Chapter 198: Original Ledger

Chapter 198 — Original Ledger

It was heading toward the place where common decisions had first grown strong enough to push it away.

The Witness Road took Austin Veyron’s team back to Grand Meridian with no source gates in between.

It was just a stone path over the abyss, wide enough for all of them to walk side by side. There were no seats along it and no voice offering them a faster way. Every few steps, the maps they carried updated to show them where the Freehold was. Austin Veyron had never been on a road like this. Every road he had walked before had tried to manipulate him in some way, shape, or form. This road simply let him walk.

"It’s odd," Calder said.

"It doesn’t try to influence you," Tessa said.

The road led to the Freehold’s lobby.

Every light in Grand Meridian was on. Refugees and keepers stood along the walls, and Freehold workers who should have been asleep were standing there as well. No one was panicking or rushing around. They were all just standing there, waiting to see what would happen. Austin Veyron felt something tighten in his stomach as he looked at them. They weren’t waiting for someone to tell them what to do. They were going to make a decision together, and not one of them looked as though they meant to leave until they had.

All of the tables had been pushed into a circle around the common ledger. Marcus stood by the foundation hatch with a route board in his hand. Elena and Nahlia were making sure every door had keepers posted at it. A hole had opened in the floor, leading down into the hotel’s foundation.

Black-white light was rising from below.

"We kept the lobby open," Marcus explained as they walked in. "No single person was put there to protect it, and no room was shut off. The echo is under the first ledger shelf in the foundation."

"The routes in the common ledger are still holding," Elena said, pointing to it. "But the foundation has the original pages, the ones written when the Freehold first created public routes after Grand Meridian fell."

"The echo is trying to alter that record," Nahlia said, lifting her relay crystal toward the hole. "If it can, every route ever made by common decision will look like it was made by something else."

Austin Veyron looked down at the black-white light rising from the bottom of the stairs.

He felt something.

He could go down there and use DEVOUR to protect the original ledger. He knew this place better than anyone. It was his home. He could protect the foundation himself. It felt right, even noble. If he didn’t think about it too deeply, it would just be him wanting to protect his home.

Veyra stood next to him.

"Name it."

"I want to protect the foundation by myself."

"What would it make you?"

"The person who owns the ledger."

Sable held up her broken crown shard. "Then we all go."

They took the stairs down to the foundation. The steps were narrower than the ones leading to the hotel’s basement, and the middle of each one had been worn down by people using them over the years.

The foundation had been built before the hotel existed. Shelves of sealed route books filled the space beneath Grand Meridian, along with food ledgers, pieces of maps, and old water-stained letters. It smelled musty, and it was so cold that their breath fogged faintly in the air. In the middle of the room, a ledger sat on a pedestal.

Its cover was a dark brown.

ORIGINAL COMMON LEDGER.

The sovereign echo stood next to it.

It still carried its three fragments: pale frost along one arm, ledger ink wrapped around its body, and grave residue spreading across its back. It had no fixed form. Each time it turned, it looked like a different person. A worker. Royalty. A hunter. A starving child. At one point, it even looked like a figure made entirely of black-white light.

"This is where your lie started," the echo told them. "When people decided to give to others and believed it made them free."

The ledger opened.

The front page showed a food ledger from back when old Grand Meridian was still alive. Twenty-four bowls of food were listed on the page. There had been thirty-one people in the camp, two days before the food arrived. The page showed everyone who had given what they could. Some of the writing was messy, because the people who wrote it had never learned to write properly. A few of them had left nothing more than a mark. But every person who had given to the camp was on that page.

The echo placed its hand on the page.

Its black-white letters spread across the paper.

ONE HAND DECIDED THE FIRST CHOICE.

The ledgers around them began to come to life.

Each ledger construct held a pen with a black-white tip. They all had blank faces, and