Chapter 193: Lanternfall Tower

So it wanted the living to ask for one voice.

Lanternfall Outpost sat along the frontier ridgeline.

A signal tower rose at its center, ringed with several levels of lamps and surrounded by a circle of short stone walls. Beneath the tower sat three water cisterns and a generator, blue sparks leaking out of its damaged casing. A storehouse stood on the far side of the yard with its doors locked, and people stood in clumps around it, airing their grievances. A cold, dry wind blew off the ridgeline, leaving grit hanging in the air. The outpost had never been designed for comfort, but it had been designed to last. Even so, Austin Veyron could already see where it was starting to give up: burn marks on the walls, damaged gates, ward posts leaning at tired angles.

The echo had gotten there before Austin Veyron and his party.

Black-and-white lamps flashed from the tower windows.

ONE AUTHORITY. NO UNCERTAINTY.

A woman stood on top of a cistern crate, holding a ledger against her chest. She was a grown woman, and her face carried the kind of weariness that only comes from too many nights of being the one everyone turns to.

"I’m Quartermaster Lysa," she called. "Our north cistern is cracked. The generator only has enough charge to run one more cycle. The storehouse can provide for everyone for two days. Everyone wants to know what to do."

Austin Veyron looked at the people around him. Many of them kept glancing up at the signal tower. Some wanted to close the gates. Others wanted to give everyone water now. A few stared at the black-and-white lights, as if wondering which choice would cause them the least pain.

Austin Veyron understood that look. When people were starving and frightened enough, they started wanting someone to tell them what to do.

"What do you want?" Austin Veyron asked Lysa.

"I want people to live."

"That isn’t the same as what you want to decide."

Lysa thought about this for a minute. "I want the amount of water we have to be known. I want our ward technicians to tell us what our generator can actually do. I want the people who run the storehouse to tell us what two days really means. I don’t want the signal tower telling me what I should do."

"Then that’s what we’ll do," Veyra said.

The signal tower flared.

Ledger constructs came pouring down the outside steps of the tower. They were made of black-and-white paper, with lantern glass for faces, and as they walked down, they fluttered like loose sheets caught in the wind. Their glass faces caught the signal light from the windows and threw it back in jagged flashes. Each one had a metal key attached to it, engraved with a single word.

EMERGENCY.

The first construct went for the water cistern’s lock.

Rin’s arrow shattered its key. The construct re-formed around a second key and headed toward Lysa. Orena pushed it away from her with her spear.

Veyra took the stairs two at a time, keeping her wounded shoulder stiff. Sable followed, pulling black-and-white letters from the railing of the tower as she climbed.

Austin Veyron could feel the echo’s local presence within the tower.

It wanted to make one hard decision feel impossible unless a single person took all the authority.

He saw Lysa fall to the ground as everyone pressed their needs onto her. He saw the generator die while the crowd argued. He saw himself walk into the yard and fix everything with a single command.

That was what DEVOUR wanted from him. Everything fixed, and no one dying. No more arguing. No one worrying about how much water was left. All he had to do was become the one voice. But what would happen the next time, when that voice was wrong?

Veyra looked down at him from the steps.

"Name it."

"I want to take control of the outpost."

"And what would it make?"

"One person to blame when things go wrong."

"And the only person who gets to decide what’s wrong," Sable said from the rail above.

Tessa and Ceryn spread clean route sheets across a table in the middle of the outpost.

"How much water do we have?" Tessa asked.

Lysa opened her ledger and spoke up. "We have a hundred and forty barrels in the south cistern. Seventy in the east cistern. Sixty in the north, if we plug the crack. And twenty in our emergency stash."

"We have enough charge to run the wards for one cycle," one of the technicians answered. "Half that if we leave the outer lamps on. A quarter if we want to power the tower as well."

"We have two days’ worth of rations," a storehouse worker added. "If we use the hunter supply, we have three."

As the crowd gathered around the boards, they began to understand. People who had been yelling a moment before stopped to read the numbers, frowning, working out the math under their breath.

The echo flashed brighter.

More black-and-white lights flared around the outpost. Every surface that could hold a reflection lit up, and in each one, a different person saw themselves as the only one who could keep everyone safe.

Nyra pointed her heart shard at the tower. "There’s an anchor in the upper signal room. It’s feeding on the emergency."

Daria and a few of her hunters walked through the outpost gate. She didn’t try to take over the outpost. She walked straight up to Lysa.

"Tell me what line you want defended," she said, "or what you need to help you decide."

Lysa looked at the boards, then up at the signal lights. "Defend the west wall. Keep those constructs away from the water. We’ll decide on our supplies here."

"Chosen," Daria said.

Lysa had chosen. Austin Veyron felt it, as though the whole outpost had finally let out a breath it had been holding.

He made his way up toward the upper signal room.

On every landing, a ledger construct offered him a key.

TAKE THE EMERGENCY.

TAKE THE BLAME.

TAKE CONTROL.

Austin Veyron walked past them with his hands at his sides. DEVOUR wanted everything those constructs were offering, and he could feel it straining in his chest with every step.

The higher he went, the louder the tower became.

When he reached the signal room at the top, he could see the echo.

A body of black-and-white light was forming around the signal lamps. It had no legs. It seemed to sprout from the floor of the tower itself, with a single face turned toward the outpost below.

"They want someone to make the decision for them," it said.

"They just need more information to make that decision," Austin Veyron said.

"Information will not stop your wards from failing."

"People will."

The signal lamp at the center opened.

Black-and-white words filled the room.

EMERGENCY BELONGS TO THE STRONGEST HAND.

Austin Veyron’s dark mark glowed. DEVOUR wanted all of it. It wanted to take over the signal tower and control every emergency that might ever come. It could run the generator. It could tell people how much water to drink.

But through the window, Austin Veyron could see Lysa below, writing down the water supply while others helped her. He could see one of the ward technicians telling the truth about the generator. He could see Daria defending a wall that wasn’t even hers.

None of them could do it alone. Together, they could.

"Target," Austin Veyron said. "The emergency-belongs-to-the-strongest-hand clause. Not the tower. Not the generator. Not the water supply."

"Witnessed," Veyra said.

"Witnessed," Sable added.

Austin Veyron laid his white root chain across the phrase.

DEVOUR opened. The clause tasted like an order shouted over a room too frightened to answer.

EMERGENCY BELONGS TO THE STRONGEST HAND.

He consumed belongs.

The signal room shook.

The black-and-white body lost its foothold in the tower floor. The signal lamp broke. As the lights around the outpost dimmed, the people staring into them blinked and began to come back to themselves.

The echo let out a shriek.

It tried to hold its body together for a moment, but it finally fell through a hidden hatch in the floor of the tower.

Nyra’s heart shard pointed to where it had fallen.

"A Deep Table branch," she said. "It’s running away."

Tessa looked at Ceryn’s map copy. A new black line had appeared beneath Lanternfall, leading to a jagged symbol.

THE WAKING QUARRY.

"I will wake the stone," the echo whispered from below.

Down in the yard, the people of the outpost went on with their tasks. One of the ward technicians cut power to the signal tower and sent what remained to the outer walls. Lysa opened the hunter supply with two people counting. Others began repairing the north cistern and helping the defenders on the west wall.

They weren’t happy. But they weren’t waiting for one person to save them either.

Veyra walked up beside Austin Veyron and rubbed her shoulder. Sable lowered her crown shard, and its glow began to dim.

Austin Veyron looked down at the route to the Waking Quarry. A chill crept up from below, carrying the smell of dust and broken rock.

The echo had failed to take Lanternfall Outpost.

Now it was looking for an army that wouldn’t question its orders.