The morning light crept over the ruins of what had once been the city of Chicago like a thief, tentative and golden, sliding between the shattered skyscrapers and the skeletal remains of cars that had rusted into modern art. A thousand years of neglect had turned the skyline into something from a fever dream, buildings leaning against each other like drunks holding one another upright, their windows like empty eye sockets.

Somewhere in the distance, something large moved through the rubble. The sound carried far in the silence, a deep rhythmic crunching, the kind of sound that belonged to jaws the size of sedans. A Tyrannorhino, one of the pachyderm-dinosaurs that had wandered down from the northern plains, was feeding on something it had pulled from the earth.

The city had been picked clean by scavengers years ago, but the deeper layers still held treasures. Subways, sewers, underground bunkers, all teeming with whatever had survived the Collapse and learned to thrive in the dark. And on the surface, in the gaps between the ruins, things grew wild and dangerous, mutated by a thousand years of radiation and magic that nobody fully understood.

Ava Silverscale moved through the ruins with the practiced ease of someone who had been navigating this hellscape her entire life. Her ceratosaurus tail swept behind her, knocking aside chunks of concrete and rebar as she walked. She was heading toward the old Loop district, where a contact had mentioned a potential score worth the risk.

She hadn't told anyone she was coming.

That was, perhaps, her first mistake.