The alarm is already screaming when Jace hits the second-flight landing. A red strobe punches the air, turning the stairwell into a blinking wound. Sweat slicks his palm on the rail. Somebody drops a laundry basket two floors below; socks explode like confetti.
"Fire drill!" a Resident Assistant yells, voice ricocheting. "Move!"
Jace takes the last twelve steps two at a time. He isn't thinking about drills. He's thinking about wind and glass and the sudden vanishing of a square of sky. His knee wants to betray him like it did on set that day; he tells it no and it listens, for once.
He shoulders the door to the third floor and slams into a corridor of sleep-drunk students in pajama pants. The hallway smells like ramen and aerosol deodorant and somebody's vanilla candle dying a brave, illegal death. At the far end, his door is open—Max leaning out, grinning around a toothbrush like a pirate with a dagger.
"There he is," Max calls over the alarm, foam bright at the corner of his mouth. "Romeo returns alone. Did she dodge left?"
Jace lurches past a guy wrestling with a goldfish bowl—water kissing the lip every time the strobe hits—and into the room. Their fan is trying to lift off the ceiling. The window is cracked an inch; cold night presses its face to the glass.
"Close call?" Max asks, spitting into the sink. "Or did she do that thing where she says 'We should hang out as friends' which everybody knows is Latin for 'Please stop texting me your gym selfies'—"
"I died," Jace says without meaning to. It comes out steady, like a cue line when the camera's rolling.
Max blinks at him, toothbrush halfway to the plastic cup. "You're very bad at metaphors."
Jace grabs the back of the chair to keep the room from sliding. The strobe doesn't help—the blink stutters everything into frames. It's too much like the set. Too much like the last thing he saw: window, leap, the gentle sag of an airbag that was one perfect meter to the left.
He breathes once. Twice. The siren shreds the seconds in half and hides them like a card trick.
"Hey." Max softens, somehow audible under the alarm. "You good?"
Jace nods. His neck feels like it belongs to a smarter man. "Yeah. Just dizzy."
"Probably because you smell like a bar that lost a fight." Max flips him a towel. "Mouthwash is in the right drawer. No judgment. Okay, some judgment."
He's halfway to the sink when the world draws a thin white rectangle in midair.
It hangs in the air with the implacable confidence of something that has always existed and only now got bored enough to show itself. The edges are clean. The text is cold.
[HOST] Jace Carter[AGE] 19[SPECIES] Primate[TALENT] Handsome[WELFARE] None[ATTRIBUTE POINTS] 0
The mirror over the sink throws his face back at him with fluorescent cruelty: the cut at his hairline he forgot about, the ridiculous eyebrows his aunt swore would make him a star, the kind of jaw casting directors use as a ruler. In the glass, the white rectangle hovers obediently over his shoulder, the text reflected thin and ghostly.
Max is at the doorway again, jammed between jambs, trying to see what Jace is staring at. All he sees is air. "If you're practicing your telekinesis, I support you."
Jace lifts a hand and moves it through the field of text. Cold breath on the skin. Not wind. Not heat. Something like a fridge opening in an empty house.
"Okay," he says, calm.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Newbie Gift Pack available. Open now?
"Open."
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Newbie Gift Pack opened.[SYSTEM PROMPT] Welfare unlocked: Level 1 Money Welfare[SYSTEM PROMPT] Welfare unlocked: Level 1 Cashback Welfare
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Level 1 Money Welfare: incoming money may critically increase ×2–×3 based on Talent.[SYSTEM PROMPT] Cap: $100,000 per day (no currency restriction).[SYSTEM PROMPT] Exclusions: system-derived money and borrowed money are not eligible.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Level 1 Cashback Welfare: spending may return ×0–×3 based on Talent.[SYSTEM PROMPT] Cap: $100,000 per day (no currency restriction).[SYSTEM PROMPT] Exclusions: system-derived money and borrowed money are not eligible.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Note: Attribute Points accrue over time and can be assigned to upgrade welfare.
Max talks over the alarm like it owes him money. "Is now a bad time to ask if your date's name rhymes with 'left me on read'?"
"Later."
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Random Attribute Point awarded. Current Attribute Points: 1.
"Show upgrade menu."
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Upgrade menu: assign 1 Attribute Point to…• Money Welfare — Improves multiplier chance and ceiling on income events.• Cashback Welfare — Improves multiplier chance and ceiling on spend events.• Constitution Talent — Improves physical resilience.• Charm Talent — Improves charisma (requires significant values to be noticeable).• Art Talent — Improves artistic skill and inner cultivation.
The RA appears in their doorway with a clipboard. "Gentlemen! Stairwell now. Bring your ID."
"We'll be right there," Jace says, eyes on the panel.
He does the math fast: cap, exclusions, timing. If I juice Money, I need income now. If I juice Cashback, I can roll in five. Split receipts. Stack micro-edges.
