The message came on the sixth day, a little after four in the afternoon.
Alley behind my building. Corner of Ash and Seventh. 6pm. Don't come to the front.
Nothing else. No hi, no question mark. Jason read it standing at the window, and then read it again, and then went to his room and sat on the floor and wrapped his arm.
* * *
The city was quieter on the sixth day than on the fourth. People had stopped pretending quite so hard. The lines outside the shops were shorter, and the shelves inside them emptier, and the police cars parked across the end of the bridge over the river had been joined by a big gray truck with no markings on it at all. A man in a dark coat stood beside it, not doing anything, watching the cars turn back.
Jason walked past on the far side of the street, with his left hand in his pocket, and didn't look at him.
Sarah's building was a narrow brick block on the corner of Ash and Seventh, four floors over a laundromat. Above the front door, bright and new and slightly crooked, somebody had screwed a small white camera to the wall. Its little red light was on.
He walked past the front without slowing, the way she had told him to, and turned down the side street, and found the alley.
It was narrow and dim and smelled of wet cardboard and laundry steam. There were three green dumpsters along one wall and a rusted fire escape zigzagging up the other, and at the far end, sitting on an upturned crate between the second dumpster and the laundromat's back door, with her hood up and her knees pulled up to her chin, was Sarah.
She had two cans of soda beside her on the ground. She held one out to him without getting up.
"You came," she said.
"You asked."
"I know. I just wasn't sure." She looked at his arm, wrapped in black from the shoulder to the knuckles, and her eyebrows went up a little. "Nice. Very subtle. You look like you lost a fight with a sheep."
He took the can, and sat down on the crate beside hers, with his back against the brick.
"The camera," he said.
"Landlord put it up two days ago." She pulled a face. "Everybody's putting up cameras. My mom thinks it's great. It's for our safety, Sarah. I don't want my face on it every time I go out the door. I don't want your face on it." She glanced at him. "Especially not your face. No offense."
"None taken."
She opened her own can, and didn't drink from it, and turned it slowly around in her hands.
He waited.
* * *
"They texted me," she said at last.
"Who?"
"I don't know. That's the thing. I don't know who." She took out her phone, scrolled, and held it out to him without looking at it.
It was a message from a number with no name. Three days old. Short.
You're not the only one. Open the door at nine. Bring it with you.
Jason read it twice. Then he handed the phone back.
"Bring it with you," Sarah said. She laughed, a little wildly. "Bring it with me. It's a shark, Jason. Was I supposed to carry it down the stairs in a bucket?"
"Did you open the door?"
"No." She shook her head. "Someone knocked. At nine exactly. Three knocks, really polite. I was sitting on the floor of the bathroom with the light off and my hand over my mouth. My mom was at work. They knocked, and they waited, and they knocked again, and then they went away." She looked down at the can. "And the next day the news said there was a terrorist organization in the city. The Association. Weapons at the port. Everybody has to report anything suspicious." She was quiet for a moment. "So either I just dodged a bullet. Or I just shut the door on the only people in this whole city who know what's going on."
"You don't know it was them."
"No. I don't know anything." She turned the can around again. "Did you get one?"
"No."
"Lucky." She looked at him sideways. "Or they just haven't found you yet."
Jason said nothing. He thought about how the message had found her: a phone number, an address, the right door, three days after the world fell over. Someone had known exactly where to look.
"There's the billboards too," Sarah said. "You've seen them? The silver eye?"
"Generously compensated."
"I looked them up." She said it quickly, as if she wanted to get it over with. "Silver Eyes. They have a website. It's all very nice, very clean. Support, they call it. Integration programs. People online say they pay you just to come in and talk to them. Like, a lot. More than my mom makes in a year, just for an interview."
She stopped.
Jason didn't say anything. He looked at her, sitting on her crate with her hood up and her knees pulled in, and he thought about a girl in a lecture hall saying I thought about my mom. Two jobs since I was eight. My dad's back. He thought about the greater the difficulty, the greater the reward.
"I haven't called," Sarah said. "Okay? Don't look at me like that. I haven't called them."
