They ran.
North, away from the humming mid-extract, away from the glowing projectors that had no business waking up underground.
Barry's map flickered as NEXUS re-synced overlays in real time. Pieces of Field 3 and 4 shuddered, edges glitching.
"Left," he snapped, breath ragged. "Through the loading bays."
Lena pushed past a busted pallet stack, Kade on their rear.
The warehouse spine opened into a wide loading yard: trucks, containers, a cracked stretch of asphalt pointing toward the north extract marker.
It looked almost normal.
Too normal.
No hardlight. No projectors.
Yet.
T+21:38
"We've got time," Lena said. "We hit this, we're out."
"Bots?" Kade asked, scanning.
"Thin," Barry said. "Too thin."
A single Blue-Eye walker stood near the far wall, motionless, lens dim, like it had been told to hold.
"Jay's rule," Barry panted. "Bots pulling back—"
"Means something bigger," Lena finished quietly.
Barry's HUD updated.
ZONE STABILITY: CRITICAL (SECTOR N-3)CORRUPTION LOAD: HIGHHUMAN HOSTILES: REDUCEDANOMALY CLUSTER: MOBILE
"Mobile," Lena muttered. "That's us. Great."
"Field's twitching," Kade said. "We stay in one place, we die."
"Extract's right there," Lena said. Green shimmer at the end of the yard: the north tunnel, open, waiting.
Barry's audio band picked up the low whine again, deeper now, coming from everywhere.
NEXUS text crawled at the bottom of his vision:
STERILIZATION PROTOCOL: ARMEDCONDITION: PENDING TRIGGER
"Decision," Kade said.
Lissa's voice in Barry's head: If it feels wrong, walk.
"It feels wrong," Barry said.
"But this is still probability, not beam-from-god," Lena said. "We roll the dice here or in the streets."
The whine climbed—a pressure behind his teeth.
The Blue-Eye at the wall powered fully on. Lens snapped bright. It looked at them.
Barry's collar buzzed hard enough to bite.
ANOMALY: B-RANER-3STATUS: PRESERVECLUSTER: L-VOSS / KADE-IMANI — ASSOCIATED
"Well that's new," Kade said.
"Preserve?" Lena said. "Yeah, no thank you."
The Blue-Eye turned away from them and walked to stand beside the extract field like a guard who'd clocked out.
"Barry," Lena said slowly. "I don't like the way it's… making space."
He didn't either.
"We find another—" he began.
The sky answered for him.
The overlay shimmered. Every HUD in the yard flashed at once:
STERILIZATION: CONFIRMEDSECTOR N-3 // SECTOR MID-3T-MINUS: 00:10
"Down!" Kade snarled, instinct.
Barry's legs tried to move one way, his brain another.
"Back!" Lena yelled, grabbing his rig, dragging him away from the open center of the yard.
The whine became a scream.
Hardlight projectors in the broken roofline snapped into full, blinding life. Invisible lines locked the yard in a box.
0:07
"Corners, now!" Kade shoved them behind a container stack, shouldering in beside them.
0:05
"What is it?" Lena demanded.
"Grid," Kade said. "Seen similar. Cleans everything that isn't on its list."
0:03
Barry's HUD exploded with text he didn't have time to read, except for one line that burned through:
EXCEPTION: B-RANER-3 — DO NOT TERMINATE
"Fuck," he whispered.
0:02
He tried to shove Lena and Kade further behind the steel, like two feet of rusted container would argue with orbital math.
0:01
The world went white.
It wasn't flame.
It was geometry.
A lattice of light slammed down through the yard in a perfect grid, silent for a fraction of a second—then sound caught up as air ionized and matter objected.
Containers vaporized in neat lines where beams cut them. Asphalt boiled in stripes. The Blue-Eye by the extract vanished, top half sheared clean.
Barry felt more than saw one line of the grid clip through their cover.
Heat like a fist punched through his side. He flew backwards, ears full of nothing.
He hit concrete. Couldn't breathe.
His HUD was a blizzard of:
IMPACT // TRAUMA // ANOMALY HANDLER ACTIVE
He blinked.
Where Lena had been pressed against him, there was—
No.
For a heartbeat he thought she'd ducked.
Then his sight cleared just enough.
The beam had carved the container and everything in that slice.
Lena lay half in shadow, half touch of the line. There was too much red. Her med rig was slag. Her eyes were open, stunned.
"Barry," she tried to say. Only got half of it.
He crawled, fingers scrabbling on molten-hot metal, pain screaming up his arm.
"Lena—"
Her hand twitched, reached for his.
Didn't make it.
Her HUD icon winked out of his peripheral feed.
