he black card sat on David's counter for thirty-six hours.
He didn't stare at it. He'd get a glass of water and its matte surface would drink the light from the corner of his eye. He'd try to sleep and the ten etched numbers would scroll against the backs of his eyelids. It wasn't a choice. It was a gravitational pull, different from the Scar but just as potent. The memory of Styx's unbreakable defense was a splinter in his mind. The promise of a real war was an open flame.
At 7:58 AM on the second day, he picked up his phone. He dialed.
It rang once. "Atlas Response Group. Please state your name and the nature of your inquiry." A professional, neutral female voice.
"David. I got a card from Styx."
"Ah. Mr. Valence. Please hold." A click, then Styx's voice, clean and direct. "Kingsland Plaza, tower three, sub-level two. Parking garage B. Ten AM."
Kingsland Plaza was a sleek, unremarkable office complex in the financial district. The morning crowd moved with purpose—men and women in tailored suits, tech workers in smart-casual athleisure, delivery drivers with augmented limbs glowing at the joints. David scanned the faces as he crossed the plaza. A woman adjusting her silk scarf revealed a delicate tracery of frost-like patterns along her collarbone. A man arguing on a headset had a palm that shimmered with circuit-board luminosity. A barista passing with a tray of coffees had eyes the color of banked coals, heat-shimmer rising from them in the cool morning air.
Normal. Everyday. His own void-black fissure drew only a passing glance, the kind reserved for any noticeable but unremarkable Scar. In a world where everyone had a door to another reality etched into their skin, his was just a darker threshold.
He found the service entrance between a bubble tea shop and a dry cleaner. The elevator to sub-level two required a keycard, but the door was propped open with a crate labeled 'Bio-Hazard - Low Yield.' The hum of machinery grew louder as he descended.
The doors opened not onto a hidden bunker, but onto the busy loading dock of what looked like a high-end logistics company. The space was brightly lit, clean, and bustling. A sign on the brushed steel wall read:
ATLAS RESPONSE GROUP
LICENSED CONTAINMENT & CONSULTATION
Permit #CX-45-889 | City Charter Annex 7
Forklifts moved pallets of equipment—crates marked 'Resonance Dampeners,' 'Localized Null-Field Generators,' and 'Emergency Binding Runes.' Workers in grey Atlas polos scanned manifests on tablets. Most had visible, active Scars: one woman directing traffic had vines of living jade growing from her forearms that twitched toward wayward crates; a stocky man hauling a heavy container had legs reinforced with stony, geometric patterns that pulsed with each step.
This wasn't a secret war. It was an industry.
"Valence." Rook's voice cut through the din. He leaned against a crate marked 'Inertial Compensators - Fragile,' arms crossed, wearing the same grey polo, looking like a disgruntled foreman. "You're two minutes late. Clock started at the call. Follow me. Try not to gawk—you're not special here."
David followed him past the dock into the main facility. The transition was seamless—from industrial logistics to open-plan corporate offices. The space was a cross between an engineering firm and an emergency operations center. Glass-walled meeting rooms lined one side, their whiteboards covered in complex diagrams and equations. The central floor was a maze of workstations, each with multiple monitors displaying city grids, atmospheric energy readings, and scrolling data feeds.
The ambient chatter was a mix of technical jargon and mission logistics:
"—thermal bleed from that forge-link is still seventeen percent above tolerance for a residential zone. We need a secondary dampening crew on site before six—"
"—manifestation forecast for the waterfront is green, but monitor the pressure-Scar clusters near Pier 12. If the gradient shifts more than two points, we go to yellow alert—"
"—tell the city regulators the Breach is contained, but the resonance clean-up bill goes to the property owner. Their insurance lapsed last month, so they're looking at a full assessment lien—"
David saw his potential future colleagues in their element. In a glass-walled data lab, a woman with a delicate web of crystal-fine lines across her temple—Anya, he presumed—was arguing with a city official on a large viewscreen. She pointed to a complex harmonic graph that spiraled across her monitors.
"Your permit allows for a Class-2 Resonant Draw for the festival, Mr. Mayor, not a sustained Class-3. The overshoot is what cracked the foundation on three historical buildings. The bill for the structural and harmonic remediation is in your inbox."
