Chapter 1

I thought I was on a boat. Every time the deck pitched, my stomach rolled over and my head throbbed and every bone in my body ached.

When I managed to open my eyes, I saw a dashboard. I was in the passenger seat of a moving car.

Outside the windshield, towers lay in heaps. The ones still standing only came into view as we passed them, close enough for me to see where the weather had eaten through the walls. There wasn't so much as a weed growing in the cracks. I couldn't see ten feet into the dirty gray air. How could the driver see the road?

Waking up hurt. Remembering hurt worse, but I made myself do it. A minute ago I'd been on an operating table. My heart surgeon had given me even odds. Now I was in somebody's car. What kind of hospital had I checked into? Did I still have both kidneys?

I could rule out a dream. I knew what it felt like to come out from under anesthesia, too, and this was something else. I tried to look at the driver. It took me several seconds to work out how to turn my own head.

“Hey, sis. You awake?”

A young man in a dark brown shell jacket had one hand on the wheel. Black fingerless gloves, black hair, eyes so dark I couldn't make out the pupils. Against all that black, his skin looked startlingly pale. Our eyes met. After a beat he looked back at the road.

“Hang in there. That was a new antigen they gave you at Central. They expected a reaction. Give it a little time.” He drove on. “I told them to speed up work on the final antibody. Once they have it, you'll be able to live like anybody else.”

I opened my mouth. That was about as far as I got.

“Don't be scared,” he said. He spoke slowly, with the ease of someone who'd talked me through this a hundred times. “Whatever happens, I'm on your side.”

The car stopped. A metal wall took shape in the windshield. Two enormous gun mounts swung around and pointed straight at us.

That cleared my head.

The driver didn't blink. A flat voice came through the car speakers. “Identity confirmed. Joker, commanding officer, Shelter A-001. Access granted.”

The guns folded down on either side of us. A seam opened in the metal and we rolled through onto smooth pavement. There had been nobody for miles outside. In here I could pick out people walking between buildings so new they scarcely seemed to belong on the same street as the ruins behind us.

We pulled up at a white building. My driver got out. I would have followed, if I could have persuaded either leg to move. My door opened. He tucked a cloak around me, drew the hood over my head, and lifted me out in one practiced motion. About all I could do for myself was turn my cheek away from his chest.

A man with bloodred hair stood beside a wheelchair. Sharp nose, sharp cheekbones. Even at rest he looked ready to start something.

“Well, look who finally made it home. Our illustrious commander.”

The young man set me in the chair without answering him. He braced his hands on the armrests. “I've got something to take care of. Caesar will take you back to the research center for your checkup.”

He stayed there looking at me. It was unnerving, like somebody had hit pause on him. I managed a whisper.

“Okay.”

That did it. He straightened and left. Caesar took the handles.

“What?” He caught me looking. He didn't bother hiding the dislike in his face. If anything, his smile made it worse. “See something you like, sis?”

Well. Whoever my brother was, this guy emphatically wasn't him.

It took several ID checks just to get inside the white building. Each checkpoint had its own steel blast door. The farther we went, the more people we passed. Conversations dried up when they saw me. Once my chair had rolled a safe distance past them, the whispers started.

“He took her to Central again. Wonder how much intel on aberrants they'll want for this one.”

“How many people has the Vanguard lost getting them that intel?”

“And the one who ought to be dead is sitting pretty.”

“Old-stock genes. Nature should've taken care of that one years ago.”

Each word came through clear enough to hurt, little pinpricks behind my temples. I couldn't explain how their whispers carried so far. I did know what they wanted. They wanted me to die.

Shelter. Joker. His sister. Central. Antigen. I knew those words, and I knew exactly whose arrival could suck all the goodwill out of a room like this.

I thought my surgery must have failed. Then I had a considerably worse thought.

I'd played this game.

Cities of Ash. A cinematic adventure with several playable leads. I'd beta-tested it. The young man who'd called me his sister was one of those leads. His name was River Arkwright. His call sign was Joker.

