I had been sitting in the rented room for two hours before I admitted to myself what I was actually thinking about.
Not tactics. Not the fragment chain or the Easter eggs or the sixteen things I knew about the Glass Wastes that Jake had not. Those thoughts had run their course in the first forty minutes and left me sitting on the edge of the straw mattress in the warm lamplight of a room I had designed to feel like rest, staring at the wall, running a different calculation entirely.
Six lives. Eleven zones. Memory fragmentation accelerating with each death, each respawn returning less of me than the last one had taken. Jake's hands trembling on the table. Sarah reaching toward a crowd that was not going to reach back.
The math was not complicated.
I was never going to beat this. Not be