"I'm not looking at you like anything."
"You are. You're doing the thing. The quiet thing." She sighed, and leaned her head back against the brick. "I'm just saying. They pay. And nobody else is paying anybody. The uni's closed. My mom's restaurant is closed because nothing can get into the city. My dad's on the couch with his back, watching the news all day, and every time they say sleepers, he looks at me." She closed her eyes. "I know it's stupid. I know there's no such thing as generously compensated for nothing. I just... think about it. At night."
"I know," said Jason.
He did.
* * *
They drank their sodas. It was too sweet, and warm, and he drank all of it anyway, slowly, the way he drank everything.
"Did it read you a list?" Sarah said. "At the end?"
He looked at her.
"After it said Trial concluded." She waved the can vaguely at the sky. "Talents registered. And then a whole list. Like a report card." She ticked them off on her fingers. "Swimming, three. Fishing, two. Navigation, one, which I think is it being sarcastic, because I never navigated anywhere, I just went where the current wanted. Rope work, two. Willpower, three." She made a face. "Three's Veteran. Did you know that? I'm a veteran swimmer. I couldn't do a length of the pool before."
"Mine said that too," Jason said. "Veteran."
"For what?"
"Most of it."
She waited. When he didn't go on, she nudged his foot with hers. "Come on. I showed you mine."
So he told her. Fishing. Survival. Knifework. Seamanship. Field medicine. Marksmanship. Board games. Perception. Three, three, three, all the way down the list.
Sarah's eyebrows went up a little further with every one. At board games, she laughed out loud, and then clapped her hand over her mouth and looked at the laundromat door.
"Board games," she said. "It gave you a talent for board games."
"I played a lot."
"On an island."
"I made a board."
She stared at him. Then she shook her head slowly, as if she had decided that there were some things she was simply not going to ask about.
"And willpower?" she said.
"Five."
Sarah stopped smiling.
"Five," she repeated. "What's five called?"
"It didn't say."
"It said Veteran for three. It must have a name for five."
"It didn't say," Jason said again.
She looked at him for a long moment, in the dim light of the alley, with the laundry steam drifting past between them. He saw her look at his eyes, the way she had looked at them in the lecture hall when she first woke up. Then at his arm. Then back at his eyes.
"Okay," she said quietly. "Okay."
She didn't ask anything else about it. He was grateful.
* * *
"I can't look at the sea," she said, after a while.
It came out of nowhere. She was looking at the far end of the alley, where a sliver of street showed between the buildings, and a bus went past.
"Not the real sea, obviously, there isn't any. Pictures. TV. There was an ad for a cruise on the first night, all blue water and white boats, and I threw up in the kitchen sink." She laughed, very short. "My mom made fish on Sunday. Before all this, I mean, every Sunday, it's a thing. She made it on Sunday because she wanted things to be normal. And I sat there and looked at it and I couldn't. I just couldn't. She cried."
"I had fish soup," Jason said. "Two days ago. At the mall."
Sarah turned her head and stared at him.
"It was good," he said.
"You are," Sarah said slowly, "the weirdest person I have ever met." But something in her face had loosened. "Eleven months. Do you know what I ate for eleven months?"
"Fish."
"Raw fish. With a pocket knife. I named them. Did you do that? Not the ones I ate. Well. Some of the ones I ate." She was almost smiling. "There was a big gray one that followed the raft for weeks. I called him Professor Hawkins, because he had the same face. Sort of disappointed. Like you'd let him down. I talked to him every day." The smile went away. "And now the real Hawkins is lying in a bed at Mercy, and my cousin says they've stopped saying when he wakes up, and I keep thinking, I spent eleven months talking to a fish with his face. Is that... is that bad? Is that a bad thing to have done?"
"No," said Jason. "I talked to a can of peaches."
Sarah let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"Did it answer?"
"Not once."
"Mine neither," she said. "Professor Hawkins never said a word."
They sat there for a moment in the alley, side by side on their crates, and neither of them said anything, and it was not uncomfortable at all.
* * *
"Show me yours," she said eventually. "Your rune. You've got it with you, haven't you? You've got that look. Like you've got something in your pocket you keep checking."
