The briefing room had a table shaped like an open book, and Priya stood at its spine with a folder that visibly *breathed*, its cover rising and falling like something asleep.
“Your first field deployment,” she said, and set it down in front of the four of them.
“Standard Proofreader protocol — low-risk Canon, minor instability, in and out. You’re not going to save the world today. You’re going to learn not to die in one, which honestly matters more.”
Dorian leaned forward like this was the part he’d been waiting for his whole afterlife.
“Which Canon.”
Priya opened the folder.
The cover art that flickered up out of it — because that was the only word for it, a kind of moving illustration hovering an inch above the page — showed a broad-shouldered hero holding a glowing sword aloft over a battlefield, cape doing something capes should not physically be able to do in zero wind.
“*The Ember Sovereign,*” Priya read.
“Mid-list power-fantasy Canon. Farmboy discovers destiny, ascends through a leveling system, collects a harem of increasingly interchangeable love interests, saves kingdom. Currently unstable — its Author’s Law has been throwing errors. Numbers not adding up. Characters repeating dialogue that shouldn’t repeat. Low-grade Canon, low-grade problem, in theory.”
Elias was staring at the hovering image with an expression he couldn’t quite control.
“You okay?” Mira asked him, low, not for the room.
“I’ve read this,” Elias said.
“Not — not *this*, obviously, I never read a real one of these, but I *wrote* this. This exact structure. Chosen farmboy, glowing sword, numbers going up. I wrote eleven chapters of something almost identical to this before I got bored and started my dragon thing instead.” He looked up.
“This isn’t just any starter Canon. This is *mine*, or — a version of the thing I used to do, badly, at two in the morning, for an audience of four people.”
Priya’s expression didn’t move, but something behind it did — filed away, noted, not commented on.
“Coincidence,” she said, in the specific tone of someone who does not, professionally, believe in those.
“Or the Margins have a sense of humor. Either way, it’s your assignment. Go in, find the source of the instability, report back. Do not — I want this very clear — do not try to *fix* the Author’s Law yourselves. You are Proofreaders. You flag errors. You do not correct them. That’s Redactor-level authority and every one of you will die trying to use power you don’t have.”
“What happens if we find something worse than a numbers glitch,” Dorian said.
“Then you run,” Priya said, “and you call it in, and you let someone stronger than you handle it. That’s not cowardice. That’s the entire job description at your Tier.” She closed the folder.
The cover art dimmed.
“Gear up. You cross in twenty minutes.”
Toby, from the armchair he’d somehow claimed even in a briefing room, raised a hand.
“Question.
If it’s *his* kind of story—” a nod at Elias “—does that mean he’s got some kind of author’s advantage in there?
Plot armor by proxy?”
“No,” Priya said, flat.
“It means he understands the shape of the trap better than the rest of you.
That’s not the same as being safe inside it.
If anything—” she looked at Elias directly, and for once there was no dryness in it at all “—it means watch yourself twice as hard.
People who think they already know a story’s ending are exactly the ones a Canon likes to surprise.”