Level 999: The Glitch King

Six Percent

"Six percent," Theodore said, "is still the number on the table."

He didn't say it like a threat. That was the problem. He said it the way a man reads out a shipping estimate, patient, willing to wait for the number to do its own convincing.

And for one honest second, it convinced.

No pain. No shaking hand. No fourteen-day countdown with his name on it. Just the quiet the other version of him had been wearing so easily, like it cost nothing because eventually it hadn't. Jace let himself feel how much he wanted that, fully, without flinching away from it, because pretending he didn't want it would have been its own kind of lie, and he was so tired of the System correcting him for lying to himself. He was tired in his hand, tired in the place under his ribs where the fear lived now, tired in whatever part of him kept insisting on staying exactly this loud and this breakable when quiet was sitting right there, free, waiting only on a word.

But quiet wasn't the same as free, and he kept snagging on that distinction even as the offer tried to smooth it over. If he took it, the version of him that stood in Seraphina's life afterward wouldn't be protecting anyone. It would just be another asset with a friendlier face, and every heir he'd ever meant to get out from under a ledger would inherit a Jace who'd finally agreed to become one.

IDENTITY VARIANCE (LIVE) — SUBJECT: JACE

Current Reading: 34% and rising.

Classification: Within tolerance. Trending toward review.

"You're watching that number go up," Jace said. "Right now. While I think about it."

"Yes," Theodore said.

"That's not subtle."

"It isn't meant to be. Wanting the offer is the first stage of accepting it. I'm not hiding that from you. I've simply stopped believing hiding it ever changed the outcome."

Something in that landed differently than the rest of his careful sentences. Jace looked at him — really looked, past the mask, past the calm — and understood he was watching a man narrate his own history back to himself in the third person because the first person had gotten too expensive to use.

"How long ago," Jace asked, "did you take it?"

Theodore's hands were perfectly still. Jace had learned, in the minutes since the Collectors arrived, that stillness in this man was never neutral.

Theodore didn't answer that. He'd stopped answering the questions that mattered several rooms ago. But something moved behind his eyes anyway, brief and unguarded, the look of a man doing arithmetic on a number he'd promised himself he'd stopped counting.

"Long enough," he said finally, "that I no longer remember deciding to be calm about it. I remember deciding. I don't remember the moment it stopped being a decision and started being simply what I am."

Caleb's hands hadn't left the edge of the field since the projection first opened. "Sentiment is not required for this procedure."

"No," Theodore agreed. "It isn't."

Jace pushed Breach Sight into the offer itself instead — not the projection this time, the paperwork underneath it, the thing "Continuity Preservation" was actually a contract for. The ache behind his eyes sharpened fast, faster than it should have on a body running this low.

"Cease that," Caleb said, without turning. "You are not stable enough for a second exposure tonight."

"Add it to my tab."

"You do not have a tab. You have a Corruption ceiling and roughly four minutes of margin beneath it."

"Then I'll be efficient."

The seam gave, all at once, like something that had been waiting to be asked properly, gold peeling back layer by layer until the offer stopped looking like mercy and started looking like a document with his name already filled in.

HIDDEN CLAUSE — EXPOSED

Clause 19: Subjects electing Continuity Preservation are reclassified from Recoverable Asset to Permanent Sunchain Holding.

CONTRACT INSIGHT — PROFICIENCY GAINED.

Not medicine. Paperwork. The kindest door in the building led to a filing cabinet.

"It doesn't preserve me," Jace said. "It files me."

Theodore's silence this time wasn't a door. It was an admission with the shape sanded off.

"Then I'm choosing the six percent," Jace said, "and whatever's left of me after it."

IDENTITY VARIANCE (LIVE) — SUBJECT: JACE

Current Reading: 34% → 19%. Falling.

Classification: Stable.

"It goes down when I refuse it," Jace said. "Not when I feel better. When I say no."

"That is the correct reading of the mechanic," Caleb said, and for once he didn't sound like he was correcting anyone. It was the closest thing to approval Jace had heard out of him all night.

[HIDDEN CONDITION UNLOCKED: Preserve Identity Under Duress]

The notice flickered too fast to read twice, gone before he could ask what it meant.

[UNRESOLVED TITLE PROGRESS: +1]

[UNKNOWN METRIC UPDATED]

That one didn't explain itself at all. It only glanced, once, toward Seraphina, and vanished before either of them could catch it doing that.

Elijah let out a breath he'd been holding since the offer first opened. "Good," he said, quiet enough that it might not have been meant for the room. "I wanted someone to say no where I couldn't." Theodore didn't look at him when he said it. That, too, was its own kind of answer.

No loot dropped. No healing arrived to reward the decision. The shaking in his hand didn't stop; the ache in his chest didn't lift; eighty-nine percent stayed exactly where it had been all evening, because refusing the trap wasn't the same as escaping what the trap had already cost him. Six percent was still six percent. Nobody in the room pretended otherwise.

Seraphina's hand closed hard around his arm, harder than it needed to be for balance.

"Jace," she said. "Listen to me. The moment it starts sounding kind — that's not the offer working on you. That's the recovery already beginning."