Three days ago, the biggest thing Alex Walker had ever killed was a spider.
Tonight, he'd killed a monster.
He was alone in a drainage tunnel under the East Side of Qasra. It was late on a Thursday night. He had a steel pipe in his left hand and the monster's blood all over his right.
The monster lay at his feet. It was about the size of a big dog, except big dogs don't have six joints in every leg, and their jaws don't open sideways. One of its back feet was still twitching against the concrete.
'I did that. Me... I actually did that.'
One lamp buzzed on the wall. Water dripped somewhere in the dark. Nobody knew he was this far down, and that was probably for the best.
He held his right hand up to the light. It was shaking.
Some of the shaking was fear. The rest was hunger.
He had been hungry since Tuesday, and it was getting worse.
A drop of blood rolled over his knuckle and fell. The tunnel smelled like hot metal and wet fur, and his mouth started to water.
'Don't. Don't you dare, Alex.'
He was already wondering what it tasted like.
***
Three days earlier, on Monday night, Alex was doing the one thing he was genuinely good at: video games.
He sat at the desk in his small apartment, headphones on, nose about four inches from the monitor.
The game was called I.Zombie. Terrible name. Best game anyone had made in Alex's lifetime, no contest. You started as the weakest creature in a walled city by the sea. What you turned into depended on what you killed, what you ate, and what you lived through.
Everyone said the city in the game was just Qasra with the street names changed. Same wall. Same Hunters. The only difference was that in the game, you were the thing they hunted.
The real Hunters were no joke. Qasra paid them to kill anything that wasn't human. Alex only ever saw them on the news.
Alex loved the game because it was fair. You put in the work, and a number went up. Nobody had ever handed him the spreadsheet for real life.
"Come on, Glass Hound," he muttered. "Fifth time's the charm, buddy."
On screen, the Glass Hound came down a bell tower head first. It was a long, thin dog made of broken glass. It had killed him four times tonight.
Alex pushed his taped-up glasses higher on his nose.
The Glass Hound jumped. He rolled under the claw and drove his spear into the soft spot under its jaw. The whole screen flashed green.
LEVEL UP
LEVEL 39
"YES! YES YES YES!"
Both arms shot up, and he nearly went over backwards with the chair.
'Nine evenings upgrading that spear. Nine! Worth it... so worth it.'
Thud.
Behind him, something in the closet hit the floor.
Alex pulled his headphones off. Upstairs, the couple who argued every night went quiet.
For a few seconds there was only the hum of the water pipes, and then the arguing started up again.
"Rat or ghost?" he asked the closet door. "Please be a ghost. Ghosts don't eat your cereal."
He opened it. Inside were the boxes from the Residence, the government home where the city raised kids with no parents. He'd never unpacked them.
On the floor, lying on its side with the lid knocked off, was a small wooden box.
Alex froze.
He kept that box on the top shelf, right at the back, behind everything. He only took it down on bad nights, and he always put it back in the same spot. It had no business being on the floor.
His parents left when he was seven. A woman at the Residence told him they "had to leave," in a very calm voice. Nobody ever said dead. After a while, nobody said anything at all.
Almost everything they left behind fit in that box.
He sat on the floor and took it all out, one thing at a time, same order as always.
The photos first. His mom at a table, laughing at someone you couldn't see. His dad's hands holding a tiny metal part up to a lamp. The three of them on a sea wall, little Alex squinting into the sun in the middle.
Next, a brass key, the number on it worn almost flat. As a kid he'd tried it in every lock he could find. It never opened a single one.
His dad's watch. Steel, scratched. He held it to his ear, like always. No tick. The hands sat where they had sat his whole life, at 2:17.
And last, a piece of black metal about as long as his thumb. It was curved, like a piece snapped off the edge of a ring. No seam, no rust. It was way heavier than it looked. Every time he'd held it, for thirteen years, it had been cold.
Tonight, it was warm.
He'd only just picked it up, so his hand hadn't warmed it. It felt like a mug of tea somebody had put down a minute ago.
'Why now? Why tonight?'
He checked the top shelf. He checked the window. Four floors up, and locked. Nobody had been in here but him.
'Okay... so who knocked it off the shelf?'
He put everything else back and returned the box to its shelf. He kept the metal out. He didn't know why. He set it on the desk by his keyboard.
His phone had been buzzing all night. He finally turned it over.
Landlord: FINAL NOTICE. Rent due.
Medical Service: Your autumn booster shot is due. Dr. E. Ward, Director.
Authority Channel: General Kane, head of the wall, on the wall levy. Watch live.
The booster was the yearly shot against the spores that blew in over the wall from the Wilds. Everyone near the wall got one.
The rent was the one that hurt. He didn't have enough again this month. It would have been worse without Sam, his boss at the phone repair shop, who kept finding him extra hours.
He flipped the phone face down and touched the metal again. It was still warm. The desk under it was cold.
He'd turned twenty on Saturday. Sam was the only person who came to see him. He gave Alex the afternoon off and a cake with his name on it. A guy he gamed with online, who went by moth, sent him a picture of a candle. His kitchen had one chair, because the second one broke in the spring and it turned out he didn't need two.
Out the window, the East Wall closed off the end of his street, with nine red lights in cages along the top. Across the road, the pharmacy's green neon cross blinked all night through his broken blind. The bathroom was the only room it couldn't reach.
Every few seconds, it lit up the black metal by his keyboard.
He went back to the game because he didn't know what else to do. At ten to two, the next boss killed him. He was too tired to see the attacks coming. He fell asleep in the chair halfway through his next try, with his right hand on the desk beside the metal.
***
A sting in his right thumb woke him. It was in the split skin by his nail, where he always bit it.
Alex got his eyes about halfway open.
The black metal was touching his thumb. A thin green line was glowing along its curve, the same green as the letters in his game. The line was moving, slow and steady, like a loading bar filling up.
The clock in the corner of the monitor said 2:17.
It was the time on his dad's watch.
The green line reached the end of the metal, and it didn't stop.
It went into his thumb.