Chapter 4: Class Selection Pending

The stairwell smelled like old concrete, blood, and the greasy bite of electrical smoke.

Mara sat on the half-landing between the twenty-first and twenty-second floors with her back to cinder block painted a hospital green gone gray in the low emergency lights. Her forearms rested on her knees. The fire axe lay across her boots, tacky with black blood that wasn’t blood and gray flakes that looked too much like cooled ash. Every breath scraped. Her pulse had slowed from a hammer to a hard, steady knock, but her body still held itself like a coiled line under strain, waiting for the next jolt.

Above them, something heavy crossed the roof.

It did not sound like footsteps. It sounded like weight deciding where reality was weakest.

Niko flinched every time it passed overhead. The kid had wedged himself into the angle where the landing met the wall, hoodie pulled up despite the heat, one sneaker bouncing. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen. There was dried blood on one sleeve and a kitchen knife tucked so deep into his waistband he looked like he thought the blade might run away if he didn’t keep a hand on it.

Tessa sat opposite Mara with her trauma bag open and sorted into neat islands of order across the dirty concrete: gauze, syringes, saline, tape, two dwindling vials of painkiller. She had tied her dark hair back with a strip torn from a bedsheet. Her scrubs were hidden under somebody else’s maintenance jacket, but there was no disguising the way she moved—efficient, exact, all her fear compressed into tasks.

Owen Pike paced because he could not seem to exist any other way. He was broad-shouldered, bearded, and wearing a denim jacket with a cracked patch on one arm that said EYES OPEN in red stitched letters. His glasses were gone. One lens had shattered in the apartment on nineteen, and without them he had to squint at everything like the world itself was deliberately blurring its edges to mock him.

Father Ellias remained where they had lowered him against the inner rail. He looked too thin for the black shirt hanging off him, and the white tab collar at his throat had gone from neat to wilted hours ago. Sweat silvered his temples. The stab wound under his ribs was packed and wrapped, but Tessa kept glancing at the spreading rust-dark bloom beneath the bandages, and her jaw got flatter every time she checked it.

The building groaned around them.

Not settling. Not fire damage. Something slower and more deliberate moved through the tower, a rearranging pressure that made the walls click inside themselves. Twice already Mara had watched a stretch of stairwell where the numbers painted on the wall changed when she looked away and back. Floor 20 had become 18 for a breath, then corrected itself with a flicker of blue static.

Denver lay beyond the narrow wired-glass window at the turn of the stairs, but it barely looked like Denver anymore. The city glimmered under drifting ash. High-rises stood with their tops split open like struck teeth. Sheets of blue light crawled over the interstate where lanes had folded into impossible angles, looping down into darkness that had not been there yesterday. Far to the west, above the mountains, the sky remained torn—a vast wound of ember-orange and electric cobalt hanging over the Rockies and leaking a slow blizzard of black.

When Mara looked at it too long, the inside of her chest felt hot.

Owen stopped pacing.

“Did anyone else just hear that?” he said.

“Hear what?” Tessa asked without looking up.

“Like…” He turned his head. “Like a modem having a panic attack in my fillings.”

Niko gave him a blank, exhausted stare. “Nobody knows what a modem sounds like, old man.”

“That hurt me personally.”

Then Mara heard it too.

A tone too high to be sound and too intimate to be imagination passed through the stairwell. Blue motes appeared in the air, no bigger than sparks, drifting from the seams in the walls and the edges of the handrails. They gathered in front of each of them in loose clusters. The skin on Mara’s arms pebbled.

Father Ellias opened his eyes.

He had been fading for the last ten minutes, his face pulled white and distant, but now he looked sharply awake, as if somebody had spoken his name close to his ear.

“It’s back,” he murmured.

“What is?” Niko asked.

The priest did not answer. He was listening to something none of them could hear clearly, and terror and wonder warred behind his eyes.

The sparks rushed together.

[Localized Tutorial Condition Met.]

[Survivor Status Interface Unlocked.]

[Action history recorded.]

[Class Selection Available.]

The words appeared in the air, made of clean blue lines that hummed faintly around the edges. Mara did not see them with her eyes alone. She felt them under her sternum, each line pressing into her awareness with cold precision.

