The road east took longer than Chen Jin expected.
Blocks hit by the spore pods were unrecognizable. A collapsed overpass leaned between buildings like a drawn blade. Transports burned on their roofs. Cable hung everywhere, snapping and spitting sparks. A dozen-odd garrison troopers moved south behind Lei Changgeng, low and quiet, Chen Jin on point.
"The third-class walks lead, and the sergeant brings up the rear," somebody muttered in the column. "What kind of rule is that?"
"New rule," was all Lei Changgeng gave them.
They were passing an apartment building with half its floors down when knocking came from under the slab—two long, three short, steady. Chen Jin raised a hand. "Two minutes." He went in, hauled out an old man still clutching a picture frame, went back, and dragged a woman free from under an overturned cabinet. A soft pulse crossed his vision:
[Humans saved x2. +2 Embers.]
The old man's legs gave out; he grabbed Chen Jin's sleeve and tried to kneel. Chen Jin pushed him against the wall. "Don't kneel. Run south—the shelter district has walls. Tell them Chen Jin sent you."
A hound-class burst from under a flipped railcar, lunging at the old couple's backs. Chen Jin was there first, backhand blade, tip in through the eye socket—clean, so clean it scared him a little.
[Kill confirmed: Hound-class x1. +10 Embers.]
Kills paid. So did rescues. The system's books were cleaner than the quartermaster's ever been.
Farther on, at a lane mouth, a boy of five or six sat hunched on a rubble pile hugging an empty birdcage, refusing to move for anyone.
"My dad said wait inside the building."
Chen Jin crouched, looked at the building that was now half a building, then picked the boy up under one arm, birdcage swinging from his other hand. "Then we pick a different place to wait. When everyone's together, your dad'll spot you in one look."
[Humans saved x1. +1 Ember.]
The shelter district gate was a crush of bodies, noise climbing past the rooftops.
The man running it crouched on the gate housing, clutching a sheet of paper, voice shredded. "The shelter is FULL! Card holders only! Residency tags out! No tag, back up!"
The card meant a residency tag—old shelter households. People fleeing in from the west and south districts had nothing in their hands.
Chen Jin pushed through and read the sheet over his shoulder. Header: INTAKE LIST (FIRST BATCH). Stamped at the bottom: Port Administration Office.
Three hundred-odd names on the paper. The crowd outside the gate ran past counting—no fewer than three thousand. The gate stood open a hand's width, and bugs were already squeezing through the gap.
A woman shoved her child through the slot and went down under the flow of the crowd. Two militia men strained at the gate wheel, teeth bared.
"Shut it! Shut the gate!"
Chen Jin arrived. He hammered the stock of his rifle down on the winch.
"Open it."
"Who are you?" The man waved the paper, shaking. "Where's your name on the list! No listing, no—"
"The list?" Chen Jin looked up at him. "The Council's list crossed off every soul in this harbor. A hundred and ten thousand of them."
He swung up onto the gate wall, and as he rose he put one round through the head of the hound-class in the gap—it burst like a dropped melon.
"From tonight on, this harbor has no list."
He plucked the paper out of the man's hand, folded it twice, and slid it into his chest pocket. Keep that. It would be useful.
The man sat down hard beside the winch, still gripping the Port Office seal, knuckles white.
The gate winched open. With every second the crowd poured through, red characters stacked up in his vision—
[Humans saved x1. +1 Ember.]
[Humans saved x1. +1 Ember.]
Piling up like snowflakes.
One militiaman stared at him. "Whose officer are you? What gives you the right to run this gate?"
Chen Jin pulled his magazine, tapped it against his thigh. A half-magazine of rounds rattled loose.
"The Second Edict of the Sovereign," he said. "Every human life is worth saving."
Nobody understood the words. But the gate stayed open.
An old woman with gray hair squeezed through with the flow and stuffed half a dried flatbread into his hand, mumbling, good man. The bread was still warm. Chen Jin pocketed it. Night rations.
Late that night, the swarm found the shelter's outer wall.
Lei Changgeng took the survivors of the squad up top; Chen Jin floated where the gaps were. A Tier-1 body at this range was nearly cheating—the bugs' lunges arrived half a beat slow, and his knife found seams every time. War-hounds were another matter. The wind kept scraping the stink of corpses up over the wall; someone retched, finished retching, and went on reloading.
