Chapter 21

Dawn on Alcatraz smelled like salt, diesel, and the particular ozone tang of a System that had rebooted at 3:17 AM and decided we were still on its kill list.

I woke to Maya kicking my cot.

"Up, debug boy. Raid day."

My status screen materialized before my eyes had fully opened, rude as a push notification from hell:

`[KEVIN PARK | LVL 14 | DEBUGGER]` `[HP: 100/100 | MANA: 100/100]` `[ADMIN PURGE: 94% — PAUSED]` `[LOCAL INSTANCE: ONLINE — PATCHED]` `[QUEST: THE PYRAMID — ACTIVE]` `[TIME REMAINING UNTIL PURGE RESUME: UNKNOWN]`

Unknown.

My favorite difficulty setting.

The command center had become a gear pit overnight. Elizabeth Chen ran logistics like she was speedrunning a survival game with permadeath enabled—crates labeled by weight, route maps laminated, med kits sorted by injury type instead of alphabet because alphabet was for people who still believed in civilization.

Marcus drilled Vance's people on the north wall while Colonel Vance herself checked ammunition counts with the expression of someone doing math on how many lives each bullet was worth.

Ghost sat in a corner cleaning his katana.

Arm still splinted.

Eyes already on the boat.

Professor Chen and Elizabeth argued over frequency harmonics in whispers that sounded like two scientists trying to defuse a bomb made of metaphysics.

Me?

I had four hours of sleep, a cracked laptop, and a wiki entry titled *Pyramid Raid — DO NOT DIE STUPID* that was somehow both a joke and a prayer.

---

I made coffee from a salvaged machine that wheezed like it had asthma.

Maya stole my mug before I finished pouring.

"Combat fuel," she said.

"That's my coping mechanism."

"Your coping mechanism is writing exploits at three AM and calling it self-care."

She wasn't wrong.

I pulled up my laptop at the central table. The screen flickered—post-crash artifacts, lines of static that looked like the System's hangover. The local instance had rebooted harder than I expected. New patch notes scrolled across my debugger overlay when I blinked:

`[PATCH 7.4.2 — DEPLOYED]` `[- Gravity Override: REMOVED]` `[- Visual Artifact Decoys: HARDENED]` `[+ Enforcer Pathfinding v2]` `[+ Memory Buffer: SANITIZED]`

Sanitized.

Of course they'd fixed my buffer overflow.

Party poopers.

"Professor," I said. "Tell me something good."

She didn't look up from her tablet. "The crash bought us six hours of stable local bandwidth. The Pyramid's signal is stronger than before. Whatever's broadcasting from the center of San Francisco, it's… awake."

"Awake is bad."

"Awake is honest."

Elizabeth slid a folder toward me. Inside: hand-drawn floor maps Ghost had stolen from a dead cartographer's quest log, satellite photos from before Day Zero, and a printout of something that looked like API documentation for a building that shouldn't have API documentation.

"The Pyramid has eighteen floors above ground," Elizabeth said. "Surveys suggest more below. Monster density increases per floor. Boss encounters at five, ten, fifteen, and eighteen."

"Standard dungeon cadence," I muttered.

"Standard if dungeons killed three hundred thousand people in the first week," Marcus said, joining us. He set a rifle on the table like punctuation. "We move by boat to Pier 39, then overland through the Financial District. Three miles. Expect everything."

"Everything is vague."

"Everything is accurate."

Ghost stood. "I'll scout the water route. Fifteen minutes."

He was gone before anyone could argue—shadow and discipline and the kind of movement that made my AGI stat feel personally insulted.

---

I spent the next hour doing what I did best: staring at code until it confessed.

The System's local instance left fingerprints everywhere now—tiny logs in the air, metadata on monsters, latency spikes when something *important* happened nearby. My [Syntax Analysis] passive had evolved without a fanfare popup, which meant the System was either sloppy or trying to hide a gift.

I pulled up a monster spawn log from last night's perimeter skirmish.

Grief Hound #44 had despawned wrong.

Not died.

*Despawned.*

One frame of its hitbox still existed in the cache after the body dissolved—like a forgotten variable in a loop nobody closed.

`[OBJECT ID: 0x7FA3C — ORPHANED]` `[STATE: PERSISTENT GHOST COLLIDER]`

Ghost collider.

I almost laughed.

"Found something," I said.

Professor Chen leaned in. "Explain in words that won't make me regret my life choices."

