Dante woke to a bone-dry, scraping throat, tasting old rust at the back of his mouth.
The first thing he tried to do was reach his right hand toward his ribs, but the motion tugged at the shredded flesh. The flare of pain shot down his waist like a glowing ember pressed to raw skin. Air fled his lungs in a sharp wheeze, and he slammed the back of his head back against the bundle of burlap serving as a pillow.
Two hit points.
The mental window sprang open before he could even focus his eyes in the gloom of the room.
[Health Points: 2/12.]
[Status: Weakened. Fractured rib in early consolidation. Hemorrhage controlled.]
The ceiling above him was not the drywall of his room in the Miller apartment. It was a thick slab of gray concrete, marred by dark moisture stains and withered cobwebs.
"If you keep flailing around like that, the tape is going to peel off and I'm not wasting another roll on you."
The voice came from the edge of the platform, less than three feet from his feet.
Dante turned his head slowly, feeling the tendons in his neck pop. The dim light filtering through the crack in the iron door silhouetted a girl in a dirt-stained red dress, sitting with her back straight against the concrete wall. Two long braids hung over her small shoulders, and her brown eyes were locked onto him with a sternness unusual for a girl her age.
He recognized her immediately. She was the girl from the alley. The one holding the juice box before his vision blacked out entirely.
"Where... where are we?" His voice came out weak, raspy from inhaled sulfur.
"In the old pump house on the reservoir lot." She didn't move. Her hands remained resting on her knees. "You were in my back laundry area, but my mom was coming home from work and would've found your blood all over the basin floor. I hauled you here in a wheelbarrow."
Dante looked down. His torn gray jacket was gone, leaving him only in shredded t-shirt fabric over a thick pad of old towels bound by tight wraps of tape. The dressing was snug, bracing the wound with steady pressure that kept the bleeding from starting up again.
He took a deep breath, feeling his chest protest the pull along his ribs.
She did this alone? A girl her size?
"You cleaned the cut." Dante tried propping his elbows on the cardboard to lift his torso, but his congenital frailty exacted its toll immediately. His arms gave out, and he had to settle for remaining half-sprawled, studying her through narrowed eyes. "There was ash inside the wound. If you had just splashed regular water on it, I would have died of infection before midnight."
"I dumped rubbing alcohol and yellow bar soap on it," she shot back without blinking. "And I pressed down until the screen told me to stop."
Dante froze mid-motion, adjusting the burlap pillow.
His eyes widened by a fraction. The pain in his side was forgotten for a full second.
"What did you say?"
Maria swung her legs off the platform. The soles of her shoes hit the hard dirt floor with a flat thud. She took three short steps toward him, stopping right beside the cardboard pallet where he lay stretched out. She raised her right hand and pointed her index finger into the empty air right in front of his chest.
"The screen," she said with irritating calm. "That glowing gray thing floating in front of you, which happens to be floating in front of me now too."
Dante's heart slammed against his battered ribs.
Impossible.
The rule was crystal clear. For ten years he had observed pedestrians, drivers, teachers, and his own parents. No one on Earth had access to that. It was a tool restricted to the denizens of the other side and to himself, for some reason his wiped memories couldn't reach.
"You're lying." Dante narrowed his eyes, his tone hardening. "Kids make up nonsense when they get spooked. You saw too much blood and you think..."
"Dante Miller," Maria cut him off mid-sentence, her tone never wavering. "Ten years old. Two health points out of twelve. And there's a yellow bar hovering over your head that says it's going to take you five more hours to regain another point if you stay lying quietly there."
Silence descended over the pump house.
Dante lost his voice. He stared at the girl's dust-streaked face, searching for any flicker of a joke or mental delusion. There was nothing. Her eyes were steady, locked onto the exact patch of empty air where his health gauge was typically projected by the system.
"How?" The word slipped past his lips before he could catch himself.
"After you dropped out of that black smoke and swore, you passed out face-first on the ground." She crossed her arms over her chest, tilting her head to the side. "I was going to scream. I was already drawing in breath to wake up the whole street. But then the world stopped."
Dante kept his mouth shut, absorbing every detail.
"A drop of my apple juice froze in mid-air," she went on. "A bug flying around the lamp post went stiff without beating its wings. And then some guy walked out from the back of the alley."
"What guy?"
"A guy in a white jacket." She shrugged. "Sleeves rolled up, light pants, and white sneakers that didn't even catch mud from the road. He had a toothpick in his mouth and spoke slow, looking like one of those lazy bums loitering at the bus stop whistling at women walking by."
Dante furrowed his brow. The description didn't match anything he expected from an entity capable of halting the temporal flow of an entire city block.
"And what did he do?"
"He kicked your shoe to see if you were alive," Maria explained as casually as possible. "Said you were as stubborn as an old mule, that you were ten years old and already poking your snout where it didn't belong. Said that if you died, it'd cause a royal mess reorganizing the paperwork for everyone upstairs."
Upstairs?
Dante's mind began to spin, processing the information at a feverish pace. He recalled his hidden quest, the one he had shoved into the depths of his menu on his very first day of life: uncover the origins of his previous soul. Someone was monitoring his existence. Someone who didn't belong to Hell and clearly wasn't an ordinary human of this world.
"And then he talked about me," Maria continued, pointing her thumb at her chest. "Said I had bad luck being there. Snapped his fingers and this window opened right in my face. Gave me a quest."
