Chapter Two

  The moment the elevator doors part, I know it’s going to be a Category 5 kind of day. The air pressure is wrong. The lights are too bright, like the bulbs know something I don’t. But mostly it’s the sound. The office, already hostile to anyone with human ears, is now piped full of noises that absolutely do not belong indoors.

  It’s not the usual TV chatter or the distant pop of motivational videos from the breakroom. It’s wind. Wet, lashing wind, the kind that’s never seen a city. Underneath that, something like the screech of dry leaves and the splintering of wood. There’s a pattern—fast, then slow, then a wet thunk followed by a silence so full of intent you feel it in your teeth. Then more breathing, ragged and wet, a stutter of heavy footfalls.

  The television feeds have always been a staple here, an omnipresent hum to keep the drones entertained between meetings about synergistic vision statements. Today, the volume’s cranked. Today, they’re not even pretending it’s for morale. No, today the screens are for The Games.

  I keep my eyes low. I’ve trained myself not to look directly at the screens more than I have to. This is harder than it sounds. They line the walls like surveillance equipment in a dystopian day spa, each one showing a different angle of a dense forest. The feeds jump from viewpoint to viewpoint at random, sometimes hanging just long enough for you to recognize the battling Realmwalker before switching to the next one.

  The System seems to only have some awareness of how humanity would like to watch the apocalypse unfold.

  I tell myself not watching The Games is a choice, not avoidance. That I’m above the spectacle. That refusing to watch is a kind of moral victory, even if it means I have to walk through this building like a horse with blinders. But I’m not sure that’s it. Maybe I just can’t handle watching other people suffering when I spend my days fighting my own inner-battles.

  I’m halfway to my desk, staring at the fake wood grain of my shoes, when I pass the reception area.

  Ashley is there, as always. I’d say she’s perched, but that would imply a readiness to flee or attack, and Ashley gives the impression of being perfectly content to do neither. Her green blouse, new today, is the color of springtime hope, which is cruel given what’s on all the TVs. She’s on the phone, but her eyes flick up as I approach.

  “Morning, Evan,” she says, a little too brightly.

  I manage a nod and my tongue only gets a little tangled as I say, “Hey, A-Ash.”

  Her smile wavers, just a bit. There’s real pity there, like she’s sorry the world is this way and that I have to notice. Which is worse than any insult Brad ever threw at me, because it means she’s not pretending.

  “The meeting wasn’t all that bad. I hope you haven’t given it another thought”

  “Thanks,” I say, already inching away. Embarrassed to my core.

  She opens her mouth to say something else, but then the phone rings, or maybe she’s just too good to force it.

  “See you around, Evan.”

  “Yeah.”

  I keep walking, quickening my pace so I won’t have to see my reflection in the glass walls. I feel worse than before, which is impressive considering where I started.

  Here’s the thing about pity: it’s a mirror. It shows you exactly how you look to other people, and it makes failure something everyone else feels compelled to acknowledge. Like you’re not just fucking up for yourself, but on behalf of the whole species.

  I pass by a TV in the hallway that’s showing a forest straight out of a pharmaceutical commercial, if pharmaceutical commercials featured more arterial spray and less smiling retirees. Two figures, Daniel Mercer, a vanguard fighter, and Alina Reyes, a spellweaver, are hauling ass through knee-high moss, pursued by a thing made of claws, bone, and bad intentions. There’s no announcer, no color commentary. Just numbers at the edge of the screen, stats climbing and dipping as the situation gets more desperate.

  The System doesn’t explain itself. Never does. It just overlays the action with flickering windows full of stats, and even the human commentators are silent. That’s how you know things are going from “This is fine” to “This is bad. Really bad.” It’s a different kind of horror. Not the slasher movie kind, but the kind where you can’t ignore the fact that these are real people dripping real blood, in a fight for their lives.

