Level Zero

Free Sample — First 3 Chapters

Cyberpunk Grid Governance — First 3 Chapters

Like what you read? Get the Complete Box Set — $9.99 →

Chapter 1: Chapter 1

She was lying.

Cross knew it before the words left her mouth, before the bare bulb finished its sway, before his palm hit the cold steel floor. The ozone from the cracked vent told him — a frequency shift in the air, the kind of signature only a dead man learns to read.

"Don't," she said. "I'm not here to kill you."

He held his breath. Three seconds. The hum of the atmosphere processors hadn't changed. The condensation on the ceiling still caught the light in a thousand tiny lenses. But her voice — something in her voice was wrong. A pattern. A frequency. His left eye throbbed, that familiar ache behind the socket, the one Suki had called a gift.

She was Grid-tagged. She'd said forty-two minutes. She was already dead.

Cross rose slowly, bare feet pressing against the steel floor, the chill bleeding into his ankles, settling into his bones. He kept his face in shadow. "You're dead already. You just don't know it yet."

Her hand trembled on the door frame. "That's why I came to you."

Three days as a warning. Cross had gone to see her on the third day, because he needed to understand what they would do to him if they caught him.

The answer was everything. They would do everything.

He stood up. Rolled his shoulders. The joints in his neck cracked one at a time — three distinct pops, like the sequential loading of a magazine. Habit. Muscle memory.

---

He dressed in silence. Charcoal jacket, salvaged from a resistance runner who died in an alley three blocks away. The jacket still had a bullet hole in the left shoulder, patched with a strip of inner tube and epoxy. The runner had been nineteen. Cross never learned his name. Black thermals. Olive cargo pants. Boots with mismatched laces — one black, one purple.

The fabric of the thermals was soft from years of washing, worn thin at the elbows. He had traded a working Grid transmitter for them two years ago — a fair price in the Flatlands economy, where anything functional was worth more than anything comfortable. The cargo pants had been through four repair patches, each one a slightly different shade of green. From a distance, they looked like camouflage.

The purple lace was frayed. It had been frayed for eight years. He hadn't replaced it.

Her name was Mira. She had been a data courier for the resistance. He had been nineteen. They had been running a package through Sector 6 when a Corporate Enforcer team cornered them. She had shoved him into a maintenance shaft and sealed the door behind him. He had watched through a grated vent as they dragged her away. Her boots had been new, and the laces were purple.

He remembered the exact shade. Not the pale violet of cheap dye jobs. Not the magenta of Grid-issue standard. A deep, specific purple — the color of a bruise three days old, the color of the sky at the edge of a storm. She had found them in a dead Enforcer's locker and kept them because they fit.

The boots arrived at his container three days later, delivered by a resistance contact who wouldn't meet his eyes. The laces were still in them. He had taken them out and put one in each of his own boots, so that every step he took, for the rest of his life, he would remember that he owed her a debt he could never repay.

He still didn't know what happened to her after that night. He had spent seven years looking.

His method was careful and detailed. He had traced the Enforcer team's patrol logs for that sector, cross-referenced every detention record within a hundred kilometers, hacked into the Spire's personnel database three separate times. Each attempt cost him a favor he could never get back, and each attempt ended in a dead end. Mira had been logged as "TRANSPORTED" to an unknown facility and then the trail went cold. No further records existed. No transfer logs. No discharge papers. She had simply been deleted from the system.

That was the thing that kept him going. The system didn't delete data without a reason. If it had erased her existence,

Chapter 2: Chapter

The Gauntlet went dark, and cold crept up his arm like frost before he could even process the loss.

"Come see this." Oren's voice came from behind him, sharp with discovery.

Cross turned. The wall fragment hummed with a low, resonant thrum that vibrated through his boots, through his teeth. Oren circled the slab with the cautious grace of a man who expected traps, but Cross wasn't watching him. He stared at the hollow shell exposed in the back of the wall — crystalline lattices alive with fractured rainbows, each shard pulsing with its own heartbeat.

At the center, cradled in copper wiring like a relic in a shrine, sat the data crystal. Warm. Smooth. Fist-sized. Lights blinked inside it in a pattern Cross's brain recognized before his conscious mind caught up. A sequence he had never learned but somehow knew.

"Whoever left this," Oren whispered, "they wanted you to find it."

Cross looked down at the dead Gauntlet on his wrist. Then back at the living pulse of the crystal. The words were still there, waiting in the dark behind his eyes: You are not supposed to exist.

He had always known. Now the Architects had told him to his face.

A thin conduit of braided copper ran from the thermal cell into the processor core, and from there into the crystal itself. The crystal was not a storage device. It was an interface. A bridge between the machine and whatever nervous system touched it.

A complete, self-contained system, hidden inside a piece of Spire wall. The air inside the cavity was warm and dry, carrying a faint smell of ozone and old dust. The scent of something that had been sealed away for a very long time.

"This isn't just a message," Cross said. "This is a terminal. Independent. Not connected to the Grid."

Oren pulled out a handheld scanner. "I ran a diagnostic on the power cell. It's got another two hundred years of charge." He paused, reading the display. "Whatever this thing was built to do, it was built to wait."

---

Cross reached into the cavity. His fingers brushed the crystal.

The world stopped.

Not figuratively. The wind stopped. Oren's voice stopped mid-word. The light stopped. Everything froze. The air turned solid and cold against his skin, pressing in from all sides like he had been submerged in ice water.

