The transition from the warped silhouettes of the Dead Zone to the more familiar garbage spires of Sector 4 was a gradual one. By the time the change was complete Mike found that his legs had settled into a rhythm. It was a poor rhythm that was more of a stagger than a true stride but it was movement nonetheless. His body howled in protest at the effort and every joint felt like a rusted hinge that had been pried open past its tolerance.

  Above him the sky was a layered smear of brown and grey. Far beyond the reach of anyone from Sector 4 faint lines of traffic blinked between distant towers like tiny scars of light on a smothered horizon. It was another world entirely. Down in the depths the air tasted of copper and plastic fumes. The chemical tang of the Dead Zone had thinned but it did not vanish and instead blended with the more familiar bouquet of mould and urine and cold ash that defined the sector.

  He hugged the shadows between heaps as he walked out of automatic habit. Distance from the crater did not change the rules. Out here one was merely scenery until somebody decided otherwise.

  There were new aches within his chest. The tumours had been a slow and familiar rot that he had learned to navigate around but this was different. It felt as though his lungs were wrapped in thin plates and an internal armour flexed unpleasantly with each breath. Every inhale scraped the lining of his throat with phantom frost. The cold of the crystal had not left him but had merely grown subtle.

  Junk shifted under his boots as he walked over broken polymer tiles and the ribcage of old machines and glass granulated into a crunchy dust. Heat radiated up from it all and was trapped by decades of exposure until even the shadows seemed to sweat.

  A flicker of motion caused him to pause.

  On the edge of his vision a slab of sun-faded plastic seemed to shiver as something slipped beneath it. He turned and squinted but saw nothing except the usual cracks and stains and a smear of something brown. His skin crawled not from what his eyes saw but from something behind them. The sense had been there humming low ever since he had torn himself out of the crater. He had been too focused on putting distance between his bones and the wolf’s corpse to pay it much attention. Now with the heaps of Sector 4 starting to arch overhead like broken teeth it pressed forward.

  It was a pressure at the outer edges of his thoughts like being in a crowded room and realizing all at once that every conversation spoke his name.

  [LEVEL UP!]

  [LEVEL: 2]

  [AUTO-ALLOCATION IN PROGRESS…]

  [ERROR: ATTRIBUTE-MAP CORRUPTED]

  [FALLBACK: [Survival Heuristic] ALLOCATION]

  [NEW PASSIVE UNLOCKED: Sense Vermin]

  The notification crawled across his vision in jagged and half-clipped letters. Parts of it blinked as if the strange power had to retype them twice. Each line hung in the air for a heartbeat before burning away and leaving the impression etched on the inside of his skull. Sense Vermin.

  He looked down at his hands where skin stretched too thin over bone and grease was ground into every line. There were no differences there nor were there sudden claws or glowing circuits beneath the skin. He flexed them anyway half-expecting to feel an overlay of something else or perhaps some new limb. The shift was not in his fingers but in the space around him.

  Closing his eyes he found the visual world felt like a distraction. It was a loud commercial playing over the only channel that mattered. The pressure sharpened. At first it was chaos. It was static with shapes trying to form inside it but slowly his brain began to tease meaning from the noise.

  Point.

  There. Under the broken plastic slab he had just seen twitch.

  A tiny brightness flared in the dark behind his eyelids. It had no colour but it had presence. It was a little motor of hunger and unease. Then another appeared inches away. Then three more clustered tight like a fist.

  Roaches.

  He did not know how he knew they were roaches but the knowledge was absolute in the same way one knows the difference between a cough and a laugh in the dark. Further off in the hollow of a rusted appliance more pinpricks smoldered with a different texture to their thoughts. They were skittish and quick and belonged to a whole warren of rats crammed into coils of old wire and lint. Beyond them came the flutter-minds of gnats and flies scattered like someone had thrown grit across the inside of his skull.

  He turned his head slowly with his eyes still closed.