In a brightly-lit infirmary bay visible through another window, a man with faint, coral-like markings on his neck—Kael—was treating a worker whose arm was half-covered in rapidly-growing, fragrant moss. A minor Draw-backfire from the look of it. Kael's own markings pulsed with a soft bioluminescence as he guided the chaotic growth, coaxing it into a small terracotta pot where it settled into a decorative, bonsai-like shape.
Everywhere, Scars were tools, accessories, facts of life. The woman running the coffee station had luminous honeycomb patterns on her cheeks that steamed in time with the espresso machine. The security guard at the internal checkpoint had irises that swirled like miniature galaxies.
"Through here," Rook grunted, leading David to a soundproofed conference room. Styx was already there, standing at the head of a standard corporate table. He wore a tailored suit, no polo for him. The room was aggressively normal—grey carpet, a water cooler in the corner, a wall-sized screen showing the Atlas logo rotating slowly.
"David. Welcome to Atlas." Styx gestured to a chair. "Sit."
David sat. The chair was ergonomic, expensive. Everything here felt funded, legitimate.
Styx remained standing, a silhouette against the glowing logo. "You're here because you have a high-capacity, aggressive link and a documented pattern of seeking conflict in unregulated environments. In this world, that makes you one of two things: a monumental public liability, or a rare asset. I'm proposing you become the latter."
He tapped the table's embedded control panel. The screen changed to display David's face beside an official dossier.
"David Valence. Scar Classification: E-7 ('Abyssal Anchor - Pressure/Shadow Variant'). Licensed for personal Draw under municipal statute 45-B, with two citations for public disturbance and one for unlawful duelistic engagement." Styx's eyes were cool, analytical. "Your license is one review away from revocation. The city's Scar Regulation Board meets next Thursday. After revocation, standard procedure is subdermal suppressant implants and mandatory monthly compliance checks."
David kept his face neutral, but the gears turned. This wasn't about secret wars or hidden callings. This was about regulation. The fight clubs were the back alleys where unmonitored power junkies played. Atlas was the licensed, bonded, and insured major league.
"The offer is straightforward," Styx continued. "You sign a contractor's agreement with Atlas Response. We become the sponsor on your Scar license, upgrading it to a Commercial Containment Grade. You follow our protocols on deployed operations. In return: salary, benefits, legal protection, and access to the most severe, high-intensity Scar events in the city grid."
"The Breaches," David said.
"Correct. The catastrophic failures. The moments when a link doesn't just leak power, but ruptures completely. When the door doesn't just open—it's torn off its hinges, and something starts climbing through." Styx leaned forward, palms flat on the table. "Municipal responders handle the small stuff—contained manifestations, resonance leaks, minor dimensional bleeds. We are the first, last, and only call for what they can't touch. We are what gets called when a city block starts forgetting the laws of physics."
He slid a tablet across the polished surface. A standard employment contract glowed on the screen. Sections for benefits, liability waivers, non-disclosure agreements regarding client confidentiality, a code of professional conduct. It was bureaucratic, dry, and utterly normal.
"The probation period is ninety days," Styx said. "You'll be partnered with senior agents for training and field assessment. You follow their lead. You fight how, when, and where we need you to fight." He paused, letting the weight of the alternative hang in the air. "Or you walk out now, and take your chances with the Regulation Board and the underground pits until they either break you with suppressants, or you accidentally cause a Breach that lands you in a permanent null-field containment cell."
David picked up the stylus attached to the tablet. He scrolled through the legalese. The subtext was the only part that mattered: We will give you the biggest fights in the world, and a badge to make it legal.
He found the signature line on page seven, section 4b. The stylus hovered for a second. He thought of the silent, yawning need that lived in him between fights. The emptiness that only the Pull could fill. Here, that emptiness had a place. It had a job description.
He signed.
"Welcome to the team, Agent Valence." Styx allowed a faint, grim smile. "Your designated field callsign will be Void. Let's introduce you to your unit."
They stepped back into the bright, buzzing main floor. Styx raised his voice just enough to cut through the operational hum. "Anya, Kael—meet our new Probationary Containment Specialist. Try to keep him from destroying municipal property."
Anya looked up from her data streams, gave David a curt, professional nod that didn't quite reach her eyes, and immediately returned to her screens. "His harmonic signature is already disrupting my baseline readings. Please keep him at least three meters from the sensor arrays."