  I reach my desk and sit down, willing myself to go numb as I go to clean all the trash that’s been dumped around my cubicle. Yesterday’s donuts. Used napkins. Crumpled papers. Whatever. I clean it all and sit back down, noticing a paper in my box that I need to give to someone in IT.

  The bro-pod is already assembled in the middle of the office, a clump of three, no, four, finance guys all magnetized to the same flatscreen. They stand so close together it looks like they’re body-checking the TV into revealing insider secrets. There’s Brad, naturally, holding court in a shirt the color of condescension. Derek hovers at his right like an understudy who never gets to go on. The two others, Interchangeable Chad #1 and #2, are background noise, but they still muscle up like it’s gym selfie hour.

  On the TV, the Realmwalkers are in a race against something that doesn’t show up on the visible spectrum, only as a “threat level” bar that keeps spiking in radioactive green. The forest is less picturesque than the earlier feed, more like a haunted dog park where you just feel like you’re being watched.

  Getting up, I grab the paper for the IT department and angle to walk past the bros without getting sucked into their orbit, even though it never works.

  “Carter!” Brad calls out, not even taking his eyes off the screen. “You see this? The Earth Realmwalkers are getting smoked out there.”

  I pause, because not responding is somehow more suspicious than engaging. “We’re still in second place.” Which still means a lot of humans will die, but it’s better than fourth place, where our whole population will be wiped out.

  Derek laughs, a thin, reedy sound. “Yeah, but we won’t stay there if Daniel and Alina get too badly injured before they can level up again. Look at those bars, they’re bleeding stamina faster than my ex after a yoga retreat.” He gestures at the display, which helpfully pops up a side-by-side graph of the eight Earth Realmwalkers, comparing their current stats with the other three worlds. Earth’s line is somewhere between “Hanging In There” and “Circled by Vultures.”

  Chad #1 weighs in. “I don’t get why they’re running. Shouldn’t they be, like, fighting back?”

  “Dude, they’re being chased by a monster. Literally,” Chad #2 says. “Like, we have powers and swords, but we’re still just flesh and bones.”

  There’s a general agreement grunt, like a herd of bison consulting on migration.

  Brad finally looks at me. “What would you do, Carter? You’re a game guy. How do you beat these odds?”

  I am not a “game guy.” I once tried to explain that coding is not the same as playing video games, but the distinction was lost on Brad. Now I just let the tide roll over me.

  My heart hammers in my chest. I just want to be done with this conversation. “Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.”

  Brad grins. “See, that’s what I’m talking about. Cold logic. None of that hero crap.”

  He claps me on the back, harder than necessary. I nearly lose my balance, which is probably the point.

  The conversation slides back into market-speak: risk, reward, exposure, mitigation. They treat planetary survival like a bonus pool that’s shrinking by the hour. I could vanish into the supply closet and nobody would notice.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  I deliver the paper and drift back to my desk and notice that someone has thoughtfully left a puddle of sticky, caramel-colored liquid directly on top of my mouse. It’s still warm, along with a few new styrofoam cups.

  When did my desk become the office trashcan? The truth is, I really can’t remember. It’s been that long.

  I take a breath and start clearing the wreckage. Cups to the trash. The puddle is trickier. I sacrifice a sleeve and try not to think about how this is my life now: cleaning up after people who don’t even bother to hide the evidence.

  It’s not a prank, not really. More like an office-wide bet that I won’t do anything about it. And they’re right. I won’t. I just want the mess gone.

  The sound from the TVs is inescapable, a constant loop of shouts, crashing, and the chime of new data. I can almost feel the numbers moving through the air, updating their probability models, cold and precise.

  I finish the cleanup, fingers sticky, and sit down. My chair is set two notches lower than it was just a few minutes ago, so my knees are up around my chest. I adjust it, knowing full well it will be reset by tomorrow.

  Staring at the monitor, I pretend to work. Across the room, the bro-pod is still glued to the screen. For how important they seem to think they are, I rarely actually see them do any work. They must though. Ironclad Financial is a soulless animal.

