I close my eyes. The hum of the core is a physical thing, getting louder. My gut isn’t a voice. It’s a pull, a magnetic drag from my navel toward the pulsing light. Run and hide? The thought feels thin now, a child’s blanket against a storm. This pull is thicker. It’s anger, a hot wire where the fear used to be.

I open my eyes. Al is watching me, his head tilted. “What does your gut tell you to do?”

The questions spill out, raw and unfiltered. “How many hunters do I need to run from? How many is prey? Am I the only prey?”

For a fraction of a second, his silver eyes sparkle. It’s not mockery. It’s awe, bright and startling, like I’ve just performed a magic trick. Then it’s gone, wiped clean by that practiced coldness. He looks almost impressed. “Clever questions. Most just scream.”

“Answer them.”

“The numbers change. The roles flip. You’re the only prey… for now.” He cocks his head, listening to something I can’t hear. “Time is ticking, Nyx. I can feel others coming. Their hunger… it’s a pressure in the walls.”

Others. Coming here. Drawn to me if I touch it, or to him if I fail. The core glows, a heartbeat of corrupted light. My brother’s face flashes in my mind—not as he was, laughing with me on his back, but as he was in the Gem Heist. Cold. Efficient. A stranger being carved out of my brother’s skin.

This game carves everyone. It carved Al into this polite, deadly thing. It’s carving me right now.

I won’t be carved. I’ll be the knife.

“You said touching it would broadcast my location to every hunter,” I say, my voice quieter than I mean it to be.

“Yes.”

“And if I don’t? You capture me. You win. You stay safe.”

“That is the calculus.” His voice is flat, but his gaze isn’t. It’s waiting. It’s asking.

I stop talking. I make my decision in the silence between one breath and the next. I step toward the dais. The light paints my skin electric blue. I reach out. My hand doesn’t tremble. The air crackles, raising the hairs on my arm. I go for the core.

My fingers are a centimeter from the crackling energy when a bell chimes. It’s deep, resonant, a single toll that seems to come from the stone itself. The entire chamber vibrates with it. I freeze. The hum of the core dies to a whisper.

A voice, smooth and synthetic, fills the silence. “Announcement. Role reassignment. The following contestants are now designated Prey: Nyx. Algaliarept. Kiran. Lira.”

My hand stays suspended. I turn my head, slowly, to look at Al. A question in my eyes.

He’s standing perfectly still. Then I hear it—a soft, sharp exhale. A breath of pure relief. It’s the first completely unguarded sound I’ve heard from him. The cold mask shatters for a full second, revealing a boy who just dodged a blade aimed at his neck.

He moves before I do. In two strides he’s at the dais, his hand closing around my wrist, pulling it back from the core. His touch is firm, urgent. “Don’t. Not anymore.”

“You’re prey?” I ask, the words stupid and obvious.

“We are prey,” he corrects, his silver eyes scanning the tunnel mouths. The awe from before is gone, replaced by a frantic, calculating energy. “Which means we are allies. For now. Touching the core now would only signal every hunter to our exact location. It’s suicide.”

“But you said—”

“The game changed the rules, Nyx. We adapt or we die. Come on.” He releases my wrist and points to a narrow opening on the left, one I hadn’t noticed. “That tunnel. It leads to a maintenance shaft, drier than the fungal levels. Fewer choke points.”

A better path. My defiance, so solid a moment ago, feels hollow and reckless. I just almost doomed us both. The heat of my anger cools, leaving a sick, shaky feeling in my stomach. I nod, my throat tight.

We’re three steps toward the tunnel when a figure emerges from the opposite archway.

He walks with a hunter’s gait, balanced and ready, his body coiled with the focused heat of the match. Dark red hair spiked short. Broad shoulders. For a dizzy second, my heart lurches—Shiro.

His eyes sweep the chamber, expecting threats, expecting strangers. Then they land on me.

He stops. Just stops. All that coiled energy vanishes. His face, usually so animated, goes utterly blank. It’s not recognition. It’s the shock of seeing a ghost in a place where ghosts shouldn’t be. “Nyx?”

My name, in his voice. It’s a punch to the chest.

Al moves instantly. A blur of black and white, and he’s placed himself squarely between me and my brother, his body a shield. He doesn’t speak. His posture is pure tension, wary and defensive, even though he must know—must have heard—exactly who this is.

