Apocalypse My Useless Skill Became S-Rank

Ayana POV

I noticed the traffic light before anyone crossed.

Red, green, red. Two seconds apart. No amber. The cars on Marrow Street jerked to a stop in the middle of the junction, and one driver leaned on his horn, and the horn cut out halfway.

Not faded. Not muffled. Cut.

I stood at the crossing with my hand on the button and counted. Red, green, red. Eleven seconds between each change, which is the wrong number for a junction this size, and the wrong pattern for a light that has worked fine for nine years.

Nobody else looked up. A woman walked straight out into it.

The office smells like toner and someone else's lunch. I sit by the radiator, which knocks every eleven minutes. Only I hear it.

The coffee machine had a red light on the side, and it was blinking wrong. Three fast flashes. A pause. Two slow ones. Then nothing. Then it started again.

"The machine's broken," I said.

Priya didn't look up from her screen. "It's fine."

"The light's blinking in a pattern. Three, pause, two. That's an error code."

"It's a light, Ayana."

"I'm telling you it's an error code."

Priya sighed the way she sighed while holding music.

At 9:40 Kershaw carried my route into Marchetti's office. I watched through the glass. He held the printout with both hands, the way he never holds anything. He tapped the eastern loop and said something that made Marchetti nod. My handwriting sat in the corner of the page. He had folded it over.

He came out and dropped the folder on my desk. "Good work, new girl." Loud enough for Priya to hear. She smiled at him.

I opened my mouth. I closed it.

The radiator knocked.

Across the street, the billboard above the phone shop stopped showing the woman with the phone.

It showed lines. Angles. No letters I know.

I counted to four and it was still there. The advert had never lasted longer than two.

The lines moved. Not like a video. Like something underneath the screen rearranging itself.

"Priya. Look at the billboard."

"Mm."

"Look at it."

She looked for less time than a blink. "It's an advert."

"It was symbols. For four seconds. It's never on for four seconds."

"It's an advert, Ayana."

Then the sound went out.

Half a second. No more. The phones stopped ringing. Priya stopped typing. The fan above the door stopped turning.

Then the phones rang and Priya typed and the fan turned and Kershaw laughed at his screen and nothing had happened.

It came again. And again. Eleven minutes apart, every time.

By the fourth one I was at the window with both palms on the glass. The clocks were wrong. Marchetti's wall clock said 10:44. My phone said 10:52. The lift display went from four to seven to two to a number that isn't a floor.

Downstairs a man started shouting about the signal. Someone at reception started praying. Another man filmed her.

I went down. Not to run. To look.

Outside, the street had stopped behaving.

Cars sat at angles they couldn't have reached. The traffic light showed red and green together. A cyclist was on the curb with both hands over his ears. A woman laughed at nothing and kept laughing.

Two men argued about whose network dropped first. A third filmed them. A fourth was already pulling at the shutter of the phone shop.

The air felt thick. Not hot. Thick, like the second before a storm, except the sky was clear and had been clear all morning.

Then I saw him.

Grey coat. Hands in his pockets. Standing perfectly still in a street that had come apart.

He wasn't watching the sky. He was watching the exits. The revolving door. The fire door on the left. The alley between the phone shop and the café.

Everyone here was looking up. He was counting ways out.

He turned and looked straight at me, and I had the cold thought that he'd been counting me too.

"Move," he said.

His voice didn't carry. It didn't need to.

"Move where?"

"Anywhere that isn't under glass."

I looked up.

The sky tore.

A seam opened from the tower block on Marrow Street to the overpass and kept going. Behind it there was nothing. Not black. Not light. An absence with edges, and the edges moved.

Colour drained out of everything. The red of the bus, the yellow of the shop sign, all of it going grey.

The wind stopped. A crisp packet hung at head height and stayed there.

The city froze. One second. Maybe less. A man mid-stride with both feet off the ground. A pigeon stalled in the air. The laughing woman with her mouth open.

The pulse hit.

I was on the pavement with one hand on the kerb. The man in the grey coat was gone.

