Chapter 3: Choose Before You Bleed Out

The lobby of Helix Tower had been built to impress people who still believed glass meant safety.

Three stories of open air rose above Mara Voss, all polished black marble and gold-veined columns, with a chandelier hanging like a frozen explosion over the reception desk. Every surface reflected panic. The hundred or so survivors trapped inside the tower multiplied in the dark glass until it looked like an army of frightened ghosts had crowded in with them.

Outside, Chicago screamed.

The sound came through the sealed revolving doors in warped, muffled waves: car alarms dying one by one, far-off impacts like wrecking balls striking meat, the shriek of something human being dragged across asphalt. Beyond the lobby’s front glass, the street had become a smear of red and blue emergency light. The black wall surrounding the city cut off the sky between skyscrapers, a vertical void too smooth to be natural, too huge to be believed.

No one looked at it for long.

Looking made it real.

Mara knelt beside the teenager on the marble floor, both knees already slick with his blood.

“Stay with me,” she said, and her voice came out steadier than the rest of her felt. “Hey. Eyes open.”

The boy’s lashes fluttered. He was sixteen, maybe seventeen, with a mop of black curls plastered to his forehead by sweat. His hoodie had once been yellow. Now it was dark from sternum to waist, soaked through where a shard of something—glass, bone, metal, she hadn’t had time to identify it—had torn under his ribs and left a wound that pulsed too eagerly with every weakening beat of his heart.

He had told her his name when she dragged him in from the sidewalk.

Eli.

He had been joking then, or trying to. “Bad first day for my internship,” he’d gasped while she and the broad-shouldered man named Torres hauled him through the tower’s doors. Mara had laughed because people clung to jokes the way drowning men clung to driftwood.

He wasn’t joking now.

His breath rattled. Tiny red bubbles gathered at the corner of his mouth.

“Is he going to die?” someone asked.

Mara did not look up. “Not if everyone stops asking me questions and finds me clean cloth.”

“Clean?” A woman’s voice cracked. “Everything’s—”

“Shirts. Scarves. Curtains if you can tear them down. Anything.” Mara pressed both hands to the wound. Warm blood filled the spaces between her fingers. “Torres, I need pressure here when I tell you.”

The man crouched across from her. He had a split eyebrow, a jaw like poured concrete, and the habit of looking toward exits even in a building that had swallowed all of them. His suit jacket was gone. His white shirt was streaked with grime and some black fluid Mara didn’t want to identify.

“Tell me what to do,” he said.

Mara glanced once at his hands. Big, steady, callused in a way his expensive watch couldn’t hide. Military, maybe. Construction. Security. Someone accustomed to taking orders if the orders made sense.

“When I move, put both palms where mine are and push down hard. Don’t let up because he cries. Don’t let up because he begs. He needs that pressure more than he needs mercy.”

Eli made a small sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t broken in the middle.

“Cool,” he whispered. “Love being talked about like a leaky pipe.”

“Leaky pipes don’t usually talk back.” Mara leaned closer. “That’s points in your favor.”

His eyes rolled toward her. Brown eyes. Too wide. Too young. “You’re a doctor?”

“Paramedic.”

“That’s like doctor speedrun.”

“Exactly.” She nodded at Torres. “Now.”

They swapped pressure. Torres’s palms came down, and Eli arched with a hoarse cry. Mara tore open the boy’s hoodie, then his shirt beneath. The wound was ugly. Jagged entry, lower left thorax, likely splenic injury, maybe diaphragm, maybe lung if the angle was cruel enough. In an ambulance she would have had oxygen, fluids, trauma shears, a monitor, a radio to scream at receiving. Here she had a lobby floor, a frightened crowd, and a System countdown floating in the air above the reception desk like a death sentence.

FIRST ASCENT WAVE BEGINS AT DUSK.
TIME REMAINING: 00:47:18

The letters glowed white against nothing, crisp and calm as hospital signage.

Mara hated them more every time she looked.

A young woman in yoga pants shoved a bundle of silk scarves toward her. “Will this work?”

“It’ll work better than staring.” Mara snatched them, wadded two together, and packed around the wound as best she could without probing too deep. Eli trembled beneath her hands. His skin had taken on the pale gray sheen Mara knew from alleyways, bathtubs, wrecked sedans. Shock had a color. Death did too.

It was already brushing his lips.

A few feet away, the second patient groaned. The woman Mara had dragged in with Eli—mid-thirties, red coat, broken arm and possible concussion—lay propped against a column, watched over by an elderly man who kept patting her shoulder as if that could hold her together. Her name was Nina. She was alive for now. Conscious enough to weep silently, which put her lower on Mara’s list than the boy bleeding into the marble.

