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

CHAPTER 4

For a heartbeat nobody in the Black Market moved, and then the whole tunnel erupted at once, with merchants sweeping their goods into sacks, buyers shoving each other toward the exits, and a woman near the far platform screaming a child's name into the crush of bodies. Kael felt Nyra's fingers close around his sleeve with surprising strength. "Not the stairs," she said, pulling him toward the shadow behind Pell's stall. "They'll have sealed both ends by now, and the second those soldiers get close enough, Voss will use his ability on everyone in the tunnel."

"His ability?" Kael asked, already wrapping the black object in a rag and sliding it back into the lining of his jacket.

"He suppresses System powers in a wide radius," she said, glancing over her shoulder with her face gone pale in the lantern light. "Anyone with a skill will feel it drain out of them like water through a cracked bowl, and the soldiers wear dampening gear so they're immune. It's how he has kept this city under his boot for four years."

Pell had already dropped to his knees behind the counter and was clawing at a square of rusted sheet metal in the floor, muttering curses with his thin hands shaking so badly he could barely find the latch. The metal came loose with a groan, revealing a narrow drainage shaft that dropped into pitch darkness and breathed out a smell of old rainwater and rot, and the appraiser grabbed Kael's wrist with a grip that surprised him. "Take it and go," Pell said hoarsely. "I never saw you, I never scanned that thing, and if anyone asks I'll tell them you were a thief who tried to rob me. Get out of here, Blank, and for the love of everything, don't let them take that object alive."

Boots hammered down the stairwell and a cold, humming pressure rolled across the platform like a change in the weather. Kael felt it brush over his skin and thought for a moment that something terrible was about to happen to him, but nothing did, and when he looked around he saw the market dissolving into chaos as merchants and thieves clutched their heads, dropping glowing trinkets and cursing as the abilities they had paid so much to earn drained away. A man next to him sank to his knees with his hands pressed against his eyes, and a woman who had been holding a flame in her palm a second earlier stared at the empty skin in horror, while Kael, who had never possessed any power to lose, stood in the middle of it all with nothing changed except the sinking realization that Nyra was staring at him with wide, stunned eyes.

"You didn't feel that," she whispered.

"I don't have anything to feel," he said, and heard how thin it sounded in his own ears.

"Exactly," she breathed, and her look sharpened into a dangerous kind of hope, but there was no time to say more, because the first row of armored soldiers had reached the bottom of the stairs with their weapons raised, and a harsh voice boomed through the tunnel demanding that every person kneel with hands on their heads. Kael grabbed the edge of the shaft and swung his legs down into the dark, and Nyra hesitated at the opening with her satchel clutched against her chest, looking back toward the crowd with an expression he could not read.

"Come on," he hissed, reaching up for her hand. "There isn't room for both of us to be heroes."

"Neither of us is going to be a hero," Nyra said, and her voice had gone strangely calm. "But if they find an open shaft and two missing people, they'll send half the squad after us and we'll be caught in a pipe with no way out. If they find only one of us, they'll think the other already escaped." She pressed something small and hard into his palm, a thin metal key on a cord, and closed his fingers over it with both of her hands. "Sector Nine, the old substation behind the water tower, blue door on the east side. Everything you need to see is there. Find it, Kael, and read the files before you decide anything."

"Nyra, don't," he started, but she had already stepped back from the shaft, and before he could grab her she had kicked the metal cover over the opening and the world went black above his head. Through the narrow gap at the edge he heard her voice ring out across the tunnel, loud and clear and furious, shouting that the thief had gone through the eastern passage and that she had seen him with her own eyes. There was a scramble of running feet, a sharp cry, the thud of a body hitting concrete, and then a cold voice speaking over the noise with the unhurried confidence of a man who had never once doubted that the world would obey him.

"Search her satchel," the voice said. "And bring her up to the transport. Commander Voss will want to ask her about her friends personally."

Kael pressed his forehead against the damp stone and shook, because every part of him wanted to climb back up and fight, and every part of him knew that a man with one cut arm and a knife would last about four seconds against a squad of armored soldiers. He thought of his sister's name spoken in a stranger's voice, of the list that Nyra had promised and the hand that had pushed the key into his fingers, and the weight of what he owed a woman he had known for ten minutes settled on his chest like a stone. Then he started crawling through the drainage shaft with the black object pressed against his ribs, scraping his knees on rust and slime, while the sounds of the raid faded behind him into muffled shouts and the distant crack of something breaking.

He came out nearly half an hour later through a grate in an alley six blocks from the market, soaked with filthy water and shivering, and lay on his back in the cold air for a full minute before he could trust his legs to hold him. The sky above the Gutter had turned a dirty orange, and a column of black smoke was rising from the direction of the butcher's yard, thick enough that he knew the soldiers had set fire to the entrance to flush out anyone still hiding below. Sirens wailed across the district, searchlights swept the rooftops, and on the wall of the building across the alley a freshly pasted notice fluttered in the hot wind, showing a blurry image of a young man with dark hair and a hooded jacket, taken from some guard's camera at the gate and captioned with a bounty that made his stomach turn over.

He tore it down, crumpled it in his fist, and kept moving through the shadows, taking the long way around the main roads until he found himself on a rooftop overlooking the central depot where the enforcement trucks gathered. Below him, a line of armored vehicles stood idling with their headlights cutting through the smoke, and soldiers in gray were herding bound prisoners from the market up a loading ramp, dozens of men and women with their faces bloodied and their hands tied behind their backs. Kael searched the line with burning eyes until he found her near the end, walking with her chin held high despite the cut across her lip, and watched a soldier shove her up into the back of a windowless black truck whose side bore a small silver emblem he had never seen before, a circle split by a single vertical line.

An officer with a clipboard called out the destination to the driver, and the words carried clearly through the damp night air, so low and ordinary that the man who spoke them could not have guessed they would change the course of a stranger's life. "Special transfer, no inspection, straight to the Hollow Ward research facility, and Commander Voss wants the woman in a separate cell." The truck's engine growled and the doors slammed, and Kael crouched on the cold roof with the key from Nyra's hands burning against his palm and the black object humming softly against his chest, understanding with perfect clarity that he could leave now and survive, or follow that truck into the one place in Ironhaven nobody had ever come back from, and that his sister's name had already made the choice for him before he ever finished asking himself the question.