"What quest?"
Maria narrowed her eyes, as if reading fine print in the air.
"Protect the Light," she recited slowly. "The main objective is to make sure you don't die while you're recovering. The secondary one is not to open my mouth about you or the screen to anyone. If I pull it off, the screen stays with me forever and I get something called a support class. If I let you turn into a corpse, he deletes the screen and I go right back to being an ordinary girl from the street down below."
She stopped talking, uncrossed her arms, and took another step forward, leaning down until her face was less than two handspans from his.
"I told you everything," she said, chin tilted in challenge. "Now it's your turn. Where did you come from with that rotten smell? What kind of beast has teeth to tear three gashes that deep into your ribs? And why did that guy say that if I took you to a hospital, doctors would chop you open because of ash from another world?"
Dante held her gaze for several long seconds.
His mind coldly calculated the risks. The fundamental survival rule he had set for the next ten years was absolute discretion. Nobody on Earth could know. Nobody in Hell could know.
Yet the girl already knew.
Worse than that, she was now tethered to the same system as him, carrying an official quest issued by a third party powerful enough to freeze real-world physics and alter soul parameters with a snap of his fingers. Lying to her now would be sheer idiocy. She had access to numbers, could see his health bar, and had saved him from a pathetic death by hypovolemic shock in the gutter.
He let out a heavy sigh, feeling the ache in his ribs throb.
"The place is called Hell," Dante began, keeping his voice low so it wouldn't echo in the hollow concrete of the pump house.
Maria knitted her brows, suspicious. "Church Hell?"
"Not the church one. The real one." He settled his head more firmly against the burlap pillow. "It's an entire world divided into continents. It has monsters, demons, and dead people who were sent there because of what they did here. Everyone who is born there or ends up there has one of these screens you're looking at right now."
"And how did you end up there if you're alive?"
"I have a passage," Dante said, omitting details about the Planar Transit of his fourth tab. "I was born with it. I can go and come back. Only I thought it would be easy to take a quick peek and return in five minutes."
A dry, humorless chuckle rasped in his throat, ending in a short cough that made his chest ache.
"I ran straight into an Ash Crawler thirty feet from where I stepped. A blind creature the size of a large wolf, with a three-part jaw and no skin. It tore through the summon I used to defend myself in two seconds and caught me with that claw swipe before I could trigger the emergency recall."
Maria looked down at the makeshift towel dressing soaked in home remedies around his waist, then looked back up into his eyes.
"Are you an idiot?" she asked bluntly.
"What?!"
"You're weak." She pointed at his scrawny arms. "Look at the size of you. You can barely lift your chest off this cardboard without groaning in pain. Why on earth did you go stepping into a place crawling with skinless man-eating beasts?"
Dante felt heat rush into his cheeks. It wasn't the wound's pain, it was the sheer humiliation of having his weakness thrown in his face by a nine-year-old girl in a floral dress and dirty socks.
"I had to know what was out there!" he snapped back, his voice rising louder than intended, which cost him another violent stab in the ribs. "I spent ten years trapped in a body that can't even run a hundred yards without wheezing. I needed to see the world where the system actually functions."
"And you almost died before thirty minutes of sightseeing," Maria retorted in kind, completely unfazed by his temper. "If it weren't for me, you'd be a cold slab of meat rotting in the garbage on my street. So take it down a notch, smoke boy."
Dante gritted his teeth. He wanted to fire back, wanted to throw in her face that he had sixteen Intelligence and could conjure darts of pure energy, but the numbers on the screen remained right there: two health points. She was right. He had acted like an impatient brat, blinded by the arrogance of finally unlocking a primary class, and the result was nearly turning into carrion for a lesser infernal beast.
He swallowed his pride dry. It stung worse than the gash across his ribs, but he swallowed it down.
"Fine." Dante shifted his gaze toward the gray ceiling. "You saved me. We're even with whatever that guy in the white jacket promised you."
"We're not even," Maria said, sitting back down on the edge of the concrete platform, crossing her legs, and staring at the streak of light from the doorway. "My quest is at forty-five percent. I only get my reward when you're completely recovered and out of danger. Which means you're staying parked on this cardboard until that yellow bar of yours fills all the way up to twelve."
"I have to go back home at some point," Dante pointed out, his voice tense. "My parents will notice if I vanish for days."
"Your dad works until late and your mom watches TV all day, you mumbled it yourself while running a fever in the laundry shed," she countered without looking back. "We'll figure out a way for you to show up back home once you can walk without looking snapped in two. Until then, you stay put."
Dante closed his eyes, feeling the heavy exhaustion of blood loss pull his thoughts under once again.
The situation was an utter disaster from the perspective of the strict secrecy he had planned for years. Yet practically speaking, he had a safe roof over his head, a tight dressing on his torso, and a girl stubborn enough to haul him in a wheelbarrow before dawn whose interests were now directly aligned with his survival.
An ally with a system.
The thought surfaced through the fog of exhaustion drifting over his consciousness.
Not the plan. But since it happened... I'll make this debt worth every penny.
"Hey," Dante called softly before deep slumber could pull him back under. "What's your name, anyway?"
The girl looked over her shoulder, brown eyes glimmering in the gloom of the abandoned pump house.
"Maria," she answered. "And you owe me an apple juice.”