Zekh’s hand closed around my collar and hauled me sideways into a service alcove half a second before the wall finished coming apart.
Chunks of stone dust rolled through the gap where the outer rampart had been, followed by a low, collective moan that did not sound like it belonged to anything I wanted to meet in a dark tunnel.
He shoved a shoulder against the alcove’s iron grate and looked at me like I owed him money.
“That’s your breach,” he said.
“The one you made.”
“I vented a valve so the chamber wouldn’t blow up the whole rampart at once. You’re welcome.”
“I didn’t say thank you.”
He had a point, and I didn’t have the breath to argue it.
Behind us, distant shouting rolled down the tunnel in that particular pitch that means people are running toward something instead of away from it, which in my experience is worse.
Zekh peeled back from the grate long enough to wave down a line of defenders retreating from the collapsed section, pointing them toward a side passage that, according to the overhead diagram flickering on his forearm display, connected to a secondary stairwell.
We had maybe three or four minutes before whatever came through that hole in the wall caught up with the stragglers.
Enough time to think, if not enough time to feel good about it.
I used it to check my wristband.
The telemetry bracelet spat cold data across the small curved screen: precise timestamps, coordinate handshakes, and strict sector registries.
Scrolling back through the swap history, I found the two entries sitting across from each other like a matched set of bookends: my arrival in Odrance, standing next to a winch wheel that wanted to remove my hands, and a second entry, same instant, opposite direction—a contestant named Rulven arriving in Vhaldrèche.
It was a tidy, reciprocal ledger entry that made a horrifying mechanism look almost administrative, but my comm chimed before I could brood over what that meant for the man standing in my old footprints.
Mavra’s voice came through flat and a little annoyed, the tone of someone relaying a problem she found more confusing than dangerous.
“You’ve got a guy here. Rulven. Says he was pulling a winch a second ago. A medic tried to wrap his wrist and he wouldn’t let her, said his wrist was fine, kept pointing at his leg instead.”
“His leg,” I repeated.
“Thigh wound. Old one, looks bad, looks as though it’s been bleeding on and off for a while. Medic didn’t know what to do with him. He didn’t know what to do with her, either.”
I looked down at my own hand, at the open palm that had been split since somewhere around the second hour and had not improved with age, weather, or the general lack of anyone in this arena carrying antiseptic.
My wrist was fine.
It had always been fine.
Whatever wound Rulven walked in with, it walked in with him, and whatever I walked in with, I kept, right down to the last infected inch of it.
“He didn’t get my palm,” I said, mostly to myself.
“I didn’t get his leg. We just traded rooms.”
“Traded floors,” Zekh corrected, not looking up from the map.
“You’re on separate continents, technically.”
“Sectors.”
“Whatever they are. Point is, your body’s yours. His is his. The only thing that moves is where you’re standing when the lights come back on.” He said it like a man confirming a rumor he’d already suspected, which, given how many times he’d been swapped himself, he probably had.
“Good to have it written down instead of guessed at.”
I would have liked to sit with that a little longer, because it explained more than just Rulven’s wrist.
It explained why I still had the shoulder I’d wrenched two swaps ago, why the shoulder I’d wrenched during the drop was still screaming.
The arena wasn’t handing out fresh bodies with every jump.
It was handing out addresses.
You brought your own damage to whichever one you landed in.
What it didn’t explain, not yet, was why I hadn’t known about the wheel.
I pulled the handover log Rulven had left behind, the one that had been sitting on my display the entire time I was fighting that winch, and read it properly for the first time since arriving.
Buried two lines under the objective—stabilize suspension line, hold central redoubt—was a note I’d skimmed past in the three seconds I’d had to make a decision: Wheel will kick back violently the instant tension is released; do not release without bracing first.
I had read the objective and grabbed the bar without looking twice.
The rest of the warning never stood a chance, because nobody stops to study fine print when a piece of machinery is spinning fast enough to take someone’s fingers.
“I almost lost a hand because I didn’t finish reading a memo,” I said.
Zekh finally looked up.
“Welcome to every job you’ve ever had.”
“I’m serious. The information was there. It just wasn’t where I’d look for it in time to use it.” I held up the display so he could see the wall of text Rulven had left, dense and well-meaning and completely useless under pressure.
