Dexter was covered in blood.

He wasn’t sure if any was his.

Most of it was Leah’s.

She was in his lap.

She was unconscious, but still breathing. That was about the only good thing that could be said about the situation. She had gashes across her neck and chest and her shirt was in tatters, revealing a simple white strapless bra beneath, now turned red from blood.

Dexter stared down at it, tears in his eyes. That one detail transfixed him, made his throat tighten and his jaw clench. It felt so wrong. She’d already suffered. The indignity was too much.

He had taken his own shirt off and placed it against the wound on her neck, but it wasn’t bleeding as much as he thought it should. He didn’t know whether that was a good or bad sign. The wound across her torso was barely bleeding at all.

He slowly looked up, noticing for the first time the auditorium around him was quiet. Most of the students and staff had escaped. But not everyone.

There were bodies. And blood.

There was an arm, but it wasn’t connected to anything.

It couldn’t move anymore.

The idea seemed so strange to him. That disconnection.

Beside him, a phone buzzed. The screen lit up and an older woman’s face appeared, distorted by the cracks and blood. Even still, he recognized the resemblance to the girl whose clothes had briefly disappeared. The ‘Mom’ at the top of the screen told him it was her mother.

Numbly, he picked the phone up, cutting his finger on the cracked glass as he swiped at the screen several times. Finally, it took, and he put it to his ear.

“Emily! Emily are you—”

“This is Dexter. Dexter Sanderson. Your daughter—”

“Oh my god no!”

“Mrs…” He trailed off. He didn’t know her name. “Hey, listen, your daughter got away.”

The woman’s incoherent sobs choked off. “What? She’s okay?”

“I think so. I’m… she got out before…” He couldn’t say it. She sounded like she’d already heard about what had happened. Not surprising in a town this small.

His gaze again swept across the carnage the monster had wrought. So many people who’d been alive only minutes ago. And now… they were gone. It had all happened so fast. Or felt like it.

Except for that one moment. That eternal moment.

His attention snapped back to Leah, still breathing, but unconscious, and his mind cleared somewhat.

The girl’s mom was babbling questions at him.

“I’m sorry, I have to go. I’ll tell your daughter to call you if I see her. She’s probably somewhere outside. I heard sirens.”

“I’m already on my way.”

Dexter put the phone in his pocket, not bothering to hang up, then extracted himself from under Leah. He tied his shirt around her neck, then delicately slid his arms under her.

She felt so cold.

He lifted her, holding her limp body against his, and picked his way through what remained of his fellow students, toward the exit. Toward, he hoped, safety.

“Are you sure you’re not injured?” a paramedic asked him, examining his bare torso, swiftly checking him for injury. With all the blood, it wasn’t easy.

He nodded, clutching his bloody shirt that had been around Leah’s neck, watching two police officers load her onto an ambulance, a proper bandage now covering the wound. There were already at least four other people in the back. Townsend Hospital was going to have a busy day.

There were no fires to extinguish nor shooter to apprehend, so both firefighters and police were helping gather and treat the wounded. Triage, he overheard one of them say as an overfull ambulance drove off.

There had only been one monster, and yet, it did all this. Officer Cal had tried to shoot it. Dexter didn’t know if the man had hit it. Now there was no sign of it. It had disappeared without a trace.

Uninjured or mildly injured students gathered near the hastily erected barricades in the school parking lot, waiting for parents to arrive, heads buried in phones, watching the horrible news.

Everyone who wasn’t working was watching the same thing, so Dexter didn’t need to pull out his own phone to see the reports.

Mitchell High wasn’t the only place in the world that had been attacked, not by any means. They had occurred everywhere around the world simultaneously.

The death toll wasn’t known yet, but worldwide was suspected to be in the hundreds of thousands. Possibly millions.

All in the span of a few minutes.

At least here it had been the middle of the day. For others, the monsters had come at night, while they were sleeping, ravishing their cities and neighborhoods.

No one had been attacked in their beds, from what he could gather. Small comfort, but for once, the news was scrambling for anything positive to report.

Dexter realized he was alone, the paramedic who had been examining him now moved on to someone who was in more need of her help.

He spotted Emily in a group of kids, and numbly walked over to her. He tapped her on the shoulder and she jumped and let out a scream which caused everyone around to startle and look in their direction. A few students had already started to dart off before they realized it was a false alarm. One of the police officers hesitantly reholstered his gun.

“Sorry,” Dexter said. He pulled out her phone, holding it out to her. “This is yours. Your mom called.”

She yanked the phone from his hands then threw her arms around him, sobbing. “Thank you.”

He awkwardly patted her back with one hand, the other holding his bloody shirt. “Sure.” He was no hero. Far from it. He’d done nothing. He hadn’t even stood up. Literally, not even stood up.

He glanced again at the ambulance with Leah inside it, a police officer shutting the doors and slamming a fist against them to indicate it could leave.

This was his fault. She would have been safe if it hadn’t been for him. She’d tried to get him to stand up and run with her. But he’d been frozen.

She’d risked herself for him, and had paid the price. Instead of getting away, she’d been attacked and knocked down, falling into his lap, already unconscious from that single slash.

That was when the monster had turned to look at him, its alien eyes gleaming with something that wasn’t quite intelligence.

They stared for a time that felt eternal, unending. A moment shared.

Then it took off with the suddenness of a pistol shot, pursuing the fleeing humans, taking out several before it reached the packed doorways. The mass of bodies proved little obstacle for the monster.

Dexter wasn’t sure what it did after that, but he had seen Officer Cal firing from the doorway at it before giving chase.

Even though it’d been gone, everyone that could, had left the auditorium, perhaps fearing another attack, perhaps not thinking at all, just reacting. Running away from the death the monster had left in its wake.

Not Dexter. He had just sat there for several minutes, not moving, staring down at Leah’s exposed, blood-soaked bra, and the deep gash in her chest as he pressed his shirt against the wound in her neck.

It was his fault. Leah was hurt because of him. All because he froze.

“You should call your mom,” he told Emily now, who was still crying against his chest.

She pulled away, sniffing and wiping her eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Thank you.”

“Careful with the screen. I cut myself.”

At the mention of this, she seemed to notice all the blood on him. Her dress now had blood spots from their hug.

He raised a thumb. “Just here.”

She shook her head, scanning his body with her cat eyes. “You’re covered in blood.”

He was about to say not mine, but stopped himself. He didn’t need to say it. They both knew it.

She nodded slowly. “I should call her. Thank you, again.” She moved away, eyes locked on her phone. A moment later, she was sobbing into it.

He looked around. He didn’t see any parents yet, but the kids with obvious signs of using the system were now all grouped together, most no longer looking so excited. Even Matt, with his new beard and horns and silver hair and impossible eyes, had lost his former gusto.

Then Dexter noticed something strange. Two police officers were moving through the crowd. This on its own wasn’t out of the ordinary. What was, was that instead of finding those who needed medical aid, they were gathering students of another sort. Each of the two already had several following obediently behind them, and the students all had one thing in common: their appearances were clearly altered. They had used the system.

Dexter still hadn’t signed his name, but he thought of the message that had appeared after he’d stared that alien monster down.

It was still there now, floating an arm’s length in front of him, yet somehow not obscuring his vision.

Involuntary system activation.

You have been awarded a new title.

Welcome to the system, Dauntless.