Someone near the elevators was praying in Spanish. Someone else was arguing loudly about the stairs.

“We can go up,” a man barked. “It said climb. We climb before the monsters get in.”

“The doors won’t open,” another snapped.

“Break them.”

“With what, your LinkedIn profile?”

A hysterical laugh burst out and died quickly.

The lobby had formed tribes in under an hour. Office workers clustered by company badges. Hotel guests from the connected atrium huddled around luggage. Security guards tried to look authoritative while checking phones that had no signal. A stocky woman with silver hair and a bloodied rolling pin stood in front of two children as if daring the whole apocalypse to come closer.

And above them all, the System had already branded everyone.

Names and levels hovered faintly when Mara focused. Not always. Not consistently. Like her eyes had learned a new muscle and kept straining it.

Daniel Torres. Level 1. Unclassed.

Nina Patel. Level 1. Unclassed.

Elias Park. Level 1. Unclassed.

Unclassed.

That word sat under every name like a diagnosis waiting to become terminal.

Mara tore another scarf with her teeth and bound it tight around the packed dressing. Eli flinched less this time. That was worse.

“Mara,” Torres said.

She heard what he hadn’t said. Blood had spread under Eli’s back. The marble’s grooves carried it in thin red rivers toward the reception desk.

“I know.”

“Tell me what you need.”

“A trauma bay.”

Torres’s mouth tightened.

“Failing that,” she said, “find me bottled water, hand sanitizer, liquor if anyone has it, and the sharpest knife in this building.”

A man in a navy vest heard her and blanched. “Knife?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t do surgery here.”

Mara looked at him then. He was in his fifties, executive haircut, face flushed with the offense of a person used to emergencies happening to other people. His name flickered when she focused.

Warren Bell. Level 1. Unclassed.

“You’re right,” Mara said. “I can let him die neatly instead.”

Warren swallowed and looked away.

Torres rose. “Water, sanitizer, liquor, knife. Move.”

The way he said it made people move.

Mara leaned over Eli again. His eyes had found the chandelier. Its crystals reflected in his pupils like stars sinking underwater.

“Eli.”

“Mm.”

“Any allergies?”

“Homework.”

“Serious.”

“Peanuts.” His throat bobbed. “And bees. And my stepdad’s cooking.”

“Medical history?”

“Asthma.”

“Meds?”

“Inhaler. Backpack.” His brow creased. “Lost it.”

“Okay.” She checked his pulse at the neck. Rapid, thready, slipping. “You’re doing good.”

“That’s a lie.”

“It’s a paramedic lie. Legally distinct.”

His mouth twitched.

For one breath, Mara saw him as he must have been an hour ago: a kid in a stupid yellow hoodie, heading downtown with earbuds in, annoyed by texts, thinking hunger meant lunch was late and fear meant grades or girls or whether the train would stall. The System had stolen all the small, survivable fears and replaced them with things that wore human skin badly and climbed glass towers at dusk.

Her hands shook once.

She pressed them harder into Eli’s blood until the tremor vanished.

A tone rang through the lobby.

Not through speakers. Through bone.

Everyone froze.

CLASS SELECTION AVAILABLE.
SURVIVORS ARE ADVISED TO SELECT A CLASS BEFORE FIRST ASCENT WAVE.

UNCLASSED MORTALITY PROJECTION: 91.7%

Screams followed. Not from outside this time.

White panels unfolded in the air before each survivor, visible enough that Mara could see their light reflected on faces, not clear enough for her to read anyone’s but her own. It appeared inches from her eyes, an impossible rectangle edged in frost-white flame.

MARA VOSS
LEVEL 1 HUMAN
STATUS: UNCLASSED

AVAILABLE CLASS PATHS
1. FIELD MEDIC
2. WATCHMAN
3. COURIER
4. BONE-SAW INITIATE

SELECT TO SURVIVE.

The words hung between her and the boy bleeding out.

“Not now,” she snarled.

The panel did not care.

All around her, people shouted at empty air.

“What does Guardian do?”

“Why do I only have Laborer?”

“It says Accountant of Measures. What the hell is—”

“Don’t pick anything! It’s a trick!”

“Everything’s a trick, Gary!”

A young man in a delivery uniform jabbed at his panel. Light crawled over his skin in thin blue lines. He gasped, then straightened, eyes wide. A translucent icon appeared over his name: Runner.

