Chapter 4

Emily Varen

The explosions were still running, the building's entire thermal signature buried under electromagnetic noise—a narrow window, and I wasn't going to waste it. I called out to her once. The crowd surging through the exit split us apart: she went left, swept along with the other survivors flooding out of the facility; I went right, into the dark, toward the part of the city I actually knew. I didn't turn around. In the wasteland, separated means separated.

The gap in the fence was my own work.

Three months ago I'd cut it with a salvaged hydraulic shear—a slot just wide enough to pass through sideways, edges wrapped in rubber tubing so it wouldn't catch skin, clothing, or sound. If there's a way to have one more exit, you make one more exit.

I went through it now. Behind me: a chain of directional detonations churning the building's thermal output into electromagnetic static, the collective mechanical groan of Rust-Walkers moving through the rubble, everything I had no intention of looking at again.

I didn't think. I ran.

Adrenaline put my legs on autopilot while my brain ran the route in parallel—right turn to avoid the collapsed section of sidewalk, wide arc around the intersection blocked by three stripped armored vehicles, where Rust-Walker patrol frequencies stacked up at night and the electromagnetic dead zone sat at exactly the angle only I knew about.

The entrance to the Trench sat in the shadow of a cluster of decommissioned reactor cooling towers. I moved along the route from memory, counting in the dark.

First EMP tripwire: seventeen paces in, left side, three centimeters off the ground. I stepped over it. Second: threaded between the abandoned server racks past the corner. I angled through sideways.

The third was my best work—a single strand of wire looped in a full circle, dressed to look like a scatter of dropped fiber-optic cable. Only someone who knew where the loop started could find the safe path through.

The entrance to the core zone was a steel door secured with three bolt latches and a welded metal brace I'd fabricated myself. I opened them one by one, went through, locked them again behind me.

Then I put my back against the door and let myself slide down to the floor.

Double-layered steel mesh packed with salvaged magnetron units stripped from junked microwaves, the whole exterior sealed with a coat of heavy-metal sludge—on any electromagnetic scan, this space read as a dead zone.

Rust-Walker thermal imaging picked up nothing here. Their bioelectric sonar picked up nothing here. I had spent six weeks building it.

Inside: one folding camp cot, half a tin of synthetic nutrient paste, a basic set of mechanical tools, and the vial of serum still pressed into my palm.

I made myself slow my breathing down first. Breathe before you think. Let the adrenaline recede. Let your brain come back online before you touch anything that matters.

Outside, somewhere in the distance, metal dragged across concrete. Far. Not close. I waited until it stopped.

I set the vial on the worktable and examined it under the glow stick.

Visually identical to every other sample bottle I'd seen on Dr. Victor's cart. I'd been flat on my back with a restricted sightline—from that angle, I'd only been able to make out the three vials on the near side of the cart. But in the second I rolled off the table and grabbed the frame, I saw the full tray: six vials, same spec, arranged in pairs, three distinct batch codes. Dr. Victor had reached for the one with the most recent batch marking. I'd grabbed the one beside it—older batch, slightly different label.

There was a line of handwritten text on the label, small enough that I had to bring it almost to my face to read.

I brought it almost to my face.

"Forced symbiosis tolerance rate: approx. 41%."

Forty-one percent chance of surviving the process. Better than even odds of dying. No ambiguity, no softening language—Dr. Victor's lab had written the mortality rate directly on the label because they had never needed to care what the subjects thought about the numbers.

I had watched Dr. Victor run a brief demonstration with a vial from the same batch while I was still in the facility. The subject had already completed a preliminary symbiosis procedure.

Less than eight minutes after injection, the veins along that person's forearm lit up beneath the skin—blue-white arc patterns tracing the vascular lines, like a circuit board taking current for the first time. That wasn't a sedative. It wasn't any kind of standard medical compound I'd ever encountered in the wasteland. It was the mechanism for forcing the symbiosis process to activate. The entry point for the Origin Project.

I had no idea what it would do to someone who had never been through any part of that process—but it was at minimum sourced from the same experiment. That was the closest thing to a real answer I was going to find tonight.

I set the vial down. Sat on the edge of the cot. Closed my eyes.

My brain wouldn't stop.

Alpha-Zero's silhouette kept cutting back in—suspended in the light of the explosions, that absolute cold in his posture, the quality of someone looking down at something that didn't concern him. He hadn't needed EMP tripwires. He hadn't needed a Faraday cage. He hadn't needed to coat himself in industrial waste oil and pass for a moving piece of garbage. He'd just hung there in the air while everyone else ran, and his expression had been nothing at all.

I thought about what Dr. Victor had said.

"Root Access can be transmitted through genetic inheritance."

I thought about the surgical table. The sedative moving through my bloodstream. The way the people in that lab had looked at me—not with hatred, which would have been easier to hold onto, but with the particular blankness of people who had stopped registering you as a person. Like being turned inside out for inspection and then sewn back up, and being told the whole thing was for the good of humanity.

Claire had run toward other people. I had run into the dark. I always ran into the dark.

People without resonance ability don't live in the wasteland. Five years in the E-Waste Trench had taught me that my EMP tripwires could stop Rust-Walkers but couldn't stop a kinetic-class Neural-Sync who decided to clear this area out. That my Faraday cage could block a signal but couldn't stop someone from simply pushing the wall in.

I had survived on technical knowledge and pattern recognition and the pre-emptive threat awareness that the wasteland grinds into you until it becomes reflex—but all of that had a ceiling. Tonight I had seen exactly where that ceiling was.

Forty-one percent.

I sat up and grabbed the vial.

Not because I wasn't afraid. Because being afraid wasn't going to change anything.

There was a thin metal probe on the worktable—0.8-millimeter gauge, the kind I used for precision circuit soldering. I located the patch of skin on my lower left side. Dr. Victor's team had swabbed that spot with disinfectant during surgical prep. It was the only part of my body that had been sterilized tonight.

I used the probe tip to open the skin—a small puncture, just enough to seat the needle cleanly. Then I lined up the serum needle against that point, set my teeth together, and pushed the fluid in.

The first sensation was cold—a deep, spreading ache radiating outward from the insertion point, like being injected with liquid coolant, the tissue registering it before the nerves had fully caught up.

Then came the burning. It started at the puncture site and moved outward in all directions at once, the way an electrical overload travels through a circuit—not blunt pain, but something precise and sharp, conducting itself along nerve pathways in distinct pulses, like someone running a live wire through my nervous system one branch at a time.

I fell back onto the cot.

Cold sweat soaked through my shirt. The smell of rust and machine oil closed around me. The green light from the glow stick bled at the edges of my vision. The burning kept spreading—past my abdomen, up into my chest, out through my arms and legs—every nerve ending receiving a signal it had no framework to interpret.

Consciousness started blurring inside the heat of it.

I thought: forty-one percent.

Which side of that number am I on.