When the armored one brought down half a breastwork, the blast threw Chen Jin clean off his feet. A gash opened on his shoulder and soaked half his sleeve red. He rolled twice, came up, magazine empty, grabbed a broken rifle off the ground, and drove its bayonet into the soft underside of the war-hound. Twist. Twist again.
The blade curled.
[Kill confirmed: War-hound class x1. +50 Embers.]
Chen Jin leaned on the snapped rifle and breathed. The gash on his shoulder burned. Tier-1 didn't make you unkillable—it only guaranteed you didn't black out. If he wanted to stop bleeding, that cost eight hundred.
He bled too. The reminder was worth more than the pain.
In the tangle, a war-hound took Lei Changgeng over the wall, shield and all. The old sergeant hit the ground rolling, and something on a chain flew loose, landing in the rubble at Chen Jin's feet.
A bronze tag. Polished bright by hands, its edges ringed with fine engraved lines, the characters in the middle worn smooth by generations of sweat.
The instant Chen Jin picked it up, a line he'd never seen before blinked into his vision:
[Faint Sovereign-era signal detected. Source: aged metal tag.]
Sovereign-era?
"Mine!" Lei Changgeng scrambled up, hand out. "My great-great-grandfather's. One instruction—don't lose it, don't ask."
The old sergeant wound the chain twice around his wrist, lifted his shield, and went back up the wall, treating it like a scrap of old brass.
Chen Jin studied the engraved lines for two seconds. That same warmth from the STORE—the one his blood remembered—touched his chest again. He didn't ask. Not the time.
Before dawn, the swarm pulled back.
People slept in heaps inside the shelter and out, here and there across the ground. When Chen Jin found Chen Xiaosui behind the granary, she had a fruit knife in her fist, point out, four or five smaller kids shielded behind her.
The knife hit the ground before anything else did.
"Chen Jin!" Her voice and her tears went off together. "Where the hell have you been! Three flares went up—three!"
Then she wiped her face, dragged out an aluminum lunch box from behind her, flipped the lid, and pushed it over.
Noodles. Clumped, still warm.
"Hot noodles. As promised." Xiaosui sniffed. "The mess had one kettle of hot water left. I gave the little ones a bit first. Yours I didn't touch."
The fruit knife was already tucked in her belt, the edge freshly ground, bright enough to sting. Chen Jin drew it out and put it inside his own jacket—next to the folded list.
"You won't need this anymore," he said. "You handle their meals now."
He crouched down and ate. Clumped noodles, salty as anything. He ate slow, and he ate every strand.
"Ge." Xiaosui sat across from him, arms around her knees. "Those things out there. Can they get in?"
"They can't get in," Chen Jin said.
The words were out and he wanted to bite half of them back—that long roar outside the walls was still coming, and nobody on this earth could promise that. But her fingers had his sleeve, so he didn't correct himself. He looked toward the gate wall, then down at his own two hands. What those hands had killed tonight wasn't enough yet.
"Not tonight," he said. "Tonight, they can't."
Before nightfall he sat alone on the gate wall and counted his money.
[Embers: 444.]
The STORE page lay open. Standard Power Armor (reconstructed from archive fragments), 800 Embers, sitting quiet in the first slot. Three hundred and fifty-some short. He looked at it for a while, then closed the page.
Couldn't afford it? Fine. It goes on the books. Sooner or later, that account gets settled—with interest.
Right then, from very far outside the city, came a bug's roar.
Long. Heavy. It came rolling across the whole plain, and the plaster on the wall under him shivered with it. Nothing like the hound-class shriek—this sound was hauled up out of the deep ground one thread at a time, and one note of it smothered every laugh in the shelter.
Then the entire harbor grid tripped.
The shelter lights died. The city lights died. Even the orbital port's lights went out, layer by layer, one after another.
All of Linyuan Harbor, black—swallowed whole.
By the wall, the militiamen looked at one another. An old soldier said the thing everyone was thinking:
"That's not the kind we've been fighting."
In the dark, Xiaosui found his sleeve by feel, voice dropped to almost nothing.
"Ge... what is that out there?"
Chen Jin sat on the wall, looking at the bottomless black beyond the city.
"Something bigger than bugs."