Dropping through a skylight is a bad idea for a man with cracked ribs.
I learned this the moment my boots hit the marble.
The impact traveled up my legs and settled in my side with a hot, bright jolt.
The old bruise from Intramuros opened like a door.
I locked my knees, kept my back straight, and tightened my grip on the blade in my right hand.
Later, I told my body.
Complain later.
The reading room spread out around me in the violet dark.
Glass lay scattered across the floor like frozen rain, and the green lamps hung dead on their cords.
Beyond the shattered tables, a creature the size of a pony crouched in the shadow of the iron stairs.
Its ash-gray skin rippled over muscle.
Its pale eyes watched me, wide and glassy and entirely without pupils.
Behind me, on the floor, a girl in a wet gray sweater stared up with her mouth half open and blood spreading across her shoulder.
Lira Espiritu.
I did not turn around.
I kept my eyes on the Hound and spoke in the voice I used for lectures, low and bored.
“Stay down. Keep your head below the table. If the room moves, close your eyes.”
“You,” she whispered.
“You were in my class.”
“I was asleep in your class. There is a difference.”
“How did you…”
“Later.”
The Hound lowered its head and a long, wet chuckle rolled out of its throat.
“Valeriano,” it said, in a hundred layered voices.
“The debtor.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“You know my name.”
“We know all the names. We have eaten most of them.” The blank hollow where its face should be tilted slowly.
“You owe us, Archivist. Nine years of memories you took from the dark and spent on your wars. Come and pay.”
“I am about to,” I said.
“Though I suspect you will dislike the currency.”
* * *
The System opened its window in the corner of my vision.
[Hostile entity: Hound (Class 4). Origin: Unlisted.]
[Dead Zone integrity: 63%. Archivist techniques: Enabled.]
[Footnote reserve: 41%.]
Forty-one percent.
I had spent most of my reserve over the years, and the number looked thin.
A Class 4 Hound was a hard enemy, and the Board’s usual advice was to retreat and call for support.
That advice assumed the Hound had not already chosen a victim.
I stepped forward.
The Hound moved first.
It crossed the room in a streak of gray, too fast for human eyes, and I met it with the blade.
Blue light flared where steel and claw collided.
The impact threw me back two paces.
My boots left long scratches in the marble.
Something in my left side gave way with a dry crack.
A rib, I thought, and filed the fact away for later.
Strong, I thought.
Stronger than a Class 4 should be.
It spun and came again.
I ducked beneath a swipe and drove the blade into its flank.
The tip passed through the ash-gray hide as though it were smoke.
The Hound laughed and slashed backward, and its claws raked my arm.
Three red lines opened under my sleeve.
I stepped away and watched it move.
It has no body, I realized.
It has only a story.
That was the secret of the Hounds, and it was the reason ordinary weapons failed against them.
A Hound was a memory that had gone feral, a piece of forgotten history wearing the shape of a beast.
You could not cut a story with a sword.
You had to edit it.
I breathed out slowly and let the blade dissolve into blue light.
“Come on,” I murmured.
“Show me where you came from.”
The Hound circled, snarling.
Its claws sparked against the floor.
I raised two fingers, pressed them against my own temple, and spoke the first line of a technique I had used five hundred times.
“Citation.”
[Technique: Citation (Tier-1). Cost: none. Read-only.]
The world went white.
* * * Get faster updates on g.com.
I saw a schoolhouse.
It was a small wooden building on a dusty road, with a tin roof and a flag hanging over the door.
Children sat inside at long benches, their heads bent over slates.
A woman with a plain gray dress stood at a chalkboard writing the alphabet.
The year hovered in the corner of the vision like a watermark: 1943.
Soldiers marched down the road.
The sound of boots rolled across the ground like thunder.
The woman at the chalkboard turned and said something, and the children huddled together, and a door slammed.
The vision flickered.
Smoke.
Flames.
The tin roof folding in on itself.
Small hands pressing against a window, then falling away.
No newspaper had printed the story.
No monument stood on the road.
The people who had known the children died one by one, and the names slipped out of every mouth, until nobody on earth remembered that a class of thirty-one students had once sat in that room and learned their letters.
I came back to myself with a gasp.
The Hound stood in front of me, trembling, its pale eyes fixed on my face.
“You saw,” it whispered.
“I saw.”
“Thirty-one,” the voices said.
“Thirty-one little ones. Nobody called us. Nobody came. We called and called, and the dark was so wide, and we were so hungry.”
My throat tightened.
I had watched too many Hounds die to feel anger at them.
Under the claws and the teeth, each one was only a wound that had never closed.
This one wore thirty-one faces.
It was the loneliest thing I had ever seen.
Do it, said the cold, practical part of me.
The girl is bleeding.
The Dead Zone will not hold forever.
The Hound lunged.
I did not retreat.
I stepped inside its reach, laid my left palm flat against the center of its chest, and felt something hot and sorrowful pulse beneath the skin.
With my right hand, I drew a single slow line through the air.
A strike across a page.
“Strikethrough.”
[Technique: Strikethrough (Tier-1). Cost: 1 Footnote.]
[Charge pending. Proceed?]