A thin grey line crossed the back of my right hand. Not a shadow. Not a scar. It didn't wipe off.

It widened into a panel, in front of my eyes and behind them at once. Cold. Flat.

THE SYSTEM IS ONLINE.

ZONE ALLOCATION IN PROGRESS.

ONE RULE ABOVE ALL OTHERS.

The street read it off the empty air. A man dropped to his knees. Another ran four steps and stopped, because there was nowhere yet to run to.

The panel cleared.

LEVEL UP OR DIE.

Ayana POV

My ears were ringing.

A thin high note, a kettle three rooms away. I was on one knee with my palm flat on the kerb and the panel still hanging in front of my face, still reading LEVEL UP OR DIE.

It didn't blink. It waited.

The street came back in pieces. A car alarm. A woman screaming a name. Glass going over and settling. The bus behind me had stopped with one wheel up on the curb, headlights on, and nobody inside it moving.

I got up. My legs worked. First surprise of the day.

The crowd hadn't picked a direction yet. That was the thing I noticed before the panic. Two hundred people on the road and not one of them running anywhere - just shoving, turning, shoving again, like water looking for a drain. The crush of bodies pushed me off the pavement and into the road and back again.

A man went down in front of me. Somebody stepped on his hand. He shouted and the crowd went over him.

I got to the wall and put my back against it.

That's when the second panel arrived.

TUTORIAL QUEST: RUN

REACH A SHELTER NODE BEFORE THE COUNTDOWN ENDS.

00:04:59

Underneath it, the city drew itself. A mini-map unfolded in the corner of my vision - grey grid, my street, the alley, the car park, everything where it should be. My position sat in the middle of it as a small white dot. Behind the shop, a fire escape ran down the back of the building into the alley.

Not one person around me was reading it. A woman shouted into her phone. A man filmed the sky. A teenager stood in the middle of the pavement with his mouth open, and I watched the numbers in front of his face drop while he did nothing at all.

"Hey." I caught his sleeve. "You have four minutes."

He looked at me as though I'd spoken another language.

"There's a countdown. Look at it."

"I don't-"

Someone shoved between us. He stumbled into a bollard and stayed exactly where he was.

I let go. I had to.

Four minutes is nothing in this city. From here to the overpass is nine. From here to the station is six. I route parcels for a living. I know what four minutes buys and it isn't either of those.

SHELTER NODE LOCATED.

DISTANCE: 340M.

The marker appeared over the alley beside the shop. Small, white, hanging in the air.

Three hundred and forty metres. A straight line. A sprint and a half-

The marker glitched.

It jumped two streets east, landed on the roof of the car park, hung there, and came back. Then it pinged, once, softly, as though it were being helpful.

He was across the road.

Not beside me - standing at the corner by the fire door with his hands in his pockets, watching the alley. I crossed the street to him because I had no better idea and because I wanted to see his face when he lied.

"Don't follow the marker," he said, before I'd opened my mouth.

"It's testing who follows."

That got me a look. Flat grey eyes, no warmth in them, reading me the way I read a route.

"Twelve seconds," he said. "It corrects every twelve seconds."

"Which one's the real node?"

"Neither." He nodded down the pavement. A man in a delivery jacket was sprinting into the alley with his phone held up, chasing his own pin. "He comes back out in a minute. Or he doesn't."

"What's at the car park?"

"Nothing."

"You're sure."

"I'm sure. There's a fourth option." He turned away and started walking. "You counted the intervals. On the sound. Nobody counts the intervals."

"You haven't told me your name."

"Later."

The city rendered.

The alley ahead stuttered - one frame, two - and the far end of it was no longer the far end. A seam of fog stood across the street, grey-white and motionless, the world cut off at the edge of a page.

Same at the top of Marrow Street. Same past the overpass. The crowd found its drain then, all at once, and went for it.

Grid lines shimmered along the pavement, faint and pale, holding a second before they vanished.

"What is that?"

"Border. We're in a Zone." He didn't slow. "The fog's the wall."

"And past it?"

"That's the part nobody in this Zone finds out today."