Shiro’s stunned stillness breaks. His gaze flicks from my face to Al, then back to me. His expression cracks open. “What are you… how are you here?” The question is a whisper, full of dawning horror. He takes a step forward, his hand coming up, not in a threat, but like he’s reaching for something he can’t believe is real.

Al doesn’t budge. “That’s close enough,” he says, his voice low and flat. The polite tutorial guide is gone. This is the enforcer again, but the threat is for my brother.

“Shiro,” I breathe out. The word tastes like chlorine and concrete. I see him now, really see him. The cold efficiency from the Gem Heist is in the set of his jaw, the way he holds his shoulders. But his eyes… his eyes are wide, lost, scared. My brother is in there, staring out from behind the hunter the game made him.

“Step away from her,” Shiro says to Al, his voice gaining strength, edged with a threat of his own. His hands curl into fists at his sides.

“She is prey,” Al states, as if explaining the sky is grey. “You are a hunter. That is the only relevant fact here.”

“She’s my sister!”

The shout echoes in the chamber. It’s raw, frayed, the sound of his world breaking. I watch his face twist. He’s fighting it, fighting the game’s calculus, fighting the part of him that knows the rules: find the prey, capture the prey, win.

And I just stand there, caught between the boy who became a shield and the brother who became a hunter, watching Shiro’s hands shake as he tries to remember which one he’s supposed to be.

The shake in Shiro's hands stops. Just like that. His fingers uncurl. His shoulders settle. The lost, scared look in his brown eyes vanishes, replaced by a flat, chilling focus I saw in the Gem Heist feed. The game’s logic wins.

He doesn’t shout again. He moves.

It’s a hunter’s lunge, fast and low, aimed not at me but at the boy between us. His fist drives toward Al’s stomach, a brutal, efficient strike meant to disable.

Al doesn’t flinch. He flows. He shifts his weight, the motion like smoke, and Shiro’s punch grazes the black leather of his jacket. In the same motion, Al’s hand snaps up, not to hit back, but to clamp around Shiro’s wrist. “Stop,” he says, a quiet command.

“Get away from her!” Shiro snarls, twisting free with a sharp jerk. He’s stronger, broader. He uses the momentum to swing a wide hook at Al’s head.

This time, Al doesn’t fully evade. He takes the blow on his raised forearm. The crack of impact echoes in the chamber. I feel it in my teeth.

“Shiro, stop! He’s protecting me!” The words tear out of me, raw and too loud.

My brother doesn’t hear me. Or he can’t. The hunter in him is running the program: eliminate the obstacle, secure the prey. He presses forward, a series of controlled, vicious strikes—elbows, knees, fists. This is the tournament’s language. This is what he learned.

Al defends. He blocks, parries, deflects. He’s faster, his movements economical and precise, but he’s not attacking. He’s a wall, taking the fury meant for him, keeping his body between me and the violence. I see his silver eyes, calculating, waiting. For what?

“You don’t understand the rules,” Al says, his voice strained as he catches a kick against his thigh. He staggers back a step. “We are both prey. Attacking me is a waste of your time.”

“The only rule is that she shouldn’t be here!” Shiro lunges again, this time feinting high and driving a shoulder into Al’s chest.

The air leaves Al in a grunt. He stumbles back, toward the pulsing core. The blue light washes over his face, highlighting the scar on his brow, the tight line of his mouth. His back hits the dais. Nowhere left to go.

Shiro sees it. The opening. His eyes lock on Al, all that brotherly love burned away into a cold, terrible purpose. He draws his fist back.

“Shiro, look at me!” I scream it.

My voice, his name—it cuts through. His head turns, just an inch. His eyes find mine over Al’s shoulder.

I see the conflict flood back in, a tidal wave crashing against the hunter’s focus. His fist trembles, suspended. His breath comes in ragged pulls. “Nyx… get back. Let me finish this and get you out.”

“He’s trying to get me out!” I take a step forward, my hands up, empty. “Listen to me. Please. Just listen.”

The moment hangs, fragile as glass. In the silence, I hear it—a soft scrape of stone on stone, from one of the dark tunnels. Not ours. Another.

Al hears it too. His head tilts. The relief from earlier is gone, replaced by a sharp, alert tension. His silver eyes meet mine. “Nyx,” he says, quiet, urgent. “We’re out of time.”

I don’t think. My body moves. My hand shoots out, my fingers wrapping around Al’s wrist. The leather of his jacket is cool, his skin beneath it warm. “Run!” I scream the word at Shiro, my voice breaking. “Trust me! Don’t follow!”

