Rion Vale sat at the back of the hall with his arms crossed and his stomach growling loud enough to turn heads.
Around him sat about two hundred other kids. All of them looked better fed than he was, which was not a high bar, and better dressed, which was an even lower one. That tracked. Rich kids got their awakening handled early and got pampered through it. Kids like Rion got a one-way ticket and a folded pamphlet.
The pamphlet said WELCOME TO REDLINE in cheerful yellow letters. Under that, smaller, it said Where Second Chances Begin.
"Second chances," Rion muttered. "Cute."
Every kid in this room had already had a first chance. They had walked into the awakening test at sixteen like everyone else in the world, and they had walked out exactly the same as they went in. Unawakened. Useless, if you asked the people who ran things, and nobody ever asked anybody else.
He shifted in the hard chair. His whole body ached from the bus, and he had not eaten since yesterday, and the kid next to him kept sneaking looks at Rion's face and then away, the way people did.
"You can just ask," Rion said, not turning his head.
The kid jumped. "Ask what?"
"Whether I'm a Vale." He finally looked over. "Yes. Whatever you heard, probably also yes. And no, I don't know why the name freaks people out, I was a baby. So we're all caught up."
The kid found something fascinating to look at on the ceiling.
Rion went back to being hungry.
A door opened at the front. A man walked out onto the low stage, and the room went quiet on its own, the way rooms do when someone expensive shows up. He was tall and clean and calm, with a coat that probably cost more than the bus. He reached the middle of the stage, looked out over two hundred rejects, and smiled like he was genuinely happy to see them.
That was the part that made Rion suspicious.
"Welcome," the man said. His voice carried without effort. "I'm Instructor Rourke. Every one of you came here because the test told you that you have not awakened. I want you to understand that the test is not the end of your story."
"Here it comes," Rion said under his breath.
"You have been told you are ordinary. You have been told you are the ones humanity can spare." Rourke let that sit. "I am telling you that the strongest people I have ever trained walked into this room exactly as unremarkable as you are right now."
A few kids sat up straighter. Rion did not. He had heard nice speeches before. Nice speeches were what people gave you right before they took something.
"Awakening," Rourke went on, "is not a gift handed down at sixteen and never again. It can be forced. Pressure, danger, the right moment. It has happened here, in this building, more times than the awakening authority would like on record." He smiled again. "So Redline does not hand you a classroom and a textbook. Redline gives you the moment. Right now. Today."
He clasped his hands.
"You are about to take our entrance exam. Survive it, and you have a place here, and a real shot at the power everyone told you that you would never have." A pause. "Some of you will not survive it. I would be lying if I pretended otherwise, and I don't lie to my students. That starts now."
The nice-speech feeling in the room curdled fast.
"Wait," said a girl near the front. "What do you mean survive."
Rourke's smile stayed exactly where it was.
"Good luck," he said.
The floor dropped out.
Not a trapdoor. The whole floor, all at once, like the building had decided it was done holding them up. Rion's chair went out from under him and his stomach shot into his throat and the last thing he saw was the ceiling getting very far away, very fast.
Then nothing.
Rion woke up on cold stone, in the dark, with a headache and a strong opinion about all of this.
"Okay," he said to the dark. "So they're insane. Good to know."
He sat up slow. Nothing broken. He patted himself down out of habit and found two things sitting on the ground beside him that had definitely not fallen with him. One was a short knife, plain and cheap, the kind you'd buy in a bulk pack. The other was a lantern, already lit, throwing a small circle of orange light.
He picked up the lantern first. Food would have been better. A lantern was not food.
Lifting it, he found he was in a round room made of rough stone, maybe twenty feet across, with a single low tunnel leading out. No door back. No stairs. No cheerful yellow pamphlet.
"Right," he said. "The moment. Very inspiring, Rourke."
He grabbed the knife too. It felt like a toy in his hand. He was not a big kid. He was fast and he was stubborn and he had learned early that if you were small and broke you either got clever or you got stepped on, and Rion had gone very hard in the clever direction.
He held the lantern up and went to the tunnel.
The tunnel was tight. He had to turn his shoulders in a couple of spots. The light bounced off wet stone and threw shadows that jumped when he moved, and he decided not to think too hard about the shadows.
Something moved up ahead.
He stopped. Held the lantern out. Down the tunnel, at the edge of the light, three low shapes crept toward him with their weight down on their knuckles.
"Oh good," Rion said. "Company."
They came into the light and he got a proper look. Small. About knee-high. Grey skin stretched over too many ribs, wide flat mouths packed with little teeth, black eyes with no white in them. Each one dragged a scrap of sharpened metal. He had seen the posters. Rift-spawn. The instructors called this kind gnashers, and the posters said they were weak and the posters also said they killed more first-year fodder than anything else in the world, because they never came alone and they never came at you one at a time.
All three of them looked at him.
Then all three of them ran.
"Nope," Rion said, and threw the lantern.
It was not a plan so much as a reflex, but it turned out to be a decent one. The lantern hit the lead gnasher square and burst, and burning oil went everywhere, and the tunnel lit up orange and screaming. The other two flinched off to the sides. Rion was already moving, low and fast, straight at the one on the left before it could get its feet back.
He hit it shoulder first and put all his weight behind the knife. It went in easier than he expected and the gnasher folded up around his arm, thin and light, barely there. He shook it off and spun.
