The Meridian Mall had a king, and his name was Reyes.
You knew it the second you saw him, and not because of a crown. Because of the way the atrium bent around him — the way people angled their bodies toward him even when they were pretending not to, the way the fires burned a little brighter in his corner and the good food ended up there without anyone deciding out loud that it should.
[Bulwark], the scout's kind had tagged him, before I learned to stop asking. A tank. A wall that walks. In a fight he could stand in a doorway and let a hundred monsters break against him like surf, and I understood, watching him for one afternoon, that this was exactly how he ran the whole place: strong in front, everyone else behind, and the arithmetic of who eats first decided by who could take a hit.
I want to be fair to him, because it would be easier not to be. Reyes wasn't cruel. He was sorting. In a world that had started keeping a body count, he'd decided the strong would keep the weak alive, and in exchange the weak would do as they were told and eat second, and the horrible thing — the thing I turned over all night and couldn't put down — was that it worked. A hundred people were alive behind his walls. That's not nothing. That's the opposite of nothing.
But I'd rolled the worst class. I knew exactly what it felt like to be sorted into the second line. And I'd spent the whole day watching where the second line ended up when the food ran low.
Her name was Nour. The [Mender].
I found her because I made myself useful — carried water, hauled rubble, kept my head down and my mouth shut, played the porter I'd claimed to be. Nobody watches the guy who carries stuff. It's the best disguise in the world. By evening I'd mapped the whole enclave: three ice-throwers, two scouts, a woman who could turn her skin to stone, a kid who moved between two points without crossing the space between — a blink — and Nour, kneeling by the dry fountain, closing wounds with gold light and looking more tired every time she did it.
I sat down near her with a Noodle of Destiny cup and offered her half. She took it. People always take the noodles.
"You heal everyone?" I asked.
"I try." She nodded at a boy asleep against the fountain, maybe ten, breathing wrong. "Him I can't fix. The gold stops bleeding. It doesn't stop sick." She pressed her hands to her eyes. "Reyes says I should stop spending it on the ones who won't recover. Save it for fighters."
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"What do you say?"
She looked at me. Just a porter, as far as she knew. Nobody. So she told the truth, the way people tell the truth to nobody. "I say I didn't get handed a miracle so I could ration it to the people who need it least."
She put her hands back on the sick boy. The gold light spilled out — soft, patient, spending itself on a kid it couldn't even save, because she'd decided that was what it was for.
The System clicked.
[Skill copied: Mend (1%)]One percent of a heal. It will close a paper cut. Eventually.But Leo. You've been a walking corpse this whole time — a Copyist with no way to fix himself. You just fixed that. Grind this one. Grind it before anything else.
I sat there with a stolen miracle warming up at one percent inside me, watching a tired woman spend hers on a boy who wouldn't make it, and for the first time since the sky broke I felt something that wasn't fear or arithmetic. It was closer to shame. I'd walked in here calling this place a store. She was in here treating it like a family.
The two things could both be true. I was starting to learn that most things were.
The blink-kid was easier to feel good about. I copied [Short Step] off him during a game of tag he was playing with the little ones — one percent of a teleport, which turned out to be a stumble of about eight inches, useless for travel, potentially very useful for the exact eight inches between where a claw was and where I needed my throat to not be.
┌─ STATUS ─────────────────────────┐ Class: Copyist — Lv. 8Copy Slots: 8 (6 used) Copied Skills: • [Minor Flame] — Lv. 12 (12%) ✦ breakpoint reached • [Warden's Inferno] — Lv. 4 (4%) • [Umbral Grip] — Lv. 5 (5%) • [Mend] — Lv. 1 (1%) • [Short Step] — Lv. 1 (1%)Uncatalogued: [Straggler's Call] — Lv. 3 (3%)Evaluation:"Useless with scaling potential." — pending revision └──────────────────────────────────────┘
Six skills in the rack, all of them grinding. A toolbox, filling up.
I was admiring it — genuinely, stupidly happy for the length of one breath — when Reyes had the sick boy carried out.
Not to a bed. To the gate.
"He draws monsters," Reyes said, to the crowd, to Nour, to no one, in the reasonable voice of a man who has done the math and doesn't enjoy it and does it anyway. "The sound he makes at night. Every Straggler for a mile hears it. He can't fight, he can't be fixed, and he is going to get someone killed who can." He wasn't a monster about it. That was the worst part. "The wall opens at dawn. He goes outside it."
Nour was on her feet. "He's ten."
"I know exactly how old he is." And he did — you could hear that he did, that he'd counted it and hated it and chosen anyway. "That's what makes me the one who has to say it."
The atrium went silent. A hundred survivors looked at the floor, because looking at the floor is how a hundred people agree to something none of them will admit to.
I looked at the floor too.
Then I thought about a number set deliberately low, so that people like the boy and people like me would be sorted quietly into the second line and disappear before anybody had to watch.
And I found that I was not, after all, going to look at the floor.