NULL AND RISING

  Chapter 13: Day Two

  Day One: fourteen people moved from Torgauer Stra?e to Schleu?ig. Two creature encounters, one engagement, one kill. No casualties. Food secured for three to four days if rationed carefully. Dr. Pfeiffer had organised the medical supplies with the efficiency of someone who had found her function and was executing it without requiring further instruction. Markus had not gone north to Gohlis. He had sat in Jana's kitchen until late and drunk the last of the real coffee and not said much and Igor had not pushed him because the decision about his wife was Markus's to make and pushing it would not help.

  He drank water at the counter and thought about Brüderstra?e.

  Benny was awake. He was sitting at Jana's kitchen table with a piece of paper and a pen, writing something down in the small dense script of someone getting thoughts down before they degraded. He looked up when Igor came in.

  "System interface," Benny said. "I've been going through all the tabs since four. There's more there than just the appraisal status — there's a full ranking somewhere in it, I keep finding the edge of it but I can't get it to open properly." He paused. "Can you?"

  Igor checked his own interface. The appraisal tab, the actions log, the integration timer. He navigated carefully, the way you navigated something new that had no instruction manual. After a moment he found it — a tab that had been present since Day One, unlabelled, that opened into something large and structured that he hadn't looked at yet.

  "Tomorrow," he said. "When we have time to go through it properly."

  Benny nodded. He had a quality this morning that was different from yesterday — something that had settled, the way things settled after the first real crisis had passed and the person had discovered they were still functional on the other side of it. He was still afraid. He was afraid and working, which was the correct configuration.

  "You're going out," Benny said. Not a question.

  "Yes."

  "Where."

  "Brüderstra?e. My flat." He paused. "The cat."

  Benny looked at him for a moment. "You're going back for your cat."

  "Yes."

  A beat. "Do you want company."

  Igor considered this. The route from Schleu?ig to Brüderstra?e: two and a half kilometres, mostly residential, one larger road to cross. Solo was faster and quieter. Solo was also, he had learned yesterday, the configuration in which poor decisions became terminal rather than merely costly.

  "Yes," he said.

  Benny put down his pen and stood up.

  They left at 6:15 while the city was still in the early grey of a November morning that did not know yet it was the second day of everything being different. The light was flat and directionless, the kind of morning light that made distances ambiguous and sounds carry further than expected.

  Igor moved at the pace he had established yesterday — faster than a walk, deliberate, the pace of someone with a destination who was also paying attention to everything between here and there. Benny matched it without instruction. He had learned yesterday too.

  The streets were different from yesterday afternoon. Not safer — different. The initial chaos of Day One had resolved into something more settled and more frightening: the stillness of a city that had accepted the new parameters. Fewer people visible. The ones they saw were moving with purpose — a woman pushing a shopping trolley loaded with tinned food, moving fast; two men carrying something between them wrapped in a tarpaulin that Igor did not look at directly; a figure in the distance who was watching them from a doorway and did not approach.

  The watching figure was the concerning one. Not a creature — the silhouette was human, the stillness was human, the specific quality of attention was human. Igor filed it without breaking pace.

  "People are going to be a problem," Benny said quietly, reading the same doorway.

  "People have always been a problem," Igor said. "The System just removed some of the reasons not to act on it."

  Benny was quiet for half a block. Then: "The person in the doorway. They decided not to."

  "Yes."

  "Why."

  "Two of us. Moving with purpose. Not carrying anything worth taking." He paused. "And we didn't look scared."

  "I was scared."

  "I know. You didn't look it."

  They heard a creature two streets east of Brüderstra?e. The same category as yesterday's — small, mobile, the wrongness of it audible before it was visible in the particular quality of sound it made moving over pavement. Igor stopped them in a recessed doorway and they waited while it passed the end of the street, moving north, apparently tracking something else.

  When it was gone Igor waited thirty seconds. Then he checked the System interface. His actions logged counter had ticked up — 35 — which meant the System had registered the evasion, the assessment, the decision not to engage. He was still being watched and measured. He was still being appraised.

  He noted this and moved.

  Brüderstra?e looked the same.

  This was wrong in a way that was hard to name — the wrongness of a familiar thing in an unfamiliar context, like seeing someone from work at a funeral. The building was the building, the courtyard entrance was the courtyard entrance, the buzzers by the door were the buzzers that no longer worked. He pushed the door — it opened, the electronic lock dead like everything else — and went into the stairwell.

  Fourth floor. His door.

  He had his key from habit and the habit was correct because the lock was mechanical, not electronic, and the key still worked. The door opened.

  The flat was cold. He had left the windows closed but the heating was gone with everything else and the Leipzig November had made its claim on the interior temperature in the hours he had been away.

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  He stood in the doorway and looked at the flat.

  The couch. The stack of books. The notebook on the table, closed. The kitchen with the camp stove and the bottled water and the bag he had packed on Tuesday morning that had been the right decision. The window.

  Teddy was at the window.

  Not collapsed, not distressed, not having destroyed anything in the specific way of a cat that had been left alone and had opinions about it. At the window, in the position he had held for a week, watching whatever he had been watching. His food bowl was empty. The water bowl still had some.

  Igor crossed the flat. He crouched beside the window.

  Teddy turned and looked at him.

  Not the evaluative look, not the surveillance look he had been using for a week. Something else. The look of a cat who had been waiting and had now been confirmed right to wait.

  He put his hand on Teddy's back. The fur was smooth, no longer raised. Whatever signal Teddy had been receiving all week — the integration approach, the pressure building, the thing that only animals had sensed before humans could — it had arrived and resolved and Teddy's spine knew it.

  "I said I'd come back," Igor said.

