Here is the choice they built for me, and I want you to see how good it was, because the caretakers are very, very good at choices.
North: the center of the city, the Root, the whole point. I could feel it now through the seam-sense, singing its one note, closer than it had ever been. The way was open. I was strong enough — barely, off-ledger, unrevocable — to walk in and reach for the one skill that could break every leash in the world. If I went now, tonight, I might actually make it before the discrepancy rating tipped over and the Redactor was allowed to draw its line.
South: a growing shard over the Meridian Mall, and under it a hundred people, and Halloran, and Nour, and a boy who couldn't be fixed, and a man named Reyes who kept them all alive by sorting them and had told me there'd be a wall that opened for me.
Go north and I might win, and lose them.
Go south and I might save them, and lose the window, and never get another.
"It's bait," Sprinkles said, watching me feel the shape of the trap. "You understand that. They can't catch you, so they're making a shard over the thing you love, to pull you off the road to the center. It is the oldest move there is. Do not mistake me for telling you it isn't cruel. I am telling you it works."
"It works because it's real," I said. "That's the whole trick. It's not a fake threat to lure me. It's a real one they know I won't walk away from." I was already turning south. "Which means the only way it doesn't work is if I stop treating it like their choice."
Priya fell into step beside me. "Third door?"
"Third door." Because that was the thing they kept getting wrong about me, the thing the leash had always gotten wrong: they built every trap as this or that, and I had spent my entire garbage apocalypse refusing to pick from the menu. "They want me to choose between the center and the mall. So I don't choose. I go to the mall — and I bring the center with me."
Priya's eyebrows went up. "You have a plan-face. Explain the plan-face."
"The shards are the Root, leaking. I copied the hum — I can open a seam and seal a seam." The idea was still assembling itself as I said it, terrible and bright. "A Threshold they grow at the mall is a door to the same place every Threshold goes. If I can reach the mall's shard, I don't have to walk all the way to the center of the city to touch the Root." I looked south, at the thickening dark over the place I'd chosen people instead of shelter. "They're going to open a door to the middle of everything, right on top of the people I care about, to make me run the wrong way."
"...And you're going to walk through it the right way."
"I'm going to walk through it the right way."
We ran the three miles. I won't pretend it was heroic; it was mostly wheezing, and Clingstep let me take the walls and rooftops where the streets were choked, and Priya's shadows carried her over the gaps, and Sprinkles simply arrived places the way cats and caretakers do. The whole time, the sixth shard grew over the mall like a bruise, and the whole time, at the ragged edge of my seam-sense, I felt the Redactor and its dozen crossed-out kin flowing south behind us, patient, waiting for a number to tip.
The Meridian Mall's walls were still standing when we came over the last rooftop. Reyes was on the ramparts, a wall of a man turning himself into a literal wall, and the ice-throwers were up, and there — small at the dry fountain, gold light in her hands — was Nour, and beside her, fist smoldering, seventy-four years old and yelling encouragement at people half his age, was Halloran.
They were alive. They were holding. And directly above them, the growing shard cracked open its first inch of purple light, and something began to come down out of it that was not a Straggler and was not a Guardian and was not anything the ledger had a tag for.
It came down in a grey coat. It had a pen.
And when it landed in the courtyard of the place I'd chosen over safety, a hundred survivors went silent at once, and the System — my System, the petty, tired, secretly-kind thing that had been narrating my whole apocalypse — put up a box it had clearly been ordered not to, in a font gone very, very small.
Leo. I'm sorry.That's the one who set the cap. That's who I answer to. That's who all of us answer to.That's the Editor.