"The System cleans up dead monsters. But it doesn't always zero the collision mesh immediately. There's a one-frame window where the mesh ID still exists in the spawn table but points to nothing. If you reference that ID with a summon command—"

"You summon nothing."

"I summon *nothing*." I grinned. "Which is not the same as summoning nothing. I summon a hole. A walking null. A walking permissions error."

Maya made a face. "That sounds horrifying."

"That sounds *useful*."

I typed fast.

The exploit was ugly—recursive pointer to a deleted object, chained through three deprecated API calls I'd scraped from the wiki and one I invented by accident last Tuesday.

My mana ticked down.

My heart ticked up.

`[CAST: SUMMON — TARGET ID 0x7FA3C]` `[ERROR: NULL ENTITY]` `[ERROR: NULL ENTITY — STACK TRACE AVAILABLE]` `[DEBUGGER: STACK TRACE CAPTURED]`

The air in front of me *tore*.

Not dramatically.

Not like a portal in a game trailer.

Like reality hiccupping when you force a null pointer into a renderer that assumed programmers would behave.

A shape appeared—humanoid, featureless, edges flickering. It didn't attack. It didn't move. It stood between me and the table like a living segfault.

`[NULL WRAITH — SUMMONED]` `[DURATION: 12 SECONDS]` `[BEHAVIOR: ABSORB HOSTILE TARGETING]`

Maya's axe hand twitched. "Kevin, what is that."

"That is a bug wearing a body."

Marcus raised his rifle, then lowered it when the wraith didn't react to his threat display. "It's blocking line of sight to you."

"It's blocking line of sight to me *in the System's targeting layer*," I said. "Enforcers don't see with eyes. Neither do most monsters. They query. This thing returns *query failed*."

Professor Chen's eyes went wide. "You didn't summon a creature. You summoned an error state."

"I summoned unemployment for anything trying to lock onto me."

The wraith flickered.

Twelve seconds.

Gone.

My status screen screamed:

`[EXPLOIT LOGGED — PENDING PATCH]` `[NEW SKILL CANDIDATE: NULL SUMMON]`

Skill candidate.

The System was *offering* me a skill for breaking it.

Like a game rewarding speedrun glitches until the devs cried.

"We leave in thirty minutes," Elizabeth said. "Pack the exploit. Pack the ego. Leave the cot."

I closed my laptop.

The null summon had cost me half my mana and all my dignity, which felt fair.

---

Gear check.

Reinforced pipe on my belt—still my main weapon because the System thought that was funny.

Cracked laptop in waterproof bag Elizabeth had sewn herself, which was both touching and alarming.

Jacket with bullet holes because superstition was free.

Maya: fire axe, riot armor, [Surgical Strike] ready.

Ghost: katana, splint, [Umbral Step]—he'd tested the arm at dawn and said nothing, which meant pain.

Professor Chen: no weapons, two tablets, one drive labeled *DO NOT DROP* in red paint.

Elizabeth: radio, maps, med kit, the calm of someone who'd organized evacuations before breakfast.

Marcus: rifle, sidearm, knife, the posture of a man who'd stopped calling anything a vacation in 2011.

Vance's squad would hold Alcatraz.

Our party would hit the Pyramid.

Six people against an operating system that had eaten a city.

Vegas would call those odds generous.

---

The boat left at 6:00 AM.

Fog rolled across the bay like a loading screen between acts.

I stood at the rail watching San Francisco slide past—broken skyline, the Pyramid's spire punching through cloud cover in the distance, black glass catching light like a blade.

My party stood with me.

Not behind me.

*With* me.

`[PARTY BUFF: MORALE — STABLE]` `[DEBUFF: TERROR — SUPPRESSED]`

Suppressed.

Not removed.

Honest UI for once.

Ghost's voice in my earpiece: "Contact north. Two skimmers on the water."

Skimmers.

New word.

Bad word.

Shapes cut through the fog—flat, fast, like manta rays made of chrome and teeth. They rode the surface without touching it, physics optional.

Marcus opened fire.

Maya braced for impact.

I pulled up my laptop, fingers cold.

"Null summon on me," I said. "Twelve seconds. Don't waste them."

The tear opened again.

The wraith stood at my shoulder.

Targeting queries died.

Skimmer projectiles veered like they couldn't decide who they hated.

