Chapter 3: Class Selection Denied

The thing wearing the woman’s face died badly.

It hit the asphalt on its side, limbs spasming with the sharp, insectile rhythm of something that had never truly owned a human nervous system. Steam rose from the deep gouge Mara had torn across its throat with the jagged frame of a road flare canister. Its blood was not red. It came out black and thin, smelling of pennies left in stagnant water and meat forgotten in a hot ambulance bay.

For three heartbeats, the freeway went quiet around her.

Not silent. Never silent. Fire chewed through upholstery somewhere behind her with a greasy whump. A man screamed from inside an overturned sedan until smoke swallowed the sound. Horns blared in long, dying bleats where dead hands pressed steering wheels. But around Mara, in the circle of cracked asphalt lit by burning gasoline and the red pulse of emergency strobes, the world narrowed to the twitching corpse at her boots.

It had begged before it lunged.

It had used a woman’s mouth to say, Please, please, I don’t want to die.

Mara’s fingers wouldn’t unclench from the canister shard. The metal had bitten through her glove and into the meat of her palm. Warm blood slicked her lifeline. She stared at the creature’s face as it rearranged itself in death, cheekbones softening, jaw unhinging, human skin sloughing back from a lattice of gray plates and wet needle-teeth.

Then the air split open with blue light.

CONGRATULATIONS.

You have slain: Mimic Larva — Level 1.

Experience gained.

Contribution bonus calculated.

First Kill designation contested…

Error.

The words hovered in front of Mara’s eyes, crisp and impossible, each letter formed from cold fire. She jerked back, nearly slipping in black blood.

“Mara!” Isaac shouted.

He came stumbling between cars, one hand clamped over the side of his neck where something had raked him. His blue paramedic shirt was soot-gray across the chest. The reflective strips on his pants flashed with every burst of ambulance light. He looked younger in the fireglow and older in the eyes, all at once, like the last twenty minutes had reached into him and wrung out whatever softness was left.

“You bit?” Mara demanded.

“Scratched.”

“Show me.”

“Mara, I’m—”

“Show me, Isaac.”

He pulled his hand away. Four shallow grooves crossed the side of his neck, bloody but clean enough. Human fingernails might have done it. A kitchen knife. The thing’s claws. Mara didn’t know if any of those distinctions mattered anymore.

She reached automatically for gauze that wasn’t there, because the jump bag had burned with the ambulance when the fuel tanker went up. Her body kept trying to be useful inside a world that had stopped accepting useful as currency.

Isaac’s gaze dropped to the corpse. “That was a person.”

“No.” Mara’s voice came out rough. “It was wearing one.”

“You don’t know that.”

“It had a mouth inside its mouth.”

He swallowed hard. Around them, more blue panels bloomed above the wreckage. Survivors crouched beside crushed cars and burning lane dividers, swatting at air, sobbing at things only they could see.

A teenage boy in a varsity jacket stood on top of a delivery van with both hands raised, laughing and crying at the same time. “I got it! I got something! It says choose class!”

An older woman with curlers still pinned under a scarf slapped her own cheeks as if waking herself from sleep. “No, no, no, I don’t do computers. Get it away from me.”

A trucker with half his beard burned off stared at empty space and whispered, “Guardian. It says Guardian. What does that mean?”

Blue light multiplied across the freeway. It glinted on shattered glass, on oil slicks, on the whites of terrified eyes. The System—because what else could Mara call the impossible thing speaking in her skull?—had descended like a bureaucrat into hell, handing out forms while people burned.

A new chime rang inside her head. Clean. Polite. Disgusting.

LEVEL THRESHOLD REACHED.

You are eligible for Class Selection.

Classes are generated from: actions, aptitude, environment, kills, desire, compatibility, available archetypes.

Please stand by.

“Do you see this?” Isaac asked.

“Yeah.”

“Mine says I can pick.”

“Then pick something that keeps you alive.”

“Helpful.” He barked a short, cracked laugh. “God, Mara, your bedside manner remains undefeated.”

She almost smiled. Almost. It died before reaching her mouth.

The freeway shook.

Not from another explosion. This was deeper, a vibration that rose through the pillars and the roadbed, through the soles of Mara’s boots and into the bones of her legs. Down below, between the concrete supports and the wrecked access road, something enormous moved in the smoke. Metal shrieked. A bus rocked sideways as if shoved by a giant hand.

People started screaming again.

