SSS-Rank Skill Copy: I Can Steal Every Class

The stratosphere was the color of a bruise.

Not the bright surgical blue the old world used to brag about in its tourism holos, but a thin, sickly violet pressed thin over black — the shade of skin stretched too tight over a wound that wouldn’t close. Glen pressed his forehead to the cold, salt-crusted porthole of the Ferryman’s trawler and watched that bruise widen as the rusted hull groaned around him, climbing, climbing, always climbing, as though the old boat itself was reluctant to leave the ground behind.

He couldn’t blame it.

Below them, Neo-Kyoto was already a smudge of light bleeding into the horizon, swallowed by the curve of the world. The Celestial Tower — that impossible obsidian spire where Empress Ryun had sat in her cathedral of stolen time and told him truths he’d spent his whole life not knowing he wanted — was gone. Reduced to a pale scratch on the heavens. From up here it looked fragile. From up here everything looked fragile, the whole of human civilization nothing more than a handful of glowing motes scattered across a dark and indifferent body.

She told you his name, the void fragment whispered.

Glen closed his eyes.

Arthur Pendelton. SSS-Rank. The man who broke the sky twice and lived to be ashamed of it. Your father.

"I know," he said, very quietly, to no one the Ferryman could see.

The fragment pressed closer. It lived behind his thoughts now, coiled in the hollow space between intention and action, and when it spoke it didn’t speak with a voice so much as a pressure — the feeling of a hand settling on the back of his skull, a thumb tracing the seam where his will met its hunger. Thirty-four point five percent. That was the number branded into the corner of his awareness like a brand on a calf, ticking in time with the corruption threaded through his veins. Thirty-four point five. The fragment had been quiet in the tower, almost reverent, drunk on the geometry of Ryun’s domain. But now, unmoored, cut loose from the apex of that awful architecture and rattling around in the guts of a smuggling trawler, it was restless.

The conduits, it murmured, slithering the word across his inner sight like oil on water. You saw the schematics. You know what they are. You know what they’re for.

Glen’s hand tightened on the datapad in his lap.

The Administrators’ Covenant. He’d torn it from Ryun’s cathedral in a bath of static and screaming light, and now it sat on this flat rectangle of salvaged glass, cool and inert and utterly damning. Conduit schematics. Layer after layered diagram of the vast arterial network that ran beneath every shielded city on the planet — Johannesburg included — drawn with the clinical precision of a surgeon mapping a body he intended to cut. And beside the schematics, the truth Ryun had let fall like a knife across the table: the System fed on the dead. Every soul harvested in the dungeons, every hunter ground down to essence and points, every name added to the endless ledger of the fallen — it was fuel. Fuel that ran up those conduits, into the shields, into the thin golden light that held the Monarchs’ tide at bay. The shields weren’t a wall. They were a furnace. And humanity was the coal.

Open them, the fragment said, and for a moment Glen could almost see it — the conduits flaring wide, the dead rushing upward in a torrent of stolen light, the shields blooming into something blinding and absolute, a fortress that no Monarch could ever pierce. He could feel the shape of the power in the offer. It would be easy. Easier than anything he’d ever done. The fragment knew the conduits the way a tick knew a vein.

All it would cost was everything he hadn’t yet lost.

"No," Glen said.

The fragment’s pressure spiked — a bright needle of rage and longing behind his left eye — and then settled back into its watchful coil. It never raged for long. That was the cruelty of it. A ravenous thing could be resisted; a seductive one was the work of a lifetime.

Glen opened his eyes and looked down at the datapad again.

The conduit schematics for Johannesburg were on the seventh layer. He’d memorized them on the way up the tower and then again on the way down, tracing the lines with his fingertip until the Ferryman had given him a look that suggested tracing the geometry of a world-killing machine in a rusting smuggler’s boat was perhaps not the most reassuring passenger behavior. He traced them again now. The lines ran deep, deeper than the city’s foundations, converging beneath the old central district in a knot the Covenant labeled, in the Administrators’ cold shorthand, Primary Sump — Johannesburg. The place where the dead of his city gathered before they were burned into light.

He wondered how many of them he’d known.

"Stop drawing on the glass," the Ferryman said from the cockpit.

Glen looked up.