Max taps the frame in time with the siren. "Thirty seconds."
Jace fishes his phone out and wakes the lock screen with his thumb. The background is a stupid photo Max took of him asleep in a lecture, mouth open, marker mustache. The wallet app sits there like a taunt. He opens it: balance so low it looks like a joke someone forgot to punchline.
He checks his actual wallet, the leather gone soft at the fold: a transit card that might be empty, a diner punch card with three sad stamps, a thin stack of mixed bills, a couple of coins, a paperclip for no reason at all. He lays them on the desk in a neat row as if a neat row will breed.
Max watches him like a scientist observing a raccoon do math. "We're really not evacuating, huh."
"In a minute." Jace glances at the panel. The alarm strobe paints the white text red once every beat, like it's bleeding and pretending not to.
He wants to ask questions out loud and doesn't. If Max spots me for dinner, does that count as borrowed money? If I transfer him back immediately, does the system care? The menu doesn't change. It's a judge, not a tutor.
He flicks to the Talent line that says Charm and snorts despite himself. Requires significant values. He's gotten by on that face before—free coffee, a free pass out of trouble—but it never paid rent. Constitution makes his knuckles itch; the memory of the fall sits in the bone. Later, he tells it. You'll get your points.
The RA is back in the hall, pounding on the next door. Someone inside yells they're in the shower. Somebody else opens their door and asks if they can bring their cat. "No pets!" the RA shouts, harassed by fate.
Jace lines up his plan in small, edible bites so it doesn't choke him. Vending machine: buy water, test the roll. Campus store: toothpaste, razors, phone card, split receipts, more rolls. Transit: load the card even if I walk everywhere tomorrow—still a spend. Dinner: pay upfront, force the spin before eating. Each step is a rung. Each rung is something he can reach with what he's got.
The strobe ticks. The alarm drills. Jace inhales until his ribs ache and lets it go. "Okay. One," he says to himself. "Two." He says it like the coordinator said it on set, counting beats to a jump.
He lifts his hand and hovers higher, just to feel the gravity of choice. The menu waits, patient as winter. He lowers until his fingertip casts a ghost shadow on Money Welfare, then slides to Cashback Welfare. The word glows like a lane opening on a highway at midnight.
"Ten seconds," Max warns without looking at his imaginary watch.
Jace ignores him. He glances down the list again, combs it for traps. Exclusions are written twice in two different places, like the system knows how human beings think when money is involved. No borrowed money. There goes a dozen scams before they're even born. No system money. So no rolling system payouts into more system payouts and building a perpetual motion machine. He doesn't even get to be mad; whoever wrote this has met the part of Jace that would have tried it.
He looks back at his reflection. His face looks awake in a way he hasn't seen since he was sixteen and the world felt like a room he could run around in without hitting a wall. The alarm paints a pulse on his cheekbone. His eyes are clear. He hates and loves everything about that.
"Five," Max says.
"Shut it."
"You said thirty seconds. I'm a man of schedules."
"Since when?"
"Since now." Max leans in the doorframe like he's holding the building up with one shoulder. "You're scaring me in a fun way."
"Good." Jace rolls his neck, earning three small cracks that feel like the hinge of a door agreeing to open. He reaches for the towel, wipes his face, hangs it back perfectly on the hook because he needs one perfect thing within reach.
He considers saying something like a prayer. He doesn't. He thinks instead of rent and of the way his mother once counted coins at the kitchen table, head bowed like she was translating them into a language that might make more sense. He hated that memory for years because it made him feel small. Now it makes him feel exact.
He touches the phone on the counter with the back of his knuckles, a boxer's little ritual. The panel doesn't flicker. The alarm doesn't stop.
He can see the vending machine in his head already, a stainless-steel oracle that only tells the truth if you feed it the right questions. He can see the campus store, the bored cashier, the receipts like snow. He can see the hotpot place with the fogged windows and the burner that sounds like a dragon clearing its throat. The plan is a path through the night with numbers nailed to the trees. He just has to take the first step.
"Three," Max says, triumphant, because he worked out how to count backward from five. "Two. One."
Jace lets the numbers slide past him. He could make the RA happy and walk downstairs like a good citizen. He will. He will, in one minute. Forty seconds. He will join the herd in the cold and shiver while people complain about alarms that happen at the worst times for the best reasons. He will do all of that and none of it will change the thing he has to do first.
He sets his feet like he's about to land a jump. Knees soft. Shoulders loose. Breath even. He wants the moment to know he respects it.
"Okay," Max says, softer now, a friend on the edge of a diving board talking you into the clean arc. "Okay."
Jace smiles at the panel. "Okay."
He lifts his finger over Money Welfare, slides to Cashback Welfare, and lets a small smile into the room. He holds there, finger hovering, alarm chewing the air, Max watching him like he's about to jump.
He waits at the edge of the touch that decides the day.