Chương 41: Chapter 40: Broken

Hours had passed the way they always did in this place at night, without a sun to mark them, without any way to know if she'd been here for twenty minutes or two hours. Now that she could feel them properly, the Shepherd's Veins were richer here, at least ten times richer than beneath the manor. They thrummed beneath the world like colossal arteries, nursing the very threads that wove this place into existence.

Every pulse drummed through her ears until it was impossible to tell where her own heartbeat ended and theirs began. Elma's palms were raw from clenching and unclenching around nothing. Her Field pressed outward, dense and obedient, exactly where it always went. Inward, it went nowhere at all. Sable hadn't corrected her stance once tonight. Hadn't offered the clipped, precise instructions Elma had come to expect.

She stood a few paces off, arms crossed, mask tilted toward the dark horizon rather than toward her student, and every few minutes some fraction of her attention seemed to drift somewhere Elma couldn't follow. She hadn't even asked about Christa. That gave Elma pause. The last time she'd done something even remotely similar to Christa, Sable had answered with a concussive slap that left no room for misunderstanding. Now, there wasn't even a question.

It made Elma quietly reconsider just how important that relationship really was to her handler. Elma lowered her hands.

"I can't do it," she said.

"It's like my body is excluded from my reach." For a fleeting instant, Elma thought she heard Sable murmur something beneath her breath. The words were so faint they might have been swallowed by the wind.

"... We're doomed." Before Elma could decide whether she'd imagined it, Sable turned to her, her expression already composed.

"Leave it."

"Leave it? I can't leave it. Do you have another way we could try?"

"No." Sable's answer came without hesitation.

"If your body were capable of Internal Reinforcement, you would've found a way already." Elma looked up.

"What do you mean?"

"What I mean," Sable said, stepping between Elma and the torch to her right, "is that you're incapable of using Internal Reinforcement." Elma blinked.

"H... how?"

"The space your body occupies is unreachable to your own Resonance. The same principle that prevents you from reaching into my Lattice, or me into yours." Sable's voice carried none of its usual sharpness.

"Your Field doesn't recognize what's beneath it as territory it can command." She lowered her voice.

"It could be a new anomaly. Or it might have something to do with—" She stopped herself, the sentence cut clean in half.

"Something to do with what?"

"It's nothing." Sable's mask tilted away, back toward the dark horizon.

"Leave it."

"Can it be fixed?"

"Not that I know of."

"Has this happened to anyone else?"

"No." Elma's chest felt like it was containing a blizzard.

"Then how did you know to diagnose it? You could be wrong." Sable didn't answer immediately.

"I'm not wrong."

"You could be."

"But I'm not." Sable's attention settled completely on Elma.

"You're broken, D-66. And the worst part is you don't even realize it." The words were like salt in a wound Elma hadn't known where to find.

"I only hope our Shepherd made the right decision," Sable added, quieter, almost to herself. Elma said nothing. She sat in the purple sand and turned the sentence over, looking for an angle that made it hurt less, and found none. She couldn't even use Internal Reinforcement. Even Jorm could use it— The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"We don't have time for you to sit with that," Sable said, before the silence could stretch any longer.

"Your first mission starts now. Whether you have Internal Reinforcement or not." Elma lifted her head, grateful for anywhere else to point her mind.

"What is it?"

"The Aurethion," Sable said.

"It needs to be destroyed." The sand seemed to go very quiet.

"You want me to destroy it?"

"Correct." Elma pushed herself to her feet, the fine purple sand slipping from her knees in a quiet cascade.

"That was supposed to be my first mission," Elma said slowly.

"I didn't realize you meant it to also be my last."

"We don't have a choice."

"Why not do it yourselves." Elma found herself saying.

"You're clearly more capable than me." Sable didn't answer. She simply raised one hand. Fire bloomed above her palm, dense enough to bleach the purple dunes white beneath its light. Heat rolled across Elma's face, dry enough to sting her eyes. The flame swelled higher and higher until it resembled a miniature sun suspended between them. Then Sable flicked her wrist toward a nearby dune. The sudden heat tore through the air. Elma flinched instinctively, her body tensing as the wave of flame surged outward.

Then it vanished. The purple grains never blackened. They never melted into glass. They didn't even stir beneath the inferno. It was as though the world had decided the flames had never existed at all. Sable lowered her hand.

"We're Restricted." Elma frowned.

"Restricted?"

"The Immutable Scale," Sable said.

"One of the Three. It limits how directly beings like our Shepherd can act in this world. Every hand he moves, every thread he pulls, it's watching. There are lines even he cannot cross without consequence." Sable crossed her arms.

"We're bound by it. Every one of us. We're the Shepherd's tools, and because of that our influence on this world is restricted." The mask's eyes settled on Elma.

"You can act freely, because it cannot sense your connection to him. You were born with it already inside you. As far as the Scale is concerned, you were always yours." Elma's mind moved fast, chasing the thread before she could stop herself.

"Then you have a loophole it can't sense? You must have others like me, ones who are more capable. Why not use them?" Sable came closer, and something in her posture shifted.

"He cannot bring back the dead twice. What happened to you was not a gift he can repeat. There is no one else he could have done this with." Sable lowered herself beside Elma, the sand shifting softly beneath her.

"You are the only one."

"Why." Silence.

"Why me, specifically." Sable said nothing at all. The unanswered question hung between them, turning the mission itself into an afterthought.

"I'm four," Elma said finally, flat, listing it like evidence.

"I can't reinforce my own body. You just told me I'm broken. And you want me to level the most heavily defended structure in Veraxys."

"You don't have to destroy it yourself." Elma stopped.

"You only need to make sure it's destroyed," Sable said.

"Soon." The sentence rearranged everything. Elma's mind, still raw from the last ten minutes, latched onto the new shape of the problem the way a drowning thing latches onto anything solid.

"You have people already," Sable said.

"Use them. Find more if you need to. Someone capable of destroying it. Or you infiltrate or find another way entirely. I'm not asking for elegance." Allies, Elma thought. She had exactly two people she could remotely call that, and both of them already had lives of their own. She didn't want to owe these people anything. She didn't want to do anything for them at all. Then, unbidden, a different thought surfaced. The Equitors.

If the Scale could bind even the Shepherd—could draw lines he wasn't permitted to cross—then whatever it was, it held authority over him. Authority meant leverage. And leverage, handled correctly, might mean a way out of a leash she'd been wearing since before she'd had a name to wear it under. It was worth the risk. If this was what they demanded of her at four years old, on her very first assignment, then nothing gentler was coming after it.

"I'll try," Elma said.

"Good." Sable's voice returned to its usual edge, satisfaction folded somewhere inside it.

"You have exactly five days to try." Elma's jaw tightened, but she said nothing more.

The green light dropped her back into her own room, and for a long moment she simply sat on the edge of the bed, staring down at her own small hands in the dark. Still nothing. Still no door into her own body. She lay back on the bed. There had to be a way. There was always a way. Everyone could use Internal Reinforcement. She would use it too. She had to. Tomorrow she would go into the city.

Tomorrow she would start looking for Sekar, and for some way to bring an entire fortress down as a four-year-old, and somewhere underneath all of it, quietly and patiently, she would start looking for an Equitor. Best case, it lifted her debt to the Shepherd. Worst case, it limited her as well. Which meant she'd be useless to them anyway. Or she could die; which wasn't worse than living under this leech. Five days.