The sky over Ashport turned the colour of a screen waking up.
Jake Turner was forty minutes from the end of a night shift when six lines of pale blue text appeared in front of every human being on Earth. Reach Level 5 before the end of Day Seven. Players below Level 5 at that time will be removed from the Field.
His sister is twelve years old. She is eleven kilometres away, on the far side of a river, in a basement on Wren Street.
At Level 2 the System offers Jake three classes and he takes the worst one. Scavenger is Common. It has no combat skill, no damage, nothing that kills anything at all. What it has is Appraise, and Appraise tells him what a thing is, and in a city where nobody knows what anything is, that turns out to be worth more than a weapon.
Seven days. Eleven kilometres. One river, one crowded bridge, one lock with something in it, and a suburb that has gone quiet in entirely the wrong way.
The System counts everything. It pays for kills, for salvage, for firsts. It has never once paid him for pulling somebody out of the water.
He is about to find out why