Kael finished potting the mossy growth and walked over, wiping his hands on a towel. The coral markings on his neck had faded to a faint texture. He offered a tired but genuine smile. "Don't mind her. She loves the data more than people. You've been favoring your left shoulder since you walked in. Old injury from an over-draw?"
David blinked. "A few weeks back."
"I can take a look after the briefing. Unchecked Scar-strain leads to permanent dimensional scarring in the connective tissue. Nasty business."
Rook just grunted from where he was inspecting a rack of specialized equipment. "He breaks it, he buys it. Company policy."
Styx handed David a lanyard with a keycard and ID badge. The photo was his fight club registration image—he looked hollow-eyed and tense. The title read: VALENCE, D | PROBATIONARY CONTAINMENT SPECIALIST | ATLAS RESPONSE GROUP.
"Orientation starts now," Styx said. "You'll get the standard package: Atlas protocols, city regulations, use-of-force guidelines for dimensional events. Your first patrol shift with Rook is tonight. He'll show you the response vehicle and standard loadout." He glanced at a large central monitor that displayed a city map dotted with softly glowing icons—green, yellow, a single pulsing red in the industrial district. "Try to get some rest this afternoon. The city," he said, his eyes on that red pulse, "never does."
David clipped the badge to his belt. The weight of it was unfamiliar. He looked around the facility—the ordered chaos, the professional focus, the mundane reality of a world where cosmic power was managed with clipboards and liability waivers.
His Scar itched, a phantom sensation. The silence in his head wasn't empty anymore. It was the quiet of a weapon in its rack, waiting.
Rook jerked his head toward a corridor. "Come on, Probationary. Let's see if you can tell a resonance dampener from a hole in the ground."
David followed, the buzz of the operations center fading behind him. The itch remained, but now it had a schedule, a partner, and a direct line to a dispatcher.
The biggest fights were waiting. And for the first time, they were looking for him too.
David spent the next two hours in a windowless training room with Kael, reviewing basic first-aid for Draw-related injuries—thermal burns from energy-links, psychic feedback headaches, somatic disassociation from prolonged use.
"The point isn't to make you a medic," Kael said, wiping a whiteboard clean of diagrams. "It's so you don't panic and make it worse when your partner's nervous system is briefly arguing with the laws of physics."
Anya popped her head in, her expression all business. "Rook wants you both in the garage. Your shift is live in five. He's prepping the vehicle."
The garage was a cavernous space beneath the main facility, filled with a fleet of identical, unmarked Atlas vans and heavier response trucks. Rook was at the back of Van 07, running a checklist on a tablet, verifying the inventory of a equipment locker: dampeners, binders, first-aid kits, and heavy, matte-black suits on racks.
"Suit up," he said, not looking up. "Standard kit. You're shadowing. You watch, you listen, you fetch gear. You speak when spoken to."
David pulled on the grey Atlas vest over his clothes. It was heavier than it looked, lined with thin, flexible plates. Rook tossed him an earpiece and a wristpad—a rugged device showing a simplified city map, currently clear.
"Comms and tracker. The screen shows our patrol grid and any flagged disturbances. Green is normal. Yellow is a call. Red is a containment emergency. You see a red, you stop breathing and wait for my order."
They rolled out of the garage and into the city's evening flow. Rook drove with calm, detached efficiency. For the first hour, it was exactly as described: profoundly mundane. They drove a slow, looping circuit through their assigned sector. The wristpad remained a peaceful, uninterrupted green.
Rook gave a running, cynical commentary. He pointed out a sleek apartment tower. "See that? Architect has a stabilization Scar. Whole building's frame is subtly Draw-reinforced. Costs a fortune in licensing." He nodded toward a quiet park. "Two years ago, a guy linked to a universe of aggressive fungi had a bad day there. Took a week and a team from Bio-Containment to scrape the sentient mold off the benches. They sealed the ground with null-concrete. It's why no grass grows."
It was a tour of a hidden, regulated city—a geography written in scars, legislation, and past disasters.
The change was instant and visceral.
A sharp, electronic chirp stabbed through the van's cabin, simultaneous with a synchronized buzz from their wristpads. David's screen, which had been a placid green field, flashed once—a single, vicious crimson pixel ignited in the gridded warehouse district.
Then it pulsed.
The red didn't just sit there. It spread, smearing across the grid like a drop of blood in water, its edges fractal and unstable. Text scrolled beside it: CODE 74-B: STRUCTURAL REALITY FLUCTUATION. CONTAINMENT PROTOCOL INITIATED.
