The staging camp smelled like boiled bandages and cold stew, which I decided was probably the best I could hope for at hour forty-one of a hundred and sixty-eight.
Somebody had strung a tarp between two supply crates and called it a briefing tent.
I ducked under it, dropped my pack, and let my knees do what they’d been wanting to do since the quarry.
My wristband lit up before I even got both hands off the ground.
Kharvoss: VALIDATED.
Vhaldrèche: VALIDATED.
Odrance: VALIDATED.
Namarre: PENDING.
External exits remain LOCKED pending full arena clearance.
Three green checkmarks out of nine.
I stared at that ratio for longer than it deserved, mostly because staring at it was easier than standing back up.
“Don’t get excited,” said the woman crouched over a dataslate a few feet away.
She had a headset looped around her neck and the kind of tired, patient face that belonged to someone who’d explained the same thing forty times already that hour.
“Three cities clear doesn’t mean three exits open. It means three cities clear.”
“I wasn’t excited,” I said, which was mostly true.
“I was doing math.”
“Everyone does math the first time they see the board.” She held out a hand without looking up.
“Coordinator. You can call me that, or Coordinator, or hey you—I answer to all three.”
“Veyr.” I didn’t shake the hand so much as let her shake mine, since mine wasn’t cooperating with anything that required grip strength right now.
“So if Kharvoss and Odrance and Vhaldrèche are all done, why is Namarre still sitting there blinking at me like it’s mad about something?”
“Because the sectors don’t talk to each other.” She said it the way you’d explain that water was wet.
“Three sectors, nine cities, three tracks. Yours cleared its first three links. The other two sectors are still working theirs. Eshkar’s crew started digging into their local situation the second Vhaldrèche went green, because that’s how their track opens. Doesn’t mean a thing for you. You don’t get their progress and they don’t get yours.”
That explained a piece of the noise I’d caught on the relay boards walking in, chatter about someone named Drez and a job in a city I hadn’t set foot in yet.
I filed it under things that weren’t my problem and moved on before I started caring about strangers three cities and a sector wall away.
“And the swaps,” I said.
“If Namarre’s still locked, can I get pulled into it early? Or pulled out into somewhere that’s already done?”
“Neither.” She finally looked up, and there was something almost like sympathy in it, buried under the exhaustion.
“Swaps never drop a player into a city that hasn’t unlocked. The system won’t do it. You could sit here for six hours cycling through swaps and you’d never land somewhere the gate’s still shut. And validated cities keep an active relief post running after clearance—medical, food, a cot if you’re lucky—so if you get swapped backward into Odrance or Kharvoss now, it won’t be a war zone. It’ll be a hospital tent with better lighting.”
“Smaller than you’d think,” she said, and went back to her slate.
I sat with that for a minute.
It was the kind of rule that sounded generous until you noticed what it actually guaranteed, which was that the network would never let a paying audience watch a contestant get teleported into a city that had already stopped being interesting.
Around the tarp, people were sorting themselves into a rhythm I recognized from every warehouse job I’d ever worked.
Someone had a clipboard.
Someone else was arguing about it.
A woman with a bandaged forearm was reading names off a list in a flat, businesslike voice, assigning shifts for casualty carries down to the med wagons and rotations on camp watch through the night, so that nobody pulled a full twelve hours without at least catching a few hours of sleep somewhere in the middle.
It wasn’t glamorous and nobody was making speeches about it.
It was just work, the kind that gets done because somebody has to do it and standing around complaining doesn’t move a stretcher.
I put my name down for the second watch rotation, mostly because my shoulder wasn’t going to be good for carrying anybody anywhere for a while, and watch duty mostly meant sitting upright and staying awake, which I could manage even half-broken.
That’s when I noticed the woman refilling waterskins near the fire wasn’t wearing a contestant’s gear at all.
No wristband.
No telemetry bracelet.
Just a plain wool coat and boots that had clearly walked a lot more miles than mine had.
“You’re not in the show,” I said, which came out blunter than I meant it to.
She didn’t seem offended.
“Not the way you mean, no. I’m local staff. Emergency logistics, Sector 3.” She kept working the waterskins as she talked, like this was a conversation she’d had a hundred times and didn’t need to slow down for.
