Her name, it turned out, was Continuity Warden Selwyn Achebe, and she had the specific stillness of someone whose Tier made moving quickly unnecessary — the room simply rearranged itself slightly around wherever she chose to stand.
“Mr. Vance,” she said, and Elias noted, with a small cold drop in his stomach, that she already knew his name.
“Editor Odhiambo tells me you fed Ink into a decaying Canon-fragment using nothing but sincerity. No Fragment. No ritual. No training.”
“I didn’t know it would work.”
“That’s the interesting part,” Warden Achebe said.
“Most things that don’t know they’ll work, don’t.” She circled the table once, slow, the moving text on her own sleeves — subtler than Priya’s, denser, older-looking — rearranging as she studied him.
“I’ve read four hundred years of incident reports in this job, Mr. Vance. I have never once read one describing what you did. That should excite me. Instead it makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I’ve learned to trust that feeling.”
“Warden,” Priya said, careful, “with respect, he’s a Tier Zero. Four days into service. Whatever he did, it clearly nearly killed him doing it—” Get faster updates on g.com.
“Which is precisely why I’m not having this conversation in a cell,” Achebe said, not unkindly.
“If I thought he was dangerous in the way that needs containing, we would not be talking, Editor, we would be past that already.” She stopped in front of Elias directly, and something about the way she looked at him made him feel, for one uncomfortable second, less like a person and more like a passage she was trying to parse the grammar of.
“Tell me what you were before you died.”
“A nobody. I wrote a webnovel. Four readers.”
“And when you wrote it — did you believe anyone would ever read it?”
Elias thought about that longer than he expected to.
“No,” he admitted.
“Not really. I think some part of me always assumed it would just… end. Unfinished. Same as everything else I ever made.” This story is hosted at g.com.
Achebe’s expression didn’t change, but something in the room did — a held breath, Priya’s, he realized, watching her Warden reach a conclusion neither of them had said out loud yet.
“That,” Achebe said quietly, “may be exactly why the Ember Sovereign’s dying draft answered you and not one of my four-hundred-year-old Redactors. You know, personally, intimately, what it costs to be unfinished. You didn’t perform sincerity at it. You recognized it.” She turned to Priya.
“I want him kept on active field rotation. Not benched, not buried in retraining. Watched, closely, by someone I trust — which is you, Editor, since you’re clearly already invested enough to lie to your own chain of command for him.”
“Warden—”
“That wasn’t a criticism.” A thin, rare almost-smile.
“It was an observation of good instincts. Don’t make me regret validating them.”
She turned back to Elias last, and her voice dropped, quieter, meant only for him.
“One more thing, Mr. Vance, and I want you to sit with it rather than answer immediately. In four hundred years, I have met exactly two other people who could do what you did tonight without training. Both of them are dead. Not from enemies. From doing it too many times, to too many dying things, until there was nothing left in them to give away.” She let that land.
“Ration yourself. Whatever this is, it isn’t free, and I don’t think you’ve felt the real bill yet.”