, desperate honesty that he found much harder to dismiss than any threat. "I think you are the reason the System is hunting them, and I think you are the only person alive who might survive finding out why."

He should have run. Every habit he owned told him to grab the object and vanish into the tunnels before a stranger with a stolen satchel and a head full of conspiracy dragged him into something he could not climb out of. But there was a hollow, hungry place inside him that had been waiting seven years for anyone to say that the things he had noticed were real, that the disappearances and the false dungeon openings and the monsters appearing early were not just paranoia in a man with too much time to think, and the look on her face told him she had been carrying that same hollow place for just as long. "What do you want from me?" he asked quietly.

"An hour," Nyra said. "I have files at my hideout, evidence you can read with your own eyes. If you still want to sell it after that, I'll help you find a buyer who won't get you killed." She hesitated, then added in a rush, "And there is a name in those files you need to see. Draven. It appears on a list of children who were taken from their homes in the month before the System arrived, and one of the entries is a girl named Mira."

The tunnel seemed to tilt around him. Kael heard his own pulse in his ears, loud and uneven, and for a moment he could not remember how to breathe, because he had not heard his sister's name spoken aloud by anyone but himself in seven years. He opened his mouth to ask a hundred questions at once, and in that instant the green lamp on Pell's counter flickered, the lanterns along the tunnel ceiling swayed on their hooks, and a deep, rhythmic thunder rolled down the stairwell from above, the unmistakable sound of dozens of armored boots hitting the concrete in perfect unison. The crowd went silent all at once, the singer's broken song died in his throat, and from the far end of the platform came the first shouted order of the night, ringing clear and cold through the dark.

"Enforcement division, by order of Commander Voss. Nobody leaves this market until every one of you has been searched."