Near the elevators, one of the security guards chose something. His shoulders broadened with an audible crack. He vomited immediately onto his shoes, then laughed while wiping his mouth.

Mara ignored her options and pulled back Eli’s eyelid. Pupils unequal now. No, maybe the light. Damn it. His breathing hitched wetly.

“Mara,” Torres said, returning with a first-aid kit under one arm, a bottle of vodka in his hand, and a kitchen knife clenched carefully by the blade. “System thing. You seeing this?”

“Yes.”

“Pick something.”

“I’m busy.”

“You’ll be dead busy if you don’t.”

“Put the kit down.”

He did, but his eyes stayed on her invisible panel. “There’s a medic option, right? Take it.”

Mara ripped open the first-aid kit. Office grade. Bandages, antiseptic wipes, tiny scissors, gloves, gauze pads too small to matter. She nearly laughed. The world ended and gave her a boo-boo box.

“Mara.”

“Field Medic,” she said. “Watchman. Courier. Bone-Saw Initiate.”

“Bone-Saw sounds cheerful.”

“It sounds like infection with branding.”

“Then Field Medic.”

She packed more gauze. “Field Medic won’t give me blood. It won’t give me an OR. It won’t put his spleen back together.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know systems.”

He frowned. “You know this System?”

Mara’s mouth went dry.

She knew protocols. Triage charts. Dispatch codes. Hospital diversion maps. She knew the kind of systems that promised order while people died in hallways because no beds were open. She knew how rules became excuses. How paperwork outlived patients. How every institution, given enough pressure, learned to protect itself first.

This glowing thing had the same smell.

Cold. Clean. Hungry.

Her panel pulsed.

CLASS SELECTION RECOMMENDED.
TIME TO FORCED RANDOMIZATION: 00:05:00

“Forced randomization?” Torres said.

“It can wait five minutes.”

“He can’t.”

The words hit because they were true.

Eli’s hand moved weakly, fingers searching against the marble. Mara caught them. His grip was cold and slick.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m here.”

“Hurts,” he whispered.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

She let out a breath that almost became a laugh. “Fair.”

His eyes shifted toward the ceiling again. “My mom’s gonna be mad.”

“At you?”

“Missed dinner.”

“Then you better not make it worse by dying.”

“That a medical order?”

“Yes.”

He blinked slowly. “You have kids?”

The question slipped past her guard like a needle under skin.

For half a second, the lobby dissolved. She saw a pediatric shoe on the shoulder of the Dan Ryan. Purple. Velcro strap. Saw rain flashing red under ambulance lights. Heard her partner, Luis, saying her name in a voice that meant there was nothing to do and she was doing it anyway.

Mara squeezed Eli’s hand too hard.

“No,” she said.

Not a lie. Not anymore.

Eli’s face crumpled, but not from pain. “I don’t want to die.”

There it was. No joke. No teenage armor. Just the oldest prayer in the world.

Mara leaned so close her forehead almost touched his. “Then listen to me. Breathe small. Don’t fight the pain. Let me do the fighting.”

“Okay.”

“Good.”

He tried.

God help him, he tried.

Torres uncapped the vodka. Mara washed the knife with alcohol, then her hands, then the torn skin around the wound while Eli sobbed through clenched teeth. She had no anesthetic. No suction. No imaging. If the object had left fragments inside, if the bleed was arterial, if his lung was filling—

Stop.

She had seconds, not a hospital. Field intervention. Stabilize. Buy time. The System had made a dungeon out of a skyscraper; maybe it had made rules that could be bent.

Her panel hovered at the edge of vision.

AVAILABLE CLASS PATHS
1. FIELD MEDIC — Improve emergency care, wound stabilization, stamina under crisis.
2. WATCHMAN — Improve perception, defensive reflexes, threat detection.
3. COURIER — Improve speed, endurance, navigation under pursuit.
4. BONE-SAW INITIATE — Improve invasive treatment, pain tolerance, anatomical exploitation.

Field Medic was the obvious choice. The safe choice. The System’s version of a pat on the head: keep doing what you were doing, little mortal, only now with numbers.

Bone-Saw made her stomach knot. Anatomical exploitation. The phrase glittered with cruelty.

Another scream rose near the stairwell.

One of the hotel guests had selected something that wreathed his hands in sparks. He stared at them, delighted and horrified, until a spark jumped to the carpet and began to smoke. People scattered. The silver-haired woman with the rolling pin stomped it out without letting go of the children.

