Chương 96: Choosing to Continue

They were all on deck. Domrek by the rail. Pell near the mast. Tessara on her rope coil. Oska at the wheel.

'I'm keeping the key,' Kaito said. Nobody spoke for a beat.

'If I stop using it, AXIOM seals the access and the key goes dead. Permanently. If I keep going, I might get erased the way Aelwin did.' He held the key up so they could see it.

'Sable found a way through. There's a section of the deep architecture where AXIOM can't see substrate access. If I use the key there instead of out in the open, it won't trigger the monitoring. The warning clock stops.'

'Who built the section,' Domrek said.

'We don't know.'

'So you're using a tool built by a dead woman, through a door built by someone nobody can identify, to dodge a system that erased the last person who tried.'

'That's the summary, yeah.' Domrek looked at him for a full three seconds. Then he nodded once.

'All right,' he said.

'What do you need from us.'

'Time,' Kaito said.

'And something else.' He looked at Tessara.

'If I get erased,' he said, 'everything I know goes with me. Every piece of it. Hana. The substrate. The key. Erebus. The design history. All the things Tessara told me. All the things Sable told me. If I vanish the way Aelwin did, none of that information survives unless I write it down first and give it to people who are still here.'

'You want to make a record,' Tessara said.

'I want to make three copies of everything I know and put one in your hands, one in Domrek's, and one in whatever Sable is.'

'I can hold a copy,' Sable said, to him alone.

'Encoded in the Original Layer. AXIOM cannot reach it there.'

'Done,' Kaito said.

'I'll need paper,' he said to the group.

'And about two hours.' Oska reached under the instrument shelf and pulled out a logbook — blank, leather-bound, the kind captains kept for cargo records.

'Use this,' she said.

'Write small.'

He wrote for three hours, not two. He sat on a crate near the bow with the logbook on his knees and he wrote in the small, fast hand he'd developed at Olympus Games for meeting notes. No cipher. Plain language. If he got erased, whoever read this needed to understand it without a decoder. He started at the beginning. Woke up in Eirath. Tutorial zone. The voice that became Sable. Ashfen. The first silver-border quest. Cassian. The gladiator pits and Domrek. The Iron Cathedral. Red's offer. Going dark. The Compact.

He wrote Solara and the Axiom Key materials. He wrote Velhen — the succession, the three heirs, the archive, the Resonance Node humming beneath the palace. He wrote Erebus in the catacombs. He wrote the Level Three classification. He wrote the escape. Cairnmouth. Oska. The fog bank and the island. He wrote Hana Sato's name in full. He wrote her message word for word. He wrote what Tessara had told him about the game and the world and the layering. He wrote the data key. What it reads. What it writes.

What it costs to use it where AXIOM can see. He wrote Sable. Not her origin — he didn't know it. He wrote what she'd told him: the room, the screens, the woman in the lab coat speaking Japanese. He wrote the sentence Sable had carried.

'If you ever meet him, tell him the error was mine, not his.' He wrote the unknown builder and the doors in the Original Layer. When he finished, his hand ached and the logbook was a third full. He tore the written pages out carefully and split them into three stacks. Each stack was a full copy.

'Domrek,' he said.

'Yours.' Domrek took the first stack. He didn't read it. He folded it once, put it inside his coat next to the freedom document, and buttoned the coat. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

'Tessara,' Kaito said. Tessara took the second stack. She held it for a moment, looking at the pages.

'You're not the first person to hand me something like this,' she said.

'I figured.'

'There is a section of my library,' she said.

'A shelf in the back, near the far wall, where the oldest wood is. I labeled it four hundred years ago. The label says Last Words.' She looked at him.

'Every person I have traveled with, or waited for, or watched walk into a thing they might not walk out of — when they had something they wanted preserved, they gave it to me. I put it on that shelf. Some of them came back for it. Most did not.'

'How many,' Kaito said.

'Forty-one,' Tessara said.

'In four centuries. You are the forty-second.' Kaito took that number and put it somewhere he could carry it without looking at it too much.

'Thank you,' he said.

'Do not thank me,' Tessara said.

'Come back for it. That is better than thanks.' She folded the pages into her book and the book went into her bag. Kaito held the third stack and spoke under his breath.

'Sable. Can you read these if I hold them up.'

'Show me each page for three seconds,' she said.

'I'll encode them.' He held them up, one at a time, turning each page to the air in front of him. To anyone watching, it looked odd. Pell watched and said nothing. Oska didn't watch at all.

'Done,' Sable said, when the last page turned.

'Stored. If you are erased, I will still have it. AXIOM cannot reach the layer I've written it to.'

'If I'm erased, who do you give it to.'

