Chapter 5 TWENTY INTO FIVE
Zara Pov
The Palmer House had stood in Chicago for over a hundred and fifty years.
In the Breach, it looked like it had been in hell for all of them.
The grand lobby was still recognizable — its shape, its architecture, the proportions of the gilded ceiling still visible through the Breach's alterations. But the light had changed. The chandeliers overhead had gone cold, their crystals replaced by something that pulsed like bioluminescence, blue-black and slow. The marble floors remained but had gone dark, and the walls at the edges of my vision moved slightly — the plaster shifting in a way that should have been impossible, soft and organic, like the building was breathing.
Everything from the real world was present. Just wrong in a way I couldn't fully articulate. Like a photograph of a room where, if you look long enough, you realize something in the background has no shadow.
I had forty-five seconds before the mission clock hit zero.
I used all of them.
RECALL: everything I'd observed in the three minutes since the Breach opened. Every Player I'd seen, their position, their designation tags, their posture, their movement toward other Players or away from them. RECALL didn't require conscious attention to record. It only required playback, which I ran now with the speed of someone who'd been doing this her whole life — which, in a way, was exactly what had been happening.
Nineteen Players. I catalogued threats by posture before designation.
Three in the far west corner, already clustered — coordinated without speaking, which meant pre-existing alliance, which meant veterans. A Player near the staircase with his back to the wall, scanning the room methodically. Dangerous in the same way I was: looking for patterns instead of targets.
I looked up at the staircase Player's designation tag.
DORIAN VOSS / PLAYER: BRONZE-VI / ECHO COUNT: 23
Player. Not Handler.
He was in this. Actually in it, same rules as everyone else, and something about his jaw told me the reclassification had not been voluntary. He caught me looking. His expression gave me nothing except a single, sharp warning that I interpreted as later.
The mission clock hit zero.
The chandeliers went dark entirely.
"Tell me we're teaming up," said Sawyer, from directly behind me.
I reflexively elbowed him.
"Ow," he said, with the resignation of someone who'd expected that. "We are absolutely teaming up. The statistics on solo players in Battle Royales are—"
"You made those up yesterday."
"They felt right." He fell into step beside me as I moved toward the east corridor. "Also I've done two of these and you haven't done any, so statistically I'm your most qualified resource."
The east corridor was clear. I moved through it without stopping.
The mission parameters were straightforward: no provided weapons, no designated zones. Advancement achieved simply by being among the last five Players when the sixty-minute timer hit zero. Players were eliminated when their Verdict Score reached zero — and in a Battle Royale, every direct aggressive action against another Player drained their score while building the aggressor's.
The System rewarded people for hurting each other.
I was going to find the highest accessible point in this building, establish a defensible position, and watch the other fifteen eliminate each other for fifty-eight minutes while I mapped everything with RECALL. No aggression. Pure survival. The cleanest path.
It worked for twenty-three minutes.
Then someone found me.
I heard them before I saw them — the specific quality of someone trying not to make sound who was making just slightly too much of it. I was on the fourth floor, a long corridor of dark wood and the Breach's cold blue wash, and I pressed my back against the wall and let RECALL sweep the last twenty minutes.
There.
Seven minutes ago. In the lobby. Two Players I'd catalogued as mid-tier, moving separately, nothing coordinated in their body language. I'd categorized them as non-threat and moved on.
Except.
Thirty seconds before the mission started, during the chaos of orientation, they had been close together — close enough for a brief exchange, both faces turned slightly away from the main group. I had seen it. I had not been watching.
RECALL gave it back to me in perfect resolution.
The taller one, barely above a whisper: She's NULL-001. The Summoner wants her down before she makes round two. Kill order, not just elimination. Void her. There's an Echo reward.
The shorter one: Understood.
The corridor was not empty.
The shorter Player from my RECALL was at the far end of it.
Male, maybe twenty, moving with the deliberate quiet of someone who had done this before. His designation tag: COLE RAFFERTY / SILVER-II / ECHO COUNT: 14. Silver tier. Fourteen Echoes. He had abilities I did not have.
I stepped out of the doorway.
He stopped.
"Cole Rafferty," I said pleasantly. "Silver-II. Fourteen Echoes."
A fast recalibration moved across his face.
"You have RECALL," he said.
"I have RECALL." I kept my voice even. "Which means I know what you were told, and I know who told you. Both of those things are useful to me." I watched his eyes. "I also know something you don't: the three-person veteran alliance from the west corner is moving up the east staircase right now. Silver-III and above, both of them. This floor in approximately eighty seconds."
