Here is the problem with my brilliant plan, the one I figured out around noon the day after I killed a Guardian: I can only copy what I see.
That sounds obvious. It wasn't, until I sat down with a stick and scratched out the whole thing in the dust by the collapsed Threshold. Seven more Thresholds in the city. Each one leashed to something the caretakers didn't want a Copyist standing next to. To clear them, I needed a toolbox — a real one, a dozen skills stacked and ground and combined. And every single skill in that toolbox had to come out of watching someone use it in front of me.
Which meant, functionally, that the apocalypse had just become a shopping trip.
"You're grinning," Priya said. "You've got the vending-machine face again."
"I'm making a list." I stood, brushing dust off my knees. "Everybody left alive has a power. Every power is a thing I can own. I've been treating this like survival. It's not survival." I looked out at the broken skyline, at the six distant shards still humming over the city like black exclamation points. "It's a store, and the whole thing's on clearance, and I've got a coupon nobody else knows about."
The cat, sitting on a chunk of rubble washing a paw, did not look up.
That is the single most disturbing thing a human has said to me in six weeks, it said, in the cold old font that was not the System's. And I've been listening to a lot of humans die.
"Good morning to you too, Sprinkles."
The paw stopped mid-wash.
My name is not Sprinkles.
"You never gave me one. I filled the field." I shouldered the backpack I'd looted from the churro cart — half of it was Noodle of Destiny cups, because a man has to eat. "Sprinkles it is. You want to come watch me shop, or you got other Copyists to go frighten out of the business?"
The cat stared at me with the flat, ancient patience of something that had watched empires do this and stop. Then it stood, and stretched, and fell into step beside me, and did not correct me again, which I chose to count as a win.
The rumor — Halloran had it from a man he'd traded a lighter to, back when a lighter still meant anything — was that survivors were gathering at the old Meridian Mall, three miles north. Strength in numbers. Somebody organizing. Food, walls, a plan.
Three miles, in the new world, is not a walk. It's a gauntlet.
We were maybe a mile in when the first pack found us — four Stragglers, moving with a coordination the ones at my Threshold never had, herding us toward a narrow alley the way sheepdogs herd sheep. Something was training them. I filed that away, cold, next to all the other things I was trying not to think about.
But here's the thing: I'd killed forty of these. I knew them at the percent.
"Priya, left one. Halloran, don't." The old man's fire was a car alarm — loud, bright, wasteful, and it would splash right off the armor and cook us all in the alley. "Save it. I've got the armored ones."
I let the first two come. When they lunged — plates spreading, that half-second of open — I already had ten percent of a flame waiting in the seam of one and Priya's shadow hitching the leg of the other so it stumbled into three percent more of the same. Two down before Halloran had finished objecting to being told to hold his fire.
The third I did something new with. I'd been watching the way they moved — how the herding one hung back, directing — and when it opened its mouth to make the low call that steered the others, I saw, for just an instant, a thin thread of grey sound leave its throat.
The System clicked.
[Skill copied: Straggler's Call (1%)]You just copied amonster.Nobody told you that was possible because nobody thought a human would want to.
One percent of a monster's herding-call. Useless as a weapon. But I filed it in the toolbox next to the flame and the grip and I felt the shape of my plan get one notch wider, and one notch meaner.
The fourth Straggler, suddenly alone and unsteered, ran. I let it. You don't waste power on a thing that's already leaving.
The Meridian Mall had walls now — cars dragged into a ring, gaps welded with something that glowed faintly blue, guards on the roof with skills I catalogued before I'd finished walking up: one throwing spears of ice, one whose eyes glowed when he looked at us, appraising — some kind of scout class, reading our levels.
I watched his face when he read mine.
I watched it go from wary to bored in exactly the time it took to see the word Copyist and the number after it, and I understood, standing at the gate of the first safe place I'd seen since the sky broke, exactly how this was going to go. The worst class. The one-percent joke. He'd already stopped listening.
Everyone always stopped listening. It was, I was starting to realize, the most valuable thing I owned.
"Names and classes," the scout called down, already turning away.
Priya opened her mouth. I got there first.
"Priya, Shadow Tamer. Halloran, Flame Warden." I paused. "I'm with them. I carry stuff."
Priya's eyebrow climbed. I didn't look at her. Below the scout's line of sight, in the cold font only I could see, the cat's box flickered.
You lied, it said. Clean and fast. Didn't even blink.Interesting.
The gate ground open. Beyond it, in the mall's cracked atrium, a hundred survivors moved between fires and market stalls, and every one of them was wearing a power like a coat, and I stood at the threshold of the biggest store I'd ever walked into and felt my heart start to go.
Across the atrium, near a fountain gone dry, a young woman knelt over a man with a bad wound. She put her hands on him. Light — soft, gold, patient — spilled between her fingers, and the wound closed.
A heal.
I had never wanted anything so much in my life.
Oh, said the cat, watching me watch her. You poor thing. You have no idea what you look like right now.