There are things that stay with you.
Not memories memories fade. They go soft at the edges, colors bleed out, voices become shapes without sound. No. I'm talking about something older than memory. The kind of thing that lives below the skin, behind the eyes. The kind of thing that never asked your permission to stay.
The smell of burning hair.
The sound a person makes when they realize no one is coming for them.
The weight of another man's blood drying on the back of your hands.
My name is Damien Kael. I was twenty-three years old when the world ended or close enough to ending that the difference didn't matter much. I was a nobody. Worked a night shift at a logistics warehouse outside of Busan, stacked parcels, ate vending machine sandwiches at 3 a.m., slept through most of the daylight hours in a studio apartment with a broken radiator and a window that looked directly into a brick wall.
I wasn't unhappy. I wasn't really anything.
That was two years ago.
I don't recognize what I've become since.
It happened at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday in October.
I know the time because I had just checked my phone the screen cracking at the corner, a hairline fracture spreading from the bottom right like a dead tree and I remember thinking that I still had four hours and thirteen minutes left on my shift, and that I would spend roughly seventy of those minutes with my eyes open and the rest of them somewhere else. I was moving a pallet of shrink-wrapped boxes toward the loading bay, and the forklift had broken again, which meant I was doing it by hand, which meant my lower back was performing a slow, private rebellion against the rest of my body.
Then the light happened.
There's no better word for it. It wasn't a flash. It wasn't an explosion. It was just light, and then everything that had been before the light was somewhere far behind me, and I was standing somewhere that was not the warehouse, and the boxes were gone, and the forklift was gone, and the flickering tube light above bay seven was gone, and in their place was a sky the color of a bruise â€" violet and deep gray and something red underneath all of it, like blood showing through pale skin and the air tasted like copper and stone and something cold that had no name.
I fell.
Not from anywhere. My legs just stopped agreeing with my brain and I went down onto my hands and knees, and the ground beneath me was smooth and black and somehow warm, like an animal's flank, and I stayed there for a moment breathing in short, ragged pulls.
When I looked up, I saw them.
People.
Hundreds of them. Thousands. Stretching in every direction until the distance ate them up. Men, women, children. Old people. Young people. People in business suits still holding coffee cups that had sloshed over and soaked their sleeves. People in pajamas. A man in chef's whites with flour still on his forearms. A woman clutching a baby to her chest with both arms, her face a white, frozen mask of terror. A teenage boy in a school uniform staring at his hands like they belonged to someone else.
One billion people.
I didn't know that number yet. It would be announced to us shortly, in a voice that sounded like it had never learned what kindness was, and it would be delivered with all the warmth of a receipt.
One billion.
Pulled from every country, every time zone, every walk of life. Pulled mid-sentence, mid-step, mid-breath. Taken from everything they knew and set down on black stone beneath a bruised sky, at the foot of something so large it took several seconds for the brain to fully accept that it was a single structure.
The Tower.
I won't try to describe it adequately. I've had two years to find the right words and I haven't found them. The best I can do is this: it was tall enough that the upper floors vanished into the strange sky, not hidden by clouds but simply ending, as if the tower itself had decided that showing you the top was not something it was interested in doing. It was dark in the way that very old things are dark not because light couldn't reach it, but because it seemed to have decided it didn't want light. Enormous black stone that caught the red-gray glow of that sky and held it wrong, reflecting it back at angles that made your eyes ache if you stared too long.
There were no windows until far, far above just surface, featureless and immense, stretching up until you couldn't see it anymore.
And then the voice came.
It didn't speak from anywhere. It spoke from everywhere. It didn't use speakers or echo or carry on any breeze. It simply was there, in the air, in the bone, inside the skull:
"Welcome."
A woman near me screamed. Then several people were screaming. Then it was hard to hear anything specific because the sound of a million people beginning to panic is like standing inside a wave â€" it's not individual noise anymore, it's pressure.
"You have been selected. One billion human beings, gathered from your world. You will attempt the Trials. You will climb. Those who reach the bottom are free. Those who do not do not."
The voice paused. A pause that felt deliberate. Like it was deciding whether to say the next part or not, and had concluded it would be mildly entertaining to say it clearly.
"If no one completes the Trials, your world ends. Those watching from home have been made aware of the same. They will watch. You will perform. This is the arrangement."
