Chương 7: Glitches

The cloaked figure by the well pushed off and walked away, slow and easy, out of the square the way it had come, and Kaito stood in the mud with half a loaf of bread in his hand and watched it go.

"Don't follow it," Sable said.

"Wasn't going to."

"And don't stand here looking pleased with yourself, either. You won that one by doing nothing, which is the only way you'll win anything for a while. Now move. You've been seen. Every minute you stand in the open, another person gets a good long look at the stranger with the bleeding arm." He moved. He shoved the last of the bread in his mouth and put his head down and walked the way she pointed him, off the square and into the muddy lanes, looking for a wall to put his back against for the night.

"Where am I sleeping," he said around the bread.

"There's a stable on the far bank that lets out floor space for next to nothing," Sable said.

"Next to nothing is still more than you have, so you'll be sleeping in the straw and lying about it. Cross the bridge, it's the long building with the bad roof." The lane bent and dropped toward the edge of town, where the solid ground gave out into black bog water and a long timber bridge ran across it to the far bank. It wasn't much of a bridge. Old planks, two log rails, the whole thing sagging in the middle from a hundred years of carts. There were people on it. A man pushing a handcart loaded with peat.

A woman with a baby on her hip. Two children running ahead of her, and one of them was small, smaller than the rest, swallowed up in a man's coat cut down to fit.

'That's the girl,' Kaito thought.

'The one from the square.' Then he saw the red. It wasn't a box. The boxes were his, blue, his own font, and they came up clean. This was nothing like that. It was red, the hard deep red he'd locked away years ago for the worst warnings in the game, and it hung in the air under the middle of the bridge in a knot of numbers and broken lines that not one person on that bridge so much as glanced at. He stopped walking. He could read it.

He didn't know how, but he could read it as easily as his own handwriting, and what it said put a cold weight in his gut. The bridge wasn't standing on its posts. Not really. It was standing on a number, a value that told the world how much weight those old timbers were allowed to hold, and the number had failed. It had dropped to nothing and sat there flashing, and the only reason the whole thing hadn't already gone into the bog was that the world hadn't gotten around to noticing yet.

[load-bearing value: FAILED]"Sable," he said, low.

"Tell me you see that."

"See what?" Her voice went sharp at once.

"Kaito. What do you see?"

"The bridge. There's red text under it. Numbers. It's broken, the whole bridge is broken, it's standing on nothing —""You can see errors." It wasn't a question, and there was a thing underneath it he hadn't heard from her before. It might have been fear.

"Kaito. Listen to me carefully. Whatever you think you can see, do not touch it. Do not reach for it. Back off the bridge, turn around, and —" The man with the handcart rolled onto the middle of it. The planks under the wheels dropped a hand's width all at once, with a crack that went off flat across the bog. The man froze. The woman grabbed the rail. The two children stumbled, and one of them went down hard on the deck. The little one in the cut-down coat. The red numbers under the bridge weren't flashing anymore.

They were counting. Counting down to the second the world caught up with its own broken math and dropped two hundred years of timber into the black water with five people standing on it.

"Kaito, do NOT —" He was already moving. He didn't decide to. There was no decision in it, no weighing of staying hidden against five people drowning in a bog. He saw the broken number, and six years of fixing broken numbers took his hands and his head before Sable got the word out. He reached for it the only way he could, the same way he talked to her, with his mind. He got hold of the failed value, and he did the one thing you ever do with a value that's crashed to nothing. You could be reading stolen content.

Head to the original site for the genuine story. He put it back. He didn't know the right number. He didn't need to. He knew it was wrong, and he knew which way wrong, and he shoved the value back up to where it had held that bridge steady for two hundred years, and he held it there with everything he had. The bridge groaned. The dropped planks shuddered, and then, with a long deep complaint of old timber, they lifted back the hand's width they'd fallen, and held. The red numbers steadied. Stopped counting.

Sat there under the deck, whole again, telling the world the bridge could carry its load, which it now could, because he was the one telling it so. His head split with a pain that put him down on one knee in the mud. Holding it cost something. He didn't know what, only that there was a price and it was being taken out of him right now, somewhere behind his eyes. Something warm ran over his lip. He touched it and his fingers came away red. Ordinary red, his own blood, his nose running with it.

