Chapter 4 THE PRICE OF BREATHING
Zara Pov
The world outside Harrison Station was rude about its normalcy.
Rush-hour traffic. A hotdog cart. The Red Line overhead announcing delays. November wind finding every gap in my jacket with the focused efficiency of something that had studied me.
Forty-seven minutes ago I had been standing in flooded dark watching a thing made of dead people calculate my location by the sound of my breathing.
Nobody on the sidewalk knew that.
I stood on the corner of Harrison and State and felt the specific vertigo of a person whose reality has split into two irreconcilable halves. There was the world where my mother had died this morning. There was the world where something called the Verdict Protocol had drafted me into a game I didn't sign up for. Those two worlds were sharing the same Tuesday, and I had no architecture for that.
My phone buzzed. Three missed calls from Aunt Renee. A text from the hospital's bereavement coordinator. A bank notification about insufficient funds.
"Your shadow covered you," said Dorian, from directly behind me.
I turned. He had followed me up from the station and was standing two feet away, hands in his jacket pockets, his expression maintaining its policy of communicating nothing.
"My shadow," I said.
"When a Player enters a Breach, the System generates a behavioral shadow at their last-known location. Anyone who needed contact with you in the last forty-seven minutes received it." He glanced at my phone. "Your aunt believes she spoke with you forty minutes ago. You told her you needed space to process. She understood."
I stared at him.
"The System impersonated me."
"The System covered you." He said it like there was a meaningful distinction. "If you'd been voided, the shadow would have been your final social presence. Final texts. Basic affairs handled. It limits loose ends."
"It kills Players and then tidies up after them so nobody notices."
"Yes."
He said it without apology. Like he'd run the moral accounting on this specific element of his situation years ago and reached a settlement with it. I wanted to ask when. Whether the settlement had cost him anything.
I didn't ask. We were having a professional exchange.
"How long have you been a Handler?" I said instead.
A beat. One second too long.
"Eighteen months."
"And before that?"
"Not relevant to your orientation."
"Relevant to me."
Something moved behind his eyes. The quality of a person who has decided not to answer rather than a person without one.
"The current mission queue has you scheduled for a forty-eight hour rest period," he said. "Use it to review the Echo, consolidate your RECALL parameters, and—"
"Dorian."
He stopped.
Saying his name stopped him. I filed that.
"What is a NULL designation?" I said. "The actual answer."
He looked at me for a long moment. The city kept making its indifferent sounds around us.
"The System profiles every Player before designation," he said finally. "Psychological analysis, stress response, skill matrix — it builds a model and assigns a tier. Bronze through Gold and above. The tier determines mission difficulty and Echo access." He paused. "NULL means the model failed. It built a profile for you, ran the analysis, and got a result it couldn't place."
"Why?"
"Unknown."
"You said that like you have a theory."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. Almost.
"I said it like it's classified above Handler clearance," he said. "Which is different."
He was the most frustrating person I had encountered in a day that had already included watching my mother die and being conscripted into a supernatural death game. He was also precise — every word doing exactly its assigned work, nothing wasted, nothing performed. The kind of person who doesn't say more than he means to.
I wanted to find the one question that would make him say more than he intended.
I hadn't found it yet.
"Handlers aren't allowed to form relationships with Players," I said.
Something in his posture shifted. Calibrated.
"No," he said.
"What counts as a relationship?"
"Anything that creates investment." His voice went flatter. "If a Handler develops interest in a specific Player's outcome beyond mission performance metrics, both contracts are escalated. Immediately."
"Both. Meaning if you decided you liked me, I'd be punished for it."
"Yes."
"The System designed that specifically to keep Players isolated."
"Yes."
He said it without flinching. Like the accounting had concluded long ago.
I thought about my mother. About the warning. About don't let them hollow you out, and whether professional neutrality was what that looked like from the inside.
"Kwame," I said instead. "The boy in the Echo. Did anyone—"
"His shadow managed the notifications." The flatness changed — densened, like something being held under pressure. "His family was informed of an unexpected cardiac event."
The city kept moving. Indifferent. Continuous.
"He was seventeen," I said.
"I know," said Dorian.
He walked away before I could see what was happening in his face.
I stood on the corner for a minute. Made my breathing even. Texted my aunt I'm okay, I'll call tonight — a lie, but the shadow had started it and I was just maintaining the fiction.
Then my vision lit up.
MISSION ASSIGNMENT: BATTLE ROYALE
TRIAL TYPE: ELIMINATION
PLAYERS DRAFTED: 20
ADVANCEMENT CONDITION: LAST 5 STANDING
LOCATION: DESIGNATED BREACH — ASSIGNED AT MISSION START
MISSION WINDOW: 72 HOURS
Note: In this trial, other Players are permitted to eliminate you.
Note: You are permitted to eliminate other Players.
Note: This is not a request for permission.
There are nineteen other people who want to advance.
Act accordingly.
Twenty players. Last five standing.
I thought about Kwame walking home with a basketball.
I thought about Dorian's face when I said his name.
I thought about my mother's hand, warm and certain, pulling me down to hear a warning she shouldn't have been conscious enough to give.
I stood there on the corner of Harrison and State and felt something settle into place inside me. Not calm. Not bravery. Something colder and more specific — the particular stillness of a person who has made a decision and is now simply executing it.
I would be one of five. Without killing anyone to do it.