  My phone buzzes. I don’t look at it. Instead, I watch the blinking cursor and try to will the day into moving faster.

  It doesn’t work, but I do it anyway.

  My best skill is existing in the cracks between disasters. If you never expect anything, every new failure is just a familiar pothole. So I bury myself in the bug list, eyes down, the click of my keys forming a kind of helmet against the sound in the room.

  It almost works. For a while, the office noise is just background static: a rising and falling tide of sales calls, the gurgle of the ice machine, the finance bros in the corner high-fiving over imaginary money. The TV feeds keep up their steady drumbeat of violence, but I have trained myself to ignore them so completely that it’s almost a meditative state. I focus on things I can control, like why the codebase hates me and which line of documentation I will rewrite six times before anyone notices.

  I lose a few hours this way. Time in the office is always measured in how long you can last before something humiliates you again.

  I’m on my second cup of machine coffee, burnt, bitter, somehow thinner than air, when the background noise tilts. The TV volume cranks up, not as a single knob turn but as a thousand tiny notches, enough to cut through the insulation I’ve built.

  It starts with a sharp, animal yelp, the kind that’s too high-pitched to be an adult human voice. Then a crash. Then, on every screen in the office, the image lurches: the feeds all swing, as if the cameras themselves are trying to dodge what’s coming. There’s a blast of static, and then you hear screaming, the real kind, no filter.

  I look up. The entire office is already in lockstep, like birds on a wire watching the same oncoming storm.

  On the feed: the forest. Not the green, enchanted one from this morning, but a gray ruin, stripped and bare, the ground churned into mud. The camera follows a woman in torn blue armor—Alina Reyes, the office’s consensus “favorite” ever since she survived the first week on live TV. She’s fast, or was, but she’s limping and bleeding down one leg, and her face is the color of bad news.

  There’s no announcer, no voiceover. Just the System overlays, windows blooming and vanishing faster than anyone could read: THREAT DETECTED, MANA DEPLETION CRITICAL, COMPANION STATUS: INJURED.

  Behind her, the forest pulses, blurs, and then something blacker than the trees lunges into frame. You never get a good look—it’s just a shadow in motion, a smear of claws and teeth, like every nightmare you forgot on purpose. The overlay pops a new warning: UNKNOWN HOSTILE—LEVEL 43.

  Alina throws a spell, but it’s weak, barely more than a flash of blue light. It hits the shadow, which seems to enjoy it, then doubles its speed.

  Another camera angle. Daniel Mercer, the other half of the pair, stumbles into view. He’s bigger than most linebackers, always described as a “tank,” but right now he’s cradling one arm, the sleeve drenched in what’s probably more than his daily allowance of blood. He shouts for Alina to run.

  The office is silent. Even the bros have shut up, mouths half-open, eyes wide.

  Alina trips, falls. Daniel gets between her and the shadow, swinging a weapon that’s more like a street sign someone sharpened to a point. It’s a solid hit, but the shadow barely notices. It grabs Daniel, and there’s a noise I have never heard come from a TV before.

  The screen jerks again. Alina tries to crawl away, spells flickering from her hands, the status bar on her health dropping by chunks. The shadow drops Daniel, who’s either unconscious or so deep in shock that he can’t move. Then it grabs Alina.

  The System overlay now flashes in red: LIFE SIGNS CRITICAL. Then, suddenly: FLATLINE.

  The camera hangs for a long, painful second on the clearing, as if nobody behind the feed knows what to do next.

  Then, all at once, both health bars vanish from the screen.

  There’s a sound from somewhere in the office, a sharp exhale like a room forgetting to breathe.

  The video freezes. For a split second, the forest is empty.

  Then every screen in the office goes dark, just for a heartbeat before the message appears at once, font bold and merciless:

  PAIR SLOT VACANCY DETECTED.

  REPLACEMENT SELECTION INITIATED.

