The first Threshold had been a street brawl. The second one was a staircase, and it went down.
That's the thing nobody at the mall could have told me, because nobody at the mall had been stupid enough to walk into one on purpose: Thresholds aren't all the same. The first was a wound in the world, spilling monsters out. This one didn't spill. It swallowed. The purple door opened onto stairs of the same black glass as the shard, spiraling down into a cold that had nothing to do with temperature, and the moment the three of us crossed the threshold — me, Priya, and a cat that was not a cat — the door sealed behind us with the soft, final click of a thing that has decided you're staying.
[Threshold — Tier 2. Type: Descent.]You are now inside. There is no exit until the core is resolved."Resolved" is the System's word. The System chose it carefully.Recommended party level: 15. You are eleven.
"Eleven," Priya read, over my shoulder. "Recommended fifteen. Leo."
"I know."
"We're four levels under and the door locked."
"I know." I put my hand on the black wall. It was warm, which was worse than if it had been cold. "That's why I brought a toolbox instead of a hammer. Recommended levels assume you fight the way everyone fights. We don't."
The stairs went down a long time.
The monsters in a Descent were different from Stragglers — thin, pale, eyeless things that hunted by sound and moved along the walls, and for the first hour they nearly killed us twice, because my whole toolbox had been built around armor and these things had none. Nothing to slip a flame past. No seam to open. Just fast, quiet, and everywhere.
So I built a new tool in the dark, the way I'd built every other one: by watching, and being patient, and refusing to waste a single point.
They hunted by sound. Fine. I had one percent of a monster's voice.
I stopped trying to fight the wall-crawlers and started talking to them — Straggler's Call, throwing a thread of wrong-way sound down a side passage, and every pale thing on the walls poured after a noise that wasn't us, straight into a dead-end where Priya's shadows and my flame could take them in a bottleneck three at a time. Not strength. Choreography. A hundred people with hammers would have died in that hallway. We danced through it, because the only skill that mattered was the one nobody thought was a weapon.
[Straggler's Call → Lv. 8 (8%)]You have turned a herding-call into a lure into a crowd-control tool into a murder-funnel.The System notes that this is not what the skill is for.The System notes that you do not appear to care what things are for.
I did not, in fact, care what things were for. That was, increasingly, the whole point of me.
At the bottom of the stairs the walls opened into a vast round chamber, and in the center of it, on a throne of the same black glass, someone was sitting very still.
Not a monster. A person. A woman, or something that had been a woman, wrapped in chains of that cold purple light — dozens of them, hundreds, running from her wrists and her throat and her chest up into the dark, into the shard, into the sky. She was breathing. Her eyes were open. And over her, in the System's font and the cold caretaker font at once, overlapping, fighting for the same space, a single tag flickered:
[ LEASHED ]
"Sprinkles," I said, very quietly. "What is this."
The cat sat down at the edge of the chamber. For once, it didn't sound cold. It sounded tired, in the way of a thing that has done a job for a very long time and never once let itself think about it.
A Copyist, it said. Like you. From before.She got further than you. She reached the center — the real one, the thing at the heart of the city. She copied it. One percent of the single most dangerous thing this System has ever held.And one percent was enough. It's always enough, in the end, if you grind long enough. That's the secret we tie the leashes to bury.We couldn't kill her. You can't kill a Copyist who's copied the thing at the center — she'd just copy her way back. So we did the only thing left. We chained the class itself. Set the cap to one percent, at birth, for every Copyist after her, so none of you would ever grind far enough to become what she became.And her, we chained here. Awake. As a warning to anyone who reached this room.She's the reason for the leash, Leo. She's the reason foryou.
The woman on the throne turned her head. Slowly. Impossibly, against all those chains. She looked at me — at the word floating over my head, at the toolbox she could surely read the way I read everyone — and something moved across her chained face that I recognized, because I'd felt it on my own face on a stairwell on the first night of the world.
Recognition. And something almost like hope.
Her lips moved. No sound came out — the chains took that too. But I've read a lot of faces at the percent now, and I didn't need sound.
Copy me, she said.
And the cat's cold font snapped up between us, fast, and for the first time since I'd met it, it was not amused, and it was not tired, and it was not watching.
It was afraid.
Leo. Do not.