Ghost's katana took one skimmer mid-leap—pixel blood, screech of metal on nothing.

The second rammed our hull.

Wood cracked.

Elizabeth swore with professional precision.

I chained the orphan ID exploit into a second cast—longer duration, worse mana burn:

`[NULL WRAITH — EXTENDED: 18 SECONDS]` `[WARNING: REALITY STABILITY -3%]`

Three percent.

Cheap.

"Kevin!" Maya shouted. "Port side!"

A third skimmer.

Bigger.

Mini-boss energy on a Tuesday morning.

I didn't have time for elegance.

I dumped every orphaned mesh ID from last night's logs into one command—seven at once, seven null holes, seven queries failing in harmony.

The water *glitched*.

Skimmers stuttered mid-charge like video buffering.

Ghost appeared behind the big one—shadow step, blade through core, dissolve.

Silence except engines and breathing.

`[+1,240 XP — SHARED]` `[LEVEL PROGRESS: 14 → 15%]`

Not a level yet.

Close.

Professor Chen grabbed my shoulder. "You just overwrote local water physics."

"Temporarily."

"That's still insane."

"Insane is the minimum bar for today."

---

Pier 39 looked like a postcard someone had set on fire.

Tourist traps rotted into spawn camps.

Sea lions were gone.

Something with too many arms had nested in the carousel.

We didn't stop.

Marcus led overland—swift, silent, hand signals I was learning because subtitles for gunfire were a bad way to die.

Ghost ranged ahead.

Maya covered our six.

I walked in the middle with the laptop and the growing certainty that the System was watching me test tools it would patch by lunch.

My overlay flickered:

`[MESSAGE — ENCRYPTED]` `[SOURCE: ADMIN]` `[TEXT: GOOD MORNING, KEVIN.]`

My hands stopped.

Maya noticed. "Problem?"

"Morning message from our favorite cosmic HR department."

"Read it or don't read it?"

"Read it."

I opened the channel.

`[ADMIN: GOOD MORNING, KEVIN.]` `[ADMIN: BRING YOUR PARTY.]` `[ADMIN: BRING YOUR COURAGE.]` `[ADMIN: DO NOT BRING YOUR FEAR — IT SPOILS THE DATA.]`

"Charming," Ghost said over radio. He'd seen the same ping on his HUD. Everyone with a System link had probably seen it.

Professor Chen's voice was tight. "It's tracking our emotional states."

"Of course it is." I forced my feet to move. "It's been A/B testing humanity since Day Zero. Why stop at body count?"

---

The Financial District rose like gravestones for capitalism.

Glass towers reflected monsters in the windows—things that used to be people, things that never were.

We moved block by block.

Fights were short.

Efficient.

Maya's axe work looked cleaner in daylight—less panic, more craft.

Ghost killed what she didn't.

Marcus suppressed what tried to flank.

I null-summoned when targeting got hot.

Professor Chen called weak points from monster logs like a sports announcer for apocalypse.

Elizabeth kept us moving when we wanted to stare.

By noon we'd cleared five blocks.

By one PM we could see the Pyramid's base.

It wasn't a pyramid the way textbooks meant.

It was a *structure*—terraced black stone and exposed circuitry, half cathedral, half server rack, rising eighteen floors into fog that seemed generated locally, like weather as UI.

The entrance yawned open.

No door.

No guard.

Just stairs descending and ascending, split like the System couldn't decide if we were guests or garbage.

`[ZONE: THE PYRAMID — FLOOR 0]` `[RECOMMENDED LEVEL: 20+]` `[YOUR LEVEL: 14]` `[SUGGESTED ACTION: RETREAT]`

"Helpful," I muttered.

Marcus checked his magazine. "Formation. Ghost, point. Maya, left. Kevin, center. Professors, behind Kevin. Elizabeth, rear guard."

"I'm rear guard," Elizabeth said. "I have one pistol and excellent boundaries."

"Boundaries save lives."

We didn't step inside yet.

Not until we'd earned the right to breathe at the door.

My debugger overlay flickered warnings even from the plaza edge:

`[SANDBOX DETECTED — RANGE: 50m]` `[RULESET: DUNGEON v3 — INACTIVE UNTIL ENTRY]` `[ANTI-CHEAT: STANDBY]`

Anti-cheat on standby.

Like a gun on a table.

Waiting.

