Chapter 2

My head hurt worse. I'd barely woken up in this game and already somebody had moved up my death?

Beta Mara had at least managed to hang on for a good chunk of the story. I'd been in the second closed test, though, and I'd heard plenty had changed since the first. The game's original title had been Elysium. Apparently that hadn't told people what they were buying, so by the second beta the studio had slapped Cities of Ash on the box. You couldn't say these people got sentimental about their work. Of course they'd change the story for the public release. I just wished they'd found somebody else's part to cut.

I concentrated on the title. More words resolved.

OP · Almost bailed after the beta. Mara made Joker's route physically painful to play. But the graphics are ridiculous, you can lose hours in this thing, and honestly the other routes slap. So yeah, midnight launch, guess who was there. Stayed up till I hit the end of the update. Haven't seen anybody talking about this yet. Am I seriously the first one here?

#2 · I've heard about her. Half the reason I haven't bought it. Details please?

#3 · [listening intently.gif]

#4 · pulling up a chair

#10 · Okay NOW I'm awake. Been doing the Central route inside Haven because Joker's pissed me off in beta. I'd way rather explore outside the walls. If she dies early I'll switch.

#12 · What is she even there for? End of the world and her one skill is being generous with other people's stuff.

#15 · It's the guilt trips for me. She's got her hooks in him and he just stands there bleeding.

#26 · let's give credit where it's due. something is deeply wrong with that boy too

#28 · lmao guess the studio figured out what it was costing them to keep her alive

#31 · Beta player here. Was on the fence. Just bought it. I want to see her die with my own eyes.

Naturally. Apart from the original post it was about ninety-nine percent people taking swings at me. I wanted to filter for OP and find out what had actually changed. I didn't even know how I'd opened the page. Before I could work it out, whatever clock this thing ran on expired and the whole forum vanished.

If I could get it back, that window on the game from the outside could tell me things I'd have no way of learning in here. So far all I'd managed to learn was that the story had changed. I didn't even know whether the comments were live.

Breathe. I'd been conscious for half an hour. I wasn't going to solve the entire world before my checkup.

“Scare you speechless?” Caesar sounded delighted at the prospect.

I understood him a little better now. River commanded Shelter A-001. Caesar led the people he sent outside it.

The game map broke down into four parts. At the heart of it was the great land ark they'd built when the disaster hit. Players called it Haven. There was enough to go around inside, and most of the strongest Ascendants had been welcomed through its gates. Outside stood four big shelters, A-001 through A-004, one in each direction. All four traded with Central and answered to themselves. If you couldn't live in Haven, you wanted to live in one of those. Ours was the oldest, unusually close to the outer edge of the safe zone.

Farther out, little numbered refuges dotted the map. The closer they were to danger, the less they had. Beyond the safe zone the map went dark. Supposedly nobody who'd gone out there had lived to come back.

When the game opened, it had only been twenty-five years since the Fall. That wasn't nearly long enough to catalog the things that had come with it. Every species had its own abilities, as varied as the powers people woke up with. Hard to wipe out an invasive species when you didn't know what it could do. Central paid well for intelligence on new aberrants.

River supplied it. Caesar's Vanguard hunted along the perimeter and brought back the data. What Central gave them in exchange was enough for most people in the shelter to live on. Then River had asked for something else. He wanted antibody research for an old-stock patient.

Imagine asking a lab to pour that much time and material into a treatment when you could count the people who needed it on your fingers. River had to make up the difference somehow. So out went the Vanguard again, and again, and some of the men and women Caesar sent out to pay my medical bills didn't come home.

Frankly, he deserved a medal for being civil enough to push the chair.

In the beta he'd been the one who rallied River's people, caught him by surprise and hurt him badly enough to run him out. Leaving his sister alive hadn't been mercy. River was so strong that without her to slow him down he could have walked away untouched.

It gave me complicated feelings about this brother I'd acquired. Players had hated him right alongside his sister. It had taken her death to get him off his ass and building something of his own, at which point public opinion had miraculously improved. Everybody really did have a better time when Mara was dead.

