System: Cull

Every window in the library turned the same colour at once, and every window showed the same number.

Zara Haddad was halfway up the reference stairs with a crate of canned soup on her hip when it happened. One second the survivors in the old reading room were doing what survivors did between waves, sorting cans, patching armour, arguing about the rota. The next, every personal window in the building flushed a flat administrative grey, the colour of a form you do not want to fill in, and across each of them sat one figure in hard white capitals.

Forty million.

Nobody moved. Wen Li was at the long table with three salvaged tablets in front of him, and even Wen, who treated the apocalypse like a stubborn bug report, had gone still. His window threw the grey up onto his face.

"Tell me you're seeing a number," he said.

"I'm seeing a number." Zara set the crate down. Her own window hung at the edge of her sight where she kept it, patient, the way it always waited for her. She did not look at it yet. She looked at the grey, because the grey was new, and new was the thing that killed you.

The window resolved.

[PRUNING DIRECTIVE] Earth, catalogue entry pending. Closure advanced. The viable index requires a shed count of forty million. Meet the schedule, or the System will meet it for you. The System does not negotiate. It files.

Zara read it once and felt the floor of her stomach drop out. Not pain, not yet. Just the cold flat understanding that the rules she had spent a month learning had been thrown away while she carried soup up a staircase.

"Forty million," Wen said. "That's not a wave. That's a population." His thumb moved over a tablet on instinct, querying a System that did not answer to tablets. "Shed. Shed by who? Shed how?"

"By us. By them." She did not know yet which. She only knew the word shed was doing terrible work in a small space.

She made herself read the deep line under the directive, the small print, the part the System tucked below the headline for anyone foolish enough to want it. Reading deep cost her. She knew the cost by now. She braced for it and pushed her attention into the seam below the white capitals, and the text down there unspooled too fast, a schedule, a clock, columns of timing she could not hold.

The library went quiet and far away. Sound dropped to white noise, like a held breath in both ears. She lost the next few seconds entirely. When they came back Wen was saying her name and the crate of soup had a smear of red across the top can and her nose was running warm.

"I'm fine," she said, which was a lie, but a useful one. She wiped her lip with the back of her hand. What she had pulled from the seam was not words she could repeat. It was shape. A schedule. The Gates were not random any more. They had a timetable now, and the timetable had just started.

Outside, beyond the boarded high windows, the widened Gate in Nathan Phillips Square chimed.

It was no roar, and that was the part that turned her cold. For a month the Gates had screamed when they opened, a tearing animal sound. This one chimed, a single clean tone, round and patient and almost polite.

The Gate outside chimed once, the way a clock chimes the hour, and the first wave came through on the beat.

* * *

Zara hit the doors running and was already shouting the rota before she cleared the last step.

"Wave. Square Gate. Sam, doors. Priya, summons up, hold the soft middle." The reading room emptied around her into its drilled shapes, the thing they had bled to learn, and for one breath she let herself believe drilling would be enough.

Then she saw the wave through the gap in the boards and stopped believing.

It was bigger than any before. Not a trickle of dog-sized spawns testing the line. A flood of them, grey and burning faintly along every edge with the same hard letters she saw in her sleep.

INDEXING.

They came in ranks. They had never come in ranks before.

Sam Tran was already at the choke with his shield up, a wall of a man holding a wider wall, and Zara could see in the set of his shoulders the exact moment he understood the count was wrong. Too many. The line would bow and then it would break, and the soft middle behind it was full of people who could not fight.

She reached for her Catalogue without looking. She knew its shape the way she knew the stamp in her pocket. Eighteen slots, full of skills she had watched other people bleed to use, none of them hers to wield. She found Bulwark, the stance she had filed off Sam himself a week ago, and she routed it.

[SKILL LOANED] Bulwark stance to recipient. Tether live. Two of two Loans active.

The loan opened like a held breath let halfway out. Thirty metres of line ran between her and Sam now, thin and bright and hers. His stats, her archived rank. Across the choke Sam's shield flared and the bow in the line stopped bowing.

It held. The doors held.

"Priya," Zara called, "second wall, my left," and her second loan went out to the girl, and a wall of summoned shapes slammed up beside Sam and the flood broke against the two of them like surf on rock.

For ninety seconds it was almost beautiful. Two borrowers carrying her stolen skills, the line straight, spawns going down in heaps along the choke. Competence. The thing they had earned. Zara stood in the doorway with both tethers live and her people holding and let herself feel, for one breath, like this could be won.

Then she looked at her window, and the feeling died.

The number had changed.

[PRUNING DIRECTIVE] Shed count remaining: thirty nine million, nine hundred eighty thousand, six hundred eleven.

She did the arithmetic before she wanted to. The spawns dying in the choke, the grey ranks Sam was breaking, the dozens going down under Priya's wall, all of it, all that work, and the count had not moved for any of them.

It had moved by something else.

In the square, past the Gate, the wave had not only come for the doors. It had spread. It had found the overflow camp along the colonnade, the ones who slept outside because the library was full, and it was in among them now, and Zara could see the small shapes that stopped moving and the count on her window stepping down in time with them.

She pulled the date-stamp from her pocket and held it, the small brass weight of it, the one true ordinary thing, and watched the System count the people and not the monsters.

She killed the loans and recast them and held the doors and it did not matter. The number on the window dropped again, and again, and every drop was a person. Killing the spawns had not moved it at all.