The transit hub is three blocks ahead and I can hear it before I see it.
Not beasts — people. The specific sound of a large group of people doing the same thing in different ways: some crying, some arguing, some organizing, some doing nothing at all. Sound carries differently in a city that's mostly stopped making its normal noise, and the hub is loud enough to hear from three blocks out, which means it's loud enough for beasts to hear from further.
Alice hears it and her expression does something careful.
"That's a problem," she says.
I know it's a problem. I want to see it anyway.
The hub's central plaza is a city block of open space surrounded by the transit infrastructure — bus terminals on the north and west, train access on the east, a covered arcade along the south that someone has turned into a medical station. People are everywhere. Hundreds of them, organized into rough clusters that have calcified into something like camps since this morning. The people with combat classes are on the perimeters. The support classes are in the center. The unclassed and the E-ranks are wherever they ended up and haven't moved.
When I walk in, the shift moves through the crowd the way a wave moves through water — from the nearest people outward, fast, the ones who know what SSS means reacting first, the ones who don't picking it up from those who do. I watch it travel. Faces turning. A space opening around me that I didn't create.
I don't know what to do with the space. I didn't ask for the space. I'm a person who spent last night eating crackers and this morning learning that chef's knives have bad aerodynamics, and there are hundreds of people here treating the space around me like it means something.
Darian, beside me: "You're going to need to get used to that."
"I'm aware," I say.
"Are you?"
I don't answer.
The man running things finds me before I find the exit.
Tall, civilian clothes, the specific energy of someone who took charge in the first hour because nobody else was doing it and hasn't let go since. His class is B-Rank Strategic Commander — he told me within thirty seconds of introduction, which tells me something about how he's been operating. He has a plan. The plan involves a defensive perimeter, staged positions, organized response to beast incursions. He walks me through it with the confidence of someone who has thought about this longer than I have.
It's not a bad plan for what it's designed for.
"I need you on the front line," he says. "With your class, if we position you at the main approach —"
"I don't do assigned positions," I say.
He stops. "This is a coordinated defense. Everyone contributes —"
"I contribute. I don't take assignments from someone I met forty seconds ago." I keep it even. No heat. Just the fact of it. "Your plan works until something this perimeter can't hold shows up. When that happens I'll be more useful without a position than with one."
He pushes. He's a Strategic Commander, it's what the class is built for, and he's been running this hub for hours on the authority of it and he's not used to a no. He finds several different angles for the same request and I decline all of them, and I can feel Darian beside me doing something that I'm pretty sure is enjoying this.
Alice pulls me aside while Walsh II — I've started thinking of him as Walsh II, which isn't fair to Walsh — is regrouping for another approach.
"The hub is wrong," she says. Low. Eyes on the crowd, not on me. "The third wave is building. I can see it in the Lattice — it's reading the concentration of people here. It's orienting on this location."
"How long?"
"An hour, maybe less. And what's coming isn't a pack."
I look at the hundreds of people in the plaza. I look at the medical station in the arcade. I look at the families in the corners who came here because it was the largest gathering of people and people felt like safety.
"We can't move all of them," I say.
"No," she says.
I stand with that for a moment.
"Can we warn them?"
"Yes," she says. "Some will listen."
I go back to Walsh II and tell him what Alice can see. I tell him about the wave, the timing, the fact that this location is a target now. He listens with the expression of someone who doesn't like the information and is deciding whether to trust it. He looks at Alice. He looks at me.
"If your Navigator is right —"
"She is."
He looks at the crowd. The math is visible on his face — the same math I ran, the same answer.
"I'll tell them," he says. He says it like it costs him something. "Some of them won't go."
"Some of them won't go," I agree.
It arrives through the sky.
No warning from below — it drops through one of the fracture lines directly over the plaza, falling without slowing, and when it hits the center of the hub the impact is a shockwave I feel from forty feet away. The ground moves. People go down just from the landing.
It's building-sized.
I've thought about building-sized all day, since the dream, since the beast with the furnace eyes standing across cracked black earth. This is the first time I'm seeing it with no barrier between us — no window, no stairwell, no framing that makes the scale manageable. It stands in the plaza and it is as tall as the transit terminal's roof and it has no eyes I can locate but it is absolutely looking at me.
The hub's defenders scatter. Perimeter gone, positions gone, the plan Walsh II spent hours building dissolving in thirty seconds into just people running.
I'm not ready for this.
I know I'm not ready. I go anyway.
The first throw is the crowbar, both hands, and it covers the distance and hits the thing's foreleg with a sound like a car crash and bounces off. No visible effect. The leg doesn't shift.
I file that. Scale up.
The rebar — spear thrown, same as the parking structure, and it finds a joint seam on the shoulder and goes in and the beast moves for the first time. Not much. Enough to confirm the joints are the target.
I run. Not away — parallel to the beast, tracking its movement, looking for the pattern in how it shifts its weight. In the dream I had this instinctively. Here I have to read it in real time, watching the way it places each limb, where it favors and where it doesn't, building the map of it the way you'd build a map of any terrain you're going to have to move through.
It hits me.
Not a swing — the tail, low, catching me across the ribs and the hip and sending me into the terminal wall at a speed that removes all my opinions about what's happening for about two seconds. I hit the wall. I hit the ground. The health bar drops hard enough that the edge of my vision goes red.
I lie on the ground for a moment.
The ceiling of the transit terminal is glass and steel, fractured sky visible through it, the impossible cold light bleeding through the cracks.
Get up, I think.
I get up.
The anger comes with it, which I didn't expect. Not at the beast — at the situation, at the gap between what I need to be and what I am, at the health bar and the red edge of my vision and the fact that I'm figuring this out one throw at a time while hundreds of people run through the exits behind me. The anger is clean. It doesn't have anywhere useful to go so it goes into my arm.
I start throwing sequences.
The rifle into the joint the rebar already opened. The hatchet into the rifle wound to drive it deeper. The crowbar into the hatchet — stacked hits, each one using the previous impact as a targeting reference, building damage in one location instead of spreading it across armor that doesn't care.
The beast's front leg buckles.
Then the other.
I summon the rebar and I throw it with everything I have and the class puts everything I intend behind it and it hits the neck joint and goes in deep and the beast falls.
Slower than in the dream. Uglier. No clean decapitation, no crowd, no line I can deliver with any sincerity right now. Just a thing that was standing and now isn't, and me standing over it breathing through my teeth with a red health bar and three cracked ribs that I don't have time to do anything about.
The plaza is mostly empty. The people who ran are gone. The ones who didn't are still against the walls, watching.
Darian is upright near the east terminal entrance, bleeding from his forehead, operational. I look for Alice.
She's twenty feet away. She's watching me with the unreadable expression and I notice again that she has a blade in her hand that wasn't there a second ago, and the beast that was between her and the terminal entrance is on the ground in a way that her class doesn't explain.
I note it. I put it next to the other things I've noted about her.
Someone near Darian's position is on the ground and not moving. I don't know their name. I know I saw them once in the hub, near the medical station, one of the people who stayed when Walsh II started clearing the plaza. They're holding a tactical folding knife that's still in their hand.
I walk over.
I crouch.
I hold the knife for three seconds.
Chime.
I don't say anything. I stand up. Walsh II is gone — fled or dead, the math on that resolves the same way. In the space he left, the hub's remaining survivors are looking at the person who knocked down the building-sized thing.
I am genuinely not ready for what I can see in their faces.
I look at Darian. I look at Alice.
"We should move," I say.
Nobody argues.