We came out of the second Threshold into ordinary daylight, which felt obscene.
The shard was gone — collapsed behind us into a settling cloud of black dust — and the street was just a street again, cracked and empty, with the sun going down orange behind the skyline the way it had every evening of my life before the sky broke. Priya sat down hard on the curb and put her head between her knees and breathed. I let her. I sat next to her and looked at my hands, at the six empty places in my chest where a toolbox used to be, and waited to feel like I'd won.
I didn't, particularly. That's the other thing the montages skip. Sometimes you resolve the discrepancy and free the woman and beat the unbeatable form-being and you still come out the far side with less than you went in, and a dead-tired ghost's map folded into your hand, and a very long way still to go.
┌─ STATUS ─────────────────────────┐ Class: Copyist — Lv. 14Copy Slots: 14 (1 used) Copied Skills: • [Straggler's Call] — Lv. 9 (9%) — ✦ uncatalogued · unrevocableRevoked (recoverable through re-acquisition): [Minor Flame], [Warden's Inferno], [Umbral Grip], [Mend], [Short Step], [Bulwark] Evaluation:"Useless with scaling potential." — pending revisionrevision withheld by order of Audit. └──────────────────────────────────────┘
One skill. Level fourteen, and one skill.
But it was mine. Off the ledger. Unrevocable. The first thing I'd ever owned outright since the sky broke, and I'd built it out of a noise everyone else threw away.
"You leveled three times in there," Priya said, not lifting her head. "You've got fourteen empty slots and one skill in them."
"I know."
"That's the saddest character sheet I've ever seen."
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
"I know." I almost laughed. "It's also the first honest one. Everything I ever had, they could take. This they can't." I looked out at the five shards still humming over the city — five, now, not six. "I've been building myself wrong the whole time. Copying the authorized stuff. The licensed classes. The things on the list." I stood up, and something in me stood up with me, harder and clearer than it had been on the first night. "So I stop shopping from the list. I copy the monsters. The Thresholds. The chains. Every broken, unlicensed, off-the-books thing in this whole dying city that no Auditor ever thought to write down. I build a toolbox they can't audit."
"And then?"
I opened my hand. Ada's map wasn't a thing you could hold, exactly — it had gone into me when her fingers closed mine, a location and a certainty, sitting behind my eyes like a landmark. The center of the city. The Root. The one skill in creation that no one could ever revoke, because revoking it would delete the pen.
"And then I go to the center," I said, "and I copy the thing they built every leash in the world to keep me away from. And I don't just break my leash. I break all of them. Every Copyist they've chained. Every one they will."
Sprinkles jumped up onto the curb beside me, tail curling, and regarded the five distant shards with the flat ancient patience of a thing that had, apparently, decided to switch sides and was still working out how to feel about it.
You understand, it said, that when the Auditor's binding fails — and it will, they always get loose eventually — it will file a report. And this time it won't send a cat, and it won't send one Auditor. You beat the leash and freed the anchor and put a caretaker in its own chains. You are, as of today, the largest discrepancy in the ledger.They will send everything.
"Good," I said, and I meant it, and it surprised me how much. "Let them audit me. I've got fourteen empty slots and a whole apocalypse full of things they forgot to write down."
The sun went down. Somewhere three miles south, behind a wall of welded cars, an old man was keeping a hundred people alive and a tired woman was spending gold light on a boy who couldn't be saved, and they were both, without knowing it, counting on a one-percent joke to walk into the center of a dead city and pull the whole knot loose.
I checked the map behind my eyes. I checked my one honest skill. I looked at Priya, and at the cat that used to be my enemy, and at the five leashes still hanging over the world.
"Okay," I said. "Power shopping. Round two. And this time we go where the list ends."