They put Elias in a room with no visible door once the four of them crossed back into the Margins, which he only found alarming for about ten seconds, until Priya walked through a wall to join him and he understood the room simply hadn’t decided yet whether it needed one.
“You’re not in trouble,” she said, before he could ask.
“I want that said first, because you have the exact face of a man rehearsing an apology.”
“I disobeyed a direct order.”
“You disobeyed an order I gave you because I assumed you couldn’t do the thing you ended up doing.” She sat across from him, and for the first time since he’d met her, she looked less like a tired professional and more like someone doing math she didn’t like the answer to.
“Proofreaders don’t feed Ink into a Canon. Editors don’t, mostly. That’s Warden-and-up work, and even then it’s slow, ritualized, expensive — weeks of ceremony to give one dying story a trickle of relevance. You did it in about four seconds, off-script, with no training, and it nearly put you in the Blank doing it.”
“That,” Priya said, “is the question three separate departments are about to start arguing about, and I would very much like to have an answer before they notice you exist, not after.” She slid something across the table — a thin strip of what looked like ribbon, text scrolling along its length too fast to read.
“This is a standard incident flag. It goes up the chain automatically. I’ve delayed it eleven hours by physically not filing it, which is the single most reckless thing I’ve done in about six years of this job, and I did it because I wanted to talk to you first, off the record.”
Elias looked at the ribbon like it might bite him.
“Talk to me about what?”
“About whether you actually understand what you did, or whether you got lucky.” She leaned forward.
“Because if it’s the second one, I need to bury this, quietly, and get you retrained somewhere safe and boring before someone above me decides you’re either a weapon or a liability. And if it’s the first one—”
“What happens if it’s the first one?”
Behind her, through the wall that didn’t exist a minute ago, something Elias couldn’t see chimed once, softly, like a bell in another room — and her whole posture changed, spine straightening, professional mask sliding back into place so fast it was like watching a door slam.
“That was fast,” she muttered, not to him.
“Too fast.”
“What was fast?”
“They already know,” Priya said, and stood, and the wall behind her opened into a hallway that hadn’t been there a second before either.
Standing in it, unhurried, patient, was a woman in the black-and-silver of a rank Elias hadn’t learned yet — a rank that made Priya, visibly, go very still.
“Editor Odhiambo,” the woman said, pleasant as a knife.
“You’ve been sitting on an incident flag for eleven hours. I’d like to know why, and I’d like to meet the Proofreader who’s currently the reason half the Continuity Wardens are awake at an hour they shouldn’t be.”