“Nobody’s going to read three paragraphs while a wall is falling on them. We need something shorter. Something you can read in the half second before you touch anything.”
Zekh thought about it while a fresh round of shouting came down the corridor, closer this time.
“Give me the format, then. You clearly want to.”
“Three lines: objective, immediate danger, forbidden action. What are you here to do, what’s about to kill you doing it, and what you must never touch, pull, or say no matter how good an idea it seems.” I said it fast, the way you say something you’ve been chewing on without noticing.
“Whoever lands next doesn’t need our life story. They need the one sentence that keeps them alive long enough to figure out the rest themselves.”
“Try it,” Zekh said, and shoved a battered defender toward us, one of the men who’d been holding the side passage, a stranger with a scorched sleeve and the kind of wide, waiting eyes that meant he’d already decided today was the day he died and was mostly curious about the method.
I didn’t know him.
He didn’t know me.
That was the whole test.
Zekh scrawled the three lines onto a slate and passed it over.
Objective: purge steam pressure from secondary manifold before rampart reseal.
Immediate danger: manifold vents scalding steam on a five-second delay after valve turn.
Forbidden action: do not open Valve C until the delay counter clears.
The defender read it once, twice, and then frowned at the manifold in front of him, a cluster of brass wheels bolted into the wall with hand-painted labels that had clearly been done by someone in a hurry and possibly drunk.
“There are two valves marked C,” he said.
Zekh looked.
There were, in fact, two valves marked C, one slightly smudged, one crisp, both wearing the same letter like a bad joke the arena’s stagehands had left for us on purpose.
“The smudged one’s older,” the defender said.
“That’s probably the original. This crisp one looks like somebody repainted over B.”
He was right.
It took him four seconds to see it and would have taken whoever came after us considerably longer, possibly forever, given that forever in this scenario meant a face full of steam.
He corrected the note himself, crossing out the ambiguous line and writing beneath it in blunt block letters: Forbidden action: do not open the crisp-lettered valve; confirm smudged label before touching anything.
Zekh looked at me with something that wasn’t quite approval but was standing close enough to it.
“Three lines and it still needed fixing.”
“Three lines means somebody has time to fix it,” I said.
“Three paragraphs, nobody even gets that far.”
My wristband buzzed against my forearm, a small green flash accompanying a single line of text: Contribution credit registered — barricade reinforcement, Sector 7 corridor, Odrance.
I hadn’t reinforced anything in the last ten minutes.
I’d been standing in an alcove arguing about valve labels.
“That’s the barricade I put up before the wheel,” I said slowly, working it out as I spoke.
“Somebody’s still building on it.”
Zekh checked his own display, tapped through a secondary feed, and gave a short, humorless laugh.
“Your friend Rulven’s log just updated. He picked up the officer’s coat Mavra left behind for whoever came through after him, and he’s using it to keep moving through Vhaldrèche without getting stopped by every patrol that sees a stranger walking around without one. Says he’s reinforcing a structure flagged under your name before he heads deeper in.”
“He’s improving my barricade. From a different sector. And I’m getting credit for it.”
“Looks that way.”
I stared at the little green flash a moment longer than it deserved.
The scoring wasn’t a zero-sum fight over a shrinking pile the way I’d assumed back when I signed up for this, half convinced that every credit some other contestant earned was a credit clawed directly out of my own share.
Instead, two strangers standing in separate sectors, neither one able to see the other, could still build the exact same thing without losing a credit in the process.
It was, unfortunately, a genuinely decent piece of news, delivered by a system that had tried to kill me twice in the last hour alone.
Before I could enjoy it any further, the ceiling above the alcove let out a long, grinding crack, dust sifting down in a fine gray curtain that told me the tunnel had decided it was done waiting for us to finish our administrative breakthrough.
“That’s our cue,” Zekh said, already moving, already pulling me by the sleeve toward the side passage where the last of the defenders had vanished.
“Nacre’s holding the next junction with what’s left of the eastern brace. She’s going to want everything we just figured out, and she’s going to want it in about ninety seconds, not ninety minutes.”
“Three lines,” I said, falling in step behind him, palm throbbing, arm complaining, the slate with our new template clutched tight enough in my good hand that the corner dug into my skin.
“I can do ninety seconds.”
Behind us, the crack in the ceiling widened, and the tunnel began, very deliberately, to come down.