Player 001

Ara POV:

"Do you accept your first mission?"

"Absolutely not," Ara said out loud, to empty the air, in an empty lot, like a completely sane person. "No. Who even are you? Get out of my head."

The voice said nothing for a moment.

Then it said, pleasantly and mechanically and with absolutely no regard for her distress:

"Designation: LUS. Level-Up System. You have been selected as Player 001."

"I don't want to be selected," she snapped. "I didn't apply for anything. I have a plan. My plan involves leaving this city and not dying in a river this time, so if you could just—"

"The apocalypse will begin in ten days."

"I know that."

"Departure from Telenburgh is now prohibited for designated players."

"Yeah." She bent down and picked up her backpack. "I'm going to go ahead and ignore that."

She walked back toward the fence gap.

She made it four blocks.

Four blocks of normal walking, of almost convincing herself that the voice had gone quiet and given up, that she was going to be fine, that whatever invisible force had stopped her at the fence wasn't going to follow her into the street.

And then something hit her.

It was like someone had reached inside her ribcage and made a fist. Every muscle in her chest contracted at once. Her knees buckled and she went down hard onto the pavement, backpack slamming into her spine, one palm scraping concrete.

"Stop," she gasped. "Stop—"

Red text detonated across her vision. WARNING. RESTRICTED ZONE BREACH. MISSION REFUSAL PENALTY IN EFFECT.

Her skull felt like it was full of static, like someone had shoved a live wire behind her eyes.

A woman nearby screamed. Someone else said what's wrong with her. A kid asked his mother if the lady was dying.

Ara was also wondering that.

"Okay," she managed, through her teeth, through the pain. "Okay. I'm stopping. I'm going back. Please… please stop. Whatever this is, just make it stop, please."

The pressure vanished like a switch flipped.

She lay on the pavement for a moment, breathing. A man crouched beside her and asked if she needed an ambulance. She told him she was fine, that she was just having cramps. He looked like he didn't believe her but walked away anyway because this was Telenburgh and people had their own problems.

She sat up, pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum, and stared at the middle distance.

Fine. Fine. The system was not bluffing.

She went home, dropped her bag on the floor, and stood in the middle of her apartment with her arms crossed.

"First mission," she said flatly. "What is it."

"Gather supplies from the nearest grocery store."

Ara waited.

"That's it?" she said. "That's my big mission? Grocery shopping?"

"Correct."

She almost laughed. She actually almost laughed, which would have been her first genuine laugh in what felt like years, except the humor dissolved fast when she remembered what starving actually felt like. The version where your body starts eating itself and everything hurts and you do things you swore you never would just to get another day.

She'd done that. She'd done all of it. For Ryan, mostly. Defending the base, running supply runs, putting herself between him and danger, and he had stood at the edge of that river and watched.

The laugh dried up completely.

"Grocery store it is," she said, and grabbed her keys.

The store felt wrong the second she walked in.

She couldn't explain it at first. Everything looked normal. Bright lights, clean floors, the smell of bread baking somewhere in the back, the soft recorded music that always made grocery stores feel slightly unreal. People moved through the aisles with their carts, checking their phones, comparing prices.

But they moved too smoothly. That was it. They were too steady. Nobody drifted or doubled back or reached for something and changed their mind. They just moved, like they'd already decided exactly what they needed and were executing a route.

Ara told herself she was being paranoid and grabbed a basket.

She kept her head down and worked fast. She got some canned goods, Water purification tablets, Medical supplies, and high-calorie dense food that would last. She kept thinking ten days, ten days, which meant she needed enough for after, not before.

She was in the canned goods aisle when she felt the sensation of being watched.

She looked up.

There was a man at the end of the aisle. He was thin and pale. His eyes had a glazed quality to them, like someone who hadn't slept in three days but was still upright through sheer stubbornness. He was looking directly at her wrist.

The glow there was faint, and barely visible in the fluorescent lighting, but he was tracking it with total focus. He took one step toward her.

"Can you hear the voices too?" he said quietly.

Every hair on her arms stood up.

She put a can of beans between them symbolically, said, "I don't know what you're talking about," and walked in the opposite direction, fast.

She paid, didn't make eye contact with anyone, and left.

Back in the apartment, the system chimed.

"Mission complete. Reward processing."

And then the warmth hit. It was nothing like pain. It moved through her, spreading from her chest outward into her arms and legs, filling in spaces she hadn't realized felt hollow. Her muscles stopped aching. Her hands steadied. She felt, suddenly and absurdly, like she had slept for twelve hours and eaten a full meal.

She looked at her right hand.

She made a fist experimentally.

Then she pulled back and punched the wall beside the kitchen doorframe.

The concrete cracked. A dent the size of her knuckles, half an inch deep, in solid concrete.

Ara stared at it for a long time.

"Okay," she said, very quietly. "Okay."

She turned back to her groceries, and that was when she saw them.

The glow. It was hairline-thin. But once she spotted one, she couldn't stop seeing the rest. Every can. Every sealed package. Every bottle. A faint luminescent mark the size of a thumbprint, hidden in the corner of the label or pressed into the underside of the lid.

Trackers.

She looked around her apartment, at twelve bags of supplies she'd just hauled home, and understood all at once. The mission hadn't been about helping her survive. It had been about marking her apartment. Broadcasting her exact location to every other player with eyes to see it.

"You used me," she said flatly.

LUS did not respond, which was somehow worse than if it had.

She was still standing there, a can in each hand, trying to decide what to do with supplies she no longer trusted, when her front door opened.

She had the kitchen knife off the counter and in her hand before she'd consciously decided to move.

The man who walked in was tall and was putting on a dark jacket. He scanned the apartment in about two seconds, the way someone did when they were checking for threats and already knew where to look. Then his eyes landed on her, and on the knife she was pointing at his chest.

He looked completely unbothered.

"Get out," she said. "Right now."

He didn't move. He looked at the bags on the floor, at the dent in the wall, at the glow on her wrist, and then back at her face. His expression didn't shift once. It was calm and assessing.

"Four players entered the building three minutes ago," he said. His voice was low, and unhurried. "Two of them are already on your floor."

"How do you know that?"

"Because surviving the system means noticing everything."

There was a beat of silence.

"I don't know you," Ara said. "You just walked into my apartment without permission. Give me one good reason I shouldn't start screaming."

"Because the people in the hall would hear you too."

She hated that he had a point.

He held up his right wrist then, slowly. The system mark on his skin glowed the same pale color as hers, same shape, and same light.

"Ronan," he said simply. "And I've known your address since the moment LUS activated you this morning."

"That's not reassuring at all," she said.

"It wasn't meant to be."

She opened her mouth to demand an explanation, to ask why, to ask how, to ask what kind of system handed out her home address to strangers like a welcome package —

And then she heard footsteps. They were heavy and deliberate, moving down the hall. More than one set. They weren't rushing, which was almost worse. Rushing meant they were panicking. Slow meant confident.

Ronan looked at her. Something in his expression shifted, just slightly.

"We can keep arguing if you want," he said quietly. "But if you wait another thirty seconds, you're going to die in this apartment.”