"So let me get this straight," Priya said, three blocks into the walk toward the center of a dead city. "You've got fourteen empty slots. Your fire is right there — you know exactly how to re-copy it. Halloran's three miles south being flammable at anyone who asks. And you're not going to."
"I'm not going to."
"Because...?"
"Because the Auditor took the fire in eleven seconds, and it'll take it again in eleven more, and the eleven seconds after that." I stepped over a fallen streetlight, the kind of thing you stop noticing you're stepping over. "Every licensed skill in the world runs through the ledger. That's the leash. Not the number — the ledger. Anything on it, they can reach in and delete. I spent three Thresholds building myself out of loans, and the first Auditor that showed up called them all in at once."
"So what do you build out of instead?"
I stopped at the mouth of a storm drain, where something down in the dark was breathing wrong. "Everything they forgot to write down."
Sprinkles hopped up onto a chunk of curb, tail curling, and regarded the drain with the flat patience of a thing that had watched a great many people have this exact bad idea.
You're going to copy a monster, it said. On purpose. To keep.
"I already did once. The Call. It's the only thing I own outright." I crouched by the drain and reached for the one skill the Auditor couldn't find — nine percent of a herding-voice — and threaded a thread of this-way down into the dark, the oldest lie in the world: food, up here, easy. "Everybody treats the monsters like weather. Like scenery. Nobody ever asked what they could do, because nobody wanted to be them." A pale, eyeless shape began climbing the drain wall toward the light, moving the way the Descent-crawlers moved — flat to the stone, silent, hunting by sound. "But nothing about a monster is on the ledger. Which means nothing about a monster is a loan."
The wall-crawler came up into the daylight, following a meal that wasn't there.
I didn't fight it. I watched it — the way it gripped sheer stone, the way its eyeless head tracked the smallest sound. And the System clicked, quiet and reluctant, the way it always clicked for the things I wasn't supposed to want.
[Skill copied: Clingstep (—%)]Source: unlisted. Not a class skill. Not on the ledger.This one's yours, Leo. Same as the Call. They can't revoke what they never wrote down.
And then the cost.
It came in as the crawler died under Priya's shadows — a wrongness that started in my ears and spread. The world got louder. I could hear the wall-crawler's siblings four streets over, the drip of water in the drain, Priya's heartbeat, my own, all of it at once, a flood of sound I had no idea how to turn down. I went to one knee with my hands over my ears, and it took a full minute to learn to filter it, the way you learn to stop hearing a fridge.
"That's the part nobody warns you about," Sprinkles said, and for once it wasn't cold. It almost sounded sorry. "Licensed skills are fitted to you — sanded down, made safe, made human. Monster skills come raw. You don't copy what a thing does, Leo. You copy what it is. A little more, every time."
I stood up, slowly, hearing the whole city breathe.
┌─ STATUS ─────────────────────────┐ Class: Copyist — Lv. 14Off-Ledger Skills(unrevocable): • [Straggler's Call] — Lv. 9 (9%) • [Clingstep] — Lv. 1 — ✦ raw · adds: acute hearingLedger Skills: — none. (revoked. not re-acquiring.)Discrepancy Rating:rising. └──────────────────────────────────────┘
"Discrepancy rating," Priya read over my shoulder. "That's new. That's ominous. Leo, why is there an ominous new number."
Sprinkles had gone very still, ears flat, staring back the way we'd come.
Because every unlicensed thing he copies makes him brighter, the cat said quietly. An Auditor hunts what's on the ledger. But the more of Leo isn't on the ledger, the more he stops being a line-item and starts being aholein the page. And there are things the caretakers send after holes.One of them just noticed this one.
Far behind us, back toward the collapsed Descent, something was coming up the street that did not walk so much as delete the distance between us — and where it passed, I realized, with my new and terrible hearing, the city went silent. Not quiet.
Silent. The way a word goes silent when someone crosses it out.