Chapter 68: The Author Stopped Writing On My Skin And That Was Worse

Thirty-four thousand.

That was the number the Verath bloom had cost, and Soren had been awake long enough to do nothing with it.

He sat against the wall of the dorm with his knees up and ran the inventory instead, because the number was already spent and inventory was the only thing that paid out.

What he had.

One Quill with two uses left.

Three bonds holding above baseline.

A soul running at fifty percent that had stopped dropping for the first time in two weeks.

What he’d lost.

The Verath grove.

A safe house.

The illusion that the Author needed a reason.

What he controlled. Less than he wanted. More than the Author thought.

Pack Sense was loud this morning.

Four frequencies, all of them restless.

Selah’s ran cold and tight, the way it did when she was angry at herself for caring.

Maren’s spiked and dropped.

Dani’s was a thin steady hum, the moth somewhere in the rafters keeping watch it hadn’t been asked to keep.

◆◆◆◆

Joan came at seven with a tablet and no greeting, which was how he liked her.

"I pulled the timestamps," she said.

She put the tablet on the floor in front of him and crouched. "All thirty-one instances since the first Quill use."

"And?"

"They cluster." She dragged two fingers across the screen.

"Every write event happens inside a window that opens the second you finish your first Quill use back in your first use. Before that, nothing. The Author couldn’t touch you before you used the thing once."

Soren looked at the cluster.

He’d known the Quill was a channel. He had not known it was the only channel.

"You’re telling me the writing isn’t the attack," he said. "It’s the symptom."

"I’m telling you the data says the Author needs a road in." Joan didn’t editorialize. "The first use built the road, everything since has used it."

"So the Author can’t reach me without the Quill?"

"The Author can’t reach you without the channel the Quill opened." She picked the tablet back up. "Think about which word matters."

Channel.

Not Author.

The Author was a writer with a pen and an agenda.

The channel was a wound that had been left open in his soul since the first time he’d reached for power he didn’t understand.

The Author wasn’t the problem, just the thing standing on the other side of a door Soren had propped open himself.

Close the door. Lose the writer.

"There’s a cost," Joan said, reading his face. "If you close it."

"I know what the cost is."

"Say it anyway."

"The Quill is the only thing I have that does anything to a Fracture." He set his jaw, then made himself stop, because that was a tell. "Close the channel, the Quill goes inert. Next Fracture, I’m fighting it with bonds and a stick."

"Two uses left," Joan said. "You’d be giving up two uses to lock out an enemy who’s already inside the house."

"I’d be giving up the only weapon that’s ever worked." He stood. "Don’t make it sound smaller than it is."

She didn’t apologize. She wrote something on the tablet and left.

◆◆◆◆

Yara found him on the roof an hour later because Yara always found him.

She came up in the humanoid shape, barefoot on the cold concrete, and stood close enough that her shoulder touched his arm.

"You’re going to do something stupid," she said.

"Probably."

"With the pen?"

Soren didn’t answer.

She felt the decision in the bond before he’d finished making it, which was the problem with bonding a goddess.

"I felt something in it," Yara said. "Both times when you used it."

"Felt what?"

She was quiet long enough that he turned to look at her.

"There’s the Author’s ink," she said. "The writing, the timers, the voice but under it there’s something older, almost like the pen was a thing before the Author picked it up."

Her hand found his sleeve, the one covering the last line on his skin. "Something is in there that the Author doesn’t own and I don’t know what it is, It just looked back at me."

"You’re afraid of it?"

"Yes."

Soren filed that because he knew that Yara was afraid of almost nothing.

He’d watched her stand in front of a First Shadow and not move.

Whatever was inside the Quill had made a goddess flinch, and that was a data point he was going to need later, when later existed.

"A third voice," he said.

"I don’t know what it is," she said again, sharper, because she hated not knowing things almost as much as she hated him reaching for things she couldn’t control.

Yara didn’t want him to touch the Quill, that was the real thing under the warning.

"Don’t use it again," Yara’s grip on his sleeve had gone from a touch to a hold. "Whatever you’re planning, find another way."

"There isn’t another way."

"Then don’t do it yet."

"Yara."

She stepped in front of him.

"That thing connects you to something I can’t follow," she said, low. "I followed you into the Fracture,I followed you down to fifty percent. I’m not letting a pen take you somewhere I can’t go after you."

The shadow under their feet curled up around his ankles, hers, claiming the floor they stood on.

[DING! — Obsession Index update. Yara Hale: 60 → 61/75. Possessive escalation logged.]

Soren didn’t react to it.

He filed it next to the thing about the third voice and the thing about the channel and the thing about thirty-four thousand he wasn’t going to think about.

"I hear you," He put his hand over hers on his sleeve and didn’t pull it away. "I’m not going somewhere you can’t follow, I’m closing the door so nothing can follow."

It wasn’t a yes or a no.

It was the only true thing he could give her, so he gave her that.

◆◆◆◆

That night he sat on the dorm floor with his back against the bed and Grimm in his lap and told one person his actual plan.

"I’m cutting the channel," he said into the dark. "The Quill goes dead after, the Fractures get harder, but the Author goes silent and the bleeding stops."

Grimm’s shut eyes pointed at the window.

She smells the same as before, she said. The pen still wants something.

"I know."

You don’t know what.

"No," he said. "I don’t."

The skin on his left forearm went warm.

Soren didn’t look, knew the warmth by now, the slow burn of ink rising under the surface in someone else’s handwriting, a new sentence the Author wanted him to read.

Thirty-one times he had read them.

Every single time.

He pulled his sleeve down over it instead and held it there until the warmth faded against the fabric.

Grimm lifted her head.

You didn’t read it.

"No," Soren said. "I didn’t."