I pull, hard, and Al doesn’t resist. He spins with my momentum, and we’re fleeing, not toward the tunnel we came from, but down another, a darker maw I hadn’t even registered. Our footsteps are thunder in the narrow space. I don’t look back. I can’t. I just run, dragging Al behind me or maybe him guiding me, the blue light of the core dying at our backs.

The tunnel slopes upward, the air growing hotter, drier. The smell of chlorine burns my nose. My lungs are knives. I can hear him behind me, his breathing measured, controlled, while mine comes in ragged, tearing gasps. The image of Shiro’s face—that blank hunter’s mask cracking into horror—burns behind my eyes.

We burst out of the tunnel mouth into blinding, sterile light. The vast, empty basin of the drained pool stretches before us, a concrete desert under arena lights. The heat coming off the floor is a physical wall. Al skids to a halt, pulling me to a stop beside him. I double over, hands on my knees, heaving.

“Clear. For now.” Al’s voice is tight. He’s not even winded. He scans the high, curved walls, the rows of empty spectator seats far above, his silver eyes missing nothing.

I straighten, wiping sweat from my upper lip. My heart is a frantic bird trying to escape my ribs. “How do we end this?” The question is a gasp. “How long does this go for?”

He turns his head, looking at me. The strategic calm is back, but I see the calculation behind it. “The match cycle is two hours. We evade the hunters. The Game Master can re-assign roles at any interval. It’s a variable.”

“How long do we have left Al?” I ask.

“Another hour at least.” He says. Al is quiet for a moment. His hand comes up, fingers resting against his chin. His gaze goes distant, seeing something I can’t—patterns, rules, loopholes. Then I see it. A flicker in his eyes, a subtle shift. A light. An idea.

“There is another way,” he says slowly, his voice dropping. “A faster termination condition. One the game permits but rarely broadcasts.”

“What? What is it?”

He looks at me, really looks at me, and the cold enforcer is gone. In his place is the boy from the cell, the one who told me hard truths. “The match ends immediately if all prey are captured. Or…” He pauses. “If all hunters are neutralized.”

I stare at him. The sheer, insane audacity of it hangs in the hot air between us. “You want to… fight them? Take them out?”

“Not fight. Win.” He takes a step closer. The heat of the concrete seems to intensify. “Think, Nyx. Your brother is a hunter. His programming is to capture. But you saw him. You reached him. The game’s control is not absolute. Not for everyone.”

“You’re saying we turn the hunters? That’s impossible.”

“Is it?” He cocks his head. “You just did. For a moment. You broke his focus with a name. Your name.” His eyes hold mine. “The game runs on fear and isolation. It makes prey run and hunters chase. But what if the prey stops running? What if it turns and offers the hunter a different equation?”

My mind reels. The scale of it, the risk. “You want to recruit them. To get everyone on the same side.”

“A team. Temporary, fragile. But a team with one goal: end the match on our terms, not the Game Master’s.” His voice is low, urgent. “It is the only path that leads somewhere other than capture or exhaustion. It is the only way we both walk out.”

“We find the other prey first,” I say, the plan forming in my mouth as I speak. “Then we find the hunters. We talk to them.”

“We persuade them,” Al corrects, his mouth a grim line. “Or we incapacitate them. The method is secondary to the result.”

A sound echoes through the vast space—a distant, metallic clang from somewhere deep in the pool’s filtration system. Another hunter? Another prey? We both freeze, listening.

“They’re moving,” Al whispers. “The board is active.”

I look at him, at this strange, sharp boy who shifts from shield to strategist in a breath. “Why are you telling me this? You could have just used me as bait. Or left me.”

For a second, his mask slips completely. I see not coldness, but a weariness so deep it looks like pain. “Because you are the variable,” he says, so quietly I almost miss it. “You see the cracks. You are the crack. And cracks…” He looks toward the sound. “Cracks are where the light gets in.”

He holds out his hand, not to pull me, but to offer. A pact. “Do you run? Or do we change the game?”

I look at his hand. At the arena. At the ghost of my brother’s shattered expression. My fear is a cold stone in my gut. But beneath it, something else is stirring. A defiant, foolish heat. The same heat that made me reach for the core.

I take his hand. His grip is firm, sure. “We change it,” I say.

A faint, almost imperceptible smile touches his lips. It’s gone in a heartbeat. “Then we move. The control node’s broadcast will have drawn attention here. We need to find cover, and then the others.”