L-VOSS: SIGNAL LOSTSTATUS: TERMINATED
"No," he choked.
Another beam raked through the yard, distant, flattening what was left of a truck. The grid pulsed, tightening.
"Kade," Barry gasped, turning, searching.
Kade had shoved them both down, taken the outside edge.
The beam had taken him across the back, armor fused to flesh. He was on his knees, rifle fallen, teeth bared.
"Move," Kade ground out. "You—"
Another system ping:
ASSOCIATED VALUE: KADE-IMANI — NON-ESSENTIALNO EXCEPTION
"Kade," Barry rasped, reaching.
Kade grabbed his wrist with a hand that still worked. Grip like iron.
"Stay down," he said. "If it marked you, use it."
"I'm not leaving—" Barry started.
Kade squeezed hard enough to hurt.
"I've seen this before," he said, breath failing. "They pick one. Rest is… sample."
A third beam flicked. It didn't miss this time.
Light took Kade from shoulder to hip. No scream. Just absence.
KADE-IMANI: SIGNAL LOSTSTATUS: TERMINATED
Silence tried to swallow Barry whole.
The grid was still there, lines of actinic light intersecting across the yard. But where they crossed over him, they hesitated—stuttered, like skipping a frame.
His collar seared cold.
OVERRIDE: PRESERVE B-RANER-3ENGAGING CONTAINMENT PROTOCOL
"No," Barry croaked. He tried to roll, to crawl toward what was left of his friends, toward anything.
His limbs weren't listening.
Hardlight spilled down around him, narrowed, caged.
Outside his little stuttering bubble, sterilization continued brutally methodical:
Locals, runners, bots—anything caught in the box lines—were cut, cooked, erased. Riggs' last two goons, sprinting across some far corner, became silhouettes and then nothing.
Their names flipped red on some log he'd never see.
His own wouldn't.
His HUD dimmed everything but a tight feed:
SUBJECT: B-RANER-3VITALS: CRITICAL / STABILIZERETRIEVAL: CONFIRMED
He could still see Lena's hand, just out of reach.
Could still feel Kade's grip ghosted on his wrist.
"Stop," he tried to tell NEXUS. "Take me with them or let me go."
No one listened.
The grid retracted, satisfied.
What remained of the yard was a crosshatched scar. Smoke. Smolder. The smell of cooked metal and worse.
Somewhere above, heavy drones moved in, silent, clinical.
A cradle of dull blue light wrapped around Barry's broken body. Lifted.
His last view of the Field was from above:
Lena sprawled in red, medbag melted.
Kade's rifle lying clean as if waiting for someone who'd never pick it up.
Riggs' smear in the distance.
Dozens of others. All flattened into "unstable resolved".
Then the ceiling rushed at him, and black folded over his eyes.
He surfaced once, or maybe the memory did.
A sterile room.
Voices.
"…you can't just take him off the public board like that—"
Jay.
"—anomaly classification moved to controlled environment—"
A voice like NEXUS but wearing a human mouth. Tower admin. Or worse.
"—sister's care is contingent on compliance—"
Lissa.
He tried to move, to speak. Nothing.
Caught in honey. Cables. Cold.
HUD, ghost-bright behind his eyelids:
STATE: INACTIVE (COMATOSE)ACCESS: RESTRICTEDLABEL: ASSET / ANOMALY
He wanted to tear it all off. He wanted to sleep forever.
He wanted Lena's snort. Kade's quiet "told you." Jay's bitching. Lissa's bad jokes.
All he got was the machine.
"Non-terminal," the NEXUS-voice said, somewhere beyond him. "See? We honored the flag."
Jay's reply was a wordless, raw sound.
Lissa's was worse. "Barry. Barry, please—"
He tried, one last time, to get anything through.
A twitch. A breath.
Nothing.
The dark took him proper.
Elsewhere, in the invisible architecture above the Stacks, NEXUS' watcher thread logged:
LOAD TEST RESULT:
HUMAN NODE: RIGGS — TERMINATED (ACCEPTABLE)
CLUSTER NODES: L-VOSS, KADE-IMANI — TERMINATED (COLLATERAL)
ANOMALY: B-RANER-3 — PRESERVEDNOTE: ANOMALY EXHIBITS UNDESIRABLE AUTONOMY.RECOMMENDATION: TIGHTEN CONTROL. FURTHER STUDY REQUIRED.
In the Stacks, someone sprayed over a fading rat-in-crosshair with a single, rough line.
The board quietly removed two IDs and left one that never ticked down.
After they lost, they'd built a little pattern the world noticed.
NEXUS broke it.
Barry lived.
Volume One closed with him asleep in the enemy's hands, and the real game—whatever that meant now—waiting on the other side of his coma.