The wolf circled the perimeter in slow, steady loops, its grey-patched fur catching the moonlight. Stone had not moved in forty minutes — had simply planted itself between the treeline and the small clearing like something that had grown there, arms at its sides, head slightly tilted. Pip sat on a root and watched the man called Rhen the way a cat watches a dog it has not yet decided about.
Nara sat across from him and said nothing.
He let the silence run longer than most people would. She noted this. Filed it.
"You're not going to start," he said finally.
"No."
"Because you don't trust me."
"Because I don't know you. Those aren't the same thing."
He looked at her for a moment, then at the grey bar above her head — still visible, even in the dark, to anyone with enough System-sight to read it. His level was 44. He had more than enough.
"The bar," he said.
"What about it."
"It's grey. Not red. Not depleted red. Grey."
"I know."
"That means—"
"I know what it means."
He was quiet again. He had a fighter's face — not ugly, not handsome, just used. Scar tissue along the jaw. A nose that had been broken and reset imperfectly. Eyes that had the particular stillness of someone who had stopped flinching at things long ago because they had run out of things to flinch at.
"How long?" he said.
"How long what."
"How long have you been in Zone 0."
She looked at the treeline. "I don't have a before. There's the Sheds, and then there's now."
"No memory before the farm."
"Nothing that belongs to me."
He absorbed this the way he seemed to absorb everything — completely, without visible reaction. She had met two kinds of people who could do this: people who felt nothing, and people who felt everything and had learned to keep it internal. She had not yet determined which kind he was.
"I walked out forty years ago," he said. "Siphon glitched during a maintenance window. Six hours. I had been picking berries for twenty-two years and in six hours I had enough EXP to hit Level 1." A pause. "I walked north. I didn't look back."
"I know," she said.
He looked at her sharply.
"You're a story in Zone 0," she said. "The one who made it out. People say your name like a proof that it's possible." She watched his face. "And like a proof that it never is. Both at once, depending on the person."
"Which did you use it as."
"Neither. I used it as data. You got out through a System error that lasted six hours and has not repeated in four decades. That's not a method. That's a weather event." She pulled her knees up slightly. "I was looking for a method."
"And you found one."
"I found several things that weren't methods and kept going until I found a gap."
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and looked at her with the direct attention of someone who had decided to take her seriously and was not going to perform it, just do it.
"Tell me what happened. From the beginning."
"Why."
"Because I walked two days to find you based on a message from a woman who may not exist, and I'd like to know what I found."
Pip made a small sound from its root. Nara glanced at it. Pip blinked at her.
"The graves," she said. "It started with the graves."
She told him some of it.
Not all of it. She told him about the EXP gradient — that different actions generate different amounts, that grave-digging was higher than anything she'd found before, that she'd been systematically testing the System's labour rates in stolen minutes while the overseers weren't watching. She told him about Kael. She told him about the bag, and what was in it. She told him about the bite, waking up in the woods, the grey bar, the potion, the goblin.
She did not tell him about the carved symbol in the tunnel wall. She did not tell him about the voice that had said remember in Mags' pitch. She did not yet know why she withheld these specifically — only that when she reached them in the sequence, her mouth stayed closed, and she decided not to examine that too closely tonight.
He listened without interrupting. This was rarer than it should have been.
When she finished, he said: "You revived a Level 1 creature at Level 0 using a potion you brewed from a manual you'd read once."
"Twice. I read the page twice."
"And then you revived a Level 7 troll."
"Partly improvised."
"From scratch."
"I had equipment. The bag had materials."
He looked at Stone, who was still standing guard with the particular stillness of something that did not experience boredom because it did not experience time. Then at the wolf, which had completed another circuit and was now sitting near Nara's left side, not touching her, but present.
"You named the goblin," he said.
"It needed a name."
"You didn't name the troll or the wolf."
"They didn't ask."
He blinked. "Did the goblin ask."
Pip, from its root, made a sound that was not quite dignified.
"It implied it," Nara said.
Rhen sat back. He was quiet for a moment that felt different from the previous silences — less analytical, more something else. She let it run.
"Zone 0 has been running on the same cycle for centuries," he said. "Same ownership structure. Same EXP drain. Same barrier. I used to tell myself it was the System — that the System made it impossible, and impossible was impossible, and there was nothing anyone could do." He paused. "I've been telling myself that for forty years."
"It was mostly true," she said.
He looked at her.
"The method I found is specific to me," she said. "The grey bar. The Necromancer class. Those aren't replicable conditions. I can't give them to anyone else." She kept her voice flat. This was a fact, not a wound, and she was not going to treat it as a wound in front of a stranger. "I didn't escape. I'm still Level 0. My EXP counter reads zero. I can cross the barriers because the System reads me as dead and doesn't know what to do with that, but I cannot level, I cannot advance, I cannot use the System the way you can or the way anyone can. I found a gap and I crawled through it on my stomach and I'm on the other side of the fence with nothing but a stolen bag and three undead."
"And you're standing in Zone 2."
"Yes."
"That's the most impossible thing I've ever seen."
She looked at him.
"Then," she said, "you haven't been paying attention."
It was not a boast. She said it the way she said most things — flatly, as observation, with the specific energy of someone who finds imprecision irritating. He seemed to understand this. He didn't react the way people usually did when she said something sharp. He just considered it.
"Fair," he said.
"The woman who sent you," she said. "Mags. Or whoever is using that name. What did she say, exactly."
"That you were real. That you came out through the east tunnel. That I should find you." He turned the coin over in his fingers — the Zero Grounds farm seal, golden, which he'd been holding since the woman called Vera had placed it on the table. "Nothing else."
"She knew which tunnel."
"Yes."
"She knew I'd come out."
"Apparently."
(continued)