The Decay System: I Alone Can Reinforce Reality

Mouthful of Ghosts

[Absorb all?]

The words hung in the air between Silas and his sister, and neither of them breathed.

Mira's gray arm had reached her shoulder. The powder streamed from her like smoke from a burning letter, and her smile was starting to slip, because even she could feel the cold reaching her heart.

"What is it?" she asked. "Silas, what are you seeing?"

He could not tell her. How do you tell your dying sister that the only way to save her is to swallow the last thoughts of a hundred strangers?

But Mira had always been the clever one. She looked at the drifting gray swirling through the shattered ward, at the ring and the hair clip and the torn hospital bracelets spinning slowly in the air, and her face changed.

"It is them," she whispered. "The dust. It is the people."

"Mira..."

"Do not." Her voice sharpened, a flash of the stubborn girl who used to argue with doctors. "Silas, do not do it. Not for me."

"I am not letting you go."

"I was already going." She laughed, small and cracked. "Do you not remember? I was supposed to be gone by spring. This is just faster."

The powder reached her collarbone. Lena, still clinging to Silas's neck, made a thin sound against his ear.

"Mister," the little girl said. "If it was my mom in the dust... I would want her to help someone."

Silas closed his eyes.

He thought of a grave eleven years ago. He thought of a promise he had made to a headstone. He thought of every missed phone call, every late arrival, every time he had chosen the contract over the person.

He opened his eyes and said, "I am sorry."

Then he opened his hand.

[Absorb all.]

The ward screamed.

It was not a sound a human throat could make. It was a thousand silent voices tearing out of the air at once, flooding into Silas through his palm, his skin, his open mouth. He felt a nurse's last prayer. He felt a boy's terror at the dark. He felt an old man's final, absurd regret about a garden he would never finish. Each one slammed into him and broke apart into gold, and the gold poured into the empty places that the System had carved out of him.

He dropped to his knees. Lena slid from his back and clutched his shoulder as he shook.

[Absorbed: 1,840 grams.] [Stability: 200 of 200.] [Maximum capacity increased.] [Title acquired: Eater of the Fallen.]

"Do it," Mira said, very softly. "Quickly. Before you lose your nerve."

Silas dragged himself across the broken floor and wrapped both hands around her one good arm. Gray powder spilled over his knuckles, cold as winter water.

"Hold," he said hoarsely. "Hold, hold, hold."

The golden light erupted from him. It did not form a circle this time. It sank into Mira's skin and ran through her like lightning along a wire. The streaming powder stopped in midair. It curled backward, and her arm reformed from the elbow down, bone and muscle and skin knitting themselves out of drifting gray.

Mira gasped. She held up her restored hand and stared at it. Her fingers trembled, flexed, and closed.

Then the light faded, and a final line burned across Silas's sight.

[Reinforcement complete: Mira Vance.] [Status: Frozen at current state. Decay halted.] [Note: Reinforced targets do not change. They neither heal nor worsen.]

Silas read it twice.

He understood what it meant before Mira did. The cancer was still inside her. The tumors, the failing marrow, the slow death the doctors had measured in months. The System had not cured her. It had stopped the clock.

She would not die. She would not get better. She would simply stay, exactly as she was, for as long as he could afford to hold her.

He had not saved his sister. He had made himself her life support.

"Silas?" Mira touched his face with her new hand. Her eyes were wet. "Why do you look like that?"

"Because I am glad," he lied, and kissed her forehead, and tasted dust.

Behind his eyes, the voices were still whispering.

He pulled himself upright. Lena stood close, her small hand tucked in his coat. Mira leaned on his arm, thin and unsteady, but alive. For one moment, in the ruins of the oncology ward, the three of them were something almost like a family.

Then the sound of boots rang up the stairwell.

Silas turned. Five figures stepped out of the dark and into the ruined ward, moving fast and in formation. Scavengers' gear, hospital-pharmacy backpacks, a fire axe, a rifle. They had the hollow, hungry look of people who had already killed that night.

The man in front raised his hand, and the others stopped.

He was tall, with a shaved head and a face that might once have been kind. A gray scarf was wrapped around his throat. In his left palm, a pale shadow spun slowly, like a pinprick of black light, and wherever it passed the concrete floor flaked into fine, glittering dust.

"We saw the light from four blocks away," the man said calmly. "Gold, with a pulse like a heartbeat. Do you know how rare that is, friend? Everyone else is just dying out there. You are building something."

Silas stepped in front of his sister and Lena. "Stay back."

The man smiled. "Relax. We are not here to hurt you. We are here to recruit you." He nodded at Silas's hands. "My name is Corvin Hale. I woke up tonight with the class [Decay Sovereign]. It lets me take things apart. I can feel you doing the opposite, which means you and I are the only two people left on this planet who matter."

A new notification flared in front of Silas's eyes, red and urgent.

[Warning: second host detected.] [Class: Decay Sovereign. Threat level: extreme.] [Natural counter-class. Reinforcement efficiency against this host: reduced by 60 percent.]

Corvin's smile widened as he took a step forward.

"Here is the offer," he said. "You hold the world together. I will hold the people together, so they do as I say. Or..." The black light in his palm brightened. Beneath Mira's feet, the floor she was standing on began, very slowly, to crumble.

"Or I show you how long that reinforcement of yours lasts against me."