ZERO

The sky didn’t crack open.

Idris would remember that later, how wrong it felt. Every story he had ever read said the end of the world should come with thunder.

Instead, it came with a chime.

But the evening had started the way every evening started, and that was the part he kept returning to afterward. The small, ordinary part.

At 7:30 p.m., the apartment smelled like boiling water and the radiator that never quite worked. Their mother had left for her night shift at the hospital an hour earlier, and the note on the fridge still said what it said every day: Eat real food. Lock the door. Love you both. Underneath, in Dara’s handwriting, someone had added: Define real.

Idris stood at the stove, stirring instant noodles for two.

“I already ate,” Dara called from the couch, not looking up from his phone.

“You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not lying.”

“You looked at the pot when you said it.” Idris didn’t turn around. “Twice.”

A pause. Then a long, defeated sigh. “I hate that you do that.”

“You make it easy.”

It wasn’t magic. It had never been magic. Idris was eighteen and quiet, the kind of person who got left out of conversations and spent the time watching them instead. He knew that Dara touched his ear when he fibbed. He knew his mother laughed too brightly when the rent was late. He knew the way a teacher’s voice went flat when she didn’t believe her own answer.

People thought he was shy. He was mostly just listening.

He had just reached for the second bowl when the chime rang.

A soft, polite, two-note sound, the kind a shop makes when you walk through the door. It rang inside his head at exactly 7:42 p.m., and the spoon stopped in the pot.

On the couch, Dara’s head snapped up. “Did you hear—”

“Yeah.”

“Everyone heard it.”

Idris knew it was true, because the whole building went quiet at once. Then the quiet broke. A TV cut out upstairs. A child started crying. Somewhere below, a man shouted a name again and again.

Then the window opened in front of his face.

It was made of blue glass that wasn’t glass, floating in the air with no wires and no light source. Words sat on it, clean and calm.

WELCOME. A System has been installed on this world.

Tutorial Zone: Your Building Objective: Survive Time Remaining: 09:59

The number ticked down to 09:58.

“Idris.” Dara was on his feet. His voice had dropped into the tone he used whenever something went wrong and their mother wasn’t home. Calm. Steady. Fake. “Look at me. Don’t panic.”

“I’m not panicking.”

“Your hands are shaking.”

Idris looked down. They were.

“Okay,” Dara said. “Okay. Try to open your status. Just think it. Status."

A second window unfolded in front of Dara, and Idris watched his brother’s eyes move across it. Dara had always been the one who caught things first: a ball, a fall, a fight that was about to start at school. He was twenty-two, broad-shouldered, and loud in the way that made other people feel safe.

Now he looked like a kid reading his own exam results.

“I’m a Vanguard,” Dara said, half laughing. “Level one. I have a skill called Hold the Line. I don’t even know what that means.”

NAME: Dara CLASS: Vanguard LEVEL: 1 HP: 120 / 120 STR: 14 VIT: 13 AGI: 8 SKILL: Hold the Line (Passive), damage taken is reduced while protecting an ally.

“It means you hit things,” Idris said. “And things hit you.”

“Idris. Status.”

He thought the word.

A white rectangle opened in front of him.

It was empty.

A thin outline. A cursor blinking in the top left corner, patient and stupid. Below it, three lines of text sat in a row.

PLAYER: — LEVEL: — CLASS: —

That was all. No health. No stats. No skills.

While he stared, new letters typed themselves across the bottom, one at a time.

DESIGNATION ASSIGNED: ZERO

“That’s not a name,” Idris said quietly.

Dara leaned over his shoulder. His breath caught, just once, and he hid it fast. He touched his ear. “Maybe it’s still loading.”

“It’s not loading.”

“Then it’s a bug.”

“Dara.”

“It’s a bug," Dara said, firmly, the way you’d say it to a dog about to run into the road. “We’ll figure it out. After. Right now we move.”

He grabbed his phone from the couch and thumbed their mother’s number. It rang once, then the screen flashed: CALL FAILED. NETWORK RESERVED FOR SYSTEM USE. He tried again. Same message. A third time, his thumb jabbing harder.

“She’s at the hospital,” Idris said. “She’s probably safer than we are.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” Idris admitted. “I don’t.”

Dara shoved the phone into his pocket anyway, as though keeping it close might change something. “We find her after. That’s the plan. Survive, then Mom.”

It was the kind of plan you could say out loud, and Idris loved him for it.

08:14.

Someone slammed a fist against their front door.

Dara opened it. In the hallway stood a crowd of neighbors, pale and loud, talking over each other, each with a blue window floating at their shoulder. Mrs. Tahan from 3A was there, gripping the hand of her little girl, Lina, who was clutching a stuffed rabbit and refusing to cry. Two college students from the end of the hall stood back to back as though they’d already agreed to die together. An old man leaned on a cane and kept muttering, “Not like this. Not like this.”