I let Caesar's question pass. Presently he gave up trying to get a rise out of me. The researchers disappeared into a lab with the Devourer. Caesar wheeled me on a little faster.

Every door so far had scanned him. At this one, he took a step back. A display hung in the air in front of my face. The scanner chimed and the blast door opened onto what looked, after all the steel and electronic locks, disconcertingly like an ordinary exam room.

A young man in white sat reading a book in white gloves. His shirt was buttoned all the way up. He took his time turning the page before he looked over the fine gold rims of his glasses.

“Wheel her in.”

Caesar ground his teeth, but he pushed. The moment my back wheels cleared the threshold, mechanical arms unfolded from recesses on either side of the door. Caesar dodged the first jet of disinfectant. The nozzles tracked him and got him from head to toe.

“Ellis Lane, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

He'd stepped farther inside trying to dodge. Ellis frowned and snapped his book shut. “Far enough. God knows what you've tracked in, handling those things.”

Caesar gave a sharp laugh. “Who do you think keeps them out there while you sit in here reading?”

“That's literally your job.”

“Beats being somebody's lapdog.”

If they hadn't been on the same side I thought they'd have taken a swing at each other. Caesar snorted and headed out. The door nearly clipped his trailing heel in its eagerness to see him gone.

I vaguely remembered Ellis. His ability, Reconstruction, worked on machines as well as living things. Give him a broken object with physical mass and he could put it back together. Incredible power. Unfortunate rank. At D he had to touch what he worked on, couldn't reconstruct anything larger than himself, and could only do it so many times.

The game hadn't given him much screen time. Mostly he'd been on hand to patch Mara up. The antigen slowed the rate at which her body broke down, but cells were still getting damaged and dying every minute, and that was where Ellis came in. He did some research on aberrants, too. Still, even with those limits, I could think of a dozen things a man like him could be doing at the end of the world. River had kept him here for one girl.

After our eviction, Ellis had simply dropped out of the story. Judging by what I'd just seen, Caesar wasn't likely to have kept him around. Nice to meet another expendable character.

“How do you feel?” Ellis got up.

The pain had eased considerably. I could think straight, and there was a little strength coming back into my arms. “Better. I think the antigen's kicked in.”

For the first time I had the energy to look myself over. Even my hands were tucked away under the cloak. It was designed to keep radiation off me. Direct exposure to the air could burst the blood vessels under old-stock skin. Add blood that barely clotted and a scratch could kill you.

Ellis crouched in front of me and pulled off his right glove. “Give me your hand.”

I laid it on his. The fingers were bone thin. An ugly red network branched up the length of my white forearm where the veins should have shown blue. It looked like ink bleeding through paper. I flinched.

“Much better than after your last trip,” he said. “Looks like this antigen does something, at least.”

This was better? One outing, in a radiation cloak, and I looked like I was bleeding through the skin. A line of game lore about old-stock fragility hadn't prepared me for the sight of my own arm.

His fingers closed around mine. The red drew back under my skin. By the time my arm looked normal, his lips were white and a bead of sweat was running down his temple. Okay. Maybe River had a point. The description on a character sheet hadn't done Ellis's limits justice, either.

“Thank you.”

He looked up, surprised, then gave a little nod. He went straight to the counter, washed the hand that had touched me in disinfectant, dried it and put the glove back on.

He could scrub all he liked. I felt well enough to push back my hood and brace both hands on the armrests. When my feet first took my weight my vision swam. I waited it out, straightened up and took two steps. Feeling the floor through the soles of my feet made this all considerably more real.

Alive. Four working limbs. That counted for more than anything.

I kept coming back to that moment when the creature had touched me. All those whispers, and the abrupt silence when I'd pulled away. Whatever it meant, it was a change in a story that otherwise had a very definite ending for me. I could work with a change.

I'd spent the first twenty years of my life figuring out how to keep living. Apparently switching worlds hadn't got me out of that job. Somewhere in my memory a heart monitor still gave one long, flat note.

Well. Here I was.