Evolving Classes In The Apocalypse-Chapter 11: Escape [pt 2]

The middle ring was the second most populated ring in all of Area C, but at night like this, the streets thinned out. I’d walked them for most of my life. I knew where to pass, where the crowds disappeared, and the shortcuts that cut straight through to the outer ring.

Tonight, that knowledge was the only advantage I had. A race against time, and every second I saved on familiar ground was a second I might need later.

The middle ring was a cluster of buildings and makeshift shelters, the kind of place reserved for Novices and Adepts and their families. Most of the pre-Fracturing structures had been repaired here, properly repaired, because the people living in them had enough rank to command resources. The architecture was a patchwork of old-world remnants and new construction, though the new construction was crude by pre-Fracturing standards. Humanity lost most of its manufacturing capability when the world broke. What got built now was functional, not beautiful. Reinforced concrete, scavenged metal, engineered materials where available.

The streets were maintained, but not well. Cracks that got filled eventually. Lighting that worked most of the time. A sense of order that was always one bad week from collapse.

The good part was that the Novices and Adepts themselves were rarely around. These were the backbone of the Defined that populated humanity today, and they were always out on different jobs: outposts, resource runs, transportation, security detail for the low-rank citizens who kept the system turning. Most of that work tied back to the government one way or another. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

Or so the rumors said. I didn’t concern myself with things like this usually, but when you had government dogs walking through your space on a regular basis, bits of information flew around and made it to one’s ears whether you wanted them to or not.

We took several dark corners and I made sure to avoid the streets where goons might be lurking. There were plenty of useless Awakened Mundanes whose entire job was to sneak into the middle ring at night and profit off privileged kids who didn’t know how to sit their ass down at home.

Eventually, we reached the barricade that separated the middle ring from the outer ring. This part was the most difficult, or at least it had been before we met the other outstanding and beautiful levels of difficulty that came after.

The middle ring’s barricade was a long, uneven stretch cobbled together from whatever was available. Sections of pre-Fracturing chain-link fence still stood, bent and rusted but functional. Stretches of piled rubble from collapsed buildings had been compacted and reinforced with scrap metal driven through like rebar. In some places, actual walls of stacked concrete slabs salvaged from old structures rose to uneven heights because they’d used whatever pieces they could find. In other places, just coils of razor wire strung between metal posts hammered into the ground.

The whole thing followed the descending slope of the middle ring as it dropped toward the outer ring, which made it uneven in ways the builders probably hadn’t intended.

I knew where the gaps were. Not because I’d used them, but because when you grew up on these streets, you noticed where the goons came through. You filed it away without thinking, the same way you filed away which alleys to avoid and which vendors watered down their food.

We ran the last stretch and I led Ysor to one of the wider erosion channels near the base of the barricade, where decades of rainwater had carved a passage beneath the barrier’s foundation. Ysor went first. She squeezed through with barely any trouble, her slim frame sliding under the gap like she’d been doing it her whole life.

Then it was my turn.

’This time is going to be different. I will lose that weight.’

The edges of the gap bit into my sides as I forced myself through. My shirt caught on something, ripped, and the rough earth scraped across my stomach. I got about halfway and stopped, having been stuck.

Ysor grabbed my arms and pulled. I could see her face from down here, the way her lips were pressed together so hard and her shoulders trying not to shake.

She was trying not to laugh.

’Unbelievable.’

I gritted my teeth and shoved forward while she pulled, and something tore again, this time, I didn’t know if it was my shirt or my skin, but after that, I was through, sprawling onto the slope on the other side with dirt in my mouth and a long scrape burning across my ribs.

I looked up at her and grimaced.

"What?"

She sucked in her lips and looked at me seriously. She tried, at the very least.

"Nothing."

I gave her one last glance and shook my head.

’How can she even manage to find anything funny in a moment like this?’

Ysor had always been like that. Back in the Academy, when pressure mounted before examinations and every other student wore their seriousness like armor, Ysor would laugh with no care in the world. It unsettled people. It confused them. I’d always liked that about her.

And it made me happy to see she hadn’t lost that edge. At least not yet.

She narrowed her gaze at me. "Is that a smile I just saw?"

"Your eyes are deceiving you. Let’s go... we have to get deep into the outer ring and find somewhere to lay low before we figure out a path forward."

We descended the slope together, and the moment we crossed into the outer ring, I felt the shift. It was not in the border you could point to, there was none in fact, the shift was in the ground beneath your feet, the air against your skin.

The maintenance just stopped.

The roads here were the original pre-Fracturing streets with a hundred years of weather and neglect carved into them. Deep fissures split the asphalt where the earth had shifted during the Fracturing, and nobody had ever bothered to repair them. Weeds pushed through the cracks, and not the safe kind. The vegetation near the border had been touched by the Fracturing’s residue. Grass that grew in pale blue and white, colors that would have been strange once but had long become the norm.

I knew these streets the way I knew my own breathing. The apartment blocks and old houses and commercial buildings that had been repurposed into housing decades ago. The windows that were just empty frames now, glass having shattered long before I was born. Everything grey, brown, and rust. Laundry still hung between buildings on ropes strung across gaps, even at this hour, because nobody bothered to take it in. People had built lean-tos and market stalls that became permanent structures, narrowing what used to be two-lane roads into single-file passages with overhead coverings of tarps and scrap metal that created a tunnel effect.

During the day, these passages were where trade happened. At night, they were pitch dark.

Which was exactly what we needed right now.

Ysor and I wove into the familiar darkness, putting distance between us and the barricade. With every step deeper into the outer ring, the tension in my chest loosened by a fraction. We had a better chance now. The outer ring was big, it was dark, and nobody came looking for people here unless they had a very good reason.

But getting out of Area C entirely? Leaving this dimension?

That was a difficult problem that I didn’t know if we’d be able to successfully pull off.