The lead figure was unremarkable in a way that felt deliberate — no visible weapon, no glowing Ink signature on display, just a calm, patient face that studied the five of them like a buyer inspecting merchandise before a sale.
“Tobias,” she said, and her voice carried none of the menace Elias expected, which somehow made it worse.
“You look well. Domesticated, but well.”
“Serah.” Toby’s hand had drifted, very slowly, toward the knife at his belt, though his voice stayed level.
“You’re a long way from your usual hunting grounds for a symbol you supposedly retired years ago.”
“Retirement is a story people tell themselves,” Serah said.
“I simply stopped needing to do the hunting personally, once the harvest started coming to us.” Her eyes moved past Toby, unhurried, and settled on Elias with an interest that felt like being catalogued.
“You’re smaller than the projections suggested. That’s often the way, with the interesting ones.”
“You’re the one who stripped my old novel,” Elias said.
“Two years ago it was nothing — thirty pages of mediocre fantasy from a man who didn’t believe in it himself. Ink retention that low doesn’t interest us. But something changed, three days before you crossed over. Your retention spiked. Sharply. Enough to put you on a list that doesn’t often get new names.” She tilted her head slightly.
“I don’t suppose you know why that happened.”
“No,” Elias said, honestly, and hated that it was true.
“Neither do we, yet. That’s rather the point of this visit.” Serah’s calm didn’t so much as flicker.
“We’d like to find out together, Mr. Vance. There are far less pleasant ways to extract that answer than a conversation, and I’d genuinely prefer not to reach for them unless you make it necessary.”
Priya stepped fully in front of Elias, Ink already gathering hard and bright along both her forearms.
“You’re on Errata-adjacent ground, three Editors deep in Margins territory, outnumbered—”
“We’re not here to fight you, Editor Odhiambo,” Serah said, almost gently.
“We’re here because Tobias didn’t finish his job the last time we sent him somewhere like this, and I’d hoped, sentimentally, that he might reconsider.”
Toby went rigid. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“That’s not why I left.”
“Isn’t it?” Serah’s gaze flicked to him, and for the first time something colder moved under her calm.
“You were supposed to bring the anomaly to us quietly, before the Errata ever got a hook in him. Instead you brought him a badge and a squad and called it a rescue.” She let that land, unhurried, watching it land on each of them in turn — Mira’s confusion, Dorian’s suspicion, Priya’s dawning fury, and last, worst, Elias’s own stunned silence.
“Ask him, Mr. Vance, why he happened to be exactly the Proofreader assigned to greet you, out of every recruit in the Errata, on the one night you crossed over with no Ink signature at all.”
Every eye in the clearing turned to Toby.
“That’s not—” Toby started, and then stopped, because the truth, visibly, was harder to finish than the lie would have been.
“It’s not what it sounds like.”
“Then tell me what it sounds like,” Elias said, very quietly, “because right now it sounds exactly like you were sent to find me before I even died.”