Being seen is a kind of injury. Nobody warns you.
By morning, everyone in the Meridian Mall knew what I was, and the enclave had reorganized itself around that knowledge overnight, the way a body reorganizes itself around a splinter. Some people looked at me like I was a weapon they'd found in a drawer. Some looked at me like I was a thief who'd been quietly inventorying their souls for a day and a half — which, to be fair, I had. And Reyes looked at me like a problem he hadn't finished solving, which was the most honest reaction in the building.
He found me at dawn, by the gap in the wall his people were welding shut.
"You could copy me," he said. No preamble. "My Bulwark. You've been eyeing it since the fight."
I had. A Copyist who could turn even one percent of himself to stone was a Copyist who might survive the seven Thresholds instead of dying at the second. He knew it. He was offering it, and the fact that he was offering it meant he wanted something, and the fact that he was being straight about it meant I could probably trust the price.
"What do you want," I said.
"Stay." He said it flat, a general stating terrain. "You're worth thirty fighters, arranged right. I keep a hundred people alive with a wall and a rationing schedule. You could help me keep three hundred." He wasn't wrong. That was the maddening thing about Reyes — he was so rarely wrong about the small math. "The road out there kills people with real classes every day, Leo. It will enjoy killing the one-percent man."
I thought about it. I want to be honest that I thought about it — about walls, and food, and a place where the body count stopped. It would have been the sane choice. It would have kept a hundred people alive, and me among them.
"There's a boy in your infirmary you tried to put outside the wall yesterday," I said. "Because he couldn't be fixed, and he made a sound in the dark, and the math said he'd get someone killed."
Reyes didn't flinch. "The math still says that."
"I know." I looked out at the six shards still humming over the city. "That's why I can't stay. You keep people alive by sorting them. I got sorted into the bottom line the day the sky broke — worst class, one percent, a joke. And the only reason I'm standing here worth thirty fighters is that nobody let me disappear quietly the way your math wanted the boy to." I shook my head. "I can't build my life inside somebody else's sorting. Even a good one. Especially a good one."
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He was quiet a while. Then, to my surprise, he threw a Bulwark up around a section of unwelded wall — a slab of grey stonelike force, held for me to see — and let the System click.
[Skill copied: Bulwark (1%)]
"For the road," Reyes said. "One percent of a wall is still more wall than you had a second ago." Almost a smile. "You out-thought me in my own atrium, porter. I'd rather you did it on my side of it. But I've been running a wall long enough to know the difference between a thing that wants shelter and a thing that wants out." He turned to go. "Clear your Thresholds. And when the caretakers come for you — and they will — remember there's a wall three miles south that'll open for you."
Halloran wanted to come. I told him no, and it was the hardest thing I'd said since the sky broke.
"I'm seventy-four, not dead," he growled, fist smoldering on principle.
"You gave me your fire, old man. It's already through the first Threshold and back — it's in me. You don't have to carry it there yourself." I put a hand on his shoulder, the way he'd put one on mine on the day I decided to fight. "Reyes needs a Flame Warden on that wall more than I need one on the road. Keep them alive. Keep Nour's boy alive. That's the mission. That's a real one."
He didn't like it. But he was a man who'd spent four days doing the arithmetic of his own body, and he knew the shape of a job that fit. He stayed.
Priya, of course, did not give me the option. "I go where the shadows go," she said, "and the shadows think you're interesting, and I'm sixteen, and you can't stop me." Which was three separate arguments, all of them unbeatable, so I stopped trying.
The cat came too. It always came. I'd stopped pretending that was a coincidence.
You're making a mistake, it said, as the south road unrolled toward the second shard. Leaving the wall. Walking toward the leash you were built to never reach.
"Probably." I checked the toolbox — six skills racked, all grinding, a heal now among them. "You keep saying 'we' and 'the caretakers' and 'the one at the center.' You keep almost telling me why a Copyist scares you so much you leash the whole class from birth." I looked down at it. "You're not following me to stop me, Sprinkles. If you wanted to stop me you'd have done it at the mall. You're following me to watch. Because part of you wants to know what happens if one of us actually reaches the knot."
The cat was silent for a long moment. When it spoke, the cold had a hairline crack in it.
The last Copyist who got as far as you, it said quietly, was a very long time ago, and in a place that is not here, and I was the one who clipped them. I have thought about it every day since.So yes. Walk. I'll watch.But understand what you're walking toward, Leo. The first Threshold leashed a monster. The second one doesn't leash a monster.The second one leashes aperson.
Ahead of us, the second shard stopped being a distant exclamation point and became a wall of black glass filling the sky, and at its base the purple door stood open — not spitting Stragglers like the first one, but silent, and deep, and going down.