The street outside had a forty-foot shard of black glass punched through the middle of it.
It hummed. At the base, a doorway of purple light stood open like a wound that had decided to stay that way, and a tag floated over it in the calm, bureaucratic font the System used for everything, up to and including the end of the world.
[Threshold — Tier 1]Origin point of local Stragglers. Will continue to spawn hostiles until cleared.Recommended party level: 5+. Recommended party size: several. You are one (1) person of level two (2).
There were bodies on the street. I'm not going to be cute about that part. Two of them, by the churro cart, under a coat someone had laid over them with the kind of care you only take when it's already too late to matter. The world had been a video game for about four hours and it had already started keeping a body count, and the System hadn't put a tag over the coat, and I was obscurely, furiously grateful for that.
"You're the vending machine guy," said a voice.
A teenager sat on the churro cart. Sixteen, maybe. Three ribbons of living shadow coiled around her arms like they were bored. She wasn't looking at the coat. She was very deliberately not looking at the coat, which is its own kind of looking.
"Leo," I said.
"Priya. [Shadow Tamer]." She flicked a chunk of rubble across the street without seeming to move. "What'd you roll?"
In the new world, people asked what you rolled the way they used to ask what you did, and they sized you up just as fast. I'd already decided how I was going to answer that question for the rest of my life.
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"Copyist," I said. "I can steal any skill I see."
Her eyebrows went up. Then, kindly, they came back down. "At one percent. I heard about that class. Leo, that's—"
"The worst one. I know." I sat on the curb across from her. "Here's the thing about the number, though. Everybody hears 'one percent' and stops listening. But it's one percent of the source. Your shadows — if I copied them, I'd get a garbage version. But if I copied something that could end the world?" I let it sit. "One percent of the end of the world is still a very bad day for somebody."
Priya looked at me for a long moment. Behind her, Mr. Halloran arrived — pants on, fist smoldering, seventy-four years old and moving like every one of them — and lowered himself onto the cart with a grunt.
"The boy's got a plan," Halloran said. "God help us. What's the plan, son?"
I looked at the Threshold. At the purple wound in the world. At the coat by the cart.
"I copy the biggest things I can find," I said. "And I grind them until one percent is enough. Everybody with a real class already has their ceiling — they roll a fireball, that fireball's as big as it gets. I don't have a ceiling. I have a floor, and I climb." I stood up. "I'm not going to be the strongest guy in the apocalypse. I'm going to be one percent of everyone, and I'm going to add them together, and nobody is going to see it coming because they all stopped listening at 'one percent.'"
There was a silence. Priya broke it.
"That's either the smartest thing I've heard since the sky broke," she said, "or you're going to die in a really specific way."
The System would like to formally register that it agrees with the child.
Halloran laughed — the big, surprised laugh of a man who's decided he's going to live after all — and clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to hurt. "Then you'll want to copy me, boy. Best fire on the block. Only fire on the block."
I looked at the old man's smoldering fist. I looked at the humming Threshold that would keep spitting out Stragglers until somebody walked into that purple door and made it stop, and I felt the plan and the fear arrive at the exact same time, holding hands.
"Yeah," I said. "I think I do."