The Ferryman was a ruin of a man in a ruin of a boat. He was built like a dock piling — broad, weathered, barnacled with old scars and the faded tattoos of a dozen port authorities he’d presumably bribed or outrun — and he moved through his trawler with the unhurried competence of someone who had long ago made peace with the idea that the sky was trying to kill him and had decided, on balance, to bore it to death. His helm was a junkyard collage of salvaged screens, duct-taped gauges, and one frankly alarming analog altimeter that appeared to be held in place by rust and spite.

"Didn’t draw anything," Glen said.

"Your finger’s doing that little circle." The Ferryman didn’t turn around. "Means you’re thinking. Bad for passengers. Passengers should sleep. Eat the dried fish. Complain about the smell. Thinking gets you noticed."

"By who?"

The Ferryman was quiet for a long moment. The trawler’s engines — a guttural, arrhythmic thudding that Glen had stopped expecting to survive about an hour ago — stuttered, caught, and resumed.

"By the thing between the world and the next," the Ferryman said, in the tone of a man reciting a grocery list. "You carry something loud, boy. Louder than the cargo I usually move. Louder than the crying aristocrats and the runaway Awakened and the poor bastards who looked at a dungeon entrance and thought there’s my future." He tapped a scarred knuckle against the altimeter. "Whatever’s in you, it’s listening. And the space between the world and the next is listening back. You think too loud up here, something hears."

Glen’s jaw tightened. Thirty-four point five percent. The fragment stirred, amused.

"You talk like a priest," he said.

"I talk like a smuggler who’s lived long enough to get superstitions." The Ferryman finally glanced back, and his eyes were pale and flat and knowing. "Priests pray. I just keep my head down and my cargo quiet." He paused. "You want quiet, you should put that pad away. Stop tracing the veins of the world. Get some sleep. Joburg’s still a long way off, and the long way home’s always the part that costs you."

Glen looked at the old man for a moment. Then he set the datapad face-down on his knee and leaned back against the bulkhead, watching the bruised sky pour past the porthole.

He didn’t sleep.

He thought about Isla instead, because the alternative was thinking about his father, and he wasn’t ready for that, and the fragment knew it, and the fragment was delighted.

Isla had the ring.

He could still feel the shape of where it had sat in his palm — his mother’s ring, the plain gold band Mary had worn for twenty years of a life she’d never asked to be extraordinary, the ring he’d pulled from his pocket in the cold light of the tower and pressed into Isla’s hands with a promise that felt, even as he made it, like a lie dressed in truth. Come back. That’s what he’d said. I’ll come back. As though coming back were a thing you could promise when the System ate the dead and the Monarchs were already walking and the boy he’d grown up beside had turned into a herald of the end.

Caleb.

The name sat in him like a stone. Caleb, who’d been Caleb — loud, reckless, loyal in the particular way of boys who’d been through the same dungeon gates and bled on the same floors. Caleb, who had stood in the light of something vast and ancient and chosen it, chosen the Monarchs, chosen to become the voice that walked ahead of the tide. Glen had seen it happen. Had seen the moment his friend’s eyes went from human to heralded, and had not been fast enough, strong enough, anything-enough to stop it.

You couldn’t have stopped it, the fragment said, almost gently. He chose. People choose. You know that better than anyone.

"I know," Glen said again, and hated that the fragment was right, and hated more that it was being kind, which was worse than when it was cruel because the cruelty he could refuse and the kindness was the hook.

He thought about his mother.

Mary. Morrigan. The two names sat over the same face now — the civilian woman who’d made him lunches and checked his homework and lied, for twenty years, about what she was, and the SS-Rank Shadow Weaver who’d woken diminished in a bed she didn’t recognize and looked at her son with eyes that held an entire buried life. She was awake. She was weak. The awakening had taken something from her that Glen couldn’t name and wasn’t sure would come back, and he’d left her behind to chase a truth across the sky, and the guilt of that was a living thing with teeth.

Shadow Thread, the fragment offered, showing him the ghost of his mother’s power, the fine dark filaments she’d woven like language. You have it. You copied it. You could—

"Shut up," Glen said, and this time he meant it, and the fragment subsided with a low, wounded hiss that he did not, under any circumstances, feel guilty about.

The trawler shuddered.

"Coming down," the Ferryman called. "Hold something."