  The cluster of roaches under the plastic shifted in his awareness as he moved and stayed relative to the slab rather than his skull. It was a fixed point in a moving map. When he pivoted farther other presences strobed into range. There were more roaches and a line of ants threading along a buried cable and something larger and brutish half-asleep in a nest of soaked insulation.

  Within a radius of perhaps fifty metres these tiny presences dotted his awareness. There was no clean interface or overlay. He simply knew where they were as surely as he knew where his toes were without looking. The realisation came with a spike of nausea.

  He snapped his eyes open and sucked in a breath.

  The world roared.

  It was not the usual roar of the scrap lanes with their distant clangs and chatter or the faint whine of generators half a sector away. Underneath and through it all was another kind of sound. It was the sound of movement. Scrabbling feet on plastic and mandibles chewing rot. Little hearts beating in staccato with some slow and some racing.

  They were everywhere.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  His whole life Sector 4 had seemed quiet in its own way. There was noise on the surface but underneath lay a constant deadness. Junk did not breathe and rust did not dream. Once one tuned out the human noise all that remained was wind and the distant echo of the heaps settling. That illusion died now. The silence cracked like old paint and below it the heaps throbbed with life.

  Roaches lived in the seams between stacked refrigerators. Rats lived in the hollow legs of shipping containers with their nests lined with shredded shirts. Silverfish whispered under damp cardboard and little larvae coils pulsed in sludge puddles. The world under his boots was a crowded city that had always been there rubbing up against his soles and his sleeping mat and his food.

  He staggered backward and his hand hit a heap for balance. The metal was hot and pitted under his palm. Everywhere his gaze fell he felt the vermin instead of just seeing the rust. Behind that panel lay twenty-seven roaches. Under that drum was a knot of worms pulsing slowly in damp grime. Inside the drum a rat cleaned its fur.

  "Stop," he muttered and pressed his knuckles against his temple. "Shut up."

  They could not hear him unless he reached deliberately but the awareness persisted. It was passive and constant. It was a new sense that none of them had agreed to give him. The heaps were alive. Not in a comforting storybook way but in a squirming and pestilent way.

  And for the first time they were on his side.

  The thought landed cold and sure. He had never been on any side but his own. No one and nothing had ever lined up behind him. The best he had managed were temporary truces and transactional alliances built on water filters and spare batteries. Now he stood in the shadow of a tower of broken kitchen appliances and felt an army of little minds rustle within it like maggots shifting through meat.

  They did not know him and they did not care. But the System had dragged a thin and invisible thread between their basic lives and his diseased one.

  He exhaled slowly and let his back rest against the heap. Metal flakes scraped his shirt. A rattling cough tried to claw its way up but he swallowed it down with effort that made his eyes water.

  "Okay," he whispered to the air or to the System or perhaps to the cockroach currently six metres to his left. "Okay. I get it."

  The radar was not a gift. None of this was a gift. It was a reconfiguration. He had been prey because he walked the heaps thinking he was alone except for monsters big enough to eat him or humans desperate enough to rob him. That worldview made him small. It made him easy to herd and to predict and to starve.

  Now the walls breathed.

  His mental map pinged as a rat darted from one nest to another across a narrow lane up ahead. He tracked its jittery awareness through the shadow of a leaning wrecked van and past a mound of stained mattresses until it vanished into the guts of a collapsed scaffold. If he wanted to he realized he could follow them all without taking a step. He could map the entire lattice of crawlspaces and hollowed-out ducts the vermin used. It was the hidden arterial network of Sector 4.

  His heart kicked harder at the thought and not quite from fear.

  The System had infected his brain with more than just connections. Thought-patterns flickered at the edges of awareness with new lenses snapping into place. Pathfinding. Exploitation. Biological network analysis. They were words he had never learned and concepts he suddenly understood in instinctive bursts.

  He straightened and pushed off the heap.

  A small motion on his mental radar snagged his attention. A single roach scuttled along a length of exposed cable at shin-height in the lane ahead before pausing suddenly. Its tiny mind tightened around a sense of threat. A second later Mike heard what it had felt as heavy boots clanged on metal somewhere down the corridor of junk.

