Chapter 2: Tutorial in the Dark

The basement lights died one row at a time.

They went with soft electrical sighs, panels stuttering from white to jaundiced amber to nothing, until the rehabilitation storage room beneath Saint Agatha’s became a cave filled with the wet sound of breathing. Somewhere above, the hospital screamed through concrete. Pipes knocked in the ceiling. Dust sifted down in thin gray curtains. The emergency bulbs along the far wall pulsed red, not bright enough to show faces clearly, just enough to turn everyone into a collection of eyes, teeth, blood, and trembling hands.

Elias Voss stood with his back against a shelving unit stacked with walkers and boxed bedpans, both hands wrapped around a fire axe he had taken from a shattered wall case on the second floor. His bad leg burned from hip to ankle, the old shrapnel scars tight beneath his jeans, the brace under his pant leg creaking every time he shifted weight. He had wrapped a towel around the axe handle to give himself grip. The towel had belonged to Pediatrics. It had little blue whales on it. Now it was brown-black with someone else’s blood.

Thirty-two people had made it into the basement.

He knew because he had counted.

Thirty-two alive. Twelve injured badly enough that moving them again would kill them. Six kids. One unconscious surgeon with a scalp wound. Two orderlies. One security guard named Nolan who had a pistol and hands that shook too much to use it. A nurse with the name MARISOL on her badge who had not stopped moving since the sky broke open. An old man in a hospital gown whispering Hail Marys with a rosary made of plastic beads. A paramedic named Tess Darnell pressed against the wall beneath a poster explaining proper wheelchair transfer technique, one hand clamped to the side of her abdomen where something from upstairs had opened her like a seam.

And Elias.

He counted again because numbers were anchors. Numbers didn’t care if you were scared. Numbers didn’t lie unless an officer made them.

Thirty-two.

No, thirty-one if Tess kept bleeding like that.

“Stop looking at me like I’m already dead,” Tess rasped.

Elias glanced down.

She had freckles across her nose and blood on her teeth. Her blond hair was pulled into a bun so tight it looked painful. One of her boots was missing. He didn’t know when she’d lost it. He had seen her drag a man with no legs under the closing fire door and then staple her own wound shut with a surgical stapler while telling a crying teenager to breathe through his nose.

“You’re not dead,” Elias said.

“That’s not what I said.”

“Then stop wasting oxygen.”

She smiled, or tried. “Bedside manner of a brick.”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“No kidding.” Her gaze flicked to the axe. “You army?”

Elias looked toward the door instead of answering.

The storage room door had been barricaded with two metal cabinets, three physical therapy tables, and a vending machine that had taken four people and a prayer to tip over. Beyond it lay the hall, the service elevators, the morgue corridor, the laundry chute, and whatever had been hunting them since the emergency stairwell. Elias had only gotten a clean look at one of the things before he’d buried the axe in its neck. It had been too long, all tendon and black plates, walking on four backward-jointed limbs and two hands that opened like hooked flowers. Its face had been a vertical slit full of little chattering bones.

It had worn a pharmacist’s ID badge tangled around one forelimb.

Nolan, the security guard, crouched near the vending machine with his pistol pointed at the door. The barrel wavered with each breath. He was a thick man with a shaved head and sweat shining on his upper lip. He had fired three rounds upstairs. All three had hit walls.

“We should call out,” Nolan said. “Maybe there are cops down here. Maybe SWAT.”

Marisol looked up from wrapping gauze around a woman’s arm. “The phones are dead.”

“I mean yell.”

“That’s how they find you,” Elias said.

Nolan swallowed. “You don’t know that.”

As if in answer, something scraped inside the wall.

Everyone went silent.

The sound came again: a slow, testing drag through the ventilation duct above the dropped ceiling. Metal flexed with a tiny pop. Dust fell onto a stack of folded blankets. One of the children whimpered, and his mother slapped a hand over his mouth so fast he gagged.

Elias lifted the axe.

The vent ran the length of the room, vanishing behind ceiling tiles stained with old leaks. Thin aluminum. Too small for a person. Not too small for the things that had poured through the radiology department like insects in human skin.

A black rectangle unfolded in the center of Elias’s vision.

TUTORIAL PHASE: FIRST WAVE

Local Instance: DENVER-AGATHA-07

Participants Remaining: 18,442 / 31,006

Objective: Survive until Class Awakening or reach designated Safe Zone.

Time Until Safe Zone Lockdown: 07:18:33

Around the room, people cried out. Some swatted at their faces. A teenager with an IV still taped to his hand screamed, “Get it off, get it off!”

“It’s in your head,” Marisol said, voice thin. “It’s not touching you.”

Elias stared at the words until they sharpened. A tiny pulsing dot hovered beside the objective line.

He did not want to think about 31,006 becoming 18,442 in less than an hour.

The rectangle flickered.

SUB-OBJECTIVE AVAILABLE

Eliminate Tutorial Predator: Lesser Skitterling

Reward: Experience. Survival Credits. Increased Class Compatibility.