And in that frozen moment, Cross saw.

He stood in a room. No windows, low ceiling, the air thick with the smell of burnt coffee and ozone, so dense it coated the back of his throat. The walls were covered in whiteboards, layer upon layer of writing and diagrams, erased and rewritten so many times that the surfaces had developed a permanent gray stain. Ghosts of equations haunted every corner. The boards had become palimpsests of argument, each new idea fighting for space against the ghosts of the old ones.

Scattered across the single table in the center of the room were coffee cups. Dozens of them, in various stages of emptiness. Some had grown mold, their interiors furred with green and white. Others were so old the coffee had evaporated, leaving dark rings like tree trunks marking the passage of days. The room had been inhabited for a long time. The people in it had stopped caring about cleanliness. They cared about only one thing.

A woman with gray-streaked hair stood at the far end of the table. Her face was gaunt, her eyes ringed with shadows that spoke of months without proper sleep. She wore a lab coat that had once been white but was now a patchwork of stains. Coffee, ink, something that might have been blood, dried to a rusty brown at the cuffs. Her hands were planted on the table, fingers splayed, as if she were holding herself back from lunging across it.

Across from her sat a man. He was calm in a way that felt deliberate. A practiced stillness designed to provoke. His clothes were clean, pressed, untouched by the chaos of the room. His hair was neat. His hands rested folded on the table in front of him. He looked like someone who had never

Chapter 3: Chapter 3

Here is the chapter with the specified edits applied. I replaced 7 of the 9 em dashes with commas, periods, or rewrote as two sentences, keeping the remaining 2 for necessary emphasis.

---

The Gauntlet on his arm went hot.

Green lines under his skin flared once, bright enough to cast shadows across his face. Then the text appeared, burning into his skull before it reached the display.

``` ARCHITECT PROTOCOL: ACCEPTED USER STATUS RECLASSIFIED: GLITCH — TIER 0 NEW OBJECTIVE: ACHIEVE LEVEL 1 CURRENT LEVEL: 0.00 XP TO LEVEL 1: 1,000 WARNING: NO CLASS DETECTED. SKILL TREE UNAVAILABLE. SUGGESTION: ACQUIRE CLASS DATA FROM DEFEATED ENEMIES. THE GRIND BEGINS. ```

"Your face just changed," Oren said.

Cross read it again. The words didn't shift. Amber text, flat and final. The Grid didn't care if he read them or not. It never had.

"Acquire class data from defeated enemies." The system was telling him to kill someone. Take their Class. Their identity. Their place in the hierarchy.

The salvage yard breathed around him. Wind pushed through gaps in the container walls, carrying hot metal and chemical sweeteners. Ozone and burnt circuitry, the taste of the Flatlands. Somewhere deeper, loose sheeting flapped against rusted frame. Clang. Clang. Clang. His left hand tingled, that low electrical hum under the skin making the hairs on his forearm stand on end.

Oren stood near the wall fragment, arms crossed. Defensive. Protective. His hands were swollen at the knuckles, fingers bent at angles that spoke of breaks never properly set. The resistance tattoo on his forearm, a purple circle of linked hands, was now a smear of scar tissue and pigment. Raised. Puckered. Rough as sandpaper. Cross had asked about it once. Oren told him the removal hurt more than the tattoo, and never spoke of it again.

"It told me how to level."

Oren's jaw tightened. "How?"

Cross looked at the old man. A resistance runner. He'd killed before. Cross knew this from the way Oren's eyes moved when someone mentioned Corporate Enforcers. The way his hands stilled. The way his breathing changed, shallow and measured. So had Cross, though neither of them talked about it. Things in the Flatlands you did and then never spoke of again, because speaking made them real in a way surviving didn't allow.

"I need to find someone with a Class," Cross said. "And take it from them."

Oren's expression hardened. The muscles bunched under weathered skin. For a moment, he looked twenty years younger. The resistance fighter he had been, not the salvage operator he had become. "That's not leveling. That's murder."

"It's the same thing." Cross's voice came out flatter than he intended. "The Grid doesn't care how you earn XP. It only cares that you do."

Oren stared at him for a long moment. His eyes, pale gray, the left one clouded with the beginnings of a cataract, searched Cross's face for something. Doubt, maybe. Hesitation. A sign that the man he'd known for seven years was still in there. Cross didn't know if Oren found what he was looking for.

"You sound like them," Oren said quietly. "The Spires. The people who built the system. They said the same thing. The Grid doesn't care. The Grid only processes. And they used that as permission to do whatever they wanted."

Cross had no answer for that. He turned and walked back toward the Flatlands, leaving Oren standing in the salvage yard with a wall that spoke to glitches and a treasure that neither of them fully understood. Behind him, he heard Oren shift his weight, the scrape of a boot on gravel. The old man didn't call after him. Didn't say goodbye. The silence was heavier than any words would have been.

The Gauntlet was warm on his arm. The first notification of his first quest glowed in amber text:

``` NEW QUEST: THE FIRST GRIND OBJECTIVE: DEFEAT A CLASS-ENABLED TARGET REWARD: CLASS DATA + 1,000 XP FAILURE CONDITION: DEATH ```

Cross had never had a quest before. People with Classes got quests. People with Levels got notifications. He had been a null value his entire life. Invisible to the sys

Enjoyed the sample? Get the complete 3-book box set.

Get the Box Set — $9.99 →

Available in 10 languages. Instant download.