Then the voice was gone.
Just like that. Gone like it had never been there, except for the two hundred thousand individual screams that filled the silence it left behind.
I stood up.
I don't know why that was the first thing I did. I don't know why my mind landed on something so mundane and so immediate just get off your knees, Damien while everyone around me was breaking apart in real time. But I stood up, and I looked at the Tower, and something cold moved through my chest that I would later come to recognize as the earliest version of a feeling I'd have many times over the next two years.
This is real. It is happening. Figure out what happens next.
Not bravery. Never confuse it for bravery. Bravery is something you choose. This was just the part of me that had learned, long before the Tower, that falling apart was something you could do later.
Around me, the crowd was becoming something ugly.
It doesn't take long. You'd think it would you'd think the shock would last longer, that a million people would take time to transition from bewildered to dangerous. It doesn't. It's shockingly fast, how quickly people remember that they're scared and that scared people need something to push on. A man about thirty feet away started shouting at a woman in French, gesturing wildly, like she'd done this to him specifically. Two men nearby were already chest-to-chest, neither of them with any plan past the chest-to-chest part. A group of people at my nine o'clock had linked arms in a cluster, facing outward, keeping everyone else away with their combined body weight and the raw, animal urgency of people protecting their small piece of space.
I started moving through the crowd.
No destination. Just moving. Because standing still in a crowd that's starting to boil felt like standing still in traffic.
I was about three hundred meters from the Tower's base when the first sub-floor appeared.
Or rather when the first door appeared.
Not in the Tower. In the ground. A section of black stone simply rose six feet wide, four feet tall, ascending without sound until it formed a doorframe in the middle of the open plaza. Inside the frame was a downward staircase, lit orange-gold, extending below the surface of this impossible ground, and above the frame were characters that shifted and rewrote themselves until they resolved into something every person there could read in their own language:
FLOOR 100 DESCENT. FIND THE EXIT. DO NOT STOP MOVING.
Requirements carved underneath: Reach the sub-floor exit. Survive.
That was it.
Around me, people stared. Then because there were a billion of them and the doors were opening in clusters across the entire plaza, spreading outward like ripples, hundreds of staircases rising from the ground simultaneously people started to move toward them.
Some ran. Some walked in clusters, holding hands. Some stood frozen until the people behind them physically pushed them forward. Some turned and ran away from the stairs, pressing back into the crowd, as if putting distance between themselves and the entrance would somehow change what was happening.
I moved toward the nearest door.
Not because I was unafraid. I was afraid. My hands were shaking and my throat was dry and something behind my sternum felt like a fist squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing. But the voice had said those who do not descend do not, and I believed it, the way you believe a knife held to your throat. There was no reason not to believe it.
I walked through the door.
The stairs went down.
I followed them.
I don't talk much about Floor 100 to people who weren't there.
Not because it was the worst. In the context of what came after, it was almost gentle â€" a low ceiling, corridors wide enough for ten people walking abreast, the orange-gold light steady and even, the air cool and dry. The monsters on Floor 100 were simple. Hulking, gray-skinned things with no eyes and too many joints in their arms, slow and loud, announcing themselves long before they arrived. They killed people, yes plenty of people but mostly they killed the ones who panicked, who ran the wrong direction, who made noise when they should have been quiet, who stood still when they should have run.
What I talk about even less is what the people did to each other on Floor 100.
I saw it first within six hours of descent. A group of maybe forty people moving together, organized, someone up front who had found a metal pipe somewhere and was carrying it like a scepter. They weren't killing the monsters. They were letting other people go first pushing smaller groups out ahead of them, using them to locate the creatures, waiting while the screaming started and then navigating safely around the noise. Forty people, surviving on the deaths of others, and the man with the pipe doing arithmetic behind his eyes the whole time.
I saw a woman steal food from a child. Not roughly carefully, precisely, while the child slept against a wall between sub-floors, hand moving slow and steady, and the woman's face was not monstrous at all. She looked like someone's mother. She looked like someone who had decided something and then done it and was already past it.
I saw a group of five men beat another man to death for his shoes.
His shoes.
And I have to be honest, because this is the only point of telling this story I walked past all of it. I kept my head down. I kept moving. I didn't help the groups that were struggling because helping cost time and time was the only currency that mattered on the upper floors. I helped no one for the first four floors, and I kept my eyes forward and my jaw set and I told myself that survival was enough, that just getting through was enough, that I'd figure out what kind of person I was when I had the luxury of being a person again.
