Falling Rocks, Everybody Dies

The tortle lists a dozen versions of her and asks which is true. She gives him the one about the blind men and the elephant, because it's the only honest answer: every account is a hand on a different part of the animal. She admits one thing — I made a mistake, that's why I'm here — and lets the rest stand sealed. When the rock falls on Oot she is under it before she decides to be. Later someone puts a baton in her hand that she isn't quite trained for. She takes it. She would rather be sparring with friends. She does not say so twice.

Everyone in this prison is a case he could close if he cared to. He doesn't. He tells the tortle he isn't solving anything, just decommissioning his cousins, and it lands as a joke because the truth usually does. Then a twenty-year-old with a riot-gas button starts crying and ND-E does the only trick he has left: he tells the kid exactly what he is — a cop — and it works. In the guard room something on the far end of the network is erasing itself faster than he can read it. He gets enough. He always gets enough. He is so tired.

Oot interrogates a history Mistarion cannot confirm, because it isn't in him anymore — each rumor a coat held up by a stranger: try this one on. He meditates through the alarm. What finally moves him isn't the open gate; it's the word library. Parchment. Ink. A scroll of Witch Bolt with his name on it. The null field thins the moment they leave the block and he can feel the weave again, like blood returning to a slept-on arm. He is not escaping a prison. He is going to get his mind back, one page at a time.

He says almost nothing and does almost everything. Checks the dead guard for a key before anyone else thinks to. Pockets a set of homemade thieves' tools. Throws the lever. Hands the baton to the person who can actually use it. When the tortle asks who sent him, Kael asks who sent the tortle. Whatever's been running quietly in the background for him — and something always is — the ceiling coming down didn't switch it off. If anything, the chaos is useful.

He repeats himself and hates that he has to: Chief-Observer of House Verum. The Citadel took his codes; they cannot take his blood. Twice this session he kneels beside a dying man with no spells and only his hands — first Oot, then Ezra Cole, who wants a witness for his confession and picks Verum because of a title Verum isn't sure he still holds. He gives the man his whole attention and carries the secret out. The healing scroll goes in his pocket. An observer observes. It is, at the moment, the only office he can actually fill.

He wakes first, because he was the least braced against any of it. He lifts the slab off Oot without much fuss and asks if the tortle is okay before he asks anything else. At the crossroads he puts his cheek to the floor and lets the station tell him which way — west — and he's right. He holds the hands of two dying men and tells them, meaning it, that the universe has them now. He keeps asking people to be his friend: the bird, the pirate, the tortle. When the day gets loud he has exactly one thing to offer. You need to center your gravity, dude.