At the front of them was Mr. Voss from 4B, the building supervisor, a broad man in his fifties who still wore his work lanyard. He was holding a fire extinguisher like a club.

“Everybody listen!” Voss shouted. “I just came up from the lobby. The stairwell is clear. We go down together, right now, and we get out of the building. Move!”

It was a good voice. A leader’s voice. Half the hallway visibly relaxed.

And then Idris saw it.

It appeared under Voss’s chin, thin as a hair, like a line of text in the margin of a page. It had a label and a bar.

HONESTY ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮

For a second the bar was full and white. Then it cracked down the middle, a jagged red fracture, as if someone had dropped a glass inside it.

Idris blinked.

The crack stayed.

He looked at Mrs. Tahan. Nothing there. He looked at the students, the old man, Lina and her rabbit. Nothing. No bars, no lines. Only when someone looked at him and spoke did the thin white label bloom beneath their chin.

Only Voss’s had broken.

“Let’s go,” Dara said, already stepping toward the hallway.

Idris caught his sleeve. “Wait.”

“We have eight minutes—”

“He’s lying.”

Dara turned. “What?”

“Voss. The stairwell isn’t clear. He’s lying.”

“How do you know?”

That was the problem. Idris had no answer that didn’t sound insane. There’s a bar under his chin. It broke when he talked. He had a blank status screen, a brother who was Level 1 and terrified, and a stranger’s voice telling everyone what they wanted to hear.

Voss had noticed them.

His eyes dropped to the empty white frame still hanging in front of Idris, and a slow, unkind smile pulled at his mouth.

“Zero,” he read aloud. A few people laughed, small and nervous. “The System gave this one nothing. Kid, stay out of the way and let the grown-ups work.”

The crack in the bar widened.

Idris felt something cold settle in his stomach, and it wasn’t fear.

“Don’t take the stairs,” he said, loud enough for the whole hallway to hear. “Please. Please don’t.”

He looked straight at Mrs. Tahan, because she was the one who might listen. “Please. Take Lina out the window.”

Mrs. Tahan’s eyes flicked to his empty screen. Then to Voss’s confident face. He watched her weigh a boy with nothing against a man with a fire extinguisher, and he watched her decide.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She didn’t say it like she meant it. She said it like a door closing.

Nobody else moved for one second.

Then the crowd turned away from him. A river of people choosing the comfortable voice over the strange one, funneling toward the stairwell door. Lina looked back over her mother’s shoulder. She held up her rabbit and waved its paw at Idris, solemn and tiny.

The door swung shut behind them.

06:51.

“Idris.” Dara’s voice was low. “Tell me what you saw.”

“I can’t explain it.”

“Try.”

“There’s a bar. It showed up when he talked. It cracked when he lied.” Idris swallowed. “I don’t know why I can see it. I just know I’m right.”

His brother looked at him for a long time. Idris waited for the look people gave a kid who’d stopped making sense.

It didn’t come.

“Fire escape,” Dara said.

“What?”

“You said not the stairs. So we take the window.” He was already moving, shoving the kitchen window open and kicking the screen out. Cold evening air rushed in, smelling of rain and car exhaust. “Come on. You first.”

“Dara, if I’m wrong—”

“Then we get out the slow way and I owe you a very embarrassing apology.” He gave Idris a half smile, the first real one since the chime. “Go.”

Idris climbed out onto the iron landing. Dara followed, and together they started down.

05:30.

They were two floors from the ground when something moved on the wall.

Idris saw it first, because he’d been watching the shadows instead of the steps. It was low and wet and pale, the size of a large dog, clinging to the brick beside the window of 2B. It had too many joints in its legs. Its face was a smooth, eyeless wedge.

A new window snapped open in front of him.

HOLLOW SCAVENGER Level 2 HP 40 / 40

It turned its blank face toward them and made a soft, clicking sound.

“Dara.”

“I see it.”

“Dara, it’s—”

“I see it.” Dara moved past him without a word and planted himself on the stairs, one step above Idris, between him and the thing. His fists were up. They were trembling. But he didn’t back down.

A small icon flickered at the edge of his screen. Hold the Line.

The Scavenger launched itself across the gap.

It hit Dara in the chest with the sound of a dropped sack of wet clothes. He grunted, staggered, and caught the railing with one hand. Claws dragged across his shirt and left four red lines through the cloth. His HP bar flashed on Idris’s side of the air, though somehow he could see it.

Dara: HP 98 / 120

“Dara!”