Glen braced a hand against the bulkhead as the boat tilted, and through the porthole the stratosphere’s bruise gave way to cloud — thick, yellow-brown, acrid. Ash. The ash clouds that ringed Johannesburg like a second sky, the fallout of the city’s first death, the day the shields had failed and the land had been scoured and remade in the image of the war that made it. The trawler groaned into the murk and the world went brown and dim and the air outside the glass looked like something you could almost taste — grit and old fire and the particular bitterness of a place that had burned and never quite stopped.

Then they broke through.

Johannesburg was a crater.

Glen pressed his face to the glass and breathed in once, sharply, through his teeth, because nothing — not the schematics, not Ryun’s cold words, not every report he’d read on the way down — had prepared him for the shape of it. The city he’d grown up in was gone, and in its place was a vast, shallow wound scooped out of the earth, miles across, lined with the fused and glittering aftermath of a heat that had turned sand to glass. The glass plains caught what little light filtered through the ash and threw it back in dull, oily rainbows, like oil on water, like a bruise within a bruise. Skeletal towers rose from the glass at broken intervals — the bones of the old skyline, stripped and blackened, leaning against each other like drunks holding each other up after a fight they’d all lost. Streets were suggestions now, ghost-lines in the slag where the grid had been. Landmarks were teeth in a jaw that had been kicked in.

His home.

He’d known. He’d known intellectually, the way you know a number, a statistic, a line in a report. But knowing it and seeing it — the scale of the absence, the silence of a place that had held four million lives and now held wind and glass and the memory of fire — were two different wounds, and the second one opened in his chest like a door.

Beneath, the fragment said, and for once it wasn’t hunger. For once it was just — noticing.

Glen looked. And there, beneath the ruins, beneath the glass and the leaning bones of towers, there was light. Faint. Steady. A glow that had no business being there, a soft green-gold pulse that breathed in the wreckage like a heartbeat refusing to stop. Eden’s sanctuary. The last garden, the place the city’s survivors had rooted themselves in the dark while the surface burned, tending a light that the war hadn’t managed to kill. From up here it looked small. From up here it looked impossible. From up here it looked like the only honest thing for a hundred miles.

And above it — above all of it — the shields.

Glen tilted his head back and looked up through the porthole’s grimy glass at the canopy of gold stretched over the crater like a membrane over a wound. It was thin. He could see it thinning in real time, the light stuttering and rippling, gold going to white at the edges where the ash clouds pressed in, the whole vast dome flickering like a candle someone had forgotten to trim. He’d seen shields over a dozen cities now, bright and brazen and self-satisfied in their strength. Johannesburg’s was none of those things. Johannesburg’s was a held breath. It was the thinnest shield he’d ever seen, thin enough that he could feel the wrongness of it through the glass — the sense of a barrier held up not by power but by sacrifice, by the steady burn of the dead rising through the conduits beneath his feet and being spent, and spent, and spent.

This is what the conduits buy, the fragment said. This trembling thing. This held breath. Open them and it stops breathing. Open them and it becomes a wall.

Glen said nothing.

The Ferryman brought the trawler down in a long, rattling arc, skirting the edge of the shield through a gap that Glen suspected was less an official entry point and more a place where the gold was so thin the old man just bullied through it on momentum and optimism. The hull shrieked once, briefly, against something that wasn’t air, and then they were under the dome and descending toward the glass plains, and Johannesburg rose around them like a graveyard with its mouth open.

The boat settled with a shudder and a cough and a final contemptible rattle, and the engines died, and the silence was enormous.

Glen sat in it for a moment. The datapad was face-down on his knee. The schematics waited beneath his hand. The fragment coiled, patient, thirty-four point five percent of him that was no longer entirely his. Somewhere beneath the glass, his mother was breathing. Somewhere out in the dark beyond the shield, Caleb was walking toward this place with a tide at his back. Somewhere in his memory, Isla held a ring and a promise he had every intention of keeping and no guarantee he could.

The Ferryman coughed. "We’re here."

"I know."

"Long way home, eh?" The old man’s pale eyes found him in the dim cabin, and there was something in them that was almost, impossibly, gentle. "Doesn’t get shorter from here. Just gets real."

Glen looked down through the porthole one more time. The ruins. The glass. The faint, stubborn glow of the garden beneath it all. The thin gold shield flickering overhead like a prayer no one had the strength to finish.

His home, in the particular and terrible shape of what it had become.

He picked up the datapad. He stood. The fragment whispered, and he let it whisper, and he held the line, and he went down the ramp into the ash.

There was a war coming, and the long way home had only just begun.

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