Failure Penalty: Continued predation.

The System rewards decisive action.

“Decisive action,” Tess murmured. “That thing has a copywriter.”

The duct scraped again.

Something clicked three times above them. Not claws. Teeth.

Elias held up one hand. “No one moves unless I tell you.”

“Who put you in charge?” Nolan asked.

“The last hour did.”

The answer landed harder than Elias intended. Nolan’s jaw bunched, but he didn’t argue. Across the room, the old man’s prayers became quieter.

Elias pointed with the axe. “Marisol. Keep people away from the center. Move the kids under those tables. Nolan, safety off if it has one. Don’t shoot unless you can hit the ceiling tile it comes through. Not the vent. The tile.”

“I know how to fire a gun.”

“Then do it better than last time.”

Nolan’s face flushed.

Tess laughed once, then hissed in pain. “I like him.”

Marisol began herding people, all brisk hands and low commands. “Under here. You, help me. Sir, I need you to slide. Yes, I know your hip hurts. Everything hurts right now.”

The air smelled of bleach, hot dust, blood, and the sour panic-sweat of too many bodies sealed in a room with no certainty of tomorrow. Elias planted his left foot, the good one, and set the bad leg slightly back so it could brace without taking the pivot. He had learned that in Mosul after the explosion, learned how to fight around a limb that had become weather, debt, and betrayal.

You should have died with them.

The thought came with the old clarity. Not grief. Grief had dulled with years. This was the splinter beneath it.

Staff Sergeant Reyes laughing with instant coffee grounds stuck in his teeth. Malik singing badly over comms. Chen asleep with his helmet still on. Eleven names folded into a flag and handed to families while Elias stood on a cane and accepted a medal he had wanted to throw into a river.

The ceiling tile above the center of the room bulged.

Elias exhaled.

“Now,” he said.

Nolan fired.

The pistol crack was monstrous in the enclosed space. Children screamed. The ceiling tile exploded into chalky fragments. Something black and pale dropped through with it, hit the floor on six limbs, and immediately sprang sideways onto the wall.

Elias saw impressions rather than a whole creature: slick dark carapace, ribs outside the body, a head like a split seed, human fingers fused into climbing hooks. It moved too fast for its size. A blur across the wall. A shadow with joints.

Nolan fired again. The bullet punched into shelving, spraying plastic urinals.

“Stop!” Elias barked.

The skitterling launched at the nearest table.

Under it, a little girl shrieked.

Elias lunged. His bad leg buckled on the second step and lightning tore up his thigh, but he turned the fall into momentum. The axe blade caught the creature midair, not cleanly, striking a shoulder plate with a sound like chopping a lobster shell. The impact numbed his arms. The skitterling slammed into him.

It weighed less than a man and more than it should. The force drove Elias backward into a rack of crutches. Metal clattered down around him. Claws raked across his chest, shredding his volunteer vest and the shirt beneath. Heat opened along his ribs.

The thing’s mouth slit peeled wide. Inside, needle bones vibrated.

Elias jammed the axe handle across its throat before it could bite his face. It snapped down on the wood, splinters flying. Its breath smelled like spoiled meat and hospital disinfectant.

“Shoot it!” Nolan screamed.

“No!” Marisol shouted. “You’ll hit him!”

Elias drove his knee up. The bad leg failed. Pain whited out half the room.

The skitterling tore free, leaving three grooves across his forearm. It twisted toward the tables again.

A boy, maybe eight, had crawled out from under one in the chaos. He stood frozen in dinosaur pajamas, one sock missing, eyes huge behind cracked glasses. His mother reached for him from three feet away, but three feet had become a canyon.

The skitterling saw him.

Elias did too.

There were moments in combat when time did not slow. That was a lie told by people who had never been there. Time became brutally exact. Every detail arrived at full speed and demanded payment.

The boy’s name was Owen. Elias knew because his mother had kept saying it while they carried a dialysis patient down the stairs. Owen, stay close. Owen, hold my hand. Owen, baby, please.

The skitterling sprang.

Elias threw the axe.

He did not think. Thinking would have made him hesitate because throwing away his only weapon was stupid, and the stupid thing was the only thing that reached in time. The axe spun once, red emergency light flashing along its blade, and struck the creature in the side. Not blade-first. The steel head glanced off, but the weight knocked it off course. It crashed into the floor beside Owen instead of through him.

Owen’s mother grabbed the boy and dragged him back under the table.

The skitterling righted itself with a chitter of fury.

Elias had no axe.

Tess moved.

She came off the wall with a sound that was half curse, half animal. One hand clamped to her abdomen, the other holding a broken metal IV pole like a spear. She drove it down into the skitterling’s back with everything she had left. The sharpened end punched between plates and pinned the thing to the linoleum.

“Kill it!” she screamed.

Elias pushed up from the floor. His leg screamed louder. He stumbled to the axe, wrapped both hands around the handle, and tore it free from where it had skidded under a chair.

