Chapter 2 ORIENTATION FOR THE DAMNED
Zara POV
The orientation packet was forty-three pages long.
I read it on the Red Line heading south, back against the door of the car, one hand on the overhead bar and the other one I couldn't stop looking at — because the text was floating in my field of vision and I was reading it like a second screen that lived inside my skull, and nobody else on this train could see it.
I'd confirmed that. A man in a gray overcoat walked directly through a glowing blue notification that materialized at eye level near the doors. Didn't flinch. Kept reading his phone.
Invisible to everyone except me. Normal Tuesday morning in Chicago.
The packet began without preamble:
THE VERDICT PROTOCOL: PLAYER ORIENTATION
What You Are:
You are a Player. You have been Drafted into service by a Summoner Authority. You did not consent to this. Your consent was not required.
What This Means:
You will receive missions at irregular intervals. Missions must be completed within the designated window. Failure to complete a mission results in Voiding. Voiding is permanent.
What You Have:
Every Player begins with one Starting Ability determined by psychological profile analysis conducted at Draft. Your designation is:
RECALL
Classification: Observation / Cognitive
Function: Perfect playback of any scene you have personally witnessed. Duration: up to 72 hours prior. Activation: voluntary. No cooldown.
Note: RECALL is classified Tier F. It is the lowest combat-applicable ability in the Protocol. Statistically, 91% of Players assigned Tier F abilities are voided within their first three missions.
Your Current Stats:
DRAFT LEVEL: 0
ECHO COUNT: 0
VERDICT SCORE: 100 \[NEUTRAL\]
BREACH RATING: 0
I read the rest of the packet. I read it twice. By the time the train reached Harrison Street, I had most of it mapped and had started identifying the gaps — the things it described precisely versus the things it skimmed, which was where the real information lived.
One line kept returning to me, sitting at the bottom of page thirty-nine like something the writer had almost decided to cut:
We need you to survive.
Not we hope. Not good luck. We need.
Something about that word made the cold in my chest worse.
Harrison Station. I stood at the top of the stairs and watched the flow of commuters below me — a woman with a stroller, a DePaul kid eating a sandwich — and let my eyes find the thing I was looking for.
There. Pale blue. Pulsing slow and steady, like a resting heartbeat. Hovering just above a specific tile at the bottom of the stairs — a tile that looked completely unremarkable to everyone around it, but glowed to me like a beacon.
Breach entrance.
I was halfway down the stairs when a voice said, "Please tell me you can see the creepy glowing tile too, because I have been staring at it for forty minutes and I am running out of reasons not to call someone."
I stopped.
The voice came from my left. A guy, sitting on the bottom step with his back against the wall and his knees up, holding a paper coffee cup in both hands like a prayer offering. Maybe nineteen. Pale, dark-circled, wearing a jacket that was not appropriate for Chicago in November. He was looking at the same tile.
He was looking at the same tile I was looking at.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
"You're a Player," I said.
"I'm having the worst Tuesday of my life," he said. "So apparently, yes."
He unfolded himself off the step — all awkward height, elbows going everywhere — and extended a hand. "Sawyer Pike. Six months in. Current survival record: statistically improbable." He paused. "I say that knowing it means absolutely nothing."
"Zara Calloway." I didn't take the hand. "Drafted four hours ago."
Something shifted in his expression. Moved through quickly, empathetic and brief.
"Four hours." He looked at the tile. "You've got the NULL tag."
"I got the packet."
"The packet doesn't cover everything." He pointed above his own head, and I looked up: a small, floating designation tag, faintly glowing.
SAWYER PIKE / BRONZE-IV / ECHO COUNT: 7
"Every Player can see other Players' tags," he said. "You're the first NULL I've ever seen in six months. The veterans are going to lose their collective minds."
Before I could ask what that meant, the station shook.
Not seismic. Not a train. Something structural and bone-deep, like the city itself had drawn a breath and then held it. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered once, twice, then changed — the standard white bleaching out into something cold and pale and blue.
The commuters kept moving. Nobody reacted. Nobody saw the walls of Harrison Station beginning to change — the tiles darkening, the transit advertisements dissolving into black, the turnstiles freezing mid-spin as though time had simply declined to continue passing through them.
I looked at Sawyer. He was already looking at me.
"Here we go," he said quietly. "For the record — I don't have a death wish. I just have extremely bad luck."
Below us, the platform had become something else.
The shape of it remained — the bones, the columns, the architectural memory of a Chicago transit stop — but the tracks were gone, replaced by a floor of dark still water that reflected the cold blue overhead light. The air rising from below smelled like ozone and something older, something that had no name I wanted to assign it.
And from somewhere in the dark, I heard breathing.
It was not human.
The mission clock materialized in my vision.
TRIAL: SURVIVE — 00:47:32 REMAINING
I hadn't even stepped inside yet.
I looked at the thirty-two seconds that had just burned off the clock. I looked at Sawyer.
"Tell me about Congregations," I said.
He blinked. "How do you already know what's down there?"
"I don't. Tell me."
He told me.
I listened.
Then we went in.