He turns, leading us along the curved wall toward a shadowed service alcove. I follow, my hand still in his, the decision settling into my bones like a new kind of gravity. We are not running anymore. We are hunting the hunt. And for the first time since I woke up in that cell, the dread is edged with something dangerous.

Something like hope.

The shadowed alcove is just that—a shallow recess in the curved pool wall, housing a locked metal grate over a filtration intake. I’m about to ask what cover this provides when Al releases my hand.

He steps past the grate, his fingers brushing the concrete beside it. Not searching, not probing. Knowing.

“The architects of these arenas are efficient,” he says, his voice low. “They repurpose existing structures. And maintenance crews need access.”

His palm presses flat against a seam I hadn’t seen, a vertical crack in the wall disguised as a stress fracture. There’s a soft, pneumatic hiss. A section of the wall, roughly the size of a door, swings inward an inch. Darkness breathes out from the gap, cooler air licking at the heat of the pool deck.

“A passage,” I breathe.

“A shortcut,” Al corrects. He hooks his fingers into the gap and pulls. The door swings open silently on hidden hinges. “The arena is a layer cake. We’re on the decorative icing. The machinery is below.”

I peer inside. A narrow metal staircase descends into gloom, lit intermittently by faint, recessed amber lights. The air smells like ozone and old dust. “How did you know this was here?”

He meets my gaze. The silver of his eyes seems to catch the low light. “I told you. I see the cracks.”

It’s not an answer, but it’s the only one I’m getting. He gestures for me to go first. “Quickly. The door is shielded from casual scan, but not from a determined hunter.”

I step over the threshold. The temperature drops ten degrees instantly, raising goosebumps on my sweaty arms. The metal stairs clang softly under my shoes. Al follows, pulling the hidden door shut behind us with a definitive thud. The ambient sounds of the arena—the hum of lights, the distant, echoing space—are cut off. It’s suddenly, overwhelmingly quiet, save for the hum of machinery below.

We’re in a utility shaft. Painted pipes run along the walls, vibrating with a deep, subsonic thrum. The amber lights make everything look sickly, washed in sepia.

“Where does this go?” I whisper. The space demands whispers.

“Service corridors. Access points for every major arena zone.” Al moves past me, taking the lead down the stairs. His movements are sure, familiar. “It’s how the Game Masters observe and adjust. And how clever contestants move unseen.”

“You’ve used these before.”

“I have.” He doesn’t elaborate. The memory of his weariness in the pool, the pain in his eyes when he called me the crack, hangs between us. How many matches has he survived down here?

We reach the bottom of the stairs. A long, low-ceilinged corridor stretches in both directions, lined with more pipes and bundles of thick, color-coded cables. The thrum is louder here, a heartbeat from the city’s artificial guts.

Al pauses, his head cocked. Listening. “This way,” he says, turning left. “The broadcast from the core will have drawn prey and hunters to the upper pool area. The other prey will be scattering, looking for deep hiding. The hunters will be converging. We need to intercept the former before the latter does.”

“How do we find them?” I ask, hurrying to keep up with his long strides. “We can’t just shout.”

“We don’t need to.” He stops beside a junction box, its face a mess of dials and blinking green LEDs. He studies it for a second, then taps a specific sequence on a small keypad I hadn’t noticed. A holoscreen flickers to life above the box, displaying a schematic. A map.

My mouth goes dry. “You can access the system?”

“Limited access. Diagnostic subroutines.” His fingers fly over the keypad. A warning popped up with a time limit, the second clocked down from 60. When it got to 10 left Al did something un benonsed to me that removed the warning all together. The schematic zooms in, showing a cross-section of the arena. I see the pool deck above us, a honeycomb of chambers and corridors below. And moving through them, small, pulsing icons. Blue. Red.

“Blue is prey,” Al murmurs, his eyes fixed on the screen. “Red is hunter. The system tags us for tracking. It’s how they keep score.”

I count. Four blue icons. Including the two of us, clustered here in the corridor. That means two other prey out there. Seven red icons. Shiro is one of them. My stomach twists.

“They’re scattered,” Al says, pointing. One blue icon is stationary, deep in a labyrinthine sector to the east. The other is moving fast, erratically, through a series of small chambers to the north. “The stationary one is hiding. The moving one is being chased.”

“The one running is closer.”

“And has a hunter in close pursuit.” Al zooms in. A red icon is just three chambers behind the fleeing blue one. “We go for the runner. It’s the greater risk, but also the greater need. Ready?”

