Zekh moved fast for someone who complained about his knees every time we stopped moving, and I had to jog to keep pace with him down the last stretch of corridor before the breach opened into a wider intersection choked with dust and screaming.
The beam was the first thing I saw, a load-bearing timber the size of a shipping container running crosswise above the intersection, already bowed visibly under the crushing sag of the ceiling.
Beneath it, a woman in scorched leathers stood with both palms pressed flat against the underside of the wood, her eyes locked on a wristband glowing an angry, insistent red.
“That’s Nacre,” Zekh said, already moving toward her.
“She’s the one holding the ceiling up. Don’t ask her how, just ask her how long.”
I didn’t have to ask.
The wristband did the talking, counting down in numbers large enough to read from ten feet away.
Three minutes fifty-one seconds.
Three minutes fifty seconds.
“Four minutes total,” Nacre said without turning her head, her voice flat and clipped like she was reading off a checklist rather than announcing her own imminent crushing.
“That’s what I bought us. When it hits zero, this beam comes down whether or not you’ve got something else holding the weight. I don’t care what you prop under it. The timer doesn’t negotiate.”
“Then we’re not saving the beam,” I said, already scanning the intersection for anything load-bearing that wasn’t currently occupied by falling debris.
“We’re saving everyone standing under it.”
“That’s the idea,” she confirmed.
Wounded were still coming through, carried on stretchers improvised from doors and cloaks, defenders half-dragging comrades whose legs no longer worked properly.
The stretcher path ran along the eastern wall, which meant the shoring had to go up along the western half, timbers wedged diagonally from floor to ceiling in a pattern that wouldn’t block the evacuation lane and would, if the math held, take enough load off Nacre’s stretch of beam to let the rest of us survive whatever happened at the four-minute mark.
I grabbed the nearest defender by the shoulder, a stocky man hauling a coil of rope he clearly didn’t know what to do with, and pointed him toward the stack of salvaged timber someone had already dragged from a collapsed storeroom.
“We need three uprights, angled at forty degrees, wedged against that support column. Cut the ends flat if you’ve got a blade; don’t waste time squaring them perfectly. This isn’t furniture.”
He didn’t argue.
Nobody argues with someone shouting clear instructions while a ceiling groans overhead.
That was the one mercy of a situation this bad: it stripped away every impulse toward debate.
Zekh had already found his own patch of trouble, a narrower side passage where chunks of the ceiling had started to sheet loose in a slow, irregular rain, falling not onto the stretcher path but close enough that a stray piece could still catch someone crossing at the wrong second.
He planted his feet, exhaled once through his nose like he was bracing for a cold shower, and told me, “Give me thirty seconds. Eyelid’s going up.”
“You know the drill,” I said.
“I’ll grab you the second you’re down.”
“You always say that like it’s reassuring.”
“It’s the only thing I’ve got.”
He didn’t answer that. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
His eyes went distant, the particular kind of distant that meant something in his head had shifted gears, and the falling debris in that side passage visibly slowed, chunks of stone and mortar drifting instead of dropping, like the air itself had thickened into syrup.
It wasn’t stopped.
It was delayed, buying whoever needed to cross that stretch a few extra heartbeats of margin.
Then Zekh’s knees buckled and he went down in a heap, out cold before his face hit the floor, exactly the way he always did.
I hauled him by the collar of his shirt into the recess where I’d left my gear, propped him against the wall out of the debris zone, and went back to the timbers because that was the arrangement.
He bought time.
I kept him breathing while he did it.
“Your top power and his top power are both just falling over,” said one of the defenders working the timber stack with me, a wiry woman with soot streaked across one cheek, grinning at her own joke like she needed it more than we did.
“Between the two of you, this whole operation runs on people passing out.”
I opened my mouth to say something about how I was, in fact, still conscious, thank you very much, when a chunk of ceiling the size of a dinner plate came loose from directly above her and caught her across the jaw before either of us saw it coming.
She dropped the timber she was holding and staggered back with both hands clapped over her mouth, and when she pulled them away there was blood on her fingers and two of her front teeth were simply gone, snapped off at the root.
Nobody laughed.
Nobody said anything about the timing.
She spat, swore in a voice thick with blood and missing teeth, and picked the timber back up like nothing had happened, because that was the only option available to her.