I told myself a lot of things on Floor 100.
Most of them were lies. But they were useful lies.
By the time I reached Floor 97, I had watched approximately eleven people die.
I know that sounds like a number I should be uncertain about. I'm not. I counted, because there was something in me that refused to let the dying become background noise. The minute it became background noise, I knew, something important would break and not be reparable.
Eleven people.
A boy, no older than fifteen, who tripped running from one of the gray things and went down face-first and was dead before he stopped sliding. An old man who had a heart attack between sub-floors, quietly, sitting with his back against the wall, and nobody stopped because nobody could afford to stop. A woman who walked into a dead-end corridor alone and whose screaming lasted eighteen seconds before it didn't.
I counted. I kept counting.
I'm at a different number now.
I stopped counting at some point in the second year, somewhere around Floor 60. Not because I decided to. Because some part of my accounting system simply broke and quietly shut itself down, and by the time I noticed it was gone, I'd already gone far enough without it that going back to find it felt impossible.
I found my first group on Floor 96.
Five people, huddled in a side chamber while something made noises in the corridor outside. Two men, three women. One of the men, a heavyset South Korean construction worker named Baek Jisoo, had already figured out that the gray things hunted by sound and had been communicating exclusively in hand signals for the last sub-floor and a half. He'd written it out on the back of his forearm in ballpoint pen directional arrows, a stop sign, a hand held flat for quiet, stop, wait. It was the single most useful thing I'd seen anyone do since we descended.
I sat with them in the chamber while the thing in the corridor moved past, and nobody spoke, and nobody made eye contact in the wrong way, and when it was gone Baek Jisoo looked at me and tilted his head in a question, and I nodded, and that was that.
We were a group.
It's almost funny, thinking back on it. No conversation. No negotiation. Just two people deciding with a nod that being together was better than being alone, and four others deciding the same, and the six of us moving through Floor 96 in a silence that became its own kind of language.
We picked up two more people by Floor 94. A Turkish civil engineer named Derin, who had an almost supernatural ability to read structural layouts and could tell instinctively which corridors were likely to loop and which ones went somewhere, and a seventeen-year-old Canadian named Priya who had been doing parkour since she was eleven and moved through the terrain in a way that made the rest of us feel obsolete.
Eight people.
We had a rhythm, by Floor 93. We had roles. We had, beginning to take fragile shape, something that resembled trust.
We had no idea what trust was going to cost us.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
This is not a story told in order. Order is a kind of mercy, and I'm not in the business of mercy right now not to you, and certainly not to myself. So let me tell you where the order is going, so you know what you're reading toward:
I spent two years in that Tower.
Two years of floors and sub-floors and things that wanted to eat me and things that wanted to use me and people who were doing their best and people who had decided to be the worst version of themselves and never looked back. Two years of learning what I was made of, in the way that only genuine, prolonged, inescapable horror can teach you what you're made of.
Two years, and then I died.
And then I came back.
Two days before the end. Two days before the moment everything went wrong before the betrayal I did not see coming, before the blade I never heard, before the black that swallowed me on Floor 3 with the exit so close I could see the light underneath the door.
I came back with my memory intact.
I came back knowing every mistake I was going to make, every person I was going to trust who would not deserve it, every floor and sub-floor and monster and trap between where I stood and the exit.
I came back with two years of hell loaded behind my eyes like ammunition.
This time, I am not surviving.
This time, I am finishing it.
But first I should tell you what the Tower taught me. What it really taught me, beneath the practical things, beneath the routes and the tricks and the learned reflexes that come from doing something terrifying enough times that your hands start to do it before your mind catches up.
It taught me that people are exactly who they are when everything is stripped away.
Not worse. Not better. Just exactly. The violence that was always in someone, held in check by civilization and consequence, comes out. But so does the kindness that was always there, held quiet by embarrassment or circumstance. The Tower doesn't make people into monsters. The Tower just removes the curtain.
What I found behind my own curtain surprised me.
I'm not going to tell you what it was yet.
You'll see it.
Two days before everything.
Floor 3.
Eleven hours until the betrayal I don't see coming.
I open my eyes.
-END OF CHAPTER 1-