"That's us," Rook said, his voice shedding all traces of boredom, becoming flat and hard as poured concrete. He didn't shout. He simply punched the accelerator and hauled the steering wheel over, executing a hard U-turn that sent a wave of coffee sloshing from a cup in the holder. His thumb hit a switch on the dash. A low, authoritative siren whooped twice, and muted blue lights began flashing within the van's grille and taillights. The traffic around them instinctively parted.
"Probationary, listen close," he said, the acceleration pressing them back into their seats. The city lights began to blur. "That's a live one. Something's torn. We are first response. Our job is perimeter, initial assessment, and deploying suppression gear to contain the spread until the heavy unit arrives. They're rolling now, but we're three minutes closer." He shot a glare at David that was pure, undiluted warning. "You will do exactly what I say. You will not, under any circumstances, use your Scar. You Draw on an unstable field like that, your chaotic frequency interacts with the collapse, you could amplify it. You could turn a ten-foot Breach into a fifty-foot permanent wound in the city. You become part of the problem. Nod if you understand."
David nodded, the motion sharp. "Understood." The word was swallowed by the roar of the engine. The grinding boredom of the night was incinerated, replaced by a razor-sharp focus that honed the world to a fine point. The constant itch under his skin flared into a single, burning signal: This way.
Rook drove with brutal, silent efficiency for ninety seconds, weaving through traffic with a calm that was more terrifying than any panic. The bright, orderly streets of the commercial district gave way to the darker, canyon-like alleys of the industrial waterfront. The map on the dash showed the red stain still spreading, pulsating like a sick heart.
They skidded to a halt, tires barking against asphalt, outside a long, low row of corrugated steel self-storage units. The air was dead silent. No crickets, no distant traffic hum. Just a low, sub-audible drone that vibrated up through the soles of David's boots and settled in his molars. From the sealed roll-up door of Unit 42B, a cold, chemical blue-white light bled around the edges, far too bright and far too sharp. It threw stark, black shadows across the gravel that seemed to twitch and stutter, out of sync with reality.
"Unit 42B," Rook barked, already throwing his door open. "Lease lists a 'tinkerer.' Probably tried to juice his Draw with a homemade amplifier." He was at the back of the van in three strides, yanking the doors open. "Grab the tripod! The big, heavy one!" He tossed the words over his shoulder as he hauled out a bulky, dish-shaped device studded with crystalline nodes.
David moved, the heavy tripod cold in his hands. As they crossed the gravel towards the unit, the wrongness in the air intensified. It wasn't a smell or a sound, but a pressure, a greasy static that coated the skin and made the hair on his arms stand up. The metal door of the unit was shuddering, not from an impact, but from the space behind it pushing, straining against the world.
"Here! Now!" Rook pointed to a spot twenty yards out. David fumbled the tripod upright on the uneven ground. Rook slammed the dish-shaped damper onto it, connected a thick cable to a humming battery pack, and stabbed a sequence into a keypad. The device whined to life, a rising pitch that made the fillings in David's teeth ache. A visible wave of distorted air, like heat haze off a summer road, shot from the emitter and washed over the storage unit door. The bleeding light dimmed, fighting the suppression. The shuddering slowed to a tense, metallic rattle.
Rook keyed his comms, his voice tight. "Lead Two on site at Code 74-B, warehouse grid seven. Primary harmonic damper active. Manifestation is contained but unstable. Field is… liquifying. We need the box kit now. No visual on the Scarred. Unit is sealed and—"
The door didn't blow open. It dissolved.
With a sound like a thousand sheets of ice shearing in a spiral, the center of the steel door ceased to be solid. It became a shimmering, jagged window into chaos. Inside was not a storage unit. It was a storm of fragmented geometry and corrosive light—a space folded in on itself a dozen times, where angles met in impossible ways. In the middle, a man was visible, frozen in the act of a scream, his body stretched and compressed like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. Shards of crystallized reality, sharp and gleaming, spun lazily in the opening.
"Breach active! Fall back to the van!" Rook roared, already moving for the next piece of gear.
David didn't move. He was rooted, staring into the tear. This was it. Not a fighter, but a wound in the world. The urge to Pull was a physical scream in his blood, louder than any order. His shadow-tendrils weren't for petty duels. They were made for this—for grappling with immensity, for crushing chaos into submission. He could feel the hole taunting him, challenging him. His hand lifted, fingers curling, drawn toward the void-black fissure on his face like iron to a magnet.
