Mara POV
The crying is coming from my left, under a slab of concrete the size of a dining table.
I know before I reach it that someone small is underneath. The sound is too high, too thin. A child's cry has a specific frequency that goes straight past your ears and grabs something in your chest. I have never had a little sibling. I have never worked with kids. I don't know how I know this.
I just know.
"Hey." The man, Kael, catches my arm from behind. "You don't know what's under there."
I pull free. "I can hear what's under there."
He doesn't stop me again. I'm not sure if that means he respects it or if he just decided I'm not his problem yet. Either way, I drop to my knees next to the slab and press my face to the gap at the edge.
Dark. Dust. And a pair of eyes looking straight back at me.
"Hi." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "I'm Mara. I'm going to get you out. Can you tell me if anything hurts?"
The eyes blink. The crying stops not gradually, just stops, like someone turned a switch. Which is almost scarier than the crying.
The child says nothing.
Kael moves the slab.
I don't ask him to. He just crouches beside me, assesses the angle for about two seconds, and shifts the concrete with the focused efficiency of someone who has done this before and doesn't need praise for it. I reach into the gap the moment it's wide enough and close my hands around small arms and pull.
The girl comes out in one piece.
She is maybe eight years old. Dust-white from head to foot, like a ghost of herself. There is a cut on her forehead, dried now, not dangerous. She is not crying anymore. She is looking at me with the most serious expression I have ever seen on a child, as if she is assessing me the way Kael assessed the slab.
Then she grabs a fistful of my sleeve.
She doesn't squeeze. She doesn't pull. Just holds. Like she is checking that I'm real and has
decided, having confirmed it, not to let go.
"Okay," I say, mostly to myself. "Okay."
I look up at Kael.
He is watching the child with an expression I can't fully read. It isn't warmth. I get the sense that warmth is not a gear he runs in naturally. But it isn't nothing, either. He looks at her the way you look at something that has just complicated every plan you made.
"Is she yours?" he asks.
"No."
"Do you know her?"
"No."
A pause. "Then we need to move."
"I know." I don't move. The girl's grip on my sleeve does not loosen.
Kael's name is the only thing he has volunteered. He hands me a water canteen without explaining why he has it or where he's going or who the "we" is when he says we need to move. I drink two mouthfuls and give the rest to the girl, who drinks it with the same serious efficiency she does everything else.
The System panel reappears in front of my face while I'm helping her.
BASE ARCHITECT MYTHIC TIER RARITY: 1 IN 11,000,000 TUTORIAL AVAILABLE. PRESS TO BEGIN.
I close it again.
"You keep closing that," Kael says. He is three feet away, scanning the street in every direction at once, the way animals do when they know predators exist.
"It's not urgent."
"Your class assignment is not urgent."
"The child is urgent. The class can wait." I look at him. "Why do you care what I do with my own panel?"
He doesn't answer. But something in his jaw shifts, and he turns back to his perimeter scan, and I get the strange feeling I said something that mattered and neither of us knows why.
We move.
Kael sets the pace fast, not running, the specific speed of someone who understands that sprinting wears you down and getting worn down gets you killed. The girl walks beside me with her hand now moved from my sleeve to my actual hand. Her grip is firm. Businesslike.
The city around us is unrecognizable.
I grew up here. I know this street. I know the coffee shop on the corner of Fifth that always burned the morning batch and the bookstore that kept the same handwritten SALE sign in the window for eleven years, and the bus stop where I stood every morning for four years, making the same commute. None of it looks like what I remember. It looks like a photograph of itself that someone crumpled up.
I don't let myself feel that yet. I file it somewhere deep, and I keep walking.
"Where are we going?" I ask Kael's back.
"East."
"Why east?"
"Because my camp is east."
"Your camp."
"Yes."
I wait for more. More does not come. The girl looks up at me like she is also waiting. We share a moment of mutual understanding about this man's conversational style.
"How many people?" I try.
"Enough."
"Enough for what?"
He stops walking, turns around, and looks at me. Just looks. Not threatening, more like a teacher who has run out of patience with a very specific type of question.
"Enough to survive the next seventy-two hours," he says. "Which is the only math that matters right now. Can you keep up?"
I have been keeping up. I am literally right behind him. I choose not to say this.
"Yes," I say.
He turns back around. We keep walking.
The girl squeezes my hand once, quickly. I look down at her. She is looking straight ahead, expression neutral, but I get the distinct impression she just agreed with me.
We are four blocks from wherever east is when the System panel opens in front of my face without me touching it.
ALERT: MYTHIC-TIER CLASS ACTIVITY DETECTED IN YOUR REGION. OTHER PLAYERS HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED OF YOUR LOCATION.
I stop walking.
Kael stops two steps later and turns. He reads my face instead of asking what's wrong, which I am starting to understand is just how he communicates.
"What is it?"
I turn the panel so he can see it.
His expression does not change. But he goes very, very still in the way that I will learn means the opposite of calm.
He says, "We need to move faster."
He says, "Don't close that panel this time."
He says, "And whatever your class does, figure it out. Now."
Somewhere behind us, in the ruins we just left, I hear the sound of boots. Many boots. Moving fast.
And they are heading directly for us.