“He’s gone to do something incredibly stupid, alone, with information that’s two years out of date,” Priya said, already moving, already pulling a crossing-seam open with sharp, angry motions.
“That’s not bravery, that’s a man trying to buy back forgiveness with his own life, and I have half a mind to be furious at him for it once we get him back in one piece.”
“You said once,” Mira said.
“Not if. Say if you don’t mean it.”
“I don’t have room to mean anything else right now,” Priya said, which wasn’t quite a promise, and all four of them heard the gap in it.
The crossing point Toby had used was easy enough for Priya’s rank to trace — a raw, hastily-cut seam rather than a properly sealed one, sloppy in a way that told Elias, more than anything else, exactly how frightened and unpracticed Toby had been when he’d made it.
They came out into a place unlike any Canon Elias had crossed into before: not golden wheat fields or a stone hallway, but a stretch of grey non-space between Canons, the Margins gone thin and unstable, littered with the broken, half-erased debris of stories that had already been harvested and discarded.
“This is what’s left after they take everything worth taking.”
Ahead of them, in the center of the grey wasteland, Toby stood alone facing three figures Elias recognized immediately — Serah, unbothered as always, flanked by the same two silent companions from before.
“You came back faster than I expected,” Serah was saying to him, almost warm, almost fond, the way one might speak to a disappointing but still-loved student.
“I did wonder if you would.”
“I’m not here to rejoin,” Toby said.
“I’m here to tell you to leave him alone. Take me instead. You wanted a conduit two years ago and I’m still the one who understands the theory best out of anyone you’ve got left. Trade.”
“That’s sweet,” Serah said, and meant it, which was somehow worse than mockery.
“It’s also not how value works, Tobias. You know that. He isn’t valuable because of what he knows. He’s valuable because of what he is. You can’t offer me a substitute for a thing that isn’t substitutable.”
“Then I guess you’re not getting either of us,” Elias said, stepping out of the tree-line of broken Canon-debris with Priya, Mira, and Dorian fanning out beside him, and Toby’s head snapped around, relief and horror crossing his face in the same half-second. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
“You shouldn’t have come,” Toby said.
“You shouldn’t have left,” Mira shot back, voice cracking with an anger that was mostly fear.
“That’s not how this works, Toby. You don’t get to decide alone that your life is the acceptable cost. We don’t leave people behind to buy the rest of us peace. That’s not the deal. That was never the deal.”
Serah watched the reunion with open, clinical interest, unbothered by the four Ink signatures now arrayed against her three.
“How touching,” she said.
“Genuinely. I mean that.” Her calm didn’t so much as flicker as she raised one hand, and the grey wasteland around them all began, very quietly, to hum.
“Unfortunately, sentiment doesn’t change the math today. I came prepared for exactly one outcome this time, and it isn’t a negotiation.”
The ground beneath all seven of them lit up at once with a containment glyph none of the Errata recognized — old, layered, clearly built for exactly this ambush and laid the moment they’d crossed the seam — and Elias understood, half a second too late, that Toby’s sloppy crossing hadn’t been fear.
It had been bait.