Trevor did not argue. That was the thing about Trevor that Noah would remember for the rest of his life. He was told to move nine hundred people and he stood up off the curb and cupped both hands around his mouth and started yelling like a guy calling a number at a deli counter.
"EVERYBODY IN THE STORE. IN THE STORE. LET'S GO, IN THE STORE."
Nobody moved for about two seconds.
Then the thing behind the neighborhood made a sound, and everybody moved at once.
It was not a roar. Noah had been braced for a roar. It was a low flat note like somebody dragging a bow across the biggest string on the biggest instrument in the world, and it came up through the asphalt into his one shoe, and every car alarm in the lot went off in the same half second.
Nine hundred and forty people ran for a grocery store.
"Mara." Noah got her under the arm and half carried her through the crowd, past the folding table, past the Red Cross woman who was screaming at people to walk. "Stay with her. That lady. You see her? Go."
"You said you'd come back."
"I did come back. I'm doing it again."
He shoved her through the doors.
Then he turned around and looked at the parking lot, and while he was looking at it, he finally did the thing he'd been putting off for four hours.
He looked at the numbers.
*****
[NOAH REYES]
[RACE: HUMAN, 99.4%]
[CLASS: NONE]
[LEVEL 2. 40 / 200 XP]
[STRENGTH: 9]
[AGILITY: 9]
[ENDURANCE: 11]
[SENSE: 10]
[UNSPENT: 3]
[BLOOD: SLOT 1 OF 1. UNCLASSIFIED.]
[SKILLS: NONE]
[TITLES: 1]
"Ten's average," Noah said. "Right? Ten's a regular guy."
"That'd be my guess."
"I'm under on two of them."
"You've slept about four hours a night since March," Ellery said. "Don't take it personal."
He looked at the word CLASS, because it was the only line up there that sounded like it belonged to somebody who knew what they were doing.
[CLASS: NONE. A CLASS IS NOT ASSIGNED. IT IS ARRIVED AT.]
"Cool," Noah said. "Thanks."
[SKILLS: NONE. SKILLS ARE NOT GRANTED. THEY ARE REPEATED UNTIL THEY STICK.]
"Okay, that one's actually useful."
"Write that down," Ellery said. "That's the first straight answer either of us has gotten all night."
Then Noah looked at the last line, the one that said he had a title, and made the mistake of wanting to know what it was.
The letters came apart and put themselves back together crooked and small, the way they had in the cemetery when the system ran out of words it knew.
[TITLE: the one who dug her back in.]
Noah stood in a parking lot and looked at that for about three seconds.
"Take it off."
"Kid."
"Take it off me."
Ellery didn't say anything, because there wasn't anything, and the letters sat there in the dark being true.
Then the first wave came over the median.
*****
They were smaller than the one in the cemetery. That was the good news and it lasted about four seconds, because there were a lot of them and they were fast.
Dog sized. Same wrong build, ribs on the outside, no faces, running with that pour that made your eyes slide off them. They came across the entrance road in a loose spread and hit the parked cars and went over them instead of around.
The Guard opened up.
Noah found out two things in the next ten seconds. Bullets worked. And there weren't enough bullets.
The line held at the folding table for maybe fifteen seconds, and then it didn't, and then it was people running between cars and a soldier on the hood of a Tacoma firing down at something under it and the sound of nine hundred people trying to fit through a doorway.
Which was the actual problem.
The doors.
They were automatic. Both sets. And the sensor was doing exactly what it was built to do, which was open, wait, close, open, wait, close, and a crowd does not move through a door that keeps thinking about it.
Noah got to them and got his hands on the rubber edge of the left one and pulled and it fought him, because a door motor is stronger than a nineteen year old.
"HELP ME HOLD IT."
Two guys got on it with him. It came open the rest of the way and the crowd went through four wide instead of two, and Noah stood there in the doorway with his shoulder against the glass and did the math on how many people were still outside.
Two hundred. Maybe more.
And out past the light, coming across the fire lane, twenty of those things.
He had three points.
He did not think about it. That was the whole decision, and he made it in the time it takes to breathe in, standing in a jammed grocery store door with his shoulder on the glass.
[AGILITY +3]
[AGILITY: 12]
It went into him like cold water in a hot mouth.
The parking lot did not slow down. That was the part he could never get anybody to understand afterward. Nothing slowed down. He just stopped being late.
His feet found the ground about a half second before he asked them to. The distance between two parked cars stopped being a thing he had to plan.
Noah let go of the door and ran.
*****
He got to the Tacoma in about a second and a half.
The soldier on the hood was out of ammunition and doing something with a magazine and there was one coming up the tailgate behind her, and Noah hit it with the shovel across the side of the head and learned his second lesson of the night.
He was fast now. He was not strong.
The shovel bounced. The thing turned its whole body toward him, and Noah went backward off the truck bed and landed on the asphalt on his feet, which was new, and which surprised him so much he almost died right there.
It came off the truck at him. He wasn't there anymore.
That was how the next four minutes went. He couldn't hurt them. He could be somewhere else, always, every time, and it turned out that was worth more than hitting.
He got the fallen kid by the ice machine and had him at the doors before the kid finished screaming.
He got the woman who'd gone down between two cars with her ankle wrong, and he did not carry her well, and she told him so.
He got a guy who was standing completely still in the middle of the fire lane looking at his own hands, and that man never did explain what happened to him, and Noah stopped asking after a while.
Eleven trips. He counted, later, from the sore places.
