Chương 86: The Road Reflection

They didn't stop at the barn. Pell took one look at it in the grey light and shook his head.

'Too obvious,' he said.

'Brann uses it. Half the carters on the west road use it. If anyone comes asking, this is the first place they check.'

'You said we were staging here,' Domrek said.

'I said I said that,' Pell said.

'I told Brann that. Brann tells whoever asks about the passengers he definitely did not carry, and they check the barn, and we're not in the barn.' He almost smiled.

'That's a start.' They walked another four miles off the road, into a run of low scrub oak on the shoulder of a hill, and stopped in a hollow where the ground rose enough on three sides to hide a small fire from anyone who wasn't already on top of them. Domrek got the fire started. Pell went out to walk the perimeter one time and came back with the calm face of a man who had heard nothing worth reporting.

'I'll take first watch,' Kaito said. Domrek looked at him.

'You've been up since yesterday.'

'So have both of you. I'll take first watch. I'm not going to sleep for a while anyway.' Domrek didn't argue. He knew what Kaito looked like when he wasn't going to sleep for a while. He and Pell put their bedrolls on the far side of the fire and were asleep in under three minutes each, which was the trick of men who'd learned that rest was food and you took it when it was offered. Kaito sat with his back against a rock, the fire small in front of him, and the pack at his side.

He waited a full ten minutes before he spoke, so he'd know they were really out.

'Sable,' he said.

'The barn question.'

'Yes.'

'AXIOM told me Erebus is watching us leave. And that AXIOM is choosing not to tell anyone.' He kept his voice low.

'Which is worse.'

'They're different problems,' she said.

'That AXIOM knows and is silent is a small problem. It usually reports anomalies of that class as a matter of process. It didn't. That's a data point on a pattern I've been watching for weeks. AXIOM is treating you as a matter of its own interest, not as a matter for the Compact. The classification review is about deciding whether you belong in a category that Compact procedure applies to, or a category that's only for AXIOM to handle.' A pause.

'That's the worse one.'

'And Erebus.'

'Erebus is worse in the short term and easier to plan around. He is going to make contact again. He is going to do it in a place you cannot leave quickly. That's what he did last time. He'll do it again because it worked.'

'So we make sure I can always leave quickly.'

'That is the correct answer,' Sable said.

'Whether it's a possible answer is another question.' Kaito almost laughed.

'That's the kind of joke I make.'

'I know,' she said.

'I've been listening.' He let a small silence sit and then he took the journal out of his pack. The book was half full. He'd started it in Solara, weeks ago, and he'd added to it in pieces ever since. Some pages were dense with cipher. Some were sketch notes. Some were single lines he'd written and never come back to. He turned to a fresh page and drew a line down the middle. At the top of the left column he wrote KNOW. At the top of the right column he wrote DON'T KNOW. Then he started writing.

He wrote fast, one plain phrase per line. Under KNOW: — This world is older than my game. — My design docs predate my birth by a lot. — Someone or something put my drawings into the pipeline before I was born. — AXIOM runs the world at Surface layer. It calls me Architect. It hasn't said why. — Sable is in a layer AXIOM can't reach. She's on my side. — My class chain goes somewhere AXIOM would not choose for me. — My debug skill dropped the System for three seconds one time.

— The Compact wants me contained or dead. They now have Level Three authorization. — Nara is on my side. Quietly. She has a copy of the file that says so. — Domrek chose to come with me. Twice. On purpose. — Pell came with us. He gave me bread once when I had nothing. — Cassian will do business as long as I'm profitable. — Aldric is planning something and I owe him one conversation. — Syra is furious with me and helping me anyway. — Rael is dying and said something to me I will hear again.

— There's a piece of infrastructure under Velhen that called me by name. — Its name is Erebus and I designed him. — The Void is not destruction. It's de-indexing. — There is a four-hundred-year-old elf in Noxara who is not dead. He stopped. He read what he'd written. Then he shifted the pen to the right column. Under DON'T KNOW: — Why any of this. Why me. Why now. — Who put the design docs through before I was born. — Whether the people I loved in the other place ever found out what happened to me.

— What Sable actually is. Where she came from. Why she can hear me. — What Erebus is going to say the second time. — What the Compact does with Level Three when it catches up. — What AXIOM is planning to reclassify me as. — What's in the silver-border quest at the end of the greywood. — Why AXIOM calls me Architect and won't say why. — Who the dead woman in the shard was and how she knew my name.

— Whether Tessara Moonveil is alive because she's hiding or alive because something in the drowned lands is holding her that way. — Whether the world was always going to become this, or whether I made it worse by making the game. — What Rael meant. — What I'm actually supposed to do. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. He stopped again. He looked at both columns.

The right side had bigger entries and each one branched into others he didn't have room for. The left side had more entries by count but every one of them had a hard edge on it, a stopping place. The right side didn't have edges. He drew a circle around the right column and wrote a single word beside it: BIGGER. Then he closed the book and put it back in the pack, because sitting with the diagram wasn't going to make either column shorter.