A pause.
"You're redirecting me," he said.
"I'm giving you information." I kept my hands visible, my posture deliberate. "What you do with it is your choice."
He looked at me.
He looked at the staircase.
Seventy-eight seconds later, the sound of a confrontation at the other end of the building pulled three Players out of their positions. I moved up to the sixth floor while Cole Rafferty made his own calculations.
Sixty minutes. Last five.
I was one of them.
My Verdict Score had not dropped a single point.
The Breach released the survivors slowly, the cold blue light thinning back into the Palmer House's real-world lobby — tourists and check-in staff suddenly visible through the clearing air, utterly unaware. I stood in the middle of it and watched the other four survivors orient themselves back into reality.
Sawyer, who had somehow survived by hiding in a maintenance closet for forty-one minutes, caught my eye across the lobby and gave me a thumbs up with the exhausted conviction of a man who did not entirely believe he was still alive.
I ran the RECALL on Cole Rafferty's pre-mission exchange one more time.
The Summoner wants her down before she makes round two.
My mother had warned me before I was even drafted. She had used her last conscious moment to warn me. She had known. A woman who had been declared neurologically unreachable for forty-seven days had opened her eyes and formed precise, targeted sentences — specifically about this.
What had she been?
What had she known about the Verdict Protocol?
A presence settled beside me at the lobby railing. Close. Not touching.
I didn't turn.
"You made it," Dorian said.
"You made it," I said.
Silence for a beat.
"Why are you a Player now?" I asked.
One second too long.
"Not here," he said.
I turned to look at him. He was staring straight ahead, jaw set, and running behind his eyes was the thing I'd been catching glimpses of since the subway — something he was working to keep submerged, something that was getting heavier.
"My mother knew about the System," I said. "She told me before she died. She warned me. She's been in a coma for forty-seven days with no recorded brain activity and she used her last conscious moment to warn me about something she should have had no knowledge of." I watched his face carefully. "You know something about that."
He looked at me.
For one moment — just one — I saw it. Not what he knew. Just the confirmation that there was something to know, sitting behind his eyes like a door he'd decided not to open.
He closed it before I could get any further.
"I'll find you in eight hours," he said. He pushed off the railing.
"Dorian."
He paused.
"Whatever it is you're not saying," I said, "I'm going to find it anyway. You might as well decide whether you want to be in the room when I do."
He didn't answer. He walked away.
I stood in the lobby of the Palmer House, in the last traces of cold blue light bleeding out of the walls, and watched my stats update.
DRAFT LEVEL: 1
ECHO COUNT: 1
VERDICT SCORE: 100 \[NEUTRAL — MAINTAINED\]
BREACH RATING: 12
At the bottom, a new notification. New sender. Not mission parameters.
SUMMONER NOTE:
Impressive, Null-001.
Most Players discover the RECALL limitation in their fourth or fifth mission. You weaponized it in your second.
I do enjoy being surprised.
Don't take that as a compliment.
Take it as a warning.
Welcome to the game, Zara.
Your mother said you'd be difficult.
She wasn't wrong.
My hands were steady.
The message stayed in my vision for a long time.
Your mother said you'd be difficult.
I read it again.
Your mother said.
Present tense. Not your mother was. Not I reviewed your mother's file or according to your mother's record.
Your mother said.
As in recently. As in the Summoner had spoken to my mother — spoken to her, not accessed her data — and she had told him something about me. Which meant the coma hadn't been what the neurologists described. Which meant forty-seven days of her being somewhere else entirely while her body lay in a hospital bed.
Which meant I had been looking for an explanation for what happened in Room 14B and the explanation was this: my mother had been in the game.
My mother had been in this specific game, with this specific Summoner, and she had found a way to reach back through it to warn me.
And he had let her. Or he hadn't been able to stop her.
I closed the notification.
Outside, Chicago kept moving — the lake cutting cold through the November air, the L train running its schedule, millions of people who had no idea the city had another layer and the layer had teeth.
I started planning.
Not to survive the next mission. Not to earn enough Echoes to advance a tier.
I started planning how to find out what my mother had been, what she had known, and what she had traded to deliver that warning.
Because if the Summoner thought telling me she said I'd be difficult was a warning, he had made a serious miscalculation.
It wasn't a warning.
It was a starting point.