He looks at me. This isn’t a rhetorical question. He’s asking if I’m ready to step out of hiding, to run toward a hunter instead of away from it. I think of Shiro’s face, the programming warring with his brotherhood. I think of the core, and the defiant heat that made me touch it.

I nod. “Ready.”

He commits the route to memory with a glance, kills the holoscreen, and moves. We run. The corridor is a blur of pipes and amber light. Al takes turns without hesitation, a ghost in the machine’s belly. My breath saws in my throat, but it’s a clean burn now. Purposeful.

We burst through a heavy service door into a different kind of space. It’s a storage chamber, stacked with faded equipment: folded mats, rusted climbing frames, the skeletons of old arena obstacles. The air is thick with mildew.

And there, across the room, pressed against a stack of mats, is a girl.

She can’t be older than me. Mousy brown hair is plastered to her forehead with sweat. Her eyes, wide and terrified, lock onto us. She flinches, scrambling back.

“Wait!” I call out, my hands coming up, empty. “We’re not hunters. We’re prey. Like you.”

She freezes, her gaze darting between me and Al. She sees his silver eyes, his sharpness, and her fear doesn’t lessen. “Stay away,” she chokes out. “It’s a trick. The game tricks you.”

“No trick,” Al says, his voice calm, non-threatening. He stays where he is. “My designation is Prey. Yours is Prey. The hunter on your tail is forty seconds behind you. You cannot outrun him in these corridors.”

“So you’re what? Salvation?” Her voice is hysterical, cracking. “You’re going to save me?”

“No,” I say, stepping forward slowly. “We’re going to offer you a choice. You can keep running. Or you can help us end the match.”

She stares at me like I’m speaking a different language. “End it? You can’t end it. It ends when they catch us.”

“It ends when all hunters are neutralized,” Al states, factual as a textbook. “A faster termination clause. We are forming a unit to enact it.”

A heavy footfall echoes from the corridor we just left. The hunter. Close.

The girl’s panic sharpens into a razor’s edge. “You’re insane. They’ll reset you! They’ll—”

“They’ll reset us if we’re caught anyway,” I interrupt, my voice harder than I intended. “My brother is a hunter. I just saw him. I reached him. For a second, he was my brother again. The control isn’t perfect. We can break it.”

Something in my tone, maybe the raw ache of it, cuts through her terror. She hesitates.

The service door swings open with a crash.

The figure that fills the doorway is huge, a mountain of muscle packed into a hunter’s grey uniform. His face is blank, his eyes glossed over with the familiar, vacant focus. He zeroes in on the girl immediately.

Al moves. Not toward the hunter, but in front of the girl, placing himself between them. “Option three,” he says to me, never taking his eyes off the advancing hunter. “Persuasion failed. Incapacitation is now primary.”

The hunter lunges. It’s not a finesse move. It’s a freight train of intent, arms outstretched to grapple.

Al doesn’t try to meet force with force. He sidesteps, fluid as shadow. The hunter’s momentum carries him past. As he does, Al’s hand snaps out, not a punch, but a precise, knife-edged strike to the side of the hunter’s neck.

The big man stumbles, grunts. The blankness on his face flickers, replaced by a spike of confusion and pain. He turns, slower now, and swings a meaty fist.

Al ducks under it, closes the distance, and drives two quick, brutal strikes into the hunter’s diaphragm. The air leaves the man’s lungs in a whoosh. He doubles over, gasping.

“Now, Nyx!” Al barks.

I don’t think. I act. I dart forward, grabbing one of the hunter’s massive arms. He’s still dazed, struggling for breath. “Hey!” I shout into his face. “Look at me!”

His watering eyes focus on me. There’s a person in there, buried under the programming. I see it swimming up, disoriented.

“The match ends if all hunters are neutralized,” I say, the words rushing out. “But it also ends if all prey are captured. Which side do you want to be on when the clock runs out? The side that gets reset, or the side that walks away?”

He blinks. The violent intent is receding, replaced by dawning, groggy comprehension. He looks from me to Al, who stands poised, ready to strike again, then to the cowering girl.

“I… don’t want to be reset,” the man rasps, his voice a gravelly rumble. He straightens slowly, one hand on his stomach where Al hit him. The gloss is gone from his eyes. In its place is a wary, intelligent sharpness. “They said… capture the blue tags. That was the whole thought.”