“Everyone choosing combat gets magic,” Warren Bell said loudly. He had climbed onto the lowest step of the ornamental fountain, perhaps because frightened men always sought height. “We need coordination. We need leadership. No one should pick randomly. We should inventory classes and assign—”

“Shut up, Warren,” the silver-haired woman snapped.

“You don’t even know me.”

“I know the sound.”

Mara almost liked her.

Then Eli stopped breathing.

Not fully. A pause. A gap where the next inhale should have been.

Mara’s whole world narrowed to his chest.

“Eli.” She tapped his cheek. “Breathe.”

Nothing.

“Eli!”

His mouth opened. A thin, wet gasp scraped in.

Mara felt the relief like a knife being withdrawn, then the dread of seeing how much blood followed it. He was losing faster now. The dressing swelled under Torres’s hands.

“Pressure,” she said.

“I’m giving pressure.”

“More.”

“If I push more, I crack ribs.”

“Then crack them.”

Torres pushed. Eli made no sound.

Mara’s panel flashed.

TIME TO FORCED RANDOMIZATION: 00:02:12

“Mara,” Torres said, voice low. “Pick the damn medic.”

Her bloody finger hovered under the panel.

Field Medic.

It made sense. It fit. It was a tool she understood, and if the System operated on anything resembling cruel game logic, maybe selecting it would pour some impossible strength through her hands. Maybe it would let her clot wounds with glowing light. Maybe it would give her just enough to drag one teenager back from the drop.

But something in her recoiled.

Not fear. Recognition.

The option sat too neatly in front of her, polished for acceptance. A box labeled useful. A leash shaped like purpose.

Eli’s fingers twitched in hers.

“Mara,” he breathed.

She looked down.

His eyes weren’t focused on her anymore. They were looking past her shoulder, past the lobby, past the black wall and whatever waited beyond the end of the world.

“It’s cold,” he said.

“I know.”

“No.” His brows pulled together. “Not here.”

The chandelier flickered.

Every light in the lobby dimmed at once.

Conversations faltered. Even Warren stopped talking.

Mara felt the temperature drop. It slipped under her blood-wet sleeves, crawled along her spine, settled behind her teeth. Her breath smoked white.

Eli exhaled.

His chest did not rise again.

“No.” Mara shifted instantly, two fingers to carotid. “No, no, no.”

There. A flutter?

Maybe.

“Torres, move.”

She started compressions.

Her palms locked over Eli’s sternum. Down hard. Release. Down hard. Blood seeped with each pump, obscene and rhythmic. Someone behind her sobbed. Someone whispered, “He’s gone.”

“He’s not gone until I stop,” Mara snapped.

Thirty compressions. Airway. She pinched his nose, sealed her mouth over his, and breathed. His chest rose badly, unevenly. Blood slicked her lips. She spat red and returned to compressions.

Come on.

Down.

Come on, kid.

Down.

You don’t get to make me tell your mother.

Down.

The panel shrieked silently at the edge of her vision.

TIME TO FORCED RANDOMIZATION: 00:00:49

“Mara!” Torres grabbed her shoulder. “Choose!”

“I am choosing!”

“You’re doing CPR on a dead kid!”

She rounded on him with a sound that made him let go.

For a heartbeat, all the exhaustion she had buried under competence tore through her face. Every patient lost after twenty minutes of perfect protocol. Every family member begging her to do something while she did everything and it wasn’t enough. Every supervisor telling her to clear the scene, restock, move on, another call waiting. Every small death stacked inside her until she couldn’t sleep without hearing monitors flatline in the dark.

“Then help me,” she said.

Torres paled.

Then he knelt, placed his hands where hers had been, and began compressions.

“Count,” she said.

“One, two, three…”

His voice was rough. He counted like each number cost him.

Mara breathed for Eli again. The boy’s lips were cold.

The lobby lights dimmed further.

Something whispered.

At first she thought it was one of the survivors. A prayer near the edge of hearing. Then it came again, clearer, directly behind her left ear.

Mara?

She froze.

Torres kept counting. “Twenty-two, twenty-three—”

Mara turned her head.

No one stood behind her. Only the marble floor, streaked with blood and footprints. Nina stared at her from the column, eyes huge. The old man beside Nina clutched his rosary so tightly his knuckles had gone white.

“Did you hear that?” Mara asked.

Torres didn’t stop. “Hear what?”

The whisper came again, trembling, impossible.

I’m still here.

Mara’s skin tightened over every bone.

It was Eli’s voice.

Not the wet rasp from his failing lungs. Not sound traveling through air. This was memory and breath and fear braided together, speaking from somewhere inside the cold.