Chapter 1 THE LAST STEADY THING
Zara POV
My mother's hands were warm.
That was the thing that kept destroying me, every single time I walked into Room 14B. How warm they were. How alive they felt when I held them. Her skin was soft in the way it had always been — she used the same lotion since I was six years old, something with shea butter and vanilla that I'd never be able to smell again without falling apart. Even now, hooked to machines and completely still, she felt like my mother. Not like someone leaving. Not like someone I had already taken from myself.
The room was too white. Everything in Mercy General was too white — the walls, the ceiling tiles, the bleached sheet folded neatly across her chest. The only color was the heart monitor's green line, that small, stubborn pulse that had become the metronome of the last forty-seven days of my life. I timed my breathing to it without meaning to. In. Out. Up. Down.
"Zara." My Aunt Renee touched my shoulder from behind. I didn't turn around. "It's time."
I knew it was time. I'd been told it was time. I'd sat in the family meeting three days ago and heard the neurologist use phrases like persistent vegetative state and no meaningful brain activity and quality of life, and I had nodded because that was what I was supposed to do. I had signed the paperwork because that was what a responsible adult did, and I was twenty-two years old, and I was the closest thing to next-of-kin that counted.
My aunt had power of attorney. But my mother would have wanted me here.
That was what I kept telling myself. That she would have wanted me here, holding her hand, when they did this. Not because I deserved to be here. Because she was the kind of woman who forgave people before they'd even finished apologizing.
I had been apologizing for forty-seven days.
The neurologist came in at 9:04 a.m. He had kind eyes, which I resented. Two nurses followed him. The room felt suddenly smaller — too many people, too much careful professionalism, too much practiced compassion moving across every face.
I held her hand tighter.
"We'll begin now," the doctor said, softly. "Take all the time you need."
He reached for the ventilator controls.
I opened my mouth to say wait — not because I believed this was wrong, not because I wanted her to stay in this half-life, but because some animal part of me wasn't ready to watch the line go flat. Because the moment it went flat, the accident was finished. Fully over. And I would have to start figuring out how to live inside what I'd done.
I didn't say wait.
I closed my mouth. I held her hand. I watched the ventilator slow.
The green line stuttered.
And then my mother opened her eyes.
I have no word for what happened to me in that moment. My brain rejected it — filed it under impossible and tried to move on — but my body had already gone rigid. Forty-seven days. No voluntary movement. No response to pain or sound. The doctors had been certain.
Her eyes were open.
Not glassy. Not vacant. Open and focused, looking directly at me.
"Mom—" My voice came out cracked, something I didn't recognize. "Mom, can you—"
Her hand closed around my wrist.
Not a weak grip. Not reflex. She grabbed me like she was drowning and I was the only solid thing in reach — fingers pressing into my pulse point hard enough that I felt my own heartbeat pushed against her palm.
She pulled me down.
And she spoke.
Her voice was wrong. It came from too deep in her chest for someone who hadn't used her lungs in seven weeks, and every syllable sounded dragged through gravel. But it was clear. It was precise.
"They chose you because of what you carry," she said. "The weight. They feed on the weight."
"Mom, I don't—"
"Don't let them hollow you out." Her eyes didn't blink. Didn't move from mine. "You fight it. You hear me? You fight every single inch of it, Zara. Don't you become what they need you to be."
"What are you — who is they — Mom, Mom—"
The green line screamed.
One long, flat, unbroken note.
Her hand went slack.
Her eyes closed.
And she was gone. Really, finally, actually gone — and I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't do anything except stand there with my fingers still wrapped around her hand while the nurses moved around me and my Aunt Renee made a sound behind me like something being torn clean in half.
I don't know how long I stood there.
I know the exact moment everything else changed, because it happened with the precision of a surgical cut.
A sound — not a sound exactly, but the idea of one, a frequency that resonated in the back of my teeth — and then cold. Not room-temperature cold. Not air-conditioning. Something absolute, spreading from the center of my chest outward, and I thought heart attack, thought grief had done something structural to me.
Text appeared in my vision.
Not on a screen. Not on the wall. In my vision, overlaid on the world like a projection burned directly onto the inside of my eyes. The font was clean. Clinical. The letters glowed a pale, cold blue.
VERDICT PROTOCOL: INITIALIZATION COMPLETE
PLAYER DESIGNATION: NULL-001
CLASSIFICATION: UNREGISTERED \[SYSTEM ANOMALY\]
SUMMONER AUTHORITY: CONFIRMED
Welcome, Zara Calloway.
You have been Drafted.
I blinked. The text stayed.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. The text stayed.
My aunt's voice was coming from somewhere far away — "Zara, honey, we should let them—" — and I couldn't answer because I was reading the next line, which had just appeared below the first, character by character, like something typing in real time.
FIRST MISSION ASSIGNED.
TRIAL TYPE: SURVIVAL
LOCATION: RED LINE TRANSIT — HARRISON STATION
MISSION WINDOW: 24 HOURS FROM INITIALIZATION
FAILURE CONSEQUENCE: VOID
A voided Player ceases to exist in all recorded forms.
This is not a warning.
This is a courtesy.
ORIENTATION PACKET AVAILABLE.
You will want to read it.
Players who don't rarely survive long enough to regret it.
My mother's hand was still warm.
The heart monitor was still making its single, unbroken sound.
Something that called itself a System had just told me I had twenty-four hours to survive a Survival Trial or be erased from existence. And I was standing in a hospital room holding my dead mother's hand, and I still had no idea what they meant, or how she had known, or what it was that I was carrying.
I looked at her face — still, peaceful, finally free of whatever she'd been dragging around in that coma — and I thought about her last words.
Don't let them hollow you out.
She hadn't said run. She hadn't said refuse or surrender or hide.
She had said fight.
I straightened up. I let go of her hand.
The cold clinical part of my brain was already working. Already looking at the words SYSTEM ANOMALY and thinking: that means something. Figure out what.
Twenty-four hours.
My mother's lotion was still on my hands.
I walked to the door.