Nova POV
55.
54.
53.
The panel just floats there, blinking, like it has all the time in the world. Like it is not counting down to something Nova is increasingly certain will kill her a second time.
She reads it again. Maybe she misread it.
CLASS: GLITCHRARITY: UNCLASSIFIEDFIRST MISSION BEGINS IN: 51 SECONDS.
She did not misread it.
Glitch. Of every word the universe could have picked to describe her, it picked the one that means something went wrong. She spent twenty-three years being the girl nobody noticed, the one who worked double shifts and still couldn't afford her mother's medication on time, the one Mika looked straight in the eyes before
40 seconds.
Focus. Focus right now, Nova.
She turns in a slow circle. Dead city. Bruise sky. Pavement still wet from rain that apparently followed her here from whatever world she used to live in. The streetlights are on, but they flicker wrong, like they're uncertain about their jobs.
No people. No sounds. No instructions beyond the panel that seems designed to explain nothing.
She looks back at it. There has to be something useful. A map, a weapon indicator, a button that says tutorial for people who got stabbed and dragged into a game without their permission
MISSION OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE.
That is the whole mission. That one word. Survive.
"Survive what?" she says out loud.
The panel does not answer. Naturally.
20 seconds.
Nova breathes in through her nose. Out through her mouth. Her mother taught her that when she was little, and she used to panic before school. You already know how to breathe, baby. Just remember.
She looks at the street. She looks at the buildings: a pharmacy on the corner, a row of closed shopfronts, a laundromat with dark windows. A fire escape ladder hanging off the side of the pharmacy, the pull-down kind, about eight feet off the ground.
10.
9.
She stops thinking.
She runs.
She hits the wall at a sprint, grabs the ladder's lowest rung, and pulls herself up the way she used to pull herself over her building's fence as a kid, the same desperate upper-body scramble, knuckles scraping, arms burning. The ladder shrieks as her weight brings it down, and she is already climbing before it finishes dropping, feet clanging on metal rungs, pulling herself up to the first platform and then the second, and she doesn't stop until the fire escape rattles under her and she is four stories up with her back pressed against brick.
She looks down.
The timer hits zero.
The panel disappears.
And at the end of the street, something comes around the corner.
Her brain tries to file it. Tries to say: dog. Large dog. Some kind of animal.
Her brain is lying to comfort her.
It is the size of a pickup truck. Low to the ground, moving on six legs, each one ending in something that gouges the pavement as it walks. No eyes she can see. What should be a face is just a wide, flat nothing, except for the mouth, which is too large and opens the wrong direction.
It moves like it knows exactly where it is going.
It moves toward the pharmacy.
Nova stops breathing.
The thing doesn't look up. It stops at the parked car along the curb, a regular sedan, something a regular person used to drive to their regular job, and puts one leg through the hood. Just through it. Like the car is made of paper, and the thing forgot to care. Metal folds and tears, and the alarm would probably be screaming if anything here still worked.
Nova watches this and understands, with complete and quiet clarity, that she cannot fight that.
She doesn't have anything. No weapon. No special power she's figured out yet. Her class is called GLITCH, which means the system doesn't know what she is either, which means there is no rulebook for her, no guide, nothing.
She almost laughs. Instead, she presses both hands flat against the brick behind her and thinks.
Okay.
Okay. Think.
Her mother always said Nova's brain was her sharpest thing. Sharper than her tongue, which was already sharp enough to cut. You watch people, her mom told her once. You notice things. Don't waste that.
The creature is not looking up. Why not? Does it track by sound? Movement? Smell?
She climbed fast and loudly, and it didn't react to the ladder.
Sound might not be it.
She moved. It turned the corner right when the timer hit zero, not when she made noise.
Maybe the timer wasn't counting down for her. Maybe it was counting down until the creature started.
Which means it has a patrol path. Which means it is not random. Which means if she can figure out where it's going
A new panel blinks open in her vision, smaller than the first.
ANOMALY BEHAVIOR DETECTED.PLAYER: NOVA REED IS ANALYZING TARGET INSTEAD OF FLEEING.NOTED.
She stares at that.
The Game is watching her think.
Something about that should scare her. It does scare her, she can feel the fear sitting cold in her chest like a swallowed stone. But underneath it, something else is waking up. Something that spent twenty-three years being overlooked and underpaid and trusted and then gutted in an alley and is done, completely done, being the girl things happen to.
The creature turns at the far end of the street. Precise ninety-degree turn. Keeps walking.
Patrol path. She was right.
She exhales.
And then the fire escape moves.
Not from her weight. Not from wind. From something on the platform one floor below her.
Nova looks down through the grating.
A boy. Maybe nineteen. Flat against the platform, wide eyes turned up at her, one finger pressed desperately to his lips.
Don't, he mouths. Don't make a sound. It has a second phase.
Nova stares at him.
He points urgently toward the end of the street, toward where the creature turned.
She follows his finger just in time to see it stop.
Turn back around.
And from that no-face, no-eye front of it, something opens. Wider than the mouth. Something that wasn't there before.
Something that is, unmistakably, looking straight up.
Straight at her.
MISSION UPDATE: PHASE TWO INITIATED.
The boy below her whispers one word.
"Climb."