Niko yelped and slapped at the message in front of him. His hand passed through it, scattering sparks.

“Nope,” Owen said immediately. “Nope, I reject this software update.”

Tessa froze with a syringe half-unwrapped. “Can everybody see this?”

“Yes,” Mara said.

“That’s bad,” Owen said. “I need it on the record that if everybody can see the nightmare HUD, then this is in fact a civilization event.”

“You had doubts?” Tessa asked.

“I had categories.”

Mara rose to one knee. Her axe balanced loosely in one hand. She had no idea if the thing in front of them was a trap, but the night had already stripped away most of the old categories that mattered. There had been creatures in the hall outside 21B with backward-jointed arms and mouths full of glass-bright teeth. There had been a woman from fifteen who had died screaming and then kept moving after the screaming stopped. A floating screen full of impossible text no longer ranked high on the list.

She reached toward her own message.

The blue pane widened like a pupil.

[Name: Mara Vance]

[Level: 2]

[Species: Human]

[Condition: Fatigued / Minor Burns / Smoke Exposure]

[Attributes Available Upon Class Selection]

[Recorded Significant Actions:]

—Survived Riftfall Event

—Killed 7 Lesser Scavengers

—Killed 1 Skinless Hound

—Maintained group cohesion under hostile conditions

—Used fire in contested environment

—Handled the dead without revulsion

[Class Selection: Pending]

[Criteria incomplete.]

Mara stared.

The others were suddenly making noises all at once.

“Level two?” Owen said. “How are we leveling? Is there experience? Is there a hidden kill feed? Oh my God, there’s absolutely a hidden kill feed.”

“Mine says level one,” Niko said, then with quick suspicion, “What do you mean group cohesion? Is this thing watching us?”

“Obviously,” Tessa said. “Move.”

She had come to her feet and shouldered close to Mara so she could look at her own pane, eyes darting as she read at speed.

[Name: Tessa Vale]

[Level: 1]

[Species: Human]

[Condition: Fatigued / Dehydrated]

[Recorded Significant Actions:]

—Stabilized 3 wounded allies

—Prevented blood-loss fatality

—Maintained function under panic conditions

—Administered treatment under active threat

[Eligible Classes:]

1. Field Medic

2. Trauma Weaver

3. Redline Surgeon

Tessa’s mouth tightened at the last one. “That sounds illegal.”

“The first two sounded legal?” Owen asked.

She ignored him. “No details. Just names.”

“Maybe select one?” Niko said.

“Not until we know what it does.”

“That worked out great for everyone who died tonight,” Owen muttered, then swiped at his own pane. His expression changed. “Oh. Oh no. Mine’s themed.”

[Name: Owen Pike]

[Level: 1]

[Species: Human]

[Condition: Concussed / Fatigued]

[Recorded Significant Actions:]

—Broadcast warning during incursion

—Observed anomalous entities

—Maintained cognition under revelation shock

—Attempted to map System behavior

[Eligible Classes:]

1. Signal Chaser

2. Static Scribe

3. Paranoid Oracle

Niko barked a laugh despite himself. “No way. It really called you that?”

Owen looked offended and vindicated at the same time. “I need everyone to understand that if the universe itself labels me a Paranoid Oracle, then I’ve been right at least thirty percent more often than any of you gave me credit for.”

“That number is impossible to verify,” Tessa said.

“Exactly. Which is how you know it’s true.”

Niko looked at his own screen and swore softly.

[Name: Niko Reyes]

[Level: 1]

[Species: Human]

[Condition: Bruised / Nutritionally Deficient / Adrenal Load]

[Recorded Significant Actions:]

—Evaded hostile entities in confined terrain

—Acquired supplies from contested rooms

—Detected threats before group contact

—Displayed flight optimization

[Eligible Classes:]

1. Runner

2. Scavenger

3. Slipknife

“Flight optimization,” Owen repeated. “That’s the system calling you a coward in office language.”

Niko’s face hardened. “Say that again.”

Mara didn’t raise her voice. “Enough.”