  He froze before melting sideways into a gap between a burned-out generator and a stack of flattened drums. The space was hardly wide enough for his ribs and flakes of rust and soot scraped his cheek as he squeezed deeper. Two men passed the gap a heartbeat later with loud footsteps and louder voices.

  "I'm telling you that Rigg don't pay for rumours," one was saying. He sounded young and arrogant. "If that wolf got something then it's dead with it. You want water rations this week? You find scrap and not stories."

  "Dead Zone's not that big," the other answered with a slight wheeze. "Something dropped from the sky and there'll be a mark. Maybe a crater. Salv runners saw light from that way."

  Mike held his breath despite the heat pressing in and despite the itching awareness of half a dozen spiders above his head and a small nest of roaches at his hip. The presences of the men were blank spots on his new sense as they were too big and too complicated to register. But their passage ruffled the vermin-radar as things scurried to avoid boots or stilled to avoid attention.

  Rigg's dogs were sniffing after the crash already. That meant the crater's grace period was gone. Whatever was left of the dead Celestial and its skeleton wouldn't stay unpicked for long. Something cold unfurled in Mike's gut that was separate from the crystal there. The image of the orb melting into him flashed behind his eyes. If Rigg's boys found even a hint of that tech they would start asking questions. He was Sector 4's favourite nobody but even nobodies left tracks.

  The footsteps faded and the vermin eased back into their routines with a low hum of resumed business.

  Mike slipped out of the narrow gap with his skin marked by thin rust-red scratches. His shirt clung damply to his back where sweat mixed with swamp residue. He wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and left a grimy streak there. The heaps no longer felt like dead monoliths but were hive-walls that watched in their own blind way.

  He had always hated how quiet it got at night. It was an odd and sideways pang that caught him by surprise. He remembered the way the sectors muffled down as generators hummed low and people slept or drank themselves toward sleep. He would lie on his scavenged mat in the shipping container and listen to the metal creak and pop and to his own lungs wheeze while thinking how he would simply fade. There would be no witnesses. Just silence.

  That future had crumbled with everything else. There would never be silence again. Not for him.

  He started walking and was guided now not just by the familiar twists of trash lanes but by the ghost-map of vermin presence. Where they were thick there was shelter and moisture and rot. Where they were thin something had cleared them. He found himself curving his route to skirt deserts in the vermin-field. It was instinct. No roaches meant abatement sweeps or burning oil barrels or worse.

  A fragile thought tried to rise that this was too much and too loud and too strange. It got as far as the second word before the System nudged it aside with a ruthless efficiency that made his skin crawl. There was no room for wishing the radar away. Only for learning to aim it.

  By the time the jagged outline of his own little corner of Sector 4 came into view he had stopped flinching at every flicker of vermin-consciousness. The noise flattened into a constant low-level hum. It was like living next to the old generators. Eventually one's ears stopped ringing and one forgot the sound was there.

  At the edge of the container stacks a familiar shape jutted from the chaos. It was the crooked antenna Jory had bolted to an old crane arm with wires snaking down into his shop. It crackled faintly with borrowed power as it scraped signals from the upper sectors and fed them into the old man's battered receivers. They were signals Jory swore he couldn't parse half the time. They were ghosts of a more ordered world raining down on the heap.

  Mike stopped for a moment and let the sight of it ground him. He was still here. It was the same rust and the same stink and the same grimy sky. Only he wasn't the same. The heaps had shifted from backdrop to infrastructure. The quiet had filled with creeping and skittering and pulsing life. For the first time he wasn't just another piece of meat moving through it alone.

  He had a network.

  He adjusted his course toward his own claim which was an old shipping container wedged halfway up a three-stack and accessed by a ladder of welded rebar. As he walked a rat's tiny mind pinged his awareness from inside the container where it nested in the insulation over his sleeping mat.

  He smiled without humour. That would be the first thing to change.