“The thought was implanted,” Al says, his posture relaxing a fraction. “You are Titus, correct? Former city watch cadet.”

The man—Titus—nods, stunned. “How do you know that?”

“I make it a point to know.” Al glances at the door. “The altercation may have drawn attention. Your choice, Titus. Hunt with them. Or hunt with us.”

Titus looks at his own large hands, then at us. A slow, grim smile spreads across his face. It transforms him. “I’ve always hated being told what to think.” He rolls his shoulders. “What’s the plan?”

The mousy-haired girl unfurls from behind the mats. Her name is Lira, she whispers. She’s in. The terror in her eyes is now threaded with a fragile, blazing hope.

We are four. One hunter turned. Three prey united. The blueprint of a team.

Al consults the mental map. “The other prey is holed up here,” he says, tracing a path in the dust on a metal crate. “A cautious one. We retrieve them. Then we find the remaining hunters. We present our new equation.”

“And if they don’t want your equation?” Titus asks, cracking his knuckles.

Al’s silver eyes meet mine. The cold strategist is there, but so is the boy who offered his hand. “Then we solve for the variable.”

We move out, a strange, quiet procession in the amber-lit dark. Al leads. Titus takes up the rear, a wall of muscle at our backs. Lira sticks close to me, her breathing slowly steadying.

My hand finds the aquamarine rose at my throat. I cling to it, a cool anchor against the heat building in my chest. It’s not a hiding heat anymore. It’s a forging heat. We are changing the game. And somewhere in the maze above, my brother is still hunting. I have to believe the crack I saw in him is still there. I have to believe the light can get in.

We round a corner, and Al freezes. He holds up a clenched fist. We all stop.

Footsteps. Not the heavy, deliberate tread of a hunter like Titus was. This is lighter. Faster. Multiple sets.

They’re not in the service corridors. They’re in the arena proper, right above our heads, moving across a chamber whose grated ceiling forms our roof. I can see slices of sterile light through the gaps.

And I hear a voice. Muffled, but unmistakable.

“Sector clear. Moving to next waypoint.”

It’s Shiro.

My heart stops. Then it hammers, a frantic drum against my ribs. I look up through the grate. I can see boots. Grey uniforms. Two pairs. Shiro and another hunter, sweeping the area above.

Al looks at me. His gaze is a question. This is it. The first test of our mad plan. Do we reveal ourselves? Do we try to turn him now, with another hunter at his side?

The footsteps pause, right above me. A shadow blocks the light.

Shiro’s voice comes again, clearer, dripping with a frustration that sounds entirely his own, not the game’s. “Where did they go? The signal was strong here a minute ago.”

This is the crack. The frustration. The person chafing against the programming.

I look at Al, at Titus, at Lira. I take a deep, silent breath. I make the choice. Shaking my head no, now is not the time.

I shake my head no at Al, and we become statues in the amber gloom as the boots and my brother’s frustrated mutterings fade away above. We wait a full minute in the echoing silence before Al gives a sharp nod, and we slip forward again, a phantom crew in the city’s gutters.

We find hunters one by one in the branching service tunnels. A woman with a stun-baton gets Titus’s fist to her temple before she can scream, neutralized. She slumps, and we drag her into a side room. The next one, a younger guy with wild eyes, I talk down. My words feel like they’re coming from somewhere else, calm and clear even though my hands are shaking. “They’re using you. The reset is a death sentence. Choose your own side.” He stares at my aquamarine pendant like it’s a lighthouse, and the fight drains out of him. He nods, joining our ragged line.

“That’s three turneds,” Titus rumbles, wiping sweat from his brow. “Not counting me.”

Al just looks at me. His silver eyes are evaluating, like I’m a formula he’s recalculating. “Your success rate is statistically anomalous, Nyx.”

“Maybe they’re just not all idiots,” I say, but the thought is already there, cold and sharp in my gut. Why *can* I convince them? Is it the pendant? Is it the desperation in my voice? Or is it something the game put in me, another piece of this twisted experiment?

We find the last prey holed up in a dead-end chamber full of rusted filtration equipment. A young man, probably my age, presses himself against a massive pipe. His glasses are smudged, his knuckles white where he grips a length of broken conduit. He looks at our group—a turned hunter, a trembling girl, a silver-eyed ghost, and me—with pure, analytical terror. “Stay back,” he says, his voice surprisingly steady. “I’ve calculated the odds. A small, mobile unit has a 12% higher survival rate than a larger, consolidated one. You’re a target cluster.”