It was barely more than a breath, but it landed. Owen shut his mouth. Niko looked away first, though mutiny still burned hot in his shoulders.

Tessa crouched by Father Ellias. “Can you read yours?”

The priest’s gaze had gone past his screen. He looked as if he were staring through it into some deeper room.

“Father?”

His lips moved before the sound came.

“It keeps asking whether I accept witness.”

A chill threaded along Mara’s neck.

“What does your display say?” she asked.

Ellias blinked, refocused, and read with visible effort.

[Name: Ellias Ward]

[Level: 1]

[Species: Human]

[Condition: Critical Blood Loss / Infection Risk / Pain]

[Recorded Significant Actions:]

—Gave comfort under terminal threat

—Maintained faith under reality breach

—Heard unauthorized response

—Refused surrender while dying

[Eligible Classes:]

1. Penitent

2. Threshold Chaplain

3. Grave Cantor

[Additional Query Pending…]

No one spoke for a moment.

Even Owen had gone quiet.

Outside the stairwell door on twenty-one, something dragged itself across carpet and then fell still. The sound made the silence thinner.

Mara looked back to her own panel. The words Criteria incomplete remained fixed at the bottom like a held breath.

“Why is mine pending?” she said.

Tessa straightened. “Maybe because you hit level two first.”

“Or because the machine devil wants a bonus round,” Owen said.

“Can you not say machine devil right now?”

“Would cyber-satan help?”

Niko scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Can we please focus on whether pressing one of these gets us killed?”

Father Ellias gave a faint, pained smile. “Everything has already been trying to get us killed, son. The question is whether this does it faster.”

He coughed after speaking. A little blood stained his lower lip. Tessa swore under her breath and knelt beside him again.

Mara watched the priest’s breathing hitch. The bandages over his side had gone darker. Too dark. She knew enough triage from wildfire seasons and bad landings to read the slope of a body heading the wrong way. Tessa was buying him minutes, maybe an hour if the world suddenly developed mercy.

It wouldn’t.

The blue panes waited.

Then a new sound came from below.

Wet. Irregular. Close.

The survivors went still in the same instant, animal-fast, all attention dropping toward the lower stairs. Mara rose without thinking and moved down three steps, axe ready. Niko slid his knife free. Owen grabbed the broken metal leg of a stairwell chair they had salvaged earlier. Tessa capped the syringe and tucked it away with hands that no longer shook.

The emergency light over floor twenty flickered.

On the landing below, a shape lay half in shadow where they had left it.

Mrs. Alvarez from 20C.

Or what had been Mrs. Alvarez.

She had been dead for at least an hour. Mara knew because she had felt the old woman’s throat herself after the thing with needle bones had gutted her and because Tessa had checked a second time while whispering a useless apology. They had dragged the body to the side so they could barricade the lower door. There had not been time for anything else.

Now Mrs. Alvarez’s fingers twitched against the concrete.

Niko made a strangled sound. “No. No, no, no.”

Blue light leaked from the woman’s open mouth in thin, pulsing threads.

Her chest rose.

Not with breath. With inflation, as if something under the ribs was filling itself like a bladder.

Mara was moving before thought caught up. She went down the stairs fast, boots skidding on grit, and planted one foot against the corpse’s shoulder as it began to convulse. The skin around the old woman’s eyes had sunk and tightened. Her lips peeled back from her teeth. A clicking rolled in her throat like pebbles in a pipe.

“Tessa,” Mara snapped. “Can she be stopped?”

“She was stopped,” Tessa said sharply from above. “She was dead.”

The body arched so hard the spine popped against concrete.

Father Ellias’s voice drifted down, thin but urgent. “Don’t let it stand.”

Mara brought the axe up. The old instincts were brutal and clean: sever, crush, finish the threat. But as she looked down at the corpse, heat spread through her palms, sudden and familiar in a way that made no sense. She smelled not only blood and rot but dry pine, resin, and the deep mineral scent of a burn scar after rain. Her skin prickled where ash from the torn sky had settled on her sleeves.

The blue light pouring from the old woman’s mouth brightened.

[Unclaimed dead reanimation in progress.]

[Preventive options available:]

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