Induction, it turned out, involved considerably less paperwork than Elias expected and considerably more of Priya pressing her palm to his sternum while unreadable script crawled across both their skins.
“This doesn’t hurt,” she said, a beat before it started to hurt, a bright cold line drawn straight through the center of his chest.
“You could’ve *led* with that being a lie—”
“Hold still. I’m giving you a base Ink signature, artificial, borrowed against your future service. It’s the only reason you’re not currently blowing away like ash. Congratulations, you now technically exist. Barely.”
When it was done, his hand — just his hand, held up in front of his face — looked marginally more *there*, like a photograph that had been slightly out of focus his whole life and had just, for the first time, resolved.
“Tier Zero,” Priya said, reading something off his skin that he couldn’t see.
“Ordinary human, no active abilities, Ink reserve just above the floor. You are, and I want to be honest with you because it matters later, the weakest thing currently breathing in this building.”
“Encouraging.”
“I’m not in the business of encouraging. I’m in the business of not getting my Proofreaders killed in their first month, which statistically requires managing expectations.” But there was, again, that flicker — something almost fond.
“Come meet the ones who didn’t die yet.”
The room she led him to was smaller than he expected, more like a common room than a barracks, with three people already in it who all turned to look at him with three entirely different expressions.
The first was a young man, sharp-jawed, arms crossed, who looked at Elias the way you look at someone standing in your assigned seat.
“New Proofreader,” he said, not a question, mostly an insult.
“Great. Another zero to babysit.”
“Dorian,” Priya said, a warning in one syllable.
“I’m just *saying*, Editor, I was a Tier One inside my first two weeks—”
“You almost lost an arm inside your first two weeks,” said the second person, a woman with her boots up on a table and a half-eaten something in her hand that smelled, bizarrely, like actual food.
She had a look about her Elias couldn’t quite place — steady, watchful, the kind of calm that comes from having already decided what she’d do if the room caught fire.
“I’m Mira. Ignore him, he’s competitive about oxygen.” She looked Elias over, not unkindly.
“You look like you died confused.”
“I died mid-sentence.”
That got a laugh out of the third person before Elias had even finished the thought — a lanky guy sprawled sideways across an armchair like furniture was a personal insult, grinning like he’d been waiting all day for someone to say something worth laughing at.
“Oh, I *like* him. I’m Tobias. Toby. Comic relief, emotional support, occasional liability.” He said it lightly, but something moved behind his eyes for just a half-second when he said *liability* — there and gone, fast enough that Elias almost didn’t catch it.
“Elias,” he said.
“I wrote a webnovel nobody read and then I had a heart attack finishing a sentence about a dragon.”
Silence.
Then Mira, very seriously: “What happens to the dragon?”
“I don’t know. I died.”
“That’s the worst cliffhanger I’ve ever heard,” Toby said, delighted.
“Welcome to the club,” Priya said dryly, “you’re about to live several.”
Dorian hadn’t uncrossed his arms.
“Zero Ink signature and a fantasy novel nobody read,” he said, half to himself, like he was cataloguing a threat that hadn’t announced itself as one yet.
“Sounds like nothing to me.”
Elias didn’t have an answer for that.
He wasn’t sure yet whether Dorian was wrong.