The burning one was down and staying down. The third came at him from the side, low, fast, teeth first. He got the knife up. Too slow. It raked across his forearm and pain lit up his whole arm white-hot and he swore and stumbled back into the wall.
The gnasher scrambled for his throat.
Rion grabbed a fistful of loose stone off the ground and threw it in its face, and while it screeched and clawed at its eyes he stepped in and drove the knife down through the top of its skull. It shuddered and went still.
He stood there breathing hard, blood running warm down to his fingers, three dead monsters and one dead lantern around his feet.
"Great," he panted. "Love that for me."
The tunnel was mostly dark now. The only light left was the last of the burning oil, guttering low.
He tore a strip off his shirt and wrapped his arm, tight, teeth clenched. The cut was long but not deep. He'd live. Probably. He picked the best of the three scrap blades off the floor, tested the weight, and traded up from his cheap knife. Then he grabbed the little pot of unburned oil, soaked another strip of shirt, wound it around the metal shaft, and lit it off the dying flame.
A torch. Ugly, but his.
"Okay," he said, quieter now. "Keep moving. Don't die. Doable."
He went on down the tunnel.
The tunnel opened into a bigger cavern, and the far wall was where the trouble was.
He almost walked right under it. He lifted the torch to check the ceiling out of pure paranoia, and the light caught something clinging up there in the dark. Bigger than the gnashers. A lot bigger. Long grey limbs folded up under it, splayed flat against the stone like it had been poured there, and it was upside down, and it was watching him.
Rion stood very still.
"So we're not doing the friendly cave," he said. "Got it."
It dropped.
He threw himself sideways and it hit the ground where he'd been standing with a wet slap, and the whole cavern shook. Up close it was worse. It had too many joints and it moved wrong, scrabbling at him with limbs that bent the way limbs should not bend, and it was fast in a way the gnashers had only pretended to be.
He swung the torch. It flinched back from the fire. Good. He filed that away.
Then it went up the wall.
Straight up, no run-up, no jump, just up, sticking to sheer stone like the rules didn't apply to it. It skittered across the ceiling and came down at him from a new angle and he barely got clear, and it did it again, and again, and Rion realized with a cold drop in his gut that he could not win a fight where only one of them got to use every surface in the room.
He backed toward the corner, torch out, blade up, thinking fast.
"Okay. Okay. It sticks to walls. If I could stick to walls I could actually" (he ducked a swipe that took a chunk out of the stone by his head) "hit the stupid thing."
And a box of light opened in the air in front of his face.
He froze. The monster froze too, halfway up the wall, like it also saw it, though later he'd be sure it hadn't. The box was clean and pale and calm, and it hung there in the dark like it had every right to.
[ VESSEL ONLINE ] Host: Rion Vale Level 1 — Slots: 1 open
"What," Rion said.
The monster dropped again. He rolled. The box followed his eyes, patient, waiting.
Enemy detected: Wall-Clinger This unit possesses a claimable Trait. Defeat it to claim.
"Oh, sure," he said, scrambling up. "Defeat it. Why didn't I think of that."
But the thing was, he had a plan now, and the plan was the box. He didn't understand it and he didn't trust it and he was going to use it anyway, because that was the whole story of his life.
The Wall-Clinger came at him low. He didn't dodge this time. He waited, let it commit, and at the last second he jammed the torch straight into its face. It reared back screaming, blind for half a second, and half a second was all he needed. He stepped in under its guard and drove the scrap blade up into the soft place under its jaw with both hands and all his weight and every angry, hungry, stubborn thing in him.
It thrashed. He held on. It thrashed harder. He held on harder.
Then it stopped.
He let it drop and staggered back, arms shaking, and the box changed.
Wall-Clinger defeated. Claim its Trait? [ GRIP ] — total control of grip and adhesion. Y / N
Rion looked at the words. Then he looked at his own bloody, shaking hands.
"That's it?" he said. "The scary ceiling monster and its power is good grip? I climbed the fence at the food bank with my bare hands, buddy, I've had good grip my whole"
He stopped.
He looked up at the sheer stone walls the monster had been running around on like they were a floor. He looked at the tunnel behind him and thought about every fight he'd nearly lost in the last hour because the other guy had somewhere to stand and he didn't.
"...Actually," he said slowly, "yes. Claim it. Absolutely claim it."
Trait claimed: GRIP. Slot 1: GRIP.
Warmth spread down both his arms, into his palms, into his fingertips. He flexed his hands. They felt exactly the same. He frowned, walked to the wall, and put one hand flat against the stone.
It held.
He put the other hand up. Pulled. His whole weight came off the ground like the wall was the floor and he was just deciding to walk up it. He hung there, six inches off the ground, grinning like an idiot in a cave full of dead monsters.
"Okay," he said. "Okay, that's actually incredible."
He climbed. Straight up the wall he'd been cornered against a minute ago, hand over hand, sure as anything, and at the top he clung to the ceiling and looked down at the cavern and the cooling body of the thing that had almost had him, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, Rion Vale was having a genuinely good day.
Then the box lit up one more time, small, at the bottom of his vision, and this one did not feel like the others.
Host confirmed: Vale. Registry match found. 1 file. Sealed. It has been a long time.
The grin came off his face.
"...Been a long time since what," he said.
The box didn't answer. It folded up and vanished, and left him hanging on the ceiling of a cave with a stolen power, a name that scared strangers, and one more question than he'd had that morning.
He hung there a second longer.
"Cool," he said. "Cool cool cool. Super normal system. No notes."
Then he climbed down to find the exit.