Chapter 1: The Worst Class in Ashfall

Rowan Vale knew he was dead when the subway ceiling came down—he just hadn’t expected death to ask him to choose a class.

One moment, the world was steel shriek, concrete dust, and the copper stink of blood.

The next, a blue-white window floated in front of his face.

WELCOME, STRAY SOUL.

You have crossed the last threshold with unresolved intent.

Initializing Ascension Protocol…

Please select a starter class.

Rowan blinked at it through a haze of grit and pain.

His ears were still ringing from the collapse. The tunnel lights had gone out thirty seconds ago—or three years ago, or in another life entirely. Emergency bulbs strobed red down the length of the subway car, painting the panicked commuters in intermittent flashes: a woman clutching a little boy under her coat, a teenager with glass in his cheek, a suited man sobbing into his phone though there hadn’t been service since the first tremor. The air was thick with dust and electrical smoke. Somewhere behind Rowan, a ruptured pipe hissed like an angry animal.

And in front of him, where the eastbound doors had been crushed inward by falling debris, a wedge of black tunnel gaped beneath a sagging concrete beam.

Beyond that wedge, people were still screaming.

“Move!” Rowan shouted, though his throat felt scraped raw. “Single file! Don’t push. If you can walk, help someone who can’t.”

No one listened at first. Panic had its own gravity. It pulled faces wide, turned adults into stumbling children, made hands claw at strangers.

Rowan shoved through them anyway.

His left arm hung wrong from the shoulder. He’d felt it go when the train slammed sideways and his body met a pole with enough force to fill his vision with stars. His ribs grated every time he breathed. A hot wetness ran down from his hairline and into his eye.

None of that mattered.

“Hey!” he barked at the sobbing man in the suit. “You. Tie off his leg.”

The man stared blankly at him.

Rowan grabbed him by the lapels and dragged his face close. “Belt. Around his thigh. Pull until he screams, then pull harder. You want to live? Make yourself useful.”

The man flinched, then fumbled for his belt.

Rowan let him go and dropped beside the teenager with glass in his cheek. Not arterial. Good. The kid’s pupils were uneven. Bad. Rowan pressed two fingers to his neck, found a rabbit-fast pulse, then looked past him to the buckled doors.

People were trapped in the next car.

The collapse had folded the front half of their train like a tin can. Concrete slabs had punched through the roof. The track beyond had vanished under rubble. But there was a gap. Narrow. Ragged. Maybe enough for a person to crawl through if they didn’t mind losing some skin.

Rowan minded.

He went anyway.

“You can’t go in there!” the woman with the little boy cried.

Rowan looked back. Her face was gray with dust except where tears had cut clean lines down her cheeks.

“Yes,” he said. “I can.”

He had been a paramedic once. Not for long enough. Not well enough. Long enough to learn the difference between what people needed and what the world allowed. Long enough to kneel in alleys with his hands inside people’s wounds. Long enough to freeze one night when a child stopped breathing in front of him while sirens painted the rain red and blue.

Long enough to quit.

He had spent the two years since driving medical supply vans, stocking shelves at clinics, and telling himself that knowing how to save people wasn’t the same as being able to.

Then the city had groaned like a dying giant, the subway tunnel had split, and people had screamed his name without knowing it.

Rowan crawled.

Concrete chewed his back. Twisted metal caught his jacket and tore it open. The gap narrowed halfway through, crushing his bad shoulder against stone until black spots swam behind his eyes. He tasted blood. He kept going.

The next car was worse.

It had tilted at an angle, half-buried in debris. Emergency lights flickered weakly. A man was pinned under a fallen handrail. Two women huddled beside a jammed door. An old commuter lay slumped against the seats, eyes open and unfocused.

Rowan counted the living in one practiced sweep.

Six. Maybe seven.

“My wife,” the pinned man gasped. “Please. My wife—”

“I’ll get to her,” Rowan lied, because lies could be splints if you used them right. “Can you feel your legs?”

“I—yes. I think—”

“Good. Breathe slow.”

A crack split the air above them.

Everyone went silent.

Dust sifted from the ceiling in a pale curtain.