The uprights went in fast after that, three of them wedged at matching angles against the support column, secured with whatever rope and chain the defenders could scavenge from the retreating evacuation.
It wasn’t elegant.
It wasn’t going to win any engineering awards.
But it took weight, and I could see it taking weight, the column groaning under a load it hadn’t carried thirty seconds earlier.
“One minute forty,” Nacre called out, still holding her hands flat against the underside of the beam though I doubted her arms alone were doing anything the physics of the situation actually required.
“Get the last stretchers through. This isn’t a suggestion.”
The defenders abandoned the turret at the mouth of the breach without a word of protest, which told me how bad the situation really was during that fight.
The turret went, and with it whatever ground the city had been clawing to keep along that stretch of wall, but the last of the wounded made it past the shoring and down the corridor toward the aid stations, and that was the trade everyone in that intersection had silently agreed to make.
“Twelve seconds,” Nacre said, her voice tightening for the first time since I’d arrived.
And then the world stopped.
I felt it happen to me too, a strange, airless suspension where I could still see and still think but couldn’t so much as blink, my body locked in whatever position it had occupied the instant the pause hit.
“And that’s a wrap on Odrance’s evening block, folks,” came Vassago’s voice, bright and untouched by anything resembling urgency, threading itself through every implant and screen in the intersection like she’d been waiting for exactly this moment to interrupt.
“We’ll be right back after these messages from our friends at Cindrel Vault Solutions, because nothing says peace of mind like knowing your savings are as structurally sound as absolutely nothing else in this scene. Sit tight, viewers. Contestants too, I suppose, though you don’t really have a choice about that part.”
I couldn’t move.
Couldn’t do anything except watch Nacre’s wristband out of the corner of my frozen eye, and the numbers on it kept falling.
Eleven.
Ten.
The rest of the world had been switched off for whatever advertising interlude the network had decided this particular catastrophe deserved, and her timer hadn’t gotten the memo.
It ran the same as it always had, oblivious to broadcast schedules, counting down toward the same appointment it had been counting toward the whole time.
Five seconds later, the pause lifted, and everyone lurched back into motion at once, gasping like they’d surfaced from underwater.
Nacre’s wristband read four seconds.
Three.
Two.
The beam let go exactly on schedule, a groaning shriek of overstressed timber giving way all at once, and it came down hard into the space where a beam that size should have come down, which was directly onto the load path the uprights had been braced to intercept.
The column took the weight.
The timbers held, cracking audibly under the strain but not breaking, and the beam settled at an angle instead of crashing the rest of the way to the floor, leaving the stretcher path clear and every defender standing in that intersection alive.
Nacre sat down hard where she’d been standing, hands shaking, and didn’t say anything for a long moment.
My telemetry bracelet chimed, a small polite ding that felt obscene given what had just happened three feet away from me.
I glanced at it out of habit more than curiosity.
Bounty issued: Nacre.
Item received: Your Dead Can Wait.
Nacre opened the chest that materialized in her lap, turning over the contents with the same flat, exhausted expression she’d worn through the whole ordeal.
Inside was a thin lens, the kind that clipped over an eye or a visor, projecting what looked like a shared roster of every timer currently running among nearby teammates.
Useful information, delivered a beam drop too late to matter for the person who’d earned it, which felt about right for a network that had just paused reality to sell vault insurance.
“It shows future countdowns,” she said, holding the lens up so I could see the faint readout.
“Doesn’t stop them. Doesn’t slow them down. Just tells you they’re coming.”
“So it’s a countdown to watch other countdowns with,” I said.
“Apparently.”
I was about to say something about the specific cruelty of a reward like that when the swap took me.
The intersection dropped away after the usual five-second warning I’d learned to trust more than any part of my own instincts, and when the world reassembled itself around me it was hot, dry, and smelled like scorched rock instead of dust and blood.
A quarry stretched out below a ridgeline, and somewhere above it something enormous banked against the sky on wings wide enough to blot out a section of cloud.
Back in Odrance, in the intersection I’d just left, a woman I’d never met named Tress found herself standing over an unconscious man she’d never met either, a set of handwritten notes tucked under his arm reading OBJECTIVE, IMMEDIATE DANGER, FORBIDDEN ACTION in Zekh’s blocky, hurried handwriting, and had exactly as much idea what she’d walked into as I now had about the dragon circling above my new patch of quarry.