The advertisement cycled every eleven seconds.
I know because I counted it four times waiting in that line, staring at a rendering of a terrace apartment with natural sunlight coming through actual windows, the kind of unit that cost more per month than I made in three.
A woman in the image laughed at something off-screen while holding a mug that probably cost more than my mug collection combined.
I wasn’t laughing.
I was doing math, the same math I’d been doing for six years, the kind where no amount of overtime ever closed the gap between what I earned and what I wanted.
That was the entire reason I stood in that line, and I saw no sense in dressing it up in romantic nonsense.
I had no illusions about survival instinct, heroics, or proving a point to the universe.
I just wanted cash—enough of it to guarantee I would never log another unpaid hour or hand over another timesheet to a shift lead who butchered my surname twice a day for two straight years.
If that made me mercenary, fine.
Mercenaries bought groceries; martyrs got nice eulogies.
“Veyr, is it?” The man behind the counter didn’t look up from his tablet right away, which I appreciated.
Nobody wants to be stared at while their whole financial life gets pulled up on a screen.
“That’s me.”
He turned the tablet around so I could see my own face next to a string of numbers that constituted, apparently, my entire legal identity.
“Confirming identity match, current registration, no outstanding disqualifying medical flags.” He tapped through three more screens with the bored efficiency of someone who’d done this several hundred times that week alone.
“You understand the guaranteed payout structure?”
“Exit alive, validated, I get paid. I’ve watched the seasons. Everyone’s watched the seasons.”
“Watching and signing aren’t the same thing.” He slid a folder across the counter, the old-fashioned paper kind, which struck me as a strange choice for an organization that broadcast death in real time to nine cities’ worth of screens.
“These are the certified records from last season. Every contestant who did not exit through a validated airlock. Cause, timestamp, and payout status.”
I opened it.
Rows and rows of names I didn’t recognize, next to numbers that all said the same thing in slightly different fonts: zero.
No indemnity.
No death benefit.
No consolation prize for the estate.
If you didn’t walk out the door yourself, breathing, the show owed your family nothing.
“So dying’s a bad investment,” I said.
“Dying is not covered by the contract,” he corrected, without a flicker of amusement, which somehow made it funnier than if he’d smiled.
“The guarantee applies to validated exits only. I need you to say you understand that before we continue.”
“I understand that.”
He made a note.
Somewhere off to my left, a woman in a gray coat who’d been filling out the same intake forms I had twenty minutes earlier stood up from her chair, looked at the folder in her own lap, and set it down on the seat like it had gotten too heavy to hold.
She didn’t say anything to the clerk at her station.
She just walked toward the exit, unhurried, like she’d remembered she left something on the stove.
Nobody stopped her.
Nobody called after her.
The door let her out the same way it had let me in, and that, more than the folder, more than the zeros, told me everything I needed to know about how voluntary this actually was.
She’d looked at the numbers and decided her life was worth more than whatever was on the other side of that arena.
I respected that.
I also wasn’t her.
“Is that common?” I asked, nodding toward the door she’d disappeared through.
“Common enough that we don’t chase them down,” the clerk said.
“You’re free to do the same at any point before final registration. After that, the contract’s binding.”
I didn’t get up.
He seemed to expect that, in the mildly disappointed way of a man who’d hoped for a slower morning.
The screen above the counter blinked to life before he could continue, and every other screen in the room did the same in perfect unison, which was somehow more unsettling than if they’d glitched.
A woman’s face filled the display, her skin rendered without a single pore or stray hair, the symmetry too flawless for human bone structure.
When she blinked, her eyelids reset on a rhythm so precise it felt synced to an internal clock, her teeth gleaming under studio lighting with the seamless enamel finish of medical-grade dental resin.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome,” Vassago said, in the tone of someone opening a store that definitely wasn’t having a going-out-of-business sale.
“168 hours. That’s the clock, that’s the whole show, start to finish, no extensions, no snooze button. You’ll be competing across three sectors, each one physically sealed off from the others, and each sector holds three cities you’ll need to work through in sequence. Nine cities. Nine problems. Nine chances to make your sponsors very, very happy.”
A scale model rose out of the counter beside me, three clusters of miniature buildings under three separate domes of pale light, close enough to touch.
Two intake demonstrators assigned to the floor took positions on opposite ends of it, wearing the standardized slate-gray network tech jumpsuits with numbered badges pinned to their chests.