`[QUEST UPDATED: REACH THE PYRAMID]` `[NEXT: THE CROSSING]` `[FAILURE: DELETION]`

Professor Chen whispered, "Kevin—the exploit. Log it to the drive. If we die on the street, someone else needs the orphan mesh trick."

I copied the script.

Encrypted it.

Named the file `sorry_for_the_segfault.zip`.

Behind us, Alcatraz was a memory.

Ahead of us, three miles that had looked short on a map and long in every nightmare I'd had since Day Zero.

Game on.

---

The boat docked at Pier 39 with a groan that sounded like forgiveness.

Vance's people weren't coming.

That had been decided at 4:00 AM in a meeting that felt like a funeral with PowerPoint—Elizabeth presenting casualty models, Marcus presenting reality, me presenting the only argument that mattered: *if we don't go to the Pyramid, the Purge finishes and everyone on this island gets deleted anyway.*

Colonel Vance had looked at me for a long time.

Then she'd nodded once.

"Hold the wall," she'd said. "Go break theirs."

Now the wall was behind us.

The Pyramid was ahead.

Ghost returned from his fifteen-minute scout with news I didn't like and couldn't ignore.

"Two patrol routes on the waterfront," he said. "Chrome Stalkers—new variant. They ping heat and System signatures. Your laptop is a beacon."

"So I turn it off."

"Then you're blind."

"Then I'm a tourist." I wiped salt off the screen. "We go fast. Pier to Market in twenty minutes. No sightseeing."

Marcus grunted approval.

Maya checked her axe edge—the ritual she'd done before every fight since Day Three, like sharpening hope.

Professor Chen pulled me aside while the others loaded the last crate.

"Kevin," she said quietly. "The null summon exploit. It's elegant. It's also a confession."

"Confession?"

"The System is learning you. Every exploit you use becomes a data point. When you cast null entities, you're teaching it what a debugger thinks like."

I looked at the Pyramid through the fog.

"Maybe it already knows."

"Then today's raid isn't assault." Her eyes were tired. "It's an interview."

That landed harder than any Enforcer punch.

I'd thought we were invading the System.

What if the System was inviting us in?

`[ADMIN PURGE: 94% — PAUSED]`

Paused.

Not cancelled.

A held breath before the guillotine drops.

Elizabeth handed me a ration bar and a comm unit tuned to our party channel.

"Eat," she said. "You're shaking."

"I'm always shaking."

"Eat anyway."

I ate.

It tasted like cardboard and childhood and the stubborn refusal to die hungry.

---

Market Street was a canyon of broken glass.

We moved in formation—Ghost ten meters ahead, invisible until he wasn't; Marcus on point when streets opened; Maya on my left, close enough to pull me back if I did something stupid; Professor and Elizabeth behind me like scientists escorting a bomb.

Monsters came in waves the System called *street encounters*.

First: Scavenger Gnawers—rats upgraded to spite.

Maya handled them.

Clean kills.

XP trickle.

Second: a Pack Leader with a crown of bone and a health bar that made my stomach clench.

`[PACK LEADER — LVL 19]` `[THREAT: HIGH]`

Marcus fired.

Ghost flanked.

I didn't null-summon—too loud, too weird for a crowd fight.

I used Pattern Interrupt on the leader's lunge cycle.

0.8 seconds.

Maya's axe used 0.6 of them.

The leader dissolved.

`[+890 XP — SHARED]`

"You're getting better," Ghost said over comm.

"Don't compliment me. I'll think I'm a main character."

"You are a main character." Maya wiped pixel blood off her cheek. "Annoying main character. Level fourteen."

"Fourteen and a half."

"Don't push it."

Third encounter was worse.

Enforcer scout.

Not full assault unit—single unit, featureless face, scanning.

Marcus raised his rifle.

I raised my hand.

"Wait."

The scout's head tilted.

Processing.

It wasn't attacking.

It was *logging*.

I opened my debugger overlay and saw what it saw—heat maps, party composition, threat scores, my laptop flagged as `[PRIORITY ASSET]`.

"Kevin?" Elizabeth whispered.

"It's counting us." My mouth was dry. "It's taking inventory for something bigger."

The scout turned and walked away.

Not ran.

*Walked.*

Like it had all day.

Like we were already dead and the paperwork was early.

"That's new," Marcus said.

"That's patch notes," I replied. "They learned from the island crash. They're not rushing. They're measuring."

Professor Chen wrote furiously on her tablet.