We came out of the alley into the side street and I stopped, because a woman stood in the middle of the road with her back to us and her phone held up in the sky, and she was smiling.

"Hey." I started toward her. "Hey-"

She didn't turn. She was taking a photo.

His hand closed on my arm. Not rough. Not letting go.

"Watch," he said.

She turned. She saw the fog at the end of the street. She looked at her countdown. She ran.

Nine steps.

The static came off her - grey lines crawling up her legs and arms, faster than a burn - and she made a sound I can only describe as a radio losing a station, and there was nothing left on the pavement except her phone, face down and still lit.

00:01:31.

The crowd at the top of the street had moved on. Nobody had seen it. Or nobody wanted to.

"Move," he said.

The car park. Up the ramp, two at a time. I followed because I had nothing better and the numbers were in my teeth now.

The marker pinged. Back at the alley. Out of reach. Sitting there as though it had never been anywhere else.

"Fourth option," I said. Breath coming hard. "You promised."

"Say the quest back to me."

"What?"

"The wording. All of it."

REACH A SHELTER NODE BEFORE THE COUNTDOWN ENDS.

"Reach," I said.

"Reach," he repeated. "Not enter. Not touch. Reach."

I looked past him along the second level and saw what I should have seen straight away. The car park was open-sided. At the far end a maintenance ledge ran two feet below the shop roof, and the shop roof ran directly over the alley.

Twenty feet across. Two feet down. Nothing between.

"Reach," I said again, and it came out almost as a laugh.

He was already moving. This time I was ahead of him.

I went across the ledge at a run, landed badly, felt my wrist complain. Then I was on the gravel and at the edge of the shop roof with the alley below me.

Narrow. Dark. The white marker sat in the middle of it, alone.

I lay down and put my arm out into the air.

00:00:09.

My hand closed on the marker and the marker closed on my hand, cold and solid, a doorknob attached to nothing.

OBJECTIVE COMPLETE.

SHELTER NODE REACHED.

PARTY STATUS: 1 OF 2.

The fog at the end of the alley stopped moving. The countdown cleared. The mini-map folded away.

I turned around.

He wasn't on the ledge behind me. He wasn't on the ramp. The alley below was empty, and the side street was empty, and the crowd was gone.

Where his name should have been, the System had written one word.

TETHERED.

NEW OBJECTIVE: FIND YOUR PARTY MEMBER.

LOCATION: UNKNOWN.

I lay there four seconds with my wrist throbbing and my breath going, and did the only thing I'm good at.

I read the panel.

Find your party member. Location unknown. Not rescue. Not reach. Find. The System hadn't given me a direction, which meant it wanted me to ask for one - and every direction it had given me so far had been a lie with a twelve-second heartbeat.

So I didn't ask.

Behind me, the fog at the mouth of the side street was moving. When the countdown cleared, the alley fog stopped. The other one hadn't. It was closer than it had been.

I got up off the gravel, put my back to the marker that had lied to me twice, and picked the one direction the System hadn't offered: north, along the roofs, toward the tower where the exits were.

The mini-map unfolded again without being asked.

PARTY MEMBER LOCATED.

DISTANCE: 12M.

Twelve metres. Straight down. Into the alley I had just been lying over, where there was nothing but wet tarmac and a dropped phone face down and still lit.

The fog came over the edge of the roof behind me.

I took the fire escape down anyway.

Ayana POV

The fire escape was rusted through in two places and I found both of them with my feet.

Half a storey above the alley, the fog came over the roof edge and stopped there, as though waiting on a decision.

I hit the ground running. Empty. Not quiet-empty. Empty-empty. Twelve metres, the marker had said, and I stood on the mark with nothing there but wet tarmac and a dropped phone lying face down and still lit.

It pinged. Pointed at the phone.

I picked it up. Unlocked. Battery full. No calls. No messages. Nobody on the other end of anything.

Then it rerouted, lifted off the phone, and traced a route up Bellwether Row.

TUTORIAL: PROCEED TO SHELTER NODE.

DISTANCE: -

CONDITION: -

PENALTY: -

00:01:12

Four dashes.