“Here’s the part everyone forgets to mention in the recaps,” Vassago went on, cheerful as ever.
“Swaps. You’ll be trading places with other living contestants, at random, sector to sector, city to city. Not teleportation in the fun sci-fi sense. A straight positional exchange. You keep your body, your injuries, your gear, your memories, your powers, exactly as they were the second before the swap. No transformations, no resets, no free heals. If you walked into the swap with a broken arm, you walk out of it with the same broken arm, just somewhere else.”
The two volunteers stepped forward on cue, and at some imperceptible cue from the console, the air between them gave a flat, concussive pop like a blown tire across the street.
In the space of an involuntary blink, their positions inverted; the shorter man landed in the taller one’s place with his boots already settled against the rubber matting, the hem of his gray jacket snapping once against his thigh as displaced air rushed back into the vacuum.
They didn’t stumble or catch their balance because the floor underneath them hadn’t moved at all.
It happened too cleanly to look violent, which only made the total lack of inertia unsettling.
“Warnings arrive five seconds before a swap triggers,” the clerk added, taking over from Vassago’s broadcast the way someone finishes a spouse’s sentence.
“Five seconds to brace, reposition, hand off whatever you’re holding if you can. Not five seconds to argue about it.”
“And if I land in the middle of someone else’s job?” I asked.
“Like they were halfway through defusing something, or holding a door?”
“You inherit the task. Not the training.” He said it flatly, like a warning label.
“You don’t gain their skills, their muscle memory, or their familiarity with the objective. If the person you’re replacing was an expert marksman and you’ve never held a bow, you’re still the person who’s never held a bow. You’ll simply be the one standing there when the bow needs to be held.”
The two volunteers by the model demonstrated it next, standing at either end of a thin arc of light that connected their two badges, some kind of joint circuit they were both supposed to maintain by staying in specific marked zones.
A countdown ticked on the model’s base.
One of them, the one on the left, got bored or distracted or simply didn’t read the instructions closely enough, and stepped half a pace outside his marker just as the counter hit zero.
The arc snapped out.
Both badges went dark.
A small chime chimed, the audio equivalent of a shrug.
“That,” Vassago said, delighted, “is what we in the business call a shared failure state. Notice how it wasn’t just his prize that disappeared. Teamwork!”
I filed that away carefully, the way I filed away anything that could cost me money through no fault of my own.
If a task needed two people holding a line, and only one of them had to slip for both of them to lose everything, then I needed to be very selective about who I trusted to hold their half.
The clerk handed me a second, thinner packet once the demonstration wound down.
“All nine missions have to validate before any exit unlocks, regardless of sector. One city stalls, everyone stays in. Prize pools are calculated per person, based on your individual contribution, logged and certified. Killing another contestant doesn’t transfer their earnings to you, in case that was on anyone’s mind.” He delivered the caveat with the deadpan neutrality of an airline agent reciting emergency exit row requirements, keeping his eyes glued to the counter so thoroughly that it landed like a personalized indictment.
“It wasn’t,” I said, which was mostly true.
“There’s a log,” he continued.
“Timestamped. Every credit, every validated action, every exchange. It’s sealed against retroactive changes, including by us. You can check your own entry at any point through the bracelet.” He nodded at a thin metal band already sitting in a tray beside the packet, waiting for a wrist that wasn’t mine yet.
I picked it up, turned it over, and asked him to pull my entry before I’d even signed anything, mostly to see if the log actually worked the way he said it did.
It did.
Zeroed out, timestamped to the second I asked, no discrepancies, no hidden line items.
I appreciated that more than I probably should have.
A system that lied about the big things usually lied about the small ones first, and this one, at least on paper, hadn’t lied yet.
I signed.
I put the bracelet on.
It was lighter than I expected, and colder.
The registration terminal asked me, in the flattest possible administrative language, to describe the nature of my requested ability, including any limitations I was willing to accept in exchange for its approval.
I’d thought about this part longer than any other part of the application, longer than the payout structure, longer than the death records.
I typed out a power that let me hand off tasks to be executed while I was unconscious—cheap on paper, dangerous in practice—and left the defect field open, to be finalized at the airlock the way the terms required.
The terminal accepted it without comment, printed a routing slip, and directed me toward a door marked with a single word in stenciled letters: Vhaldrèche.