"We should assume the Pyramid knows we're coming," she said.

"It sent me a good morning text," I said. "It knows."

We kept moving.

---

The approach to the Pyramid's plaza was quiet in the wrong way.

No birds.

No wind.

Even the distant moans of the city muted, like someone had dragged a noise slider down in the world settings.

The plaza itself was marble—or something pretending to be marble—cracked with glowing veins that pulsed in time with my heartbeat until I looked away and they pulsed on their own.

Statues lined the approach.

Not heroes.

*Users.*

People frozen mid-level-up, mid-scream, mid-prayer, faces locked in the moment the System had chosen them for display.

Maya's jaw tightened.

"Don't look long," Ghost said. "They might be traps."

"Or warnings," Professor Chen said.

"Same thing in dungeon design."

At the center of the plaza stood a pedestal with a stone bowl and a prompt only I could see:

`[OFFERING REQUIRED: ONE MEMORY]` `[REWARD: MAP FRAGMENT — FLOOR 1]` `[WARNING: MEMORY CANNOT BE RECLAIMED]`

"Absolutely not," Elizabeth said before I could speak.

"It's a quest mechanic," I said. "It's gated content. We need the map."

"We have Ghost's maps."

"Ghost's maps are pre-Patch 7.4.2." I stared at the prompt. "This is live data."

Marcus checked the perimeter. "We don't have time for philosophy."

I thought about my studio apartment.

About my parents' funeral.

About the night I'd decided needing people was a vulnerability and built a life out of not testing that hypothesis.

I thought about Maya's shoulder against mine at the fire pit.

About Professor Chen calling my exploit elegant.

About Ghost saying *you're not alone on the route anymore.*

I placed one hand on the bowl.

Not a whole memory.

A fragment.

The taste of instant ramen at 2 AM after my mother taught me to add an egg—the last normal night before the accident.

The bowl glowed.

Pain was a debuff with no icon.

`[MEMORY SACRIFICED — MINOR]` `[DEBUFF: NOSTALGIA — TEMPORARY]` `[ITEM RECEIVED: MAP FRAGMENT — FLOOR 1]`

I stumbled.

Maya caught me.

"What did you give?"

"Ramen," I said. "Don't ask."

Elizabeth took the fragment—glass shard with circuit lines inside—and slotted it into her compass rig.

The plaza exit opened.

A door that hadn't existed a second ago.

Stairs down.

Stairs up.

The raid had two paths.

Ghost looked at me. "You okay?"

"No."

"Good enough?"

"For now."

We would mark the exterior after the crossing.

Marcus insisted on that order.

Military habit.

Survive the route before you admire the architecture.

On the pier, before we moved inland, the view from the water had already stolen my breath.

San Francisco spread below like a broken motherboard.

Alcatraz a dim dot.

The bay a ribbon of gray.

And everywhere, threads of light connecting players, monsters, nodes—visible only to me in debugger mode.

The System's network.

Live.

Beautiful.

Obscene.

Professor Chen stood beside me.

"What do you see?"

"Dependencies," I said. "Everything's wired to the Pyramid. Cut the hub, you don't kill the network—you orphan it. Or reboot it. Or—"

"Or become it," she finished.

The Admin message pulsed again:

`[ADMIN: SEE YOU SOON.]`

Not good morning anymore.

Soon.

Marcus called time.

We moved inland as a party.

Six hearts.

One debugger.

Zero certainty.

My loadout screen flickered as we left the pier:

`[SKILL UNLOCKED: NULL SUMMON — RANK 1]` `[COST: HIGH MANA | DURATION: 12s | COOLDOWN: 90s]` `[NOTE: SKILL DERIVED FROM UNAUTHORIZED BEHAVIOR]`

Unauthorized behavior.

My brand.

Maya bumped my shoulder with hers—armor clanking, human underneath.

"For what it's worth," she said, "I'm glad you're the one who breaks things."

"That's the job."

"That's the job," she agreed.

The city waited between us and the Pyramid doors.

Three miles of evolved nightmares and patch notes written in teeth.

The last thing I said before we stepped off the pier was on comm:

"Remember: we come back out."

"We come back out," the party echoed.

Even Ghost.

Even me.

Especially me.

Because deletion wasn't a failure state I was willing to accept.

Not today.

Not with a guild at my back and a null wraith in my skill bar and a cosmic HR department watching like this was performance review day for the species.

