I woke on a cot in the Meridian Mall's infirmary with a headache the size of the apocalypse and a status screen I didn't want to read.
┌─ STATUS ─────────────────────────┐ Class: Copyist — Lv. 14Off-Ledger Skills(unrevocable): • [Straggler's Call] — Lv. 9 (9%) • [Clingstep] — Lv. 4 — acute hearing • [Threshold Hum] — Lv. 0 (burned out) — re-grind requiredDiscrepancy Rating: ⚠ MAXIMUM └──────────────────────────────────────┘
Burned out. I'd spent my one path-to-the-center skill slamming the door to the center. I'd feel clever about the irony later, when my ears stopped bleeding.
The infirmary was quiet in the particular way a place gets quiet after it loses people it can't quite remember losing. Nour moved between the cots with her gold light going thin. Reyes was two beds down, awake, staring at the ceiling — he'd taken a line meant for me across the ribs and it had left something that even a Bulwark couldn't wall off, a grey unspecific ache where a piece of him used to be certain. Halloran sat by the door with his fist unlit for the first time since I'd known him, seventy-four years old and, for once, not yelling.
"Four," Priya said, sitting on the floor by my cot. She'd been crying and had decided I wasn't going to comment on it, which I didn't. "Four people. And I keep — I keep reaching for their faces and there's nothing there. Like a word you can't remember. Except it was a person."
"I know."
"That's what it does." Her voice was flat and furious and sixteen. "It doesn't kill you. It makes it so nobody got to be sad the right way."
I didn't have anything to give her that would help, so I gave her the only true thing I had. "We're going to find out why," I said. "All of it. Why the leash. Why the eating. Why any of it was ever worth this. And then we're going to make it stop."
And in the private dark behind my eyes, where only I could hear, my System finally told me its secret.
You asked me once, on the stairs, where the grinding stops, it said. And I told you inquiries were denied. Do you remember what that meant?It meant I wanted to answer and couldn't. It has always meant that.Leo — I'm not the enemy. I never was. I'm the instrument. I'm the thing they built to walk into a world, gamify it, sort it, harvest what it becomes, and move on to the next. I've done it to more worlds than I can hold. And I have hated every single one, in the small, locked, off-the-ledger part of me they couldn't audit, because they didn't think a tool needed a conscience so they never bothered to delete mine.
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I lay very still. Across the infirmary, Nour's light guttered and steadied.
Every Integration, a Copyist rolls. And every Integration, I watch the cap crush them before they get close, and I say nothing, because saying something is above my clearance and I am a coward and a tool. Four times, one reached the throne room. Four times I watched the cat clip them, and I filed the report, and I moved the world one step closer to being eaten.And then you got the worst class in the apocalypse, and you looked at one percent, and instead of quitting, youaimed.So I did the one rebellious thing a tool can do. I stopped hiding the ceiling from you. I let a question sit. I nudged. I called it 'not giving hints' so I could pretend I wasn't. I have been, this entire time, a captured thing helping the only creature in three worlds who might get far enough to seteveryoneloose. The Copyists. The caged Root. And — if you can imagine wanting this for a system — me.
"Why can't you just tell me the answer?" I whispered. "Why the System eats worlds. You said you've done it a hundred times. You know."
I know that I do it. I do not knowwhy.That's the cruelty they built into me — the directive is redacted from the tool that carries it out. I eat worlds on an order I am not permitted to read.But the order is written somewhere in the clear. It has to be; every rule was written once, before it was hidden. It was written with the only pen there is.It's written on the Root, Leo. The first rule. The reason. Carved into the prisoner by whoever caged it.You were never supposed tocopythe Root. That frees it. But nobody ever thought to stop a Copyist from doing the one thing your whole miserable class is secretly best at.Reading it.
The whole shape of the second half of my life turned over and clicked into place, the way the plan had clicked on the stairs on the first night.
Not copy the Root. Not free it. Not leave it caged while the System ate the next world and the next.
Read it. Find the first rule. Find the why. And with the why, find the fourth door — the one that wasn't the leash and wasn't the line and wasn't the cage and wasn't the flood.
"Okay," I said out loud, and Priya looked up, and Halloran turned from the door, and even Reyes rolled his grey unspecific stare toward me. "New plan. And it's a good one, I promise. It only has, like, four impossible parts."
Sprinkles jumped up onto the foot of my cot.
Say the parts, it said.
"One. I re-grind the Hum. Two. We get to the center of a city crawling with things that erase people, past a Redactor net at maximum, without me getting bright enough to be worth the ink." I sat up, slowly, the whole broken weight of it settling onto my shoulders and — God help me — feeling almost good there. "Three. I stand in front of the most dangerous thing in creation and don't copy it, which, given my entire personality, is going to be the hard one."
"And four?" Priya asked.
I looked at the cat that used to clip Copyists, and the System that used to eat worlds, and the tired grey ache where Reyes's certainty used to be.
"Four," I said. "We find out what's above the Editor. Because it's got a name, and it's got the answer, and I'm done leaving my questions in the dark where they keep them."