  No explanation. No slow dissolve. Just a blank space where two people used to be, and the certainty that someone, somewhere, is about to get very bad news.

  The room stays silent for a long time.

  I can’t stop looking at the screens. Not this time.

  I wonder if they’ll even bother to announce who’s next, or if it will just be another system message, as impersonal as a spam email.

  I wonder if anyone will care.

  I wonder if I’ll even notice.

  The thing about being at the bottom is you get very good at pretending the next shovel-load won’t surprise you. But this—this is something different. The office is a tomb, everyone waiting for the reaper’s second pass. A few of the finance guys are muttering, but nobody jokes. Even the air is too thick, like we’re all breathing through gauze.

  Daniel and Alina weren’t just the best; they were the only ones left from the first batch. The originals. The survivors. Earth’s hope was basically a single, battered thread, and the System just clipped it in front of us.

  The message cycles, unwavering:

  PAIR SLOT VACANCY DETECTED.

  REPLACEMENT SELECTION INITIATED.

  I laugh. Quiet, but it escapes. For a second, I’m sure the universe is fucking with me, that the next message will be a gif of a shrugging skeleton and we’ll all go back to pretending this is normal.

  But the words don’t change. They linger. Everyone is looking at the TVs, but nobody wants to be the first to look away.

  That’s when the message shifts. The words glitch, fragmenting at the edges, flickering between two lines like a corrupted PowerPoint:

  HUMAN VARIABLE

  HUMAN VARIABLE

  It shouldn’t feel personal, but it does. Like the System is scanning the room, going face to face, cataloging who’s still alive and what’s left to burn.

  Then the letters reassemble. The line is sharper, the font heavier. It’s not on the TV anymore. It’s in front of my eyes, floating over the desk, strobing in time with my pulse.

  EVAN CARTER—SELECTION CONFIRMED.

  I jerk back so hard I nearly tip my chair. The world narrows to the tunnel between me and the blue text, each blink of my eyes pushing the message closer until it’s the only thing I can see.

  A thousand thoughts crash together: Dad, alone in the care home, maybe waiting for a call that won’t come. The stack of bills on my kitchen table. The total absence of anything in my life that would qualify as a “skill,” unless you count silent suffering.

  I’m not a hero. I’m not even a runner-up. I am not, under any circumstances, supposed to be here.

  But the System is merciless, and it does not make mistakes.

  The text pulses again, brighter now, an afterimage burning into my retinas.

  PREPARE FOR TRANSITION

  No warning. No timer. No “Are you sure you want to quit?”

  The temperature drops, fast. It’s like someone flipped the world’s thermostat from “corporate malaise” to “meat locker.” The cold bites through my clothes, and I feel my skin tighten, my bones hum. My breath fogs out in front of me, then freezes mid-air, the crystals shattering as they fall.

  The light is next. It starts at the edges, a white corona that eats the gray cubicle walls, then the monitors, then the floor. I can’t move, but I can feel the weight increase, like I’m being pressed between two giant, invisible hands.

  Somewhere in the periphery, people are shouting. Or maybe I am. The System overlays fill my vision, lines of code and status updates sprinting up and down like ticker tape:

  INITIATING REALM TRANSFER

  BODY: HUMAN, MALE, SUB-OPTIMAL FITNESS

  PSYCHE: VARIABLE, ELEVATED STRESS

  The cold turns to pain, sharp and deep, like a dentist drilling straight through the back of my skull. My vision fractures, the world splitting into a thousand thin slices that flicker and strobe.

  I remember, suddenly, a time when Dad took me to a baseball game and I got beaned in the head by a foul ball. The world spun, and for a minute I thought I was dead, but then I was just me, smaller and more afraid.

  Now, the world spins again. Harder, faster. I try to scream but there’s no air left.

  The office, the screens, the people—they all collapse to a single pixel of blue, then nothing.

  The System takes me.

  I’m gone.