CHAPTER 1: THE DEBT OF SLEEP
I hadn't slept in forty-eight hours. In another six, the Nightmare Spell would take me anyway.
The Eastern Quarter used to be called Chicago. That was before the Spell, before the Wastes swallowed the Great Lakes and the High Circle carved the ruins into territories. Now it was just a grid of salvaged steel and the smell of burning oil.
Ten years. Three thousand, six hundred and fifty days of staying awake. Three years ago, I'd stayed conscious by jamming a pen through my own thigh during a negotiation with a High Circle envoy. I still had the scar. The pen had belonged to my mother. I couldn't use it anymore without remembering the look on the man's face when I didn't flinch. The moment he realized a Hollow with a pen through her thigh was more dangerous than the Awakened guards behind him. That's what ten years of this does; it turns your memories into weapons until you can't remember what they were before.
I stood in Rust's vault, counting the burst capillaries in his nose. He smelled like sour grain alcohol and the metallic tang of his 'Durable' Gift. Most people saw a warlord. I saw a bank teller who still couldn't balance a ledger without me.
"Vex is moving, Ani," he growled.
My eyes were too dry to blink. Forty-eight hours of forced consciousness turns your body into a machine that forgot how to maintain itself.
"The bridge shipment is a decoy," I said. "Vex is coming through the sub-tunnels tonight. If you don't move your perimeter guards now, you're dead by midnight."
"Why should I trust you, Hollow?"
I was too tired for the usual performance. "Because I'm the only one who remembers where you hid the reserve capacitors. Kill me, and your fence goes dark. Then the monsters in the Wastes won't care how thick your skin is."
I turned and walked out. Rust didn't give thank-yous; he just gave you a head start before he decided to kill you.
I made it three blocks before the world started to tilt. My heart was doing that frantic, useless hammer-thud. I ducked into a narrow alley and pulled a jagged piece of rebar from my pocket. I pressed the sharp end into my palm—the same palm my mother had kissed the morning the vault collapsed. She'd been singing. A song about birds I could never quite remember. I couldn't remember the words, but I remembered she had been happy.
I needed the pain. I needed—
The rebar hit the pavement. The colors bled out. The soot-stained brick turned to obsidian. The neon signs above me began to weep thick, black ink.
[System Prompt: First Nightmare Initiated.]
[Candidate: Ani.]
[Role: The Architect of Ruin.]
[Trial: Survive the Fall of the Eastern Quarter.]
[Success Condition: Survive until dawn. The Quarter will fall. You will not.]
[Failure Condition: Death or permanent consumption by the Nightmare.]
[Note: You built this world by remembering every detail. Now watch what happens when you forget.]
My throat locked. No sound came out.
A man in a charcoal suit stood at the end of the alley. His cane tapped the ground in perfect rhythm with my heartbeat. Clack. Clack. Clack. He shouldn't have been able to hear it from that distance. He had grey eyes—no glow, no power. Just like me.
"The math is finally wrong, isn't it, Ani?"
His voice was a cold needle in my ear. He wasn't a man. He was the Spell pretending to be one.
"You've dodged me for a decade," he said. "But every debt comes due. Welcome to your First Nightmare."
He smiled and stepped backward into the wall. The obsidian swallowed him whole. I filed it away: the Quiet Man wasn't the beast I had to survive. He was the architect. And architects always have blueprints.
I reached for the rebar. It was gone. In its place was a heavy, leather-bound ledger. The cover was cold. The kind of cold that doesn't warm up, even when you hold it.
[Attribute Gained: The Red Ledger.]
[Description: You cannot gain power. You can only trade. Every memory you sacrifice allows you to rewrite one variable of the Nightmare.]
[Cost: To forget is to survive.]
The blast doors at the end of the alley groaned. Vex was there. But he wasn't a man anymore. He was a mountain of shadow and teeth, but his eyes—those were still Vex's eyes. Greedy. Calculating.
I looked at the Ledger. Then I looked at the shadow-beast.
I'll give it a war instead. That's all I know how to do anyway.
I opened the book. On the first page was a static image of my mother. She was frozen mid-song, her mouth open in a note I'd never hear again.
The calculation was simple: lose a piece of my past, or lose the next seven seconds of my life.
I tore the page out.
I couldn't remember her face anymore. I knew she'd been there, but the image was a smeared thumbprint in my mind. The shadow-beast stopped, confused by a reality that no longer recognized its intent.
I should have felt something. Grief, maybe. Loss. But all I felt was the profit: seven seconds bought. I was becoming a person who could trade her mother's face and only count the change.
I started running.