Warden Achebe didn’t look surprised when she arrived.
That, more than anything else, told Elias how bad this actually was — the one person in the room who should have been shocked simply looked like she’d been expecting exactly this, and had hoped she wouldn’t be.
“A first-mission Bookmark,” she said, circling him slowly in the same infirmary cot Priya had refused to let him leave.
“In four hundred years, I can name you the Archivists who took a decade to earn their first Fragment properly, safely, without losing a piece of themselves in the process. You did it in five days, at Tier Zero, and you nearly erased yourself doing it twice.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s fast,” Achebe said, which wasn’t an answer, and both of them knew it.
“Fast things break more often than slow things. That’s not a metaphor, Mr. Vance, that’s just physics with better branding.” She stopped at the foot of his cot.
“I’m promoting you to Editor. Effective immediately.”
Priya, standing in the doorway, made a small strangled sound.
“Warden, he’s been in the field once—” Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
“And already outpaced most of my three-year Proofreaders.” Achebe didn’t look away from Elias.
“I’m not doing this because I think you’re ready. I’m doing it because whatever you are, it’s going to keep happening whether we sanction it or not, and I would rather you have training, resources, and a rank that lets people take your reports seriously — than have you stumble into your next unclassified miracle with no structure around you at all.”
Elias sat with that for a moment, the weight of it settling somewhere he hadn’t found a place for yet.
“What about Dorian, Mira, Toby?”
“They stay Proofreaders for now. On schedule. Earned, the normal way.” A flicker of something almost like sympathy.
“I know how that sounds. I know how it’ll sit with them. I’d rather you hear that from me plainly than pretend it’s fair, because it isn’t, and pretending otherwise insults everyone involved.”
Priya’s jaw tightened at that, but she didn’t argue further, and Elias understood — with a small cold twist in his chest — that she’d already had this exact fight with the Warden before either he or the others were even conscious to hear it.
Achebe turned toward the door, then paused, one hand against the frame, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped into something quieter, meant only for him. This chapter is updated first at novelping dot com.
“One more thing, Editor Vance.” The new title sat strangely in her mouth, like she was trying it on to see if it fit him.
“I had a report cross my desk an hour before I came here. Unrelated, in theory. A minor Canon on the outer Shelves went dark three days ago — not decayed, not forgotten. Stripped. Every scrap of Ink drained out of it in a single night, characters and all, down to nothing. That’s Forger work. Clean, efficient, and they don’t usually bother with minor Canons unless something in them is worth more than it looks.”
“Why tell me that?”
“Because the Canon that went dark,” Achebe said, “was called The Last Draft of Elias Vance. Your unfinished dragon novel, Mr. Vance. It existed here, on the Shelves, the moment you started writing it in your old life. And someone just emptied it out completely, three days before you woke up in this world for the first time.”
The room went very quiet.
“That’s not a coincidence I like,” Achebe said, and left him to sit with it.