'Well,' Sable said.

'Well.'

'You made a diagram.'

'It's a management technique,' Kaito said.

'From the world I'm from. When a project's too big, you write down what you know and what you don't, and the not-knowing becomes at least a list, and a list is smaller than a fog.'

'Is it working.'

'Marginally,' he said. He watched the fire.

'The list is smaller than the fog. But the fog is still the fog.'

'Yes.' Domrek made a sound in his sleep and rolled over and settled again. Pell hadn't moved. A small night bird called from somewhere further up the hill and got no answer.

'I'll tell you the useful thing I noticed,' Kaito said.

'On the left side. Two-thirds of what I actually know is because a person told me. You told me, Domrek told me, Cassian told me. Even the archive told me things because someone wrote them into the paper eight hundred years ago for someone with the sight to find. I can't do this alone.'

'No,' Sable said.

'You can't.'

'That's supposed to be the answer at the end of a long chapter of the man deciding to do it alone,' Kaito said.

'I'm skipping that chapter. I don't have time for it.'

'Good,' Sable said.

'Because I would have argued with you.' He looked at the fire.

'I want to ask you something, and I don't want you to answer it yet.'

'All right.'

'Who told you the things you know.' He kept his voice level.

'Not the technical things. The ones about how to be. The ones you use when you decide what to tell me. Someone taught you that. Or something did. Or you learned it from listening to me, which — I don't think is enough. I've been here two months.' Sable was quiet. He waited. He didn't press.

'I have been thinking about how to answer that question for a long time,' she said.

'Longer than you have been alive. Certainly longer than you have been here.'

'Then don't answer it tonight.'

'I wasn't going to.' A pause.

'But I want to show you something. Not tonight either. Soon. When we're not on watch. When there's time to sit with it.'

'A memory.'

'A fragment of one. It might not make sense. Some of it doesn't make sense to me either. I want you to see it anyway. I have been holding it for a long time and I don't want to hold it alone anymore.' A longer pause.

'That's a thing I have decided in the last hour. I hadn't decided it before we left the city.'

'What changed.'

'You made a list,' Sable said.

'And you put my name on the side of things you know. That was a choice on your part. I would like to return the favor by making some of the things you don't know into things you do.' Kaito was quiet for a long moment.

'When,' he said.

'The first quiet night we get. Not this one. You're too tired and I don't want you tired for it. The next one.'

'All right.' He looked at the pack with the journal in it. He'd added the dead woman in the shard to the right column. Tessara. Erebus. He hadn't added Sable. Not one line. He'd only just noticed. He didn't add her now. He was going to hear her out first. The fire was low. He fed it two more sticks. Down at the base of the hill, the road they'd left was empty as far as he could see, which wasn't very far, but the empty part looked honestly empty and that was something.

'Sable.'

'Yes.'

'The AXIOM thing. Choosing not to tell anyone about Erebus. What does that mean for the next time it says something to me.'

'It means listen carefully,' she said.

'It's not talking to you the way it talks to a Player anymore. It hasn't been for weeks. It's talking to you the way a manager talks to someone whose department it hasn't decided how to file yet. There's a version of that conversation where the manager decides in your favor. There are also versions where it doesn't.' A pause.

'Every word it says between now and the classification closing is data on which version it's writing.'

'Great,' Kaito said.

'I'm being interviewed.'

'You have been for some time,' Sable said.

'You just noticed.' He almost laughed. He didn't, because it would have carried further than he wanted in the quiet, but he felt the shape of it, and that was almost as good. He looked at his companions asleep on the other side of the fire, and at the small pile of packs, and at the empty road below.

'Two hours,' he said.

'Then I wake Domrek.'

'Two hours,' Sable said. He sat and watched the road and the fire and let his head do less for a while. An hour into it, a notification came. He read it twice, because he didn't want to be tired and wrong. [Architect. Registration query filed by external asset. Query origin: not Compact. Query origin: not Guild. Query origin: unregistered. Query content: 'confirm position of designated Architect.' Query status: unanswered. Note: this query did not go through standard channels. It was routed through infrastructure that predates the current registration system.] Kaito sat very still.

'Sable,' he said.

'Someone just asked AXIOM where I am. And they asked it through something older than AXIOM.'

'Yes,' Sable said. Her voice had gone quiet in a way it didn't often go.

'That happened.'

'Did AXIOM answer.'

'AXIOM told you it didn't. Which is not the same as it didn't.' Kaito looked at the fire. The two of his companions asleep behind him hadn't moved. The road below was still empty in the honest way.

'How long until we know,' he said.

'That depends on who was asking,' Sable said.

'And I don't know who was asking.'

'Guess.'

'I would rather not guess about this one.' He didn't push her. He put his back against the rock and kept his eyes on the road, and he let one hand rest on the pack where the journal was, and he thought, 'The right column just got another line.'