Split The Reward

Ayana POV

The panel over Marie hadn't cleared.

COST: REDISTRIBUTED.

DISPUTE WINDOW: 00:00:58.

Fifty-eight, falling.

She sat on the concrete with one hand flat beside her, one shoe missing, her bar sitting red at 12. The boy from the stairs had his arm around her shoulders and his face turned up at me.

"I didn't know," I said.

She looked at the wall.

Feet on the steps below. More than three. More than ten. The dragging had stopped, which was worse.

The last creatures came up into the crowd and Jarek took them apart against the fire door — two hits, three, and the strands faded where they fell.

Two things stayed on the floor.

A card, bone-white, wet at one edge. Beside it a second one, smaller, folded brown.

REWARD: 1 CLAIM ONLY.

CLAIM WINDOW: 00:01:00.

Forty people on the stairs, and every one of them read the same two lines at the same time.

"Two," the limping man said. "There's two of them—"

"There's forty of you," the liar said, and smiled.

The crowd came up onto the landing. Not a crush. Something quieter, and worse.

Marie's boy got to the front and saw her bar and turned on me.

"What did you do?"

"Nothing. I—"

"Split it," Jarek said.

He was at the fire door with his back to us, watching the dark above.

"One claim only. On each."

"Two cards. Forty people."

"I know how many people there are."

Marie's panel was still counting.

DISPUTE WINDOW: 00:00:31.

I read it because I read everything, and because nobody else on that landing was looking at her.

COST RECEIVED.

SOURCE: CLAIM REGISTERED TO ANOTHER PLAYER.

Received.

Not lost. Not taken. Received. As though it had come in the post.

I swiped the panel open. There was a word at the bottom of it I hadn't seen before, small and grey and sitting under the countdown like it had been there the whole time.

DISPUTE.

"Don't," Jarek said.

He hadn't turned around.

"Don't what?"

"Whatever you're about to do. Don't."

I filed it.

DISPUTE FILED.

SOURCE PLAYER: AYANA.

CLAIM UNDER AUDIT.

Marie's bar went from 12 to 68.

She made a sound and put both hands on the concrete and dragged in a breath that went all the way down. Her boy grabbed her. The limping man's bar climbed out of the red and his knees went and he sat down on the step and laughed once, high and shocked, with his face in his hands.

The crowd stopped moving.

AUDIT RESOLVED.

CLAIM: UNASSIGNED.

COST: VOID.

The bone-white card lifted off the floor, turned over once, and hung there.

Nobody's.

The limping man reached it first. His hand went through and the card didn't take. The boy was second. The liar was third and fastest, and it made no difference — it let all of them touch it and belonged to none.

"It's not working," somebody shouted.

"Try the brown one—"

The brown one went grey in the same instant. Its claim window died mid-count.

Forty people stood in a stairwell with two cards in the air and no way to take either of them.

Jarek turned around.

"Off the landing," he said. "Now."

"Marie's—"

"Now."

WARNING.

UNAUTHORIZED AUDIT MANIPULATION.

RULE VIOLATION?

The question mark didn't resolve.

It sat in the air in front of my face and did nothing — didn't clear, didn't flash, didn't count down. Every panel I'd seen in two days had known what it wanted. This one didn't, and it stayed there, and the whole landing went quiet around it.

Then it opened.

INFRACTION LOGGED.

PENALTY ASSIGNED TO LINKED PARTY.

My bar dropped.

So did he.

I watched it happen — 71 to 44 on mine, 71 to 44 on his, two names on one shared meter going down together — and I understood exactly what I'd done, and exactly who I'd done it to.

He didn't say anything.

That was the worst part. He stood there with his hand against the fire door and his bar in the yellow and his mouth shut, and he'd told me not to, and he'd been right, and he wasn't going to say it.

"You knew," I said.

"I knew."

"You could have said—"

"I did say." His voice was flat as a panel. "You filed it anyway."

The fire door swung open behind him.

Not slammed. Open, slowly, the way a door opens when someone on the other side has all the time in the world.

Beyond it there was no corridor. There was a room — wide, bare, its floor laid out in a grid — and in the middle of the grid stood a figure with its back to us.

It was the size of a person. It wore nothing I could name. Its shadow fell the wrong way.

INFRACTION LOGGED.

ADJUDICATOR DISPATCHED.

Nobody on the landing moved.

The figure turned its head.