In the game's future, people had the technology for spaceflight. When the radiation closed in around Earth, even that couldn't get them off the planet. Radiation blanketed the planet. The plants died, most of the things that ate them died, and what was left of the safe zone fit inside the American mainland. Monsters turned up by the thousands. A few humans developed powers that let them fight back.

In the game they called the day it happened the Fall. In the years afterward, the people who survived developed antibodies against the radiation. Now even newborns had them. The old stock, the people whose bodies couldn't adapt, had all but died out. The girl whose wheelchair I was sitting in had been protected in the womb. After she was born, her body had reverted.

I remembered this particular girl in excruciating detail. During the beta, every time her little brother showed a sign of putting his people first, she'd remind him they were family. He'd hand over most of the shelter's resources for another dose of antigen. His defenses fell apart. Eventually his own people ambushed him and drove them both out.

That was where you got control of Joker. Congratulations! Time to build a new faction from scratch, with a sister who could barely breathe and a fresh crisis every time you tried to get something done. She made it halfway through the story before an aberrant finally ate her.

The NPCs had plenty of competition in the wishing-her-dead department. Players did give Joker some grief for losing his mind whenever his sister so much as sneezed. Most of the hate was reserved for her. And since the developers had given that girl my actual name, Mara Arkwright, scrolling through the forum had always felt a little too personal.

My vision went dark around the edges. Apparently even getting upset was more than this body could handle. Easy. However bad this was, it beat dying on the table. I still had a chance. I just needed to know how much time I had before they threw us out—

“Look out!”

A body clipped the side of my chair and went down at my feet. Something slipped under my cloak and wrapped around my wrist. Cold. Slick. A hundred voices whispered inside my skull, all at once, too tangled to understand.

I looked down and went rigid. There was hardly anything human left of him. Little pink buds stood up all over his bare skin. His face was covered in them. They lengthened and writhed, feeling their way toward me like worms.

I jerked my hand free and clung to the armrest. Acid rose in my throat. The voices cut out.

The woman who'd shouted crouched and pulled an injector from the back of his neck. “Took its sweet time kicking in. We nearly lost him.” She waved people forward, then rounded on Caesar. “Do you ever use your eyes? You're captain of the Vanguard, for God's sake. If he'd hit her—”

She glanced down at my chair. We could all fill in the rest. I might as well have been made of porcelain.

Caesar spread his hands. “Eyes in the back of my head would've been handy.”

He'd let it happen. Nobody in that hallway had looked at me quite the way he did.

He clicked his tongue at the man on the floor. “Poor bastard. Even a useless Devourer comes in handy when he's nearly dead. Oh, hey, sis. Didn't scare you, did he? I suppose you've never seen one up close. Hope the commander doesn't hold it against me.”

I scarcely heard him. As they lifted the man, three lines of text materialized over his body.

Class · Devourer

Bodily damage · 99% (available to claim)

Symbiont · Thread viper

What the hell? And what had the voices been? I was still in pain, still fighting the urge to throw up, and now the man had a stat block. I let my eyes slide to the researchers carrying him. Nothing over their heads. Nothing over Caesar's, either.

In the beta, people came in two varieties. You were Ascendant, which meant you had a power, or you were ordinary. Aberrants were a category all their own. I'd never heard of a Devourer.

“What’s a Devourer?” I asked, as if he'd brought it up. Which, to be fair, he had.

For once he spared me the wisecrack. “Ordinary people who want what an Ascendant has. They let an aberrant live in them. They get to use its power for a while. Then their minds start to go, the thing eats them up, and all you've got left is a monster wearing somebody's skin. Happens every time.”

Lovely. I had questions, but there was only so much I could afford to sound ignorant about. From what he'd said about their being useful near death, I guessed the researchers could get something out of an infected host. Information, maybe. And I'd been able to see what lived inside this one.

Before I could make anything of that, a page swam into focus in my head. Rows and rows of densely packed text. A forum. One thread title stood out in bold in the middle of the page.

GOOD NEWS: They changed the launch storyline. We might get rid of Mara early this time!