'Domrek,' she said.

'He won't be able to hear me. But I'll find a way. I've been alive a long time. I can be patient about a delivery.' Kaito almost smiled. He put the third stack in his own pack. Three copies. Three carriers. If the worst happened, the information survived.

'Now,' Sable said.

'The door.'

'How does it work.'

'Hold the key. Close your eyes. Think about the place I described — a section of the Original Layer that AXIOM's monitoring doesn't cover. The key was built to find access points. It will take you there. Not physically. Your body stays here. Your perception shifts.'

'How long.'

'Seconds on this side. Longer on the other. Time moves differently in the Original Layer.'

'Will I be able to talk to you while I'm in there.'

'I don't know,' Sable said.

'I live in the Original Layer. You'd be visiting it. Those might work differently.'

'Great.' He told Domrek.

'I'm going to sit down, hold the key, and go somewhere in my head for a bit. If I stop breathing or my eyes go wrong, shake me.'

'How wrong,' Domrek said.

'You'll know.'

'That's not reassuring.'

'It's not supposed to be.' Kaito sat on the crate. He held the key in both hands. He closed his eyes. He thought about the door. Nothing happened for about five seconds. Then the key got warm. Then it got warmer. Then the warmth moved up his arms and into his chest and the ship dropped away. Not fell. Dropped. The rocking stopped. The wind stopped. The sound of water and wood and rope stopped. Everything physical went somewhere else, and what was left was — quiet. A big quiet.

The kind of quiet that had depth to it. He opened his eyes. He was standing in a corridor. The walls were dark and smooth and covered in the same kind of writing he'd seen in Tessara's library, but denser. Layered so deep the individual characters blurred into texture. The light came from the writing itself. No other source. The corridor went forward and it went back. One direction was brighter. One was darker.

'Sable,' he said. Nothing. He tried again.

'Sable.' Silence.

'All right,' he said, to himself.

'Bright or dark.' He went bright. The corridor opened after maybe thirty paces into a small room. Round. Low ceiling. The walls were all writing, floor to ceiling, and in the center of the room was a pedestal with a flat surface on top. On the surface was a mark. A handprint. Small. Pressed into the material. Not carved. Pressed, the way you press a hand into wet clay. Kaito looked at it. He put his hand over it. His hand was bigger. The print was someone with small hands. Someone thin and short and precise.

The room lit up. Every character on every wall went from dim to bright at once, and the writing rearranged itself. Lines moved. Characters shuffled. The whole room reorganized around the handprint and his hand on top of it, and when it settled, the wall directly in front of him had one line of text, clear, in Japanese. It read: This room is yours now. Use it carefully. The monitoring cannot reach here. When you write from this room, AXIOM does not see. When you read from this room, AXIOM does not know.

This is the only safe workshop in the world. I built it for you. I'm sorry it took so long. Below the text: — H. S.

'Hana,' Kaito said. The room said nothing back. It just waited, the way a good workspace did. He looked at the walls. He looked at the pedestal. He looked at the handprint under his hand. Then he felt the pull — gentle, steady, like someone tugging a thread attached to the center of his chest. The ship was calling him back. His body was where he'd left it and it wanted him in it. He let go of the pedestal. The room dimmed. The corridor appeared behind him.

He walked back through it and the dark end took him and the ship came back all at once — the rocking, the wind, the creak of wood, the smell of salt. He opened his eyes. Domrek was two inches from his face.

'You stopped breathing,' Domrek said.

'How long.'

'Nine seconds.'

'Felt longer.'

'It looked longer too.' Kaito breathed in. Out. The key was still warm in his hands.

'I found it,' he said.

'Hana built it. A workspace in the Original Layer where AXIOM can't see. She left a note.' He looked at the key.

'She built the key and she built the room for the key to work in. She planned all of it.'

'Is it safe,' Domrek said.

'It's the only safe place in the world,' Kaito said.

'That's what the note said.' He looked at the cracked navigation mirror still mounted by Oska's wheel. The crack hadn't healed. AXIOM's warning was still on the record. But the clock had stopped.

'Sable,' he said.

'I'm here,' she said.

'I lost you for twelve seconds. I could not follow you into that room. Wherever it is, it is shielded from me as well.'

'Hana built it.'

'Yes,' Sable said.

'I heard you say that. I believe you. And it frightens me a little, that she built a place even I cannot go.'

'Why.'

'Because it means she knew about me,' Sable said.

'And she decided I should not be in the room where you work.' Kaito let that sit.

'Does that change things,' he said.

'Yes,' Sable said.

'I don't know how yet. But yes.' The Grey Line moved south. The cracked mirror caught the light. The water ran.