Mara POV
"Open it," Kael said.
Mara looked up from the piece of bread she'd been breaking into smaller pieces so Rin could eat it without choking. "Open what?"
"Your System panel." He said it the way someone says, " Tie your shoes flat, no explanation, like it was obvious.
"I already closed it."
"Open it again."
She almost said why. Something about the way he was looking at her, not quite at her, more through her, like she was a number he was trying to add up, made her swallow the question.
She touched the air in front of her, and the panel blinked open.
White text. Blue border. A lot of words she didn't understand.
"I've never played games," she said. "I don't know what any of this means."
"I know." He moved to stand behind her shoulder. Not touching. Just close enough that she could feel the weight of his attention landing on the screen. "Hold it still."
She held it still.
Jax, the one with the sharp eyes who hadn't stopped watching her since they left the rally point, came over from the other side of the room. He looked at the panel. He looked at Kael. He made a sound like someone had dropped something heavy on his foot.
"What?" Mara said.
Neither of them answered.
She looked at her own panel. It still meant nothing to her. Classes, tiers, rarity classifications, it was a foreign language in a font that was trying too hard. She found the number at the bottom: 1 in 11,000,000. She didn't know if that was good or bad. She assumed it was some kind of error.
"What does that mean?" she asked.
Kael reached past her and closed the panel himself. His arm was close enough to her face that she could see a dried cut along his forearm she hadn't noticed before.
"It means you're useful," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer you're getting right now."
She turned and looked directly at him. He was already looking somewhere else. Jax had his back to her, very deliberately, in the way people do when they're trying not to have an expression.
Fine. She had lived twenty-two years without answers. She could survive one more night.
"Is there food?" she asked.
There was.
Not much protein rations, some canned thing that had no label, water that tasted like metal. Mara sat on the floor with her back against the wall, and Rin folded herself into the space beside her like a small, warm anchor. The girl still hadn't spoken. She hadn't cried either, which Mara respected more than she could explain.
When the food was passed around, Mara split her portion and put half in front of Rin without thinking.
Rin looked at the food. Looked at Mara. Ate it.
Nobody said anything about it. But she felt Kael watching from across the room, and when she glanced over, he was already looking somewhere else.
She was starting to notice he did that a lot.
Don't, she told herself. He pulled you out of the rubble. That's all that is.
She'd thought Derek loved her too, and she'd watched him step back from a window.
She was done making that mistake.
She was almost asleep, Rin's head warm against her arm, the room finally quiet when the sound hit.
Not an explosion. Worse: a System alert. The kind that screamed from every active panel in the room at once.
She jerked upright. Rin grabbed her sleeve.
Every panel in the room was open. All are showing the same thing. Red text, scrolling.
Kael was already on his feet. Whatever ease had been in his posture and there hadn't been much was completely gone. He looked like a different person. Like the version of himself people probably saw right before things went very badly for them.
"Report," he said, voice flat.
Jax was reading from his own panel. "Three factions. Closing on the eastern perimeter. Orin's group from the south, Harken's people from the north—" He stopped.
"And the third?" Kael said.
Jax looked up. "It's the Coalition, sir. They mobilized six hours ago."
The room went very still.
Mara didn't know who the Coalition was. But she could read a room. And every single one of Kael's people had gone the color of old ash.
"Timeline," Kael said.
"Forty-eight hours. Maybe less if they push through the night." Jax's voice was careful now. Controlled. "If all three hit simultaneously, we don't have the numbers. We lose the territory."
We. She'd been in this room for four hours, and somehow it was already we.
Kael turned. Not to Jax. To her.
She didn't understand why until he spoke.
"That panel you closed," he said. "What's your class?"
"Base Architect," she said. "Whatever that means."
He looked at her for a long moment. Outside, the wind had died completely. The quiet felt like a held breath.
"It means," he said slowly, like he was choosing every word, "that in forty-eight hours, the only thing that keeps us alive is you."
Mara looked down at Rin, still gripping her sleeve, small fingers tight.
She thought about a door that didn't open.
She thought about the girl she used to be, standing on the other side of it.
"Tell me what to build," she said.