You can't walk across a city at maximum discrepancy. I learned that in the first hour.
The Redactor net had gone taut while I slept — a ring of crossed-out shapes drawn tight around the mall, every one of them tuned to the enormous bright hole I'd become in their page. Sprinkles's custody claim was the only reason they hadn't drawn their line already, and custody, the cat kept reminding me, was not protection. It was a formality with an expiration date, and my discrepancy rating was the clock.
So I couldn't be bright. But everything that made me strong made me brighter. That was the trap, still, always.
Which meant I needed help from someone who'd solved it before me.
"There is one," Sprinkles admitted, when I finally asked. We were on the mall roof at dawn, watching the crossed-out shapes hold their patient ring. "A caretaker. Older than me. It served longer than me, ate more worlds than me, and then one day it did the thing they tell us is impossible: it went quiet. Dropped its rank. Stopped showing up on the ledger it was made to keep. The Editor spent a whole Integration hunting it and never found it, because it had done the one thing an off-the-books man might appreciate." The cat's cold font almost warmed. "It made itself a footnote. Too small to cite. Too marginal to redact. It's been living in the margins of the world ever since, and it is the only being I know who ever walked away from the Editor and lived."
"And it'll help us?"
It'll helpyou.You're the thing it's been waiting in the margins for. But I warn you, Leo — it went quiet for a reason. It learned something, at the edge of a world it was eating, that made a caretaker desert its post across a hundred Integrations. Whatever the Footnote knows, it was heavy enough to break a thing like me.
Getting to the margins meant going under.
The Footnote lived where the ledger's attention didn't reach — the storm drains, the dead utility tunnels, the seams of the city that no Threshold pressed on and no Redactor bothered to read. And getting down there, past the ring, meant the thing I'd been dreading: re-grinding the Hum, in the dark, one seam at a time, while a net of erasure held its breath above me.
Stolen novel; please report.
It was slow. It was chores with a number attached, the way it always is. I'd find a sealed grate, a locked seam, a place reality was pressed shut, and I'd sing nine percent of open into it and feel the note give, and the counter would tick, one painful level at a time. Priya kept watch. Sprinkles walked point. And with every seam I opened, my seam-sense deepened and my discrepancy climbed, and far above us I felt the Redactor net lean lower.
[Threshold Hum → Lv. 5.]Re-grind progressing. Seam-sense restored. You can open small seams cleanly now — grates, doors, the shut places. Not a shard. Not yet.Discrepancy: still maximum. There is no floor beneath maximum, Leo. Do not mistake the lack of a rising number for safety.
Three levels down, in a tunnel that hadn't seen light since the sky broke, my new hearing caught something ahead that wasn't a monster and wasn't a caretaker and wasn't Priya's heartbeat or mine.
It was the sound of someone very old and very small, writing.
The tunnel opened into a chamber lit by nothing, and I saw it anyway, because seam-sense doesn't need light: a shape in the corner, coat greyer and more threadbare than any Editor's, hunched over the wall, scratching endless tiny words into the concrete with a broken-off nub of something that had, a long time ago, been a pen. It did not turn around. It did not stop writing.
[ — ]No tag. No rank. No entry.The System has no record of this being. The System is, quietly, delighted about that.
"You're the Copyist," the Footnote said, in a voice like paper that's been folded too many times. Still writing. Still not turning. "The one who aims. The cat finally brought you. Took you long enough — I've been holding a seat since three worlds ago." At last it set down the nub of pen, and turned, and where its face should have been there was a page so covered in tiny crossed-out words that not one of them could be read anymore.
"Sit," said the Footnote. "You want to know why the System eats worlds. I'm the only one left who wrote it down before they made me forget I knew." A dry, terrible sound that might have been a laugh. "And then I wrote it down again, in the margins, ten million times, so that forgetting wouldn't take. Ask me your question, boy."
"Why?" I said. "Why does it eat worlds?"
The Footnote's crossed-out face tilted.
"Wrong question," it said. "That's the question they let you ask, because the answer is a wall. Ask the one underneath it. Ask me what happens to a world after the System's done — after it's harvested, sorted, eaten, moved on." It leaned closer, and every crossed-out word on its face seemed, for one instant, to almost resolve. "Ask me where the worlds go, Leo. Because they don't die."