The morning sun shining down makes everything easier.

  Daylight doesn't eliminate threats. But it does seem to make them predictable. In that territorial kind of way, that each of us understands simply from living alongside one another or watching animals at the zoo. An implicit understanding that underlies all of biology, that each of us is generally content to live lives of obscurity if it means we aren’t forced to be chased through streets to buy bread or see friends on a Friday night.

  I move north along Piedmont Avenue, past the shells of restaurants that used to have hour-long waits, past boutiques with shattered windows and picked-clean displays. A few survivors are out. I spot them in doorways, on rooftops, going about the business of staying alive. A woman hauling water jugs on a modified hand truck. Two men reinforcing a barricade with car doors. A kid, maybe fifteen, sitting on a fire escape with a crossbow across his lap, keeping watch while someone inside cooks something that smells like canned soup and ethically locally sourced meat..

  None of them bother me and I don't bother them and none of it is any different to how any of us acted three weeks ago before the System brought everything crashing down.

  But I also get the opportunity to view the wildlife, like a pair of lupine howlers skulking in an alley between Twelfth and Thirteenth. Level 3 and 4, clearly a fresh spawn. They look up at me when I pass but both remain in the alleyway, content to watch. Yet even if they wanted to hurt me I can see the panic behind their eyes, our level difference alone enough to quell their appetite even without daylight. It makes me wonder if they too can identify us humans as I can the monsters.

  So mornings feel almost normal, almost safe. Safe if you can move through it while understanding the implicit rules of survival.

  I pass the corner of Fourteenth Street. The park opens up on my right.

  The western edge of Piedmont stretches out below me as I crest the hill. The Active Oval spreads across the middle distance. Green grass sits there, surprisingly vibrant, maintained by whatever strange logic governs the System's relationship with nature. The lake beyond catching the morning rays. Trees lining the paths in the same configuration I remember from three years ago, when this was only a park.

  Morning sunlight makes everything easier.

  Daylight doesn't eliminate threats, it just makes them predictable, territorial. The same implicit logic that governed rush hour on MARTA or kept strangers from making eye contact in elevators. Biology's oldest non-disclosure agreement, stay in your lane, I'll stay in mine, we all die later rather than sooner.

  I move north along Piedmont Avenue, past the shells of restaurants that used to have hour-long waits. Ecco. Table & Main, places where the account managers used to expense client dinners and call it relationship management.

  A few survivors are out, going about the business of staying alive. A woman hauling water jugs on a modified hand truck. Two men reinforcing a barricade with car doors, their focus only waning to watch me. A kid, maybe fifteen, sits on a fire escape with a crossbow across his lap, keeping watch while someone inside cooks something that smells like canned soup and ethically sourced protein.

  None of them bother me and I don't bother them. Standard counterparty behavior. No different than three weeks ago, really.

  A pair of lupine howlers skulk in an alley between Twelfth and Thirteenth, level 3 and 4. Fresh spawn, coats still glossy. They look up when I pass but stay put, content to watch. I catch the panic in their eyes. Our level difference alone enough to quell appetite, even without daylight. I wonder if they read me the way I read them.

  I pass Fourteenth Street. The park opens up on my right.

  The western edge of Piedmont stretches below me as I crest the hill. The Active Oval spreads across the middle distance, green grass surprisingly vibrant. Whatever strange logic governs the System's relationship with nature is often wild and yet in this place it feel like it includes grounds keeping. The lake shining, crystal clear. Trees, freshly trimmed, line the paths in the same configuration I remember from three years ago. Sunday afternoons, Lily feeding ducks while I answered emails I told myself were urgent.

  Just a park, back then.

  But its empty now, obviously empty. No joggers, no dog walkers, no families spreading blankets for picnics. I keep walking, keep noticing, the absence is expected. Normal, even, for the new Atlanta.

  But this is something else.

  The birds aren't singing.

  I catalog it without meaning to. No sparrows in the hedges. No crows picking at the garbage that should have accumulated over three weeks of collapse. No geese on the lake, and there were always geese on that lake, the aggressive kind that Lily used to throw bread at in anger while hiding behind my legs.

  Nothing moves, nor calls and nothing rustles in the underbrush either and its even more noticeable because the entire space around me is pristine.

  The grass is too neat. The paths are too clear. Even the fallen leaves seem arranged, pushed to the edges, like something walks these grounds regularly and prefers its sightlines unobstructed.

  I think about those Lupine Howlers two blocks back. How they watched me pass. How the daylight and my level kept them still and I wonder if I'm not the reason they acted so suppressed.

  Nothing here is watching me pass.

  Nothing here is visible at all.

  I’m not even running into looters.

  I keep moving, north along the western edge. The Driving Club is maybe a hundred meters northeast. I’ll be able to see it at any moment.

  I’m passing by a bus stop, a beautiful red home across the street, a Tudor Revival. With a steeply pitched roof, the asymmetrical fa?ade, the prominent cross-gable and decorative half trimming.

  The details, too specific, too narrow, too niche. How did I even know all that? And as I look at the house, the tudor revival, I feel a prickling at the base of my skull. The sense of being scrutinized and quantified by something patient enough to watch and smart enough to wait.

  A predator logic, fits it the most and I recognize it so well because I've done it myself. Observing prey, calculating distance, estimating effort against reward. Was this what it was like to have an ability used on you?

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  Still I find the pressure continues to build. That wrongness at the edge of perception. The air itself feels heavier, charged with attention I can't locate. Something is watching, something close.

  I chose then to no longer look around, while also not changing my pace. I don't give any indication that I've noticed anything at all, I simply look ahead. The sensation passing as I continue to act aloof, what an odd feeling...

  I arrive half a minute later to the Piedmont Driving Club.

