The Decay System: I Alone Can Reinforce Reality

What the Dust Is Made Of

Three seconds. The dust crept over Silas's shoes and began to eat the laces.

He did the only thing he could. He stopped trying to save the world and shrank it down to the size of two people.

The golden light flared from his palms and closed into a tight ring around his boots and the little girl's bare foot, a circle barely wider than a manhole cover. The crumbling stopped at its edge. Beyond the line, the street kept dissolving into a gray tide.

[Stability: 0 of 31.] [Warning: reinforcing at zero Stability will consume the host.]

Something inside Silas tore. It was not pain, exactly. It was the sensation of a thread being pulled out of the middle of his body, thin and bright and impossible to get back. His vision went white at the edges. His knees buckled, and the girl yanked on his coat to keep him up.

"Mister, you are bleeding from your nose."

He wiped it. His hand came away red and gray. The blood was already turning to powder at the edges.

"What is your name?" he rasped. He needed to talk. If he stopped talking, he was going to stop thinking.

"Lena."

"Okay, Lena. I need you to hold my hand and not let go. Can you do that?"

She nodded, solemn as a judge. Then she looked at the gray drifting past the ring, and her small face did something terrible. It went very still.

"My mom is in that, isn't she?"

Silas opened his mouth. No lie came. "I do not know."

"She was holding my hand," Lena said. "And then she was not."

He pulled her against his chest, and she did not cry. That was worse. Over her head, across three kilometers of dying city, St. Aurelia's upper floors had vanished into the haze. Mira was inside that. Mira, who had learned to ride a bike on the day their father died because Silas had been the only one left to hold the seat. Mira, who texted him a bad joke every morning from her hospital bed because she knew he would not answer and wanted him to know she was still there.

He could not reach her. The numbers were simple. Three kilometers in four minutes, on legs that could barely hold him up, through a street that was erasing itself.

He was going to be too late. Again.

Something pinged in the corner of his vision.

[Aether Dust detected in range.] [Aether Dust: residue of dissolved matter. Absorbable. Restores Stability.] [Absorb? Yield: 1 Stability per 10 grams.]

Silas stared at the prompt. Then at the gray falling all around them. It was not ash. It glittered faintly when the orange light hit it, and tiny motes of it were drifting toward his open palm like iron filings to a magnet.

He saw it then. Caught in the drift, spinning slowly, was a wedding ring. Beside it, a child's hair clip, the plastic still bright pink. Then a strip of something that had once been a coat.

Residue of dissolved matter. Matter, and everything that had been standing in it.

"Do not look at it," Silas whispered, and did not know whether he was talking to Lena or to himself.

He closed his hand.

The dust poured into him.

It did not feel like dust. It felt like standing in a crowd that was all whispering at once. A man's last thought about unpaid rent. A woman's silent apology to her sister. A laugh, cut off mid-breath. Each mote carried a tremor of the person it had been, and then each tremor sank into his chest and turned into warmth, into strength, into fuel.

[Absorbed: 312 grams.] [Stability: 31 of 31.]

He nearly vomited. He kept going.

[Stability: 44 of 44. Maximum capacity increased.]

He understood what the System had made him. A thing that survived by consuming the dead, so that the living could stand a little longer on solid ground.

"Can we go now?" said Lena.

"Yes." His voice cracked. "Yes. Climb on."

He ran.

He ran the way the hunted run, in short, brutal bursts, putting the golden ring under his feet only where he needed it. A square meter of road, a step, another square meter, another step. Behind him the street collapsed into a river of gray. Ahead, the city folded like paper. A bus dissolved around a screaming driver. Silas did not look. He did not stop. Every few seconds he caught a drifting cloud of dust and gulped it down, and with each swallow, a stranger's final thought rolled through him and was gone.

Somewhere around the second kilometer, he realized he was crying, and had been for a while.

[Distance: 900 meters.] [Estimated time until hospital dissolution: 41 seconds.]

"Faster," Lena breathed into his ear. "Mister, please go faster."

He went faster. His lungs burned and his ribs ached, and the thread inside him pulled tighter with every stride. He hit the foot of the hill just as the final floors of St. Aurelia began to flake into the sky. The entrance had collapsed into a hollow gray mouth. He tore through it, shielding Lena's head, reinforcing the ground in desperate half-second flashes.

The lobby was gone. The elevators were gone. But the stairwell, impossibly, still stood, a skeleton of concrete and iron lit by a flickering emergency lamp.

He took the stairs three at a time. Fourth floor. Fifth. Sixth.

The oncology ward.

He burst through what remained of the doors. Beds lay overturned and half-melted. The walls were gone, and he could see straight out into the dying night. And in the middle of it all, standing alone in a hospital gown with one hand on an IV pole, was his sister.

Mira turned.

She was smiling. She was so thin, and she was smiling, and her left arm was no longer an arm. It ended at the elbow in a drift of fine gray powder that streamed away from her like smoke.

"You came," she said. "I told them you would come."

"Mira." His voice broke into pieces. "Do not move. Do not move."

"It does not hurt, Silas. It is just cold."

The powder was climbing her shoulder now.

[Target: Mira Vance. Decay: 47 percent. Progression: accelerating.] [Full reinforcement cost: 200 Stability.] [Current Stability: 44.] [Insufficient. Additional sources of Aether Dust required.]

Silas looked down at Lena clinging to his neck. He looked at the swirling gray where the ceiling used to be, thick with the remains of a hundred patients and nurses and families who had been alive an hour ago.

Then he looked at his sister, who was smiling at him while she disappeared.

The System spoke one final line, cold and almost courteous.

[Aether Dust available in range: 1,840 grams. Sufficient to save one life.] [Source: the souls of the dissolved.] [Absorb all?]

Silas Vance, who had sworn he would never again be too late, understood that he would have to eat the dead to keep the living.