“We have to go,” Mara said.

“Go where?”

She scanned the pileup. Northbound lanes were a furnace, cars stacked three deep against a jackknifed semi. Southbound wasn’t much better, but gaps threaded between bumpers and torn guardrail. Beyond that, an exit ramp sloped down toward Merrin Street and the hospital district, though the skyline past it had become unrecognizable.

Halewick’s towers stabbed up black against a sky cracked with luminous seams. The fractures weren’t lightning. They hung there, jagged and stationary, pouring curtains of green-white aurora over downtown. Something like a second moon pulsed behind the clouds, square-cornered and wrong.

At street level, sirens wailed from every direction. Gunshots popped in staccato bursts. Farther off, a church bell rang and rang until it abruptly stopped.

“Exit ramp,” she said. “Move anyone who can walk. Leave the trapped.”

Isaac stared at her.

“We don’t have tools,” Mara said. “We don’t have water. We don’t have time.”

His jaw tightened. He had always hated that part of the job. The math. The blood arithmetic. Mara hated it too; she was just better at pretending hate wasn’t there.

“You tell them,” Isaac said.

“Fine.”

She climbed onto the hood of a crumpled SUV. Pain lanced up her left thigh where the mimic had slammed her into the median earlier. She ignored it and raised her voice until it tore at her throat.

“If you can walk, you move now! Exit ramp southbound! Help the person next to you if they can keep up. If they can’t, you do not stop.”

A man kneeling beside a minivan looked up, face streaked with soot and tears. Inside, someone pounded weakly against a cracked window. “My wife is stuck.”

Mara met his eyes. “Then get her unstuck in the next ten seconds or say goodbye.”

“You bitch!”

“Yes,” she said. “Move.”

Isaac flinched like she’d struck him, but the man began yanking at the bent door with animal desperation. Two strangers joined him. The door screamed open on warped hinges, and a woman spilled out coughing, alive enough to be dragged.

Sometimes cruelty worked faster than comfort.

Mara jumped down from the SUV and nearly fell as another message blazed across her vision.

CLASS SELECTION READY.

Available Classes:

Field Medic — Common

Emergency Responder — Common

Combat Triage Specialist — Uncommon

Mercy Knife — Uncommon

…

Generating additional compatible classes…

For one breath, relief cut through the panic.

Medic. Responder. Something she understood. Something with rules, with protocols, with a clean chain of action. Assess airway. Control bleeding. Stabilize spine. Transport. Live.

Then the panel flickered.

The blue text stuttered. Letters smeared downward like wet ink. A sour taste flooded Mara’s mouth, thick and medicinal, as if someone had poured old antibiotics over her tongue.

Field Medic — Common

Status: Denied

Reason: Incompatible contamination profile.

Emergency Responder — Common

Status: Denied

Reason: Incompatible contamination profile.

Combat Triage Specialist — Uncommon

Status: Denied

Reason: Incompatible contamination profile.

Mercy Knife — Uncommon

Status: Denied

Reason: Incompatible contamination profile.

“No,” Mara whispered.

Isaac grabbed the arm of a dazed woman in office heels and shoved her toward the ramp. “Mara?”

The panel pulsed again. A thin black vein crawled through the blue light.

Recalculating…

External corruption detected.

Internal corruption detected.

Death exposure: extreme.

Infection exposure: moderate.

Rot exposure: rising.

Mercy threshold: failed.

Survival priority: extreme.

Compatible Classes Found:

Corpse-Touched Carrier — Corrupted

Sepsis Harvester — Corrupted

Grave Nurse — Corrupted

Plague Warden — Forbidden

The world tilted.

Mara blinked hard. The panel remained, hovering over the burning road as if the System had presented her with a menu at a diner, as if any sane person would look at Corpse-Touched Carrier and think, yes, that sounds like a career path.

“What do you have?” Isaac asked, too close now.

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. You made that face.”

“What face?”

“The one you make when dispatch says psych call and then the address is your ex’s apartment.”

Despite everything, a hysterical laugh scraped up her throat. She crushed it down. “My options are bad.”

“Define bad.”

A scream rose from behind them, cut short in a wet crunch.

Mara turned.

At the far end of the pileup, shapes crawled over the divider. More mimics, maybe. Or things wearing different lies. One moved on all fours with its head upside down. Another had the upper body of a child and the hind legs of a dog made from bundled wire. Behind them, smoke bulged around a larger silhouette, broad as a truck, antlers scraping sparks from overhead signage.