“Separate contract from you lot. Network hires residents and guards direct, through the production office. Pays into a family insurance line if something happens to us on shift, plus a role stipend on top for hazard duty.”
“So you get paid to be here.” I tried to keep the surprise out of my voice and mostly failed.
“While the city you’re standing in is trying to kill everybody in it.”
“Same as anyone gets paid to stand near something dangerous,” she said, shrugging.
“Fire crews. Mine workers. You people just happen to be the danger with better ratings.” She capped a skin and set it aside.
“I’ve got two kids and a contract that covers their schooling if I go down out here. That’s not nothing. Most of what I make doing this in a month is more than what I’d clear in half a year doing anything else the city’s got for someone like me.”
I thought about my old job, the time-sheets, the terrace I could never afford on what they paid me to file other people’s paperwork.
It wasn’t the same kind of desperate, but it rhymed close enough that I didn’t have much room to judge her for taking the deal.
“Is there a way out for you people that isn’t the same one we’re stuck fighting for?”
Her mouth went thin.
“There’s crew airlocks. Production access, cameras, cable runs, all that. Those exist. I’ve seen them.” She nodded toward a stretch of wall behind the med tent that looked, now that she pointed it out, distinctly more reinforced than everything around it.
“But those are keyed to production credentials. Crew only. I don’t have crew clearance. I have a labor contract and a stipend and a promise that my kids get looked after if I don’t come home.” She said it without much heat, like she’d already had this argument with herself a long time ago and lost.
“So no. If this city goes under, I go under with it, same as you. Difference is you’re getting a fortune for the privilege.”
I didn’t have a clever answer for that, so I didn’t try to give her one.
I just nodded and let her get back to the waterskins, because sometimes the only respectful thing you can do with a hard truth is not pretend it needs fixing on the spot.
The briefing for Namarre went up on the board an hour later, and it was worse reading than the numbers had let on.
A census, locked and unalterable the second the city validated, meaning the system already knew exactly how many people were supposed to be pulled out alive and wasn’t going to let anyone argue about the math after the fact.
A 95% survival threshold on that census, no partial credit, no rounding favorably.
And underneath all of it, in smaller text like the network was embarrassed to admit it mattered: dam failure projected at hour 81.
Forty hours, give or take, to find every living person in a city that was apparently already flooding in places, and get ninety-five out of every hundred of them somewhere the water couldn’t reach.
I pulled up the intermediate boards out of habit while I chewed on a heel of bread someone had handed me.
Eshkar’s track had unlocked its own second city and people were already trading notes about vaults and courier runs and something called the Glass Heart, whatever that was.
Sector 2 had cities I hadn’t even glimpsed yet, names scrolling past that meant nothing to me.
Somewhere out there, contestants were picking locks and running heists and probably getting paid handsomely for the trouble, while I was about to walk into a drowning city with a countdown clock that didn’t care how tired my shoulder was.
I could get swapped out of this.
That was the ugly little thought that kept surfacing no matter how many times I pushed it back under.
Somewhere in the next hour, the system could pull me sideways into an investigation or a smash-and-grab in a sector that hadn’t started sinking yet, and I’d never have to see the inside of Namarre at all.
Somebody else would inherit the census and the 95% and the dam.
That was how the swaps worked.
That was the whole rotten logic of the thing.
I decided I didn’t much like myself for thinking it, and I decided that didn’t matter enough to stop me from thinking it again later.
What I did instead was eat the rest of the bread, drink water until my stomach complained, and lie down on a cot that had clearly hosted better sleepers than me, judging by the smell.
I got maybe three hours before someone shook me awake for the second watch, and I sat by the fire with a spear I didn’t fully trust across my knees, listening to the camp breathe around me until the sky started going gray at the edges.
When the shift ended, I packed what I had, checked my wristband one more time out of habit rather than hope, and fell in with the small column of survivors and stragglers heading down the road toward the next set of green lights on somebody’s board.
Namarre was still a few hours’ walk off, but I could already smell the wet in the air, faint and wrong, like a river that had gotten somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be.
I put one foot in front of the other and kept walking.