The skitterling bucked. The IV pole bent. Tess was pulled forward and fell to one knee, blood spilling through her fingers in a dark sheet.

Elias raised the axe.

The creature turned its head all the way around to look at him.

Its mouth opened, and from inside came a voice.

Not words. Not exactly. A wet imitation of a hospital intercom chime. Then a child’s sob.

“Mom?”

Owen’s mother made a broken noise.

Elias brought the axe down.

The blade split the head nearly in half. Black fluid burst across the floor, hot and reeking of ammonia. The skitterling convulsed, limbs drumming, claws carving crescents into tile. Elias struck again. Again. The fourth blow lodged in the floor beneath it.

The room held its breath.

The body twitched once and collapsed.

Then the System blossomed in Elias’s vision like ink dropped in water.

LESSER SKITTERLING SLAIN

Contribution: 74%

+18 Experience

+3 Survival Credits

Combat Trait Progress: Pain Tolerance I — 63%

Class Compatibility Updated.

Violence performed in defense of the group has been recorded.

Across the room, Nolan shouted, “I got points! I got points for shooting it!”

His voice cracked with something too close to joy.

Marisol stared at him as if he had stripped naked. “People are bleeding.”

“I’m just saying—there’s a score. We can level.” Nolan looked at Elias. “You saw it, right? Credits. Experience. We kill more, we get stronger.”

Tess slumped beside the dead skitterling. “Christ, that was fast. Civilization lasted, what, fifty-seven minutes?”

Elias knelt beside her, ignoring the pull in his ribs. “Let me see.”

“Buy me dinner first.”

“Tess.”

Her humor cracked. Her hand lifted away from her abdomen with reluctance. The makeshift staples had torn. Beneath them, the wound gaped wetly. Something inside her pulsed that Elias knew should not be visible.

Marisol came over and went still.

“Don’t make that face,” Tess said.

Marisol blinked hard. “I need more gauze.”

“You need a surgical suite, two units of O-neg, and God’s personal cell.” Tess looked at Elias. “How bad?”

Elias pressed a folded towel against the wound. “Bad.”

“Brick bedside manner,” she whispered.

“Consistent.”

Her fingers closed around his wrist. Strong, despite the blood loss. “Listen to me. I’m not getting out.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know exactly that. Paramedic, remember?” Her eyes flicked toward the survivors. “But they might. If you get them moving.”

“We’re not moving with things in the vents.”

“More will come.” She coughed, and red speckled her lower lip. “They herd. First one finds prey. Others follow. Like coyotes, if coyotes were designed by a sadistic blender.”

Elias looked at the hole in the ceiling.

In the exposed darkness of the duct, something far away tapped once.

Then twice.

An answer came from another vent.

People began to murmur. Fear spread differently after the first monster died. Before, terror had been a storm. Now it had direction. Everyone looked up.

The System window still hovered at the edge of Elias’s vision. Experience. Credits. Compatibility.

Rewards for killing.

Records for violence.

He hated how quickly part of him had catalogued the numbers.

“Elias,” Marisol said quietly. “His arm.”

She pointed.

One of the patients, a man in his twenties with fresh surgical tape across his chest, was staring at his forearm. A black mark had appeared beneath the skin, rising like a bruise in the shape of a thin ring. Around the room, others cried out as marks surfaced on wrists, throats, palms.

Elias felt his own burn a heartbeat later.

He looked down.

On the inside of his left wrist, black lines wrote themselves beneath the skin. Not ink. Something deeper. A brand made of absence. It formed a narrow rectangle, then broke into symbols he somehow understood without knowing the language.

PARTICIPANT BRAND STABILIZED

Name: Elias Voss

Species: Human — Integrated

Level: 0

Attributes: Locked

Class: Unawakened

Status: Injured, Marked, Observed

Pending: Tutorial Directive

“Observed?” Elias muttered.

The word chilled him more than the blood drying under his fingernails.

Nolan had stood up. The pistol hung at his side now, forgotten as he stared at his own brand. “Level zero? But I got experience. How much for level one? Did anyone—does it show?”

“Shut up,” said Owen’s mother.

Nolan blinked. “I saved him too.”

“You almost shot everyone.”

“I fired at the thing!”

“Enough,” Elias said.

The room obeyed, but reluctantly now. Fear was making factions in the dark. Those who had fought. Those who had been saved. Those who resented needing saving. Elias had watched platoons fracture under less pressure.

A new message appeared.

TUTORIAL DIRECTIVE: RESOURCE ALLOCATION

Survival Credits may be exchanged for minor boons.

Available Purchases:

— Sterile Bandage: 1 Credit

— Pain Suppression: 2 Credits

— Nutrient Gel: 1 Credit

— Crude Weapon Token: 5 Credits

— Emergency Stabilization: 10 Credits

Sacrifice accelerates survival.

The list hung there, obscene in its neatness.

“Bandages,” Marisol breathed. “Can it actually—?”

Nolan lifted his hand. “I have one credit. From the kill. Anyone else?”