“I’m fine!” He wasn’t. He drove his elbow into the thing’s side, then his fist, then his whole weight, and it screeched and slid down the stairs. It came back faster. Dara’s second punch landed on its leg and broke it with a crack like a snapping branch.

The third time, it didn’t get back up.

Silence settled over the fire escape, broken only by Dara’s heavy breathing.

HOLLOW SCAVENGER DEFEATED XP +40

Dara sagged against the railing, staring at his own hands as though they belonged to someone else. “I killed it,” he said. “Idris. I killed something.”

“You did.”

“I don’t feel good about that.”

“You shouldn’t have to.” Idris put a hand on his brother’s arm. “But thank you.”

A voice called softly from below.

“Hey! Up here, kids! Quick, come in this way!”

It was a window on the second floor, open wide, with a lamp glowing behind it. A man leaned out, thin and gray-haired, wearing a cardigan over pajamas. Mr. Okafor from 2B. Idris knew him. He fed the stray cat behind the building and always said hello.

“Climb in!” Mr. Okafor said. “It’s quicker through my apartment, and the creature is in the stairwell. I’ll hold the door.”

Idris looked at his chin.

HONESTY ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮

Full. Clean. White as bone.

He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “He’s telling the truth,” he whispered.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

They climbed through the window, and Mr. Okafor shut it behind them with shaking hands.

The apartment was small and warm and impossibly normal. A gray cat watched them from the sofa with polite disinterest. Framed photographs crowded the walls: a younger Mr. Okafor beside a woman in a yellow dress, a graduation, a fishing boat. Nothing in this room had been told yet that the world had ended.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, eyeing Dara’s shirt. “Are you scared?”

“A little,” Dara admitted.

“Me too,” said Mr. Okafor. “I’m terrified, honestly.”

The bar stayed white.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine, though,” he added quickly, patting Dara’s shoulder. “It’ll all be fine.”

The bar cracked. A small, thin line, hardly anything.

Idris stared at it.

So it wasn’t only villains. It wasn’t only men like Voss. It was a kind old man who needed to believe that things would be fine. A lie like that didn’t hurt anyone. But the System had marked it all the same, without judgment or mercy, exactly the same red.

It doesn’t tell me why, Idris thought. Only that.

He didn’t know yet how much that would matter.

From the stairwell on the other side of the apartment wall came the screaming.

It started muffled. Then sharp. Then so loud that the windows rattled. Under it ran a heavy, wet scraping, like something very large dragging itself up the inside of the building.

Mr. Okafor closed his eyes.

“Don’t listen,” he whispered. “Don’t listen, children.”

Idris listened.

He listened for a small voice, and a stuffed rabbit, and he didn’t hear either one. He only heard something stop.

00:42.

They went out through the lobby, which was empty now, the glass of the front doors fogged by the cold. Outside, the street was a strange, unfamiliar quiet. Streetlights flickered. A car alarm went off two blocks away and then gave up.

The countdown reached zero.

TUTORIAL COMPLETE. Survivors: 41 / 63 Rewards are being distributed.

Dara’s window flashed gold. His eyes went wide. “I’m Level 2.”

Idris’s window did nothing.

He stood on the curb, staring at the empty white frame, feeling something heavy and familiar settle over him. Being left out. Being skipped. The same feeling he’d had in every classroom, every line, every room where someone else got picked first.

Twenty-two people hadn’t made it. He had stood in a hallway and told them the truth, and they had walked past him anyway.

He thought of Mrs. Tahan’s whispered apology. He thought of Lina’s rabbit, one paw raised in a wave. He tried to picture them somewhere safe, in some other part of the building, in some other ending, and he couldn’t make the picture hold.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Dara said quietly, as if he’d followed the whole thought.

“I told them.”

“You did. And they didn’t listen.” Dara’s voice cracked on the last word. “That’s not the same as failing.”

Idris glanced at his brother’s chin out of habit. The bar there was white and full. Then, for a heartbeat, a hairline flicker ran through it, gone before he could be sure he’d seen it.

Dara touched his ear.

Idris said nothing.

Then a thin line of text appeared at the bottom of his screen.

SKILL UNLOCKED: ???

A second window popped open beside it. This one was smaller, jagged at the edges, and a sickly red color that didn’t match anything else the System had shown him. Its text flickered as if it were being typed in a hurry.

Okay. Okay okay okay. That is NOT supposed to be possible.

Idris stared at it.

“Dara,” he whispered. “Do you see that?”

“See what?”

The red window blinked.

He can’t. Only you can. Hi. I’m Help. Nice to meet you. Please don’t tell anyone I’m talking to you.

Another line crawled in underneath, slower this time.

Also, stop looking at people like that. They’ll notice you can see it.

And then, under that, almost too fast to read, one last message.

Someone wrote that line under your name, Zero. I didn’t.