He hesitated. Then he took the crest out of his jacket pocket and put it in her hand.
She turned it over in the dim light. The dark old metal. The salamander, coiled with its tail touching its head. The three small stars.
"Salamander, Third Rank Entry," Jason said. "Four-five."
"Four-five," Sarah said. "Mine's eight-three." She frowned. "Is that better or worse?"
"I don't know."
"Four's smaller than eight. So, worse? Like levels. Level eight beats level four."
"Or it's a ranking," Jason said. "First place is number one."
"Then you'd be better." She considered this, and didn't seem to like it much. "Or it doesn't mean anything at all, and it's just making us guess, because it thinks that's funny." She handed the crest back. "It does think things are funny. Did you notice that? It never laughs. But you can tell."
Jason put the crest back in his pocket. "What's yours called?"
"Heavy Shark." She said it a little self-consciously, like someone admitting to a middle name. "That's it. That's the whole name. It sounds like a toy, right? Like something you'd win at a fair." She was quiet for a second. "But that's not what it feels like. When I think about it, it feels like there's something big and slow and gentle, hanging in the water somewhere, waiting for me. And inside it there's this... thing. A gatling. I looked it up. The kind with all the barrels that spin." She pulled her knees in tighter. "I still haven't tried it. I'm not calling a shark with a gatling inside it into my mom's bathtub, Jason."
"Probably wise."
"And entry," she said, looking at his pocket. "Third Rank Entry. Entry into what?"
"I don't know."
"Does it worry you?"
Jason thought about it. He thought about a violet moon and a black shore. About a figure in rags with a white face, sitting across an empty board, and a game he had lost without ever knowing the rules.
"Yes," he said.
* * *
The light at the end of the alley had gone orange. Somewhere across the city, a church clock was striking seven. Four hours until the curfew, and the sirens, and the empty streets.
"It told me my next trial will come," Sarah said. "At the end. Rest, Sarah. Your next trial will come." She was looking at her hands. "Did it tell you that?"
"It said when I'm ready."
"When you're ready." She laughed under her breath. "Well. I'm never going to be ready. So maybe I'm safe."
"I don't think it works like that."
"No," she said. "Me neither."
She stood up, and brushed off the back of her jeans, and picked up the two empty cans and held them for a moment as if she didn't know what to do with them. Then she dropped them in the dumpster, one, two, and they clanged against the bottom.
"I'm not going to text you every day," she said, without looking at him. "Okay? I'm not... I can't do that. I've got my mom, and my dad, and the money, and the shark, and the knocking at nine o'clock, and I can't carry any more. I'm sorry. I just can't."
"I know."
"But if something happens." She looked at him then. "If they knock on your door. Or the next one comes. Or you... I don't know. If something happens. You tell me. And I'll tell you. Deal?"
"Deal."
She nodded. She stood there a second longer, with her hands in the pocket of her hoodie, looking at him: at the black wool on his arm, and at his face, and at whatever she saw behind it. She looked as if she wanted to say something else.
Then she turned and went to the laundromat's back door, and knocked on it twice, and someone inside opened it, and she was gone.
* * *
Jason walked home the long way, through streets that were already starting to empty.
At the corner of Ash and Seventh, he glanced up without meaning to. Above Sarah's front door, the little white camera was still looking down at the street, with its red light on.
He looked away, and put his head down, and kept walking.
When he got home, Tim was on the couch, exactly where he had left him.
"Where were you?" Tim said, without taking his eyes off the screen.
"Seeing a friend."
There was a long pause. Tim paused the game. He turned his head, very slowly, and looked at Jason with an expression of total disbelief.
"You have friends?" he said. "Other than me?"
"One," said Jason.
Tim thought about this for a while. Then he nodded, as if it made sense, and turned back to the screen, and unpaused the game.
"Is she pretty?" he said.
Jason went to his room, and closed the door, and sat down on the floor under the window. Then he unwound the scarf from his arm, turn by turn, slowly, the way he had wound it.
He was smiling, a little. He didn't quite know why.