Somewhere around the eighth one, with a man's whole weight across his shoulders and his knees telling him about it, the letters came up in the corner of everything.
[REPETITION THRESHOLD MET.]
[SKILL LEARNED: CARRY (1)]
[FUNCTION: what you pick up gets lighter.]
Noah kept running. He'd think about it later, in daylight, sitting on a loading dock with a bottle of water, and it would knock the wind out of him a little.
Out of everything in the world he could have gotten first, out of every way a person can be dangerous, what his body had done enough times to be good at was carrying people who couldn't walk.
He'd been doing it since March.
And on the twelfth trip, coming back out, he saw the doors go down.
*****
One of them had gotten inside the vestibule.
The doors are automatic, and automatic means it works for anything with a body. It had come in behind the last group and turned around in that little glass box between the two sets of doors, and people were screaming in the produce section and the second set of doors was standing wide open with nothing between it and the store.
Trevor was in the vestibule.
He was in there with a shopping cart, of all the things in the world, a shopping cart he'd shoved sideways into the gap, and he was leaning on it with both arms and his heels skidding on the tile.
The thing hit the cart and Trevor went into the glass.
Noah heard it from forty feet away. Not the glass. The other sound.
Trevor went down under the cart with the thing on top of it and his face went a color Noah had seen exactly once before, in a living room, in March, and the sound coming out of him was a person trying to breathe through a hole that had closed.
Noah was moving. He was fast now. He was not going to be fast enough and he knew it at about step three.
Then the vestibule lit up.
There wasn't a flash. Nothing exploded. The air around Trevor's hands just went wrong, went thick, the way a road goes when it's hot, and then it went solid, and then the thing on top of the cart was not on top of the cart anymore.
It hit the ceiling. It hit the ceiling of a grocery store vestibule hard enough to come apart, and then it landed in a rack of free real estate magazines and did not get up.
Trevor lay on the tile under a shopping cart, breathing, both hands out in front of him, staring at them.
"What," he said.
"Yeah," said Noah.
"WHAT."
*****
They got the outer doors shut and a pallet jack across them and a stack of forty pound bags of water softener salt on top of that.
Noah sat down on the tile in the vestibule with his back against the glass and his legs out in front of him, and the shaking started in his hands and went up his arms and got into his jaw.
Trevor sat next to him, still looking at his hands.
"Did I do that."
"Yeah."
"How did I do that."
"I don't know," Noah said, and it was the truest thing he'd said all night. Then, before he could talk himself out of it: "Hey. Do you see anything?"
"See what."
"Words." Noah tapped the air in front of his own face, which he understood, doing it, looked insane. "Letters. Like a screen, kind of, in the corner. Numbers on it."
Trevor looked at him with the specific patience of a guy who works retail.
"No," he said.
"Nothing at all."
"Man, I can barely see the ceiling." He flexed his fingers and watched them do it. "It's not like that. There's no, like. It's a pressure? It's like when your ears want to pop and they won't. It's all around me and it's kind of pushing, and when I got scared I just." He made a shoving motion at nothing. "I pushed back on it."
"You pushed back on it."
"I don't know how else to say it."
Noah sat with that.
Nine hundred people in that building and however many hundred million out past the doors, and every single one of them was going to have to guess. Feel around in the dark. Find out what they could do by nearly dying and then find out how much of it they had by running out at the worst possible moment.
And he had a menu.
"Don't tell him," Ellery said quietly.
"I wasn't going to."
"I know. I'm saying it out loud so it's a thing I said."
"That's mine," Noah said. "You can't use that."
"He almost died," Ellery said. "And then he didn't. That's the whole thing, kid. That's how it works out here." A pause. "It's leaking. My side into your side. It's been leaking since the seam opened and every person in that building is full of it and none of them know, because the thing that opens somebody up is going right to the edge and coming back."
"So everybody who almost dies."
"Everybody who almost dies."
Noah looked down at his own side, at the four pale seams under the ruined shirt.
"I almost died," he said. "In the cemetery. That thing put me face down on a headstone and I was gone, Ellery, I was all the way gone."
"Yeah."
"So why don't I have what he has."
Ellery was quiet a second.
"Because you were first," he said. "You went over that seam by twenty minutes. Nothing was in the air yet, kid. Whatever this is, it hadn't finished deciding what it was going to be. You went to the edge and came back and there was nothing out there to catch you."
"So I got nothing."
"You got me," Ellery said. "For whatever that's worth. I was the only thing that fell that early."
Noah looked out through the glass at the parking lot, at the cars with their alarms still going, at nine hundred people's worth of dropped phones and shoes and one folding table on its side.
Tonight, a whole planet's worth of people were going right to the edge.
"Oh," he said.
*****
[+180 XP]
[LEVEL 3]
[+3 UNSPENT POINTS]
Noah did not spend them. He'd learned that much.
He got up on legs that did not want him to and went and found Mara sitting on the bottom shelf of the empty bread rack in aisle nine with the Red Cross woman standing over her like a hen, and Mara saw him and did not say anything and did not have to.
Then the low note came again, from outside, closer.
Everybody in aisle nine went quiet.
Noah walked back up to the front of the store and looked out through the glass and the pallet jack and the salt.
Out past the light, standing in the entrance road where the folding table used to be, was the black shape from the sky. It was on the ground now. Standing up, it was taller than the store.
It was not coming any closer.
It was just standing there in the dark, at the edge of the lot, looking at the building.
"Kid," Ellery said.
"Yeah."
"It's counting."