I checked my stats one more time:

`[KEVIN PARK | LVL 14 | DEBUGGER]` `[NEW SKILL: NULL SUMMON]` `[PURGE: 94% PAUSED]` `[PARTY: ACTIVE]`

Active.

Still active.

The Pyramid spire cut the fog ahead.

The crossing started now.

For now, that was victory enough.

---

At 5:30 AM, before the boat, I ran one more test in the command center.

Null summon again.

The wraith formed faster this time—muscle memory for reality.

`[CAST TIME: -8% — PROFICIENCY]`

Proficiency.

The System was training me to break it efficiently.

Marcus watched without comment.

Then: "When we hit the Pyramid, you stay center. Not because you're soft. Because you're the objective."

"I'm the DPS on the System."

"Same thing."

Vance's radio crackled once—her voice, clipped: "North wall holding. Don't make this a funeral."

Elizabeth answered: "Working on it."

I thought about the frozen Enforcers still standing in our doorway upstairs.

Statues of violence paused mid-swing.

Tomorrow they'd thaw when sync completed.

Today we had to move faster than thaw.

Ghost returned from perimeter check with a Grief Hound mesh ID fresh in my log.

"Orphan at the dock," he said.

I tagged it.

Ammo for later.

Maya sharpened her axe by firelight that wasn't fire—System light, cold, useful.

Professor Chen handed me a printed sheet: mana curves, sync projections, a graph labeled *Purge Resume Probability* climbing like a stock we were shorting.

"Cheery," I said.

"Accurate," she replied.

At 5:58, we boarded.

Six souls.

One island behind.

One Pyramid ahead.

The bay didn't care about our odds.

The bay had seen worse.

So had we.

---

On the water, Elizabeth reviewed med protocols aloud—triage order, blood types, who carried morphine, who carried hope.

Ghost listened.

Marcus listened.

I pretended to listen while copying mesh IDs from the skimmer fight into a fresh exploit file.

Pattern: the System forgot to garbage-collect collision data when entities died over water.

Hypothesis: water instances had looser cleanup.

Test later.

Survive now.

When the big skimmer died, Maya had cheered—one syllable, fierce.

When my mana hit twenty percent, she'd shoved a stimulant bar into my hand without looking.

"Eat."

"Boss fight rules?"

"Boat rules. Same energy."

I ate.

The bar tasted like chalk and childhood vitamins.

I loved her for it anyway.

Not romantically.

Not yet.

Humanly.

The kind of love that says *I will notice if you forget your body*.

---

Pier 39 landing was chaos compressed into minutes.

A Chrome Mantis nested in the carousel—optional fight, Marcus said.

We didn't optional.

Ghost needed the XP.

Maya needed the motion.

I needed the mesh IDs.

The mantis died ugly.

`[+780 XP]`

Its despawn left three orphans.

I stored them like bullets.

Professor Chen noted joint timings.

Elizabeth noted blood spatter patterns for infection risk.

We were a machine.

Imperfect.

Loud.

Working.

---

Between fights on Market Street, I updated the public wiki by mesh uplink—yes, the System still had internet, because cruelty includes connectivity.

New entry: *Null Summon — Rank 1*.

Warning label: *May cause segfault in observers*.

Comments rolled in from survivors we didn't know—thank you, it worked once, patched in my zone, stay alive.

I closed the feed.

Couldn't carry strangers today.

Carried them anyway in the work.

---

The memory bowl at the plaza still haunted me after we left it.

Not because I'd lost ramen.

Because the System had priced nostalgia like a microtransaction.

Elizabeth said, "You gave enough."

Professor Chen said, "You gave exactly what it wanted."

Both true.

I walked with emptiness where a small comfort had been.

Maya didn't ask again.

She just walked closer.

---

At the Pyramid threshold, my debugger overlay listed eighteen floors of threat.

I counted breaths instead.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

Marcus counted ammunition.

Ghost counted shadows.

Elizabeth counted heartbeats—literally, she'd taken pulses before we stepped off the pier.

Hers was steady.

Mine was not.

"Ready?" she asked me.

"No."

"Good." She checked my badge clip. "Ready people still die. Unready people die faster."

"Motivational."

"Medical."

We laughed.

Quiet.

Necessary.

The crossing would finish on the other side of those doors.

For now, dawn loadout was complete.

Exploit logged.

Party active.

War scheduled.

I could work with that.