I pressed my palm harder against the Hound’s chest.
Proceed.
* * *
The cost hit me first as a cold wave.
It began in my fingertips and traveled up my arms and into my skull, a numbing frost that erased a single thing as it passed.
I felt the Footnote go.
It took the smell of a rain-soaked classroom, chalk and wet wool and open windows on a gray afternoon.
The room stayed in my head as a picture with the smell cut out of it, like a photograph with one corner torn away.
I wrote it down in my mind for the notebook, and I held the line steady.
And then the Hound screamed.
It was a rising chorus of thirty-one small voices, wailing at once, and the sound shook the dust from the shelves.
Its body blurred.
A web of pale lines spread across its gray hide, like cracks on a plate, and white paper-ash began to flake from its skin.
“Do not be afraid,” I told it.
I had not planned to say the words, and they came out low and cracked.
“Somebody remembers you. I have seen the schoolhouse. I will carry it.”
The screaming faltered.
The pale eyes lifted to mine.
For an instant they looked human, small and wet and bewildered.
A tiny whisper threaded through the chorus.
Teacher?
“I am only a student,” I said.
“Rest.”
The Hound exhaled, long and slow, and fell apart in my hands.
The ash rose in a silver spiral and drifted toward the broken skylight, thousands of pale flakes glittering in the violet dark.
Paper ash settled on my shoulders like snow.
[Hostile entity eliminated.]
[Dead Zone integrity: 41%. Collapse imminent.]
I swayed.
That was when I noticed the second thing that had happened.
* * *
The warm sensation in my side was spreading.
I looked down.
A dark stain bloomed across my gray hoodie from ribs to hip.
At some point during the fight, a claw had slid through the opening under my arm, and I had not felt the entry.
Blood ran down my hand and dripped from my fingers onto the marble.
Ah, I thought, with a strange detached calm.
So that is what it did while I was busy being sentimental.
[Warning: Vital signs critical.]
[Internal hemorrhage detected. Estimated time to unconsciousness: 40 seconds.]
[Footnote reserve: 41%.]
The Board rounds in its own favor, as always.
I stared at the number and felt nothing at all.
Pia would tell me afterward that she had been crossing the canteen with a tray of rice and adobo at that exact minute.
A pain that belonged to someone else had cracked in her left side, and the tray hit the floor with a crash that silenced forty students.
She laughed it off.
Her hand stayed pressed against her ribs for the rest of the night.
The legs gave out gently.
My knees touched the floor, and then my hand, and the cold marble rose up against my cheek.
The violet dark slid in at the edges of my sight.
In the distance, the Dead Zone creaked, and the frozen rain outside the windows began to tremble.
I would not be able to stand again.
Some animal part of me knew that.
Well, I thought.
This is how it goes.
I had spent nine years preparing for this moment.
I had imagined it a hundred ways, in a hundred Dead Zones, on a hundred rooftops, and in every version I had felt a quiet relief.
The weight would lift.
The notebook would close.
Nobody would have to watch me forget my own name.
The thought arrived on schedule, calm and familiar.
Then someone screamed my name.
“ARIS!”
Footsteps pounded across the broken glass.
A pair of hands, small and shaking, caught my shoulders and turned me over.
A face swam into view above me, wet-eyed and flushed, with a loose braid of black hair hanging over her shoulder.
“Stay awake,” Lira said.
“Stay awake. Please, you are bleeding, you are bleeding so much.”
I tried to answer.
My tongue felt heavy.
“Your name is Aris,” she said, pressing both hands against my side.
“Aris Valeriano. You are in your fourth year. You sleep in the back row and you read everything. I heard you laugh at my answer. You hear me?”
She noticed that, I thought.
Of course she did.
“Why are you…” I rasped.
“Run.”
“No.”
“Girl. The Dead Zone will collapse. You have to…”
“I said no.” Her voice cracked.
“You came here for me. You jumped through a window. I am not leaving you.”
Tears dripped from her chin and landed on my cheek.
They were warm.
Her hands pressed harder, and something strange happened.
A faint golden glow began to gather under her palms.
It was the same light I had glimpsed in the reading room, the one that had made the Hound recoil.
It rippled outward from her fingers in slow, bright circles.
Where it touched the blood on my hoodie, the stain seemed to shimmer.
The cold in my fingertips eased by the smallest degree.
That color, I thought.
I had seen that color once, in the oldest page of the oldest book I had ever read.
It was the color the first Archivists had written about in their founding charter.
They had called it the source.
The Board had hidden that chapter from every student for a century.
She is the one, I thought, in a calm, clear, impossible voice.
She is what they have been looking for.
Then the Dead Zone cracked.
Far overhead, the violet light shuddered, and a sound like breaking ice rolled through the building.
The frozen rain outside the windows began to fall.
I looked up at the girl bending over me, with golden light on her hands and tears on her chin, and felt something stir in my chest that I had not felt in nine years.
I do not want to die in front of her.
It was a strange thought.
It had no business arriving at that moment.
[Subject: Valeriano, Aris. Status: Critical.]
[Subject: Espiritu, Lira. Origin signature: Rising.]
The golden light grew brighter, and the world went white.