  With its white, colonial-style guardhouse with a slate roof. The heavy white metal gate arm rent to pieces. The stone pillar on the left spray painted red, PRIVATE PROPERTY, the guard booth's windows smashed and interior burned.

  I step past it all and find myself on a forked road leading into a teardrop.

  The clubhouse sits at the center with its classic Georgian architecture, red brick, white columns. Old money aesthetic that used to mean golf memberships and charity galas.

  Used to.

  The front doors hang off their hinges. Not forced open, torn. The wood splintered inward like something outside wanted badly enough to go through rather than around. Hoof marks gouge the white marble columns, four parallel lines carved deep into the polished surface, each furrow wider than my palm.

  Something large, strong enough that it acted like doors were a suggestion it declined.

  I scan the grounds. An overturned SUV near the tennis courts, windows shattered the roof caved in by an impact from above. Shell casings scattered across the circular drive, brass glinting in the morning light. Hundreds of casing, possibly thousands. Multiple people made a stand here. Multiple people with ammunition to spare.

  Somehow it wasn't enough. All that firepower, all that coordination, and they still got liquidated. Amateurs, they must have been build this position without an exit strategy.

  I come upon a dried blood pattern outlining where a body used to be, near the fountain. Another by the pro shop entrance. A third pattern laid over a toppled sandbag wall that never got finished. Seven total patterns on the outside alone but their are no bodies to be seen and its clear no scavenger has tried to come through. Peering in through the door I can see more inside but I stop counting the ones inside after five because the number stopped mattering after that.

  I could search the clubhouse. Pick through whatever supplies the dead left behind. But the marks on those columns are fresh… glistening almost. Something could be holding this position, and it didn't leave a forwarding address.

  So I consider the expected value of looting versus the risk of occupancy disputes.

  I activate my ability instead.

  The world narrows and there, at the edge of my vision. A silver thread pulls me back from these doors and traces toward a gardener’s service door half-hidden behind overgrown hedges.

  A staff entrance clearly. The one groundskeepers used to slip through without disturbing members. I went to a place like this once, all to placate a top client with a vice for sunny golfing entertainment.

  I follow it, away from the clubhouse. Away from the patterns with no bodies. Deeper into the grounds bordering Piedmont Park. Through the hedges, along a flagstone path gone to seed, past a rusted shed full of lawn equipment. The gardener's route.

  Finally the path curves behind the clubhouse, down a gentle slope, and opens into something I wasn't expecting.

  A conservation garden, untouched and immaculate.

  The aquatic pond stretching before me, lily pads floating on water so clear I can see the stones at the bottom. Native plants framing the edges in careful arrangements. A wooden footbridge arcs over the narrowest point, leading to a gazebo on the far side.

  Beautiful, hidden, the sort of place that would have charged admission just to enter.

  A quest! Here?

  I stop and ponder the System's version of an unsolicited offer.

  I’m reminded of when I learned to play chess, back when I was twelve. The first lesson that stuck was when your opponent offers you a piece, ask why they want you to take it. Free is never quite as free as it seems. It's a line they want you to walk, a position they want you to occupy, a sequence they've already calculated three moves past where you're looking.

  The golden thread led me here. Through a park where nothing hunts. Past territorial markers the size of my forearm. To a quest offering exactly what Lily needs, stability.

  It wasn’t a coincidence, it was offering a line all the while making sure that I’ll step across it.

  The reward structure's interesting though. Blueprint contingent on component acquisition. Far more specific than the generic kill-quests the System's pushed before. This one feels tailored, like the System built this sequence for a particular reason, perhaps my class?

  Clearly I’m not meant to understand what the System gets if I take the piece. I can’t possibly even know really what position I might be forced into if I accept it. But I know what I get if I decline, I’ll get nothing. I’d have to go back to a building where Lily's safety hasn’t changed at all, with a generator that I might have to turn off tomorrow night or the night after, should I get too badly wounded and I cannot accept that. Perhaps this core would have a solution for me.

  Sometimes you take the offered piece because the alternative is slow strangulation.

  I accept. Not because I trust the terms. But because I can't afford to refuse them.

  The notification folds away.

  The silver guidance from Pragmatic Hunter shifts, brightening in response. To a golden hue now, not silver. The difference between a suggestion and a conviction perhaps.

  Never the less I follow it, past the pond, over the footbridge, through a gap in the manicured hedges that opens onto grounds I didn't know existed.

  The first territorial marker stops me cold.

  A tree, scarred at a foot above my head, not by claw marks but by antler gouges. Deep parallel grooves carved into the bark with fresh sap still weeping from the wounds.

  I know what territorial markers look like, I used to work in a building full of them. Until my mind reminds me of Sex Panther Jaguar colone and I struggle to hold back a laugh.

  The plants grow stranger as I go deeper. Tomatoes the size of softballs hang from vines that shouldn't be fruiting in November. Squash and zucchini sprawling across raised beds in impossible abundance. Apple trees bowing under a bounty of profusion that would have broken them before the System rewrote the rules. I stop to harvest a bunch and gather ten to fifteen pounds of produce, a luxury in our unrefrigerated world.

  Cornucopia, the word surfaces from my mind. Thanksgiving decorations, the horn of plenty. Pilgrims too, something of the mayflower from elementary school.

  As I continue forward I run into more markers. A boulder with divots and scrapes across its face. A fence post rubbed smooth by repeated contact. A muddy wallow near a creek bed, the hoofprints in the soil larger than my spread hand.

  I push through a final curtain of overgrown wisteria.

  A clearing is before me, sheltered on three sides by ancient oaks draped in Spanish moss. Sunlight cuts through the canopy in shafts. Bouncing motes of light dance around me.

  And there in the center, grazing on clover that glows faint silver in the light.