I wake to a mouth full of dust and the city's familiar, indifferent clatter. My head is a drumline today; the tinnitus settles into the same note like a neighbor who refuses to move out. I roll off Corin's crate bed and pretend I didn't sleep in a stack of something that once had value. Pride is a thing you can leave in a locker with your lunch if you want to be useful.
System: Status check — Shade Rank 1 active. Side effect reminder: mild tinnitus persists. Daily quest progress: Compliment 12 shadows (3/12).
I grumble at the System because conversations with entities that can rearrange reality deserve sarcasm. It blinks into my head with all the cheerfulness of someone who doesn't understand personal space. Fine. I get up and lace my shoes like a man rehearsing for a bad day.
Corin is already up, cataloging the yard's small defeats—broken hinges, half a radio, a chair missing a leg. He has a habit of making lists out of ruin; it keeps him from inventing ghosts. He offers me boiled water in a dented cup, which is Corin's version of luxury.
"You look like you met something that refuses to be polite," he says, not bothering to pretend that market fights are normal.
"I did," I tell him. "And it was ruder than I expected."
He doesn't press. Corin knows how to fold questions into work. He hands me a pair of gloves and a square of paper with an address; salvage run two blocks from the river. "Short job. Pay enough for real tea." He expects me to go. I expect to go. Expectation is currency in our world.
We walk with the morning damp on our shoulders. The city is half‑asleep and thinks it can be honest in that state. I keep the ledger tucked into my jacket like a small, unwritten promise. Sometimes I stare at the margin where I wrote Find stabilizer and feel like someone else scribbled the note for me. Memory already has a slippery quality around the ledger's edges, like a photograph left in sunlight.
At the site, the salvage crew works with the practical violence of people who have seen storms take more than roofs. A low building leans like it's ashamed. Inside, the place smells of rust and machines that used to be useful. Light struggles to find the corners; Echo Sight picks out the motion lines people left—where a table broke, where someone ran for a door. The afterimages are small maps, helpful and invasive.
System: Suggestion — Observe salvage team techniques to increase survival odds. Reward: 20 XP.
The System offers survival tips like it's a concerned parent. I obey it the way you obey traffic signals: because invisible rules save you from a lot of stupidity.
Corin puts me on the job moving a beam that's pinning a collapsed crate. His instructions are blunt: "Lift. Shift. Watch for echoes." Simple, useful. Echo Sight doesn't make me stronger; it just gives me more data to be bad with. I follow the faint blue lines of motion and avoid the weak points. For once my clumsy is useful instead of heroic.
Halfway through, a salvage alarm—someone triggers an old ward sensor—and the building complains. Shadows stir near the back wall like something with a bad memory trying to leave the room. The crew tenses. I feel the echo like a hand at my throat: there and not there, the ghost of a movement that promises trouble.
We all know how these go. You get a blast of adrenaline, a question of where to put bravery, and then the world gives you a way to pay for your choices. Corin signals with a look—old, efficient—with the kind of shorthand long friendship invents. We move together like people who have practiced missing good decisions.
The shadows that come are small at first, like scraps of dark cloth. They try for the tools and the working hands, the soft and easy targets. Echo Sight tells me where they will shove and where the floor will give. I move a bit before I think—pull an ankle, push a beam—and one of the shadows scrapes the wood and goes down with an offended whine.
Afterwards the crew breathes as if someone eased a complex knot. A kid on the team—new, all nervous enthusiasm—looks at me like I did something special. I shrug because that's what you do. Doing something and wanting applause are different business models.
Then the ledger slips from my jacket on a bump. It lands open on a page I hadn't noticed: a scrawled entry, half‑smudged, about a stabilizer fragment and a ward collapse two years prior. There's a name fragment, but the letters run like they were written by someone crying. My chest tightens. The name is part of the map I'm trying to find. My fingers itch to trace the letters.
A broker's shadow falls at the doorway; he's been watching the salvage trade like a vulture watches territory. He smiles with clean teeth and too‑clean clothes. "We pay for rare finds," he offers, voice oily and precise. He taps the ledger like it's a menu.
Corin's jaw hardens in that specific way that corners men into choices. His voice is short. "Not yours."
The broker's eyes flick to me. "You're the one with the new tricks, aren't you? Could be useful. Names are a valuable commodity."
I feel the old temptation like a draft under the door. Memory trade is not unheard of—people sell snippets of regret to buy a tomorrow that looks less hollow. I imagine a device that hums and returns what you promised, but devices chew in their own ways. I can hear Corin's warning in my head: Don't trade yourself.
I close the ledger and put it back in my jacket. The weight is a comfort. I don't tell the broker yes. I don't tell him no. I tell him the only thing that keeps the world from getting too deep into his pockets.
"We do salvage," I say. "We keep things. We don't sell names."
He smiles like a man who thinks rules bend around money and walks away. The crew laughs nervously and resumes work. Someone passes me a cup of tea that's hot enough to be honest.
That night, after we tally the haul and patch the worse tears, Corin and I sit on the yard's roof and smoke because it's a ritual that predates good sense. He asks me about the ledger calmly, like a man testing the surface of a glass of water. I tell him what I saw. He listens and nods the way someone who has cataloged loss learns to be present without being overwhelmed.
"You'll have choices," he says. "You'll have those moments where you can fix things faster by giving up parts of yourself. Don't take the quick fix."
I watch the city blink along the river and think about names like currency. Corin's words settle in me like gravel. I have a new gift, maybe a curse. I have a ledger that hums. I have a promise on paper.
System: Daily quest complete — Compliment 12 shadows. Bonus unlocked: Bake for Corin.
The System rewards me for the day's small, ridiculous victories like a teacher who gives stickers for breathing. I pocket the notification and feel something like resolve. I will learn how to use this without losing the scaffolding that holds my life together.
Tomorrow we go further into the ward. Today I sleep with a ledger under my pillow and a ringing in my ear that sounds like a bell someone used to call the faithful to work. I am not a hero yet. I am a man who keeps walking because that is the only currency I can afford.