  Teddy made a sound. Not the unnamed sound from the integration night — something smaller, more ordinary. The sound of a cat acknowledging a statement without feeling the need to elaborate.

  Igor sat on the floor beside the window for a moment. Just a moment. The city outside, the courtyard, the building opposite with its dark windows. Somewhere in the distance — far enough to be background — the sound of the new world doing what it did.

  He had fifty-eight hours of integration remaining. He had a knife and thirty-five logged System actions and an unlabelled tab in his System interface he had not yet opened. He had a group in Schleu?ig and a cat and a notebook on the table that he had not opened since Tuesday.

  He opened it.

  The last entry, Tuesday, two days ago, a different world:

  Whatever is coming — I want a fair start. That's all I've ever wanted.

  He read it twice.

  Then he took the pen from his jacket pocket — he had been carrying it since Jana handed him the spare notebook in the office, the automatic habit of a man who wrote things down — and he wrote below it:

  It came. It was fair. Everyone started at Level 1.

  He closed the notebook and put it in his bag.

  He packed methodically. The camp stove and the fuel canisters. The remaining food — not much, he had bought for one person and had not anticipated two days of apocalypse. The blanket from the bedroom. A change of clothes, practical, layered. The first aid kit supplement he had not taken yesterday. A second knife from the kitchen block, smaller than the carry knife but useful. The notebook.

  Benny had stayed in the doorway during this, watching the corridor, which was the correct instinct and which Igor noted without saying anything because saying things about correct instincts sometimes made people self-conscious about them.

  "Is there anything of his?" Benny said, nodding at Teddy.

  Igor looked at the food bag, the bowls. "The bowls. Some food." He paused. "He'll eat what we eat."

  Benny looked at Teddy, who was looking at Benny with the evaluative expression. "Does he — is he okay? With all of this?"

  "He knew before we did," Igor said. "He's been ready for a week."

  Benny looked at the cat for another moment. "That's either very reassuring or very unsettling."

  "Both," Igor said. "Let's go."

  Teddy rode in the crook of Igor's left arm for the first block and then made it known, with the specific muscular communication of a cat who has decided something, that he preferred to walk. Igor set him down.

  Teddy walked beside him.

  Not behind, not ranging ahead — beside, at ankle height, matching the pace, the tail carried low and purposeful. Benny watched this for half a block and then stopped watching it because it was either remarkable or completely natural and deciding which was not the priority.

  They saw two more creatures on the return route. Both were avoided — one by changing streets, one by waiting in a stairwell entrance for four minutes while it moved through an intersection. Both times Teddy went completely still before Igor heard anything. Thirty seconds of advance notice, minimum. The raised fur. The direction of his attention.

  On the second evasion Benny looked down at Teddy and then up at Igor and said nothing. The nothing covered everything that needed saying.

  They were back in Schleu?ig by 8:30.

  The group was awake. Dr. Pfeiffer had organised a breakfast from the collective supplies — small, rationed, but hot, the camp stove working as camp stoves did because fire was analogue and the System had taken everything except the things that didn't need it. She had made something with the dried oats from Igor's bag and the last of Jana's honey and nobody complained about what it was because it was warm and it was there.

  Jana looked at Teddy when Igor came in. Then she looked at Igor.

  "You went back for the cat," she said.

  "Yes."

  She looked at Teddy again. Teddy was examining the room with the systematic attention of a creature conducting a threat assessment of a new environment, which was exactly what he was doing.

  "Good," Jana said. In the same tone she had used in the office when he had made the correct call. The accurate word for the situation.

  Thomas made space at the table. The group shifted and accommodated, the organic reorganisation of people who had spent a night in close quarters and were now, without having formally decided to, operating as a unit. Markus passed Igor the oats without being asked. Horst, whose disc had apparently decided that the apocalypse was sufficient reason to stop being the primary problem, looked better this morning — or not better exactly, but more present, the presence of a man who had something to do today even if he didn't know yet what it was.

  Igor sat down. He put his bag down. He accepted the oats.

  Teddy jumped onto the table, which Jana's husband started to object to and then didn't, looking at the cat's copper-green eyes and revising his assessment in real time.

  "Today," Igor said. The table went quiet. "We figure out what we have, what we need, and what the next two days look like." He looked at each of them. "The integration window closes in fifty-seven hours. Before it closes we need to be at the best position we can manage. That means levels. That means actions." He paused. "The System has been logging everything we do. Everything. What we logged yesterday was survival. Today we start making choices about what we log."

  "Hunting," Markus said. Not a question.

  "Yes."

  Markus nodded. The anger that had been forming yesterday was more visible this morning — not hot anger, something cooler and more useful. The anger of a man who had a reason and had been looking for a direction for it.

  "The System interface has more in it than we've looked at," Benny said. "After the window closes I want to go through the full ranking properly. See who else is in Leipzig."

  "Yes," Igor said. "After the window closes and classes are assigned, we do that."

  "And Gohlis," Markus said.

  Igor looked at him.

  "After the window," Markus said. "You said. When it's clearer." His voice was controlled in the way of someone who had been holding something very carefully for twenty hours. "It's clearer now."

  "Yes," Igor said. "Gohlis is on the list."

  Markus looked at his watch — the wind-up watch, the only clock in the room. 8:47am. Fifty-seven hours and thirteen minutes of integration remaining.

  He put his hand flat on the table. Not the gesture of defeat from yesterday morning — something different. The gesture of a man setting a foundation.

  Teddy sat in the middle of the table and looked at each of them in turn with the evaluative expression and then settled, tucking his paws under his chest, the position of a cat that has decided a place is acceptable and intends to remain.

  Outside, the city continued becoming what it was becoming.

  The Integration of Earth, Day Two, had begun.