I swiped back. The old objective slid up:

REACH A SHELTER NODE BEFORE THE COUNTDOWN ENDS.

DISTANCE: 340M.

Reach. Three hundred and forty. A number I could argue with.

I swiped forward.

PROCEED TO SHELTER NODE.

DISTANCE: -

I've read thousands of forms. The trap never sits in the line you're reading. It sits in the space where the answer should be.

Bellwether Row.

I know that street. I route vans along it four times a day. Narrow, floods, and there's a skip outside the launderette that has been there since before I moved to this city.

The arrow pointed into a street with no skip, no cars, no glass, no bodies.

It snapped into place at the mouth of it. Not drift. Not draw. Snap, like a piece of UI being dragged and dropped.

Two hundred people walked into the gap where the skip should have been.

They came out of the side roads and off the pavement in a crush, shoulder to shoulder, all following the same white arrow. A trolley went over and nobody stopped to write it. A woman carried a dog. A man carried nothing at all.

A man in a hi-vis jacket came past while jogging. I caught his arm.

"You've got no distance."

"There's a countdown."

"Look at the panel. Where the number should be. Look at the dash."

"There's a countdown," he said, pulled free, and went.

I stood at the mouth of Bellwether with my feet on the right side of the arrow and watched the countdown tick away over two hundred heads.

It hit zero at the far end.

The boundary came down. That's the only word for it - a wall of fog, no thicker than a door, dropping across the street from rooftop to tarmac in one clean movement.

The near end was sealed too.

The street went grey. Not covered in fog - rendered in it, the way the alley had rendered when the city drew itself. For a moment I could see shapes. The trolley. The woman with the dog. The hi-vis jacket flat against the wall, both hands up.

Then the fog flattened and there was nothing to see at all.

The boundary held a moment. Then Bellwether was a street again, with the skip outside the launderette and nobody in it.

It rerouted.

Lifted off Bellweather, pulled a new route behind the shop, along the service corridor, and turned left.

Behind the shop. Where the fire escape came down.

I stood with the fog at my back and the empty street at my front, and the one thing I actually knew was that he'd told me not to follow it, and hadn't told me anything else.

You counted the intervals, his voice said. Nobody counts the intervals.

So I counted the dashes on the panel. Four. Then I went the wrong way.

Not that way. Not Bellweather. The service corridor behind the shop - the one the mini-map had shown me when it was still pretending to be my friend.

I walked it at a pace I could hold. Sprinting in a sealed zone is a way of dying tired.

The corridor ran between two buildings with nothing at either end but a door and a wall. I crossed the threshold at the far end.

ROUTE LOCKED.

PATH SEALED.

BOUNDARY STABLE.

The door behind me slammed.

Not closed. Slammed - the frame jumping, dust coming off the brick - and when I turned round there was no door. Fog, flat and grey, across the corridor where the doorway had been.

I put my hand on it. It didn't give. It didn't feel like weather. It felt like a wall that had been painted to look like fog.

The corridor had one direction left in it.

TUTORIAL: PROCEED TO SHELTER NODE.

NEW PATH AVAILABLE.

DISTANCE: -

CONDITION: -

PENALTY: -

00:03:40

The countdown had reset. The dashes hadn't moved.

The marker laid a line straight along the corridor, turned at the end, and pointed at a doorway I couldn't see from here.

I pushed the fog behind me. Nothing. I pushed lower, near the floor where the wall met the tarmac, and my fingers went in a quarter of an inch and stopped.

Boundary stable.

Stable is a word with an expiry date.

I walked and counted my footfalls, because counting is what I do and it has kept me alive for two days.

On the twelfth step, the corridor light went out.

Not the lights. The corridor - from my feet to the corner, going dark in a wave, swallowing itself as it came.

I ran.

The marker kept pace beside me, drawing its little arrow, and it went where the marker wanted.

The fire escape was behind the wall. The street was behind the wall. The dashes were still on the panel, all of them, and I ran toward the doorway they were pointing at because it was the only open thing left.