Blue panels flashed above people’s heads as choices were made.

The varsity boy dropped from the van and landed too lightly, silver light wrapping his fists. He punched one of the crawling things and sent it skidding under a burning sedan. “I’m a Brawler!” he shouted, voice cracking with manic triumph. “I’m a goddamn Brawler!”

The trucker with the scorched beard stepped in front of two children, and a translucent shield snapped into existence on his arm. He stared at it, then bared his teeth. “Get behind me.”

A woman in scrubs touched a bleeding man’s forehead. Golden light seeped from her palm, closing a cut along his scalp. She sobbed while doing it, whispering apologies to Jesus or the System or both.

Classes were real. Power was real.

Mara had been offered rot.

Another prompt unfurled in front of her, darker than the others.

WARNING: Selection of Corrupted or Forbidden classes may result in:

— Social hostility

— Skill instability

— Mutation

— System scrutiny

— Termination

Proceed?

Termination. The word sat in the air like a bullet waiting for a chamber.

Isaac followed her stare, eyes flicking across nothing. “Mara, talk to me.”

She couldn’t tell whether he couldn’t see her panel or only saw his own. Around them people were changing, becoming harder, brighter, stranger. She remained flesh, blood, exhaustion, and a bad list of worse choices.

The creature with antlers stepped fully into the light.

It had once been a horse, maybe. Or the System had borrowed the idea of a horse from a child’s nightmare and built wrong from there. Its skin hung in translucent sheets over ropes of black muscle. Its head was too long, split vertically from muzzle to brow, and between the opening halves dangled a cluster of human hands, fingers twitching like bait. From its ribs protruded antlers of bone, branching outward through the torsos of dead motorists impaled along the tines.

It lowered itself, hands wriggling. A dozen mouths opened along its neck.

“Run,” Mara said.

The survivors ran.

The freeway became a slaughter chute.

People shoved through the wreckage, climbing over hoods, crawling under trailers, slipping in blood and coolant. Those with new classes tried to hold the rear. The boy Brawler hit a mimic hard enough to burst its skull, then screamed when another latched onto his calf. The trucker’s shield flared as claws struck it again and again, each impact driving him backward. Golden light flickered from the woman in scrubs until her nose bled.

Mara moved because standing still meant dying. She pushed a limping man ahead of her, ducked under a bent signpost, and dragged Isaac after her when he stopped to help an unconscious driver hanging from a seatbelt.

“We can cut him down!” Isaac shouted.

“With what?”

“Mara!”

The driver opened his eyes. They were already clouding black.

Mara saw it before Isaac did: the swelling under the man’s jaw, the skin splitting along the gumline, the second row of teeth pressing through. She grabbed Isaac by the collar and yanked him back just as the driver’s neck elongated with a rubbery snap and his jaws clamped shut on empty air.

Isaac went pale.

“Move,” Mara said.

They moved.

The exit ramp lay fifty yards ahead. Fifty yards of twisted metal, fire, monsters, and people discovering the cost of their first powers in real time.

A man in a suit extended both hands and sent a fan of ice shards into a mimic’s chest. He whooped once before frost crawled up his own wrists and split his skin. A grandmother holding a tire iron moved with impossible speed, cracking knees and skulls until she tripped over a severed arm and vanished beneath three writhing bodies. A teenage girl with braces screamed one word—“Burn!”—and a cone of flame erupted from her mouth, lighting two creatures and the sleeve of her own hoodie.

The System had handed out knives in a nursery.

Mara’s denied class list kept pulsing at the corner of her vision.

Selection pending.

Selection pending.

Selection pending.

“Not now,” she snarled.

A crawling mimic sprang from the roof of a compact car. Mara had no weapon but the jagged canister shard. She slashed upward on instinct. The shard opened the creature’s belly. A gush of black fluid poured over her forearm, hot as fever.

Pain hit.

Not burning. Not acid. Something deeper and more intimate, as if the fluid had recognized her pores and gone knocking. Her skin prickled. Veins darkened beneath her wrist, thin black lines branching toward her elbow.

The mimic landed behind her, shrieking with a woman’s voice and a pig’s lungs.

Mara staggered. The panel exploded open.

Contamination profile updated.

Infection exposure: severe.

Rot exposure: severe.

Compatibility increased.

Plague Warden resonance: 91%.

Select now?

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