Nova POV
She is already running when she realizes she forgot her umbrella.
Doesn't matter. Mika needs her.
That is the only math Nova Reed has ever known how to do. Someone else's problem plus Nova equals Nova running. Two jobs, sixty-hour weeks, a mother who needs medication that costs more than rent, and still, the second those three words hit her screen, I need you, she was out the door with one shoe half-tied and her heart already ahead of her feet.
The rain comes down like it's angry about something. It soaks through her jacket in the first block. Her sneakers slap the wet pavement in a rhythm that sounds almost like a word if she listens wrong fool, fool, fool, fool, and she tells that sound to shut up and runs faster.
Eleven at night. Streets mostly empty. The kind of dark that sits heavy.
She has known Mika since they were nine years old, and Mika punched a sixth-grader for stealing Nova's lunch. She has held Mika's hair back and covered her shifts and lied to her mother for her and shown up, always shown up, because that is what you do for the one person who chose you when the world was busy choosing other people.
She turns onto Caldwell Street and sees the alley entrance, and doesn't slow down.
Later, much later, she will understand that this is the last decision she makes as the person she used to be. This turn. These running feet. This heart that never learned to hesitate.
She sees Mika halfway down the alley.
Mika is standing still, which is wrong, because Mika texted I need you and people who are in
trouble don't just stand still in alleys like they're waiting
"Mika." Nova slows to a stop, chest heaving, rain running down her face. "Hey. What happened? Are you"
She sees the knife.
Not pointed at Mika.
In Mika's hand.
Nova's brain does that thing it does when something doesn't make sense, it just... stops. Skips. Like a scratched disc trying to play a song it can't get through.
"Mika." Different word, same name. Completely different voice. "What"
"I'm sorry," Mika says.
And then she moves.
It's fast. Nova doesn't she doesn't even get her arm up. The blade goes in below her ribs, and it doesn't hurt the way she expected, which is the most terrifying thing about it; it just feels like pressure and cold, and then her legs are deciding things without consulting her, and the ground is coming up to meet her face, and she can't
She hits the pavement.
The rain keeps falling. It doesn't care. It has places to be.
Nova lies there, and the cold spreads from that spot beneath her ribs outward, slow and deliberate, like it's been waiting its whole life to do this. She can hear her own breathing. Shallow. Too fast.
She should look at the wound. She knows that. Instead, she looks up.
At Mika's face.
Not the knife. The face.
Because here is the thing about Mika's face in this moment, it isn't cruel. That would almost be easier. It isn't twisted or monstrous or the face of a stranger wearing her best friend's skin.
It is just Mika. Eyes bright with tears she isn't letting fall. Jaw tight. A person who made a decision and is living inside it.
That is what Nova takes into the dark with her. Not the blade. The eyes.
The dark comes in from the edges first. Nova tries to hold on, digs her fingers against the wet pavement, counts things the way you're supposed to five things you can see, four things you can she can see the drain at the end of the alley, a broken bottle, Mika's shoes, the rain making circles in a puddle, Mika's face, Mika's face, Mika's
The dark swallows the rest.
Silence.
Not peaceful silence. Not the comfortable dark behind your eyes when you sleep. This is the silence of something enormous holding its breath.
Nova floats in it.
She thinks: I forgot to call Mom today.
She thinks: I left my second-job apron on the chair.
She thinks, small and furious in the middle of all that nothing: I was going to eat the leftover rice when I got home.
And then something cracks.
Not like a bone. Like bigger. Like the sound a sky would make if the sky had a spine and someone broke it. A crack that goes in every direction at once and has no beginning and no end and comes from everywhere simultaneously.
Then a voice.
It has no warmth. It has no body. It sounds like the space between words, like the pause before a sentence that will change everything.
PLAYER DETECTED.
Nova tries to say what.
ANOMALY FLAGGED.
She tries to say I'm dead, I think I'm dead, please
DRAFTING INTO THE GAME.
She opens her eyes.
She is standing.
She does not remember standing up.
The city around her looks like hers. Same kind of streetlights. Same shape of buildings against the sky. For one half-second, she thinks it worked, whatever just happened worked, she's home, she's back, she's
But the streets are wrong.
Empty in a way that streets in her city never are. Not late-night-quiet. Deleted-quiet. Like someone pressed a button and removed every living thing and forgot to turn the sounds back on. No cars. No voices from open windows. No distant sirens. Nothing.
The sky above her is the color of a bruise purple-black, too vivid, like someone painted it badly on purpose.
And floating in front of her face, glowing faintly, a panel that should not exist:
WELCOME, NOVA REED.CLASS: GLITCHRARITY: UNCLASSIFIEDFIRST MISSION BEGINS IN: 60 SECONDS.
Nova stares at it.
The timer blinks.
59.
58.
She died in an alley. She is standing in a dead city. Something called her an anomaly. And she has fifty-seven seconds before something called a mission begins, and she does not know what that word means here, she does not know what any of this means, but somewhere in the bruise-colored quiet a sound is building
Low. Rhythmic. Getting closer.
Not human.
56.
55.
Run, says every nerve in Nova Reed's body.
She hasn't decided if she will, yet.
She's thinking about Mika's eyes.
The mission doesn't care what she's thinking.