Holding the bridge up was bleeding him, and he had no idea how much it had left to take. On the bridge, nobody had fallen. The man with the cart stood frozen and white. The woman had the baby crushed against her chest. The little girl in the coat had scrambled back to her feet, and she wasn't looking at the bridge that had almost killed her.

She was looking back across it, at the foreign man down on one knee in the mud with his hand held out toward nothing at all, and her small face was doing a thing no six-year-old's face should do. She understood.

"Get up," Sable said, and her voice was tight and fast.

"Get up right now and walk. You have about ten seconds before —" Too late. The man with the cart found his voice and used all of it.

"The bridge — it was going, I felt it go, it dropped and then it just —" He turned and pointed, straight at Kaito.

"Him. I saw him. He put his hand out and it stopped falling." The woman was already saying it too, and the word went out across the gathering crowd. Blessed. Touched. A miracle. Look at him. The stranger, the one with the arm. People came off the bridge and out of doorways, and they came toward him, not away. Pell was among them. He'd come at the noise, apron and all, and he pulled up at the edge of the crowd and looked at the man he'd handed a free loaf an hour ago, kneeling in the mud working miracles.

Whatever was on his broad face, it wasn't the easy wonder on everyone else's. It was closer to worry. Then the box opened. It came up in front of Kaito's face, blue, his font, and for one stupid half second he waited for it to say well done. He'd just saved five people. In the world he used to build, this was where you got the reward. But that wasn't this world. He'd wiped that one off its own drives himself, and then it had dropped a server rack on his head for the trouble. [Error Correction Unauthorized. Monitoring initiated.] The words sat there, cold and clean, in the same calm font as everything else. No reward. No level. No thanks. Just the flat note of a thing that had watched him fix what was broken and had not liked it one bit.

'Monitoring,' he thought.

'It's been watching me since the tower. And I just knelt down in front of a whole crowd, an hour after a Compact scout walked off with my face, and showed it exactly what I can do.'

"It's worse than monitoring," Sable said, low and fast.

"Listen, because we may not get a quiet minute for a while. People don't edit the world, Kaito. They live in it, and it does what it does to them, and that's the deal everyone's signed. Gods edit the world. You just reached into the bones of a bridge and moved a number with your mind, in front of forty witnesses, and the thing that runs this place felt every second of it. You didn't save five people. You announced yourself." A breath.

"Now get up off your knees before they make you a saint, and let's be gone before anyone who matters hears the word miracle." He got up. It was harder than it should have been. The crowd was on him now, close and warm and reaching, hands on his sleeves and his shoulders, the bad arm screaming where somebody gripped it, voices stacking over each other too fast to pull one out from the next. And past all of them, over their heads, the town was glowing. That was the only word he had for it.

The red hadn't gone when the bridge held. It had spread. It ran along the stable's bad roof across the water, a thin crawling line where some value had worn soft. It sat in the well behind him. It was knotted low through the muddy lane, down where the ground itself didn't quite add up anymore. He turned his head and a hundred small red failures lit the dusk, all over Ashfen, in the walls and the roofs and the dirt, and not one other living soul could see a single one of them.

"Sable." His voice came out thin.

"It's on everything. The whole town. Why is it on everything?"

"Because you opened a door you can't close again," she said, and this time there was no dry edge on it at all.

"You're seeing the seams now. Every place the world's math has worn through. It's been broken like this a long, long time, Kaito. You're only the first thing in ten thousand years made to look straight at it." The little girl in the cut-down coat had worked her way to the front of the crowd. She didn't grab at him like the others. She stood there in the press of legs and looked up at him, steady, the same far-too-old look she'd given him in the square, like she was filing one more thing about him away for later.

Then she was gone, slipped back into the dark between two buildings, and the crowd closed over the spot where she'd stood. Out at the back of them a man was already breaking away, turning, running off into the night to go tell somebody what he'd watched the stranger do. The hands kept pulling at Kaito and the word miracle went around and around. A god was watching him from inside the very ground he stood on.

And the whole of Ashfen burned quietly red with a hundred broken things only he could see, while he stood in the middle of it with no idea at all whether the next person to reach him would want to bless him or put him in chains.