Elias came back to himself lying in wheat, Mira’s hand braced hard against his sternum like she was checking he hadn’t followed the old Sovereign into whatever came after.
“Don’t,” she said, before he could try to sit up.
“You spent something. I don’t know what, I don’t know how much, but you *spent* it, and I need you to just breathe for a second before you do anything else stupid and heroic.”
“Is Dorian—”
“Arm’s not coming back grey anymore. It’s not coming back *normal* either, not without a Warden looking at it, but it stopped.” Mira’s jaw was tight.
“You bought him that. I watched you do it and I still don’t understand what you did.”
The farmboy — the current one, the one still, technically, alive and in his own story — knelt a few feet away, staring at the empty patch of dirt where the well had cracked open, now sealed shut and ordinary again like none of it had happened.
“He’s gone,” the boy said.
“Really gone. Not rewritten-gone. Just — gone, gone.” He looked at Elias with an expression that had no business being that old on a face that young.
“I don’t actually know,” Elias admitted, which was the truth, and which scared him considerably more than anything else that had happened today.
“I just meant it. That’s all I had.”
Toby crouched down to help him sit up the rest of the way, quieter than Elias had heard him be since they’d met.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “that’s the first time in three deployments I’ve seen something in one of these Canons actually get *better* instead of just contained. That’s not standard Proofreader output, boss.”
“Don’t call me boss.”
“Little bit gonna call you boss now, sorry, that ship sailed.”
Behind them, the wheat field rippled once, all at once, in a wind that hadn’t been there a second ago — and a seam tore open in the golden sky itself, the unmistakable shape of a Margins crossing point, early, unscheduled.
Priya stepped through it looking like she’d run the entire way, which — Elias would learn later — she basically had, because a Tier-Zero Proofreader’s Ink signature had just spiked hard enough in the middle of a low-risk starter deployment to trip an alarm three ranks above her clearance to normally notice.
She looked at Dorian’s half-grey arm.
She looked at the sealed-over well. Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
She looked, longest of all, at Elias, still sitting in the dirt, drained pale and shaking and entirely unable to explain what he’d just done.
“I told you,” she said slowly, “not to try to fix the Author’s Law.”
“I didn’t,” Elias said.
“I don’t think I fixed anything. I think I just—” He stopped, because he genuinely didn’t have the word yet, and Priya’s expression told him that not having the word was, somehow, the single most alarming part of everything she’d just walked into.
“You *read* something,” she finally said, very quietly, like she was testing whether saying it out loud would make it true.
“You gave a dying story an audience of one, and it *answered you back.*”
Behind her, still hanging half-open, the Margins seam flickered — and through it, for just a fraction of a second before she sealed it shut, Elias caught a glimpse of a hallway lined with shelves he hadn’t seen before, every single one of them dark, unlit, waiting.
“That’s a problem,” Priya said.
“That’s a very, very large problem. And I think it just became mine.”