Chapter 3: Affinity: Negative Twenty

Dust and debris rained down as Skylar spun, half-expecting a monster, a mutant rat the size of a truck, anything the apocalypse countdown might've decided to throw at her three days early.

What she got instead was worse.

A boulder-sized chunk of the wall crashed down exactly where she'd been standing a second earlier — except she wasn't standing there anymore, because something had yanked her backward by the collar of her shawl with terrifying precision.

Skylar blinked up at her rescuer.

He was tall, dark-haired, and looking at her like she was a particularly annoying stain he'd just discovered on his shirt.

"You," he said flatly, releasing her collar the instant she was steady, "are going to get yourself killed standing in collapsing buildings."

"And you," Skylar shot back, straightening her shawl with as much dignity as a sixty-eight-year-old body could summon, "have wonderful timing and a terrible bedside manner."

[Target identified: Zane Corvid. Ability: Void Manipulation — spatial cuts, shadow traversal. Current market classification: Unwanted — social liability, unstable temperament.]

Skylar read the text and thought, privately, that "unstable temperament" was doing a lot of quiet, diplomatic work.

Behind her, Corin was already scrambling upright despite his injured leg, silver markings flaring as he tried to seal the gash on his own arm. "Zane," he said, sounding both relieved and wary. "What are you doing here?"

"Tracking the tremor." Zane's dark eyes flicked over the rubble, over Corin's wound, and finally — reluctantly — over Skylar, like she was an afterthought he resented having to include. "It originated near here. Figured it was worth checking before it brought the whole mill down on someone stupid enough to be inside it."

"Excuse me," Skylar said.

"I wasn't talking about you," Zane said, in a tone that made it extremely clear he absolutely had been.

[System: Target's affinity: -20.]

Skylar nearly choked. "I'm sorry, negative twenty? We've known each other for eleven seconds!"

"And I already regret ten of them."

"That's not how affinity is supposed to work! You're supposed to start at zero, like a normal, well-adjusted person!"

Zane raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. "I don't know what you're talking about, and frankly, I'd like to keep it that way." He turned to Corin instead, voice softening slightly — the first hint that he was capable of anything other than icy disdain. "Your arm."

"It's healing," Corin said.

"It's healing slowly, because you keep wasting energy trying to be polite to strangers instead of resting." Zane crouched, checking the wound with a clinical briskness that somehow still managed to be gentler than his words. "You need to stop doing that."

"I don't think it's polite to bleed on people," Corin said mildly, and Skylar decided right then that she liked him enormously.

"He's got a point," she offered.

Zane didn't even look at her. "Nobody asked you."

"Rude," Skylar said, delighted despite herself. There was something almost fun about how thoroughly, unapologetically dismissive he was — like arguing with a brick wall that occasionally insulted you back. "For the record, I'm not a stranger. I'm his wife."

Corin made a strangled noise. "That's not— I never agreed to—"

"Details," Skylar said breezily, echoing her own favorite excuse from an hour earlier.

Zane finally turned his head to look at her properly, and for one strange second, something flickered behind his eyes — a flash of confusion that didn't match the contempt he was clearly trying to project. Like he'd heard that sentence before, in a different mouth, in a different life, and his body remembered it even if his mind insisted it hadn't happened.

It passed as quickly as it came. His jaw tightened. "You're delusional."

"I prefer 'ambitious.'"

"You're sixty years past ambitious."

"Sixty-eight," Skylar corrected primly. "Get the number right if you're going to be insulting."

Something that might have been the ghost of amusement crossed Zane's face before he crushed it ruthlessly. He stood, brushing dust off his sleeves, and addressed Corin instead, as if Skylar had already stopped existing. "The tremor wasn't natural. Timeline shouldn't be shifting three days out. Something's wrong with the countdown."

"You felt that too?" Skylar said, surprised into seriousness. "The numbers glitched. Went backward for a second before resetting."

Zane's gaze snapped back to her, sharper now, actually paying attention for the first time. "You have a countdown."

"I have a system. Comes with a countdown, a beauty rating, and an alarming amount of sass."

"You're a Host." It wasn't a question. Something shifted in his expression — wariness, maybe, or recognition he didn't want to have. "That's rare. Systems don't usually attach to—" He stopped himself, but not fast enough.

"To old hags?" Skylar supplied sweetly. "Go on. Finish the sentence. I dare you."

Zane's mouth pressed into a thin line, and for a moment, Skylar thought he actually might. Instead, he turned and started walking toward the exit, void-dark shadows curling faintly around his boots with every step, like the darkness itself was reluctant to let him go.

"Don't follow me," he said, without looking back.

"Wasn't planning to," Skylar lied cheerfully, already following him.

"I mean it."

"So do I."

Behind them, Corin let out a long, exhausted sigh, the sound of a man who had clearly already accepted his fate, silver markings still flickering faintly along his arm as he limped after them both.

They'd made it three streets from the mill — Zane rigid with irritation, Skylar humming something tuneless just to annoy him further — when the sky above them flickered.

Not clouded. Not dimmed.

Flickered, like a badly tuned television, the blue overhead glitching briefly into something wrong — a color that had no business existing in a normal sky — before snapping back to ordinary daylight.

All three of them stopped walking.

[System: Warning. Rift Event countdown has advanced. New estimate: 26 hours remaining.]