The stone was a period.
The crack of it shattering against the asphalt rang louder than the roar of the Erasure.
It was a vote. A verdict cast by an invisible jury.
Leo didn't turn around.
Turning meant showing his face.
He forced his body to take another step forward, dragging the injured foot, holding an impossible straight line across the exposed avenue.
Pain became a mantra. It pushed thought away.
He needed to get out of sight.
Away from windows. Away from drones.
High-density System zones. The ping interval shrinks.
Eli's words cut through his head like ice.
The center of the district, where the Shops were, would be a trap.
But it was also the only place where a wounded man could maybe dissolve into noise for a few minutes.
He turned onto a side street, narrower, lined with luxury boutiques whose windows were dark and cracked.
The sweet-metallic smell of the Erasure faded here, replaced by rotting trash.
And something else. Grilled meat.
Someone, somewhere, was cooking over an open fire.
Normalcy as an obscene act of rebellion.
That's when he saw the light.
Not fire. A cold, bluish pulse leaking from the end of the street.
It didn't spill like normal light. It sliced the dark cleanly.
There was sound too: a low, steady hum, and over it the anxious murmur of voices.
The System Shop.
It wasn't a building.
It was a floating geometric structure, a cube made of pure blue and white light, hovering half a meter above the ground.
Data crawled across its surface. Item lists. Prices in Reality Points.
"Limited-Time Offers." Icons glowed.
A bottle of water. A protein bar. A stylized bandage. A knife.
In front of it, a loose, ugly line of about twenty people.
Everyone stared at their own interfaces, selecting options in the air.
The atmosphere crackled with static energy.
Leo leaned against the entrance of a shop, his heart accelerating.
This was the heart of the new world.
The source. Healing. Weapons. Information. Amnesty.
He watched.
A man in a leather jacket, one eye swollen shut, reached the front of the line.
He raised his hand. Fingers moved through an invisible interface.
On the Shop's surface, an icon flared bright: a silver can.
The man made a pulling gesture.
There was an audible digital click.
From nothing, blue particles shimmered and converged, weaving themselves into a solid object.
A can. It dropped into his open hands with real weight.
Fascination and a deep, animal hunger twisted in Leo's gut.
Water. Food. Something for the pain.
All of it was a few meters away.
All he needed were Points.
Points he could only get by being killed or captured.
But Eli had sent him here for a reason.
See what kind of mistake you are.
He focused, forcing his blurred vision to sharpen.
Not on the people. On the Shop itself.
On the reality-code lines he now knew he could see.
The migraine came back instantly.
The cost of attention.
And he saw it.
The Shop wasn't perfect.
Around its light-structure, faint silver glitch-lines flickered.
And during the transaction—at the exact moment the object materialized—the Shop's central terminal stuttered.
A micro-freeze. Maybe a tenth of a second.
In that instant, a thicker glitch-line, dirty white, crawled from the base to the top.
The System was economizing.
During the overload, the perfect façade fractured.
There was a gap. A moment of weakness.
It was data. A fragment. A grain of sand.
Driven by an impulse that bordered on suicide, Leo left the safety of the doorway.
He moved toward the edge of the plaza.
The line ignored him.
He stopped about five meters from the glowing edge of the floating cube.
A smaller holographic sign snapped into existence in front of him.
ACCESS YOUR INTERFACE TO PROCEED.
He raised his hand and held it there.
Nothing.
The sign flickered. The words dissolved and reformed, in warning red.
[SCANNING PROXIMAL BIOLOGICAL ENTITY…]
A needle-thin beam of white light swept over him from feet to head.
[SCAN COMPLETE.]
[ACCESS DENIED.]
[REASON: DESIGNATED ENTITY: ANOMALY-ZERO. STATUS: NONEXISTENT IN I.A.R.A. SYSTEM SOCIAL DATABASE. NO ACCOUNT RECORD DETECTED. NO TRANSACTION PERMISSIONS ASSIGNED.]
The words hung there, raw and final.
He wasn't just a target.
He was a non-person. A ghost.
The System didn't recognize him as a user.
He couldn't buy. Couldn't sell. Couldn't even touch the economy of the new world.
The cold that settled in him was deeper than the glitch.
It was the cold of absolute exclusion.
"You."
The voice came from his right. Calm. Neutral.
Leo turned his head slowly, carefully.
The man was leaning against the wall, watching him.
He wasn't in line.
He wore a black tactical vest over an immaculate gray shirt, untouched by the chaos.
His interface hovered above his shoulder, clean and minimal.
LOYALIST.
RANK: VERIFICATION AGENT.
LEVEL: 6.
No name. Just function.
His eyes—light gray, analytical—ran over Leo.
They paused in the empty space above his shoulder where Leo's interface should have been.
Then back to Leo's face.
"You look lost," the Loyalist said.
Not a question. A clinical observation.
Leo said nothing. Kept his face blank.
"Your interface," the agent continued, his voice low. "It's… weak. Barely detectable. Post-initialization sync issue?"
Professional curiosity.
But his eyes catalogued Leo's injuries, the torn clothes, the metal pipe.
They lingered on the warped line of his collarbone.
The agent pushed off the wall.
His movement was smooth, efficient.
His right hand shifted slightly to rest on the holster at his hip.
Not leather. Black polymer. Angular.
It held something pistol-shaped, but with a wider barrel and a line of tiny LEDs.
A System Containment Device.
Built to disable. Not kill.
Capture. Study. Prolonged use.
"Maybe I can help with that synchronization," the agent said, stepping closer.
The distance between them halved.
"The District Verification Center is offering free diagnostics. For the sake of collective compliance."
His fingers released the holster's safety with a soft click.
The Shop's line murmured, unaware.
Blue light pulsed, throwing uneven shadows.
In the corner of Leo's vision, the countdown to the next location ping ticked down.
00:18:33.
Five meters from the inaccessible Shop.
Two meters from a Loyalist agent with a containment weapon.
Surrounded by a city that wanted him dead or caged.
The agent took another step.
His hand closed around the weapon's grip.
"Let's resolve this quickly, citizen," he said, and for the first time, an order cut through the neutral tone.
"Please don't make any sudden movements."
Leo looked at the Shop.
At the central terminal where the glitch had appeared.
Looked at the weapon.
Looked at the agent's gray, impersonal eyes.
He had no Points.
No status.
No strength.
All he had was a metal pipe.
And knowledge of a weakness that lasted one-tenth of a second.
The agent began to draw the weapon from its holster.