"DAVID! LOOK AT ME!"
Rook's bellow cut through the droning chaos. He wasn't by the van. He was five feet away, having moved with shocking speed. He held a heavy, tube-like launcher. It was not aimed at the Breach.
It was aimed at David's chest.
His eyes were chips of flint. "You use your power right now," he snarled, each word a hammer blow, "and you're not fighting that. You're giving it a new pattern. A new rhythm. Your frequency hits that instability, and you could scatter the collapse across this whole yard. You could make it bigger. Stand. Down."
David's hand froze. He saw it, past the addict's blinding hunger. The Breach was a chaotic, unstable frequency. His Draw would be another, violent frequency. They wouldn't fight; they'd resonate. They would amplify each other. The math of catastrophe became clear. He lowered his hand, his whole body trembling with the effort, the unspent power feeling like a live wire under his skin.
The deep-throated roar of a diesel engine announced the heavy unit. A massive, six-wheeled truck with a wedge-shaped ram on the front skidded to a halt, and four operators in matte-black, sealed hazard suits spilled out. They moved with silent, terrifying economy, ignoring David and Rook completely. They unloaded a crate, swiftly assembling a device that unfolded like a giant metal spider. Its legs anchored deep into the asphalt with pneumatic thunks. From its core, a lattice of solid, golden light erupted, wrapping the Breach in a net of强制 order. The screaming chaos slowed, then stilled, then was compressed with immense, visible pressure back into the rough shape of a room. The light winked out. The sudden silence was deafening.
The medical team moved in with a collapsible stretcher. The man they brought out was unconscious, waxen. The Scar on his chest—an intricate, burnished-copper knot—was still there, permanently part of him. But it looked dull, bruised, silent. They hadn't removed it. They couldn't. They had built a cage around the link inside his own body. As they passed, David saw the man's fingers twitch in a frail, repetitive pattern against the stretcher strap—a ghost of the Draw, a memory in the muscles.
Rook walked over, his boots crunching on gravel. He looked older in the aftermath, the harsh garage lighting carving deep lines in his face. He lit a cigarette, the flame of his lighter perfectly steady.
"You wanted to Draw," he said, exhaling smoke. Not a question.
"Yes."
"That's why you're here." Rook nodded toward the departing ambulance. "He wanted to Draw, too. Wanted more of it. Used scrap parts and hubris to try and amplify his link. He ripped it wide open instead." He took a long drag. "They'll pump him so full of neural and harmonic blockers he'll never feel the Pull again. He'll just have the scar and the memory. That's the failure state. Not death. Getting permanently locked out of your own life."
He looked at David, the cigarette's ember glowing in his eyes. "But you stopped. You used the part of your brain that can do math under pressure. That's the only reason you're still standing here with me." He dropped the cigarette, crushed it under his heel with finality. "That was the test. You passed. Don't let it go to your head."
David watched the ambulance's taillights disappear. The itch for a fight, for the Draw, was still there, a constant, humming baseline to his existence. But it was different now. It had been measured against the raw, swallowing void of a real Breach and found to be just a part of the equation, not the solution. The bigger fight, he realized, wasn't in the chaos. It was in the moment of choice on the precipice, the will to stand still.
He got into the passenger seat. Rook started the engine. The screen on the dash refreshed, the last remnants of the red alert dissolving into a soft yellow 'Post-Event Stabilization' marker, then finally fading back to green.
"Where to now?" David asked, his voice rough with unused adrenaline.
"Debrief. Mountains of incident paperwork. Then," Rook said, pulling the van onto the deserted street and casting a sidelong glance that held the faintest trace of something other than pure disdain, "you get to go home and try to sleep while knowing what's really out there, waiting to tear."
He let the statement hang in the quiet cab.
"Welcome to Atlas."
The van drove into the swallowing night. David watched the city pass by—the locked storage units, the dark windows of apartments, the glow of streetlights on wet asphalt. He no longer saw just a city. He saw a fragile skin, stretched over an infinite number of doors, each one held shut by nothing more than control, regulation, and the daily, grinding work of people who knew how to stand at the edge without falling in.
The hunger remained. But now it had a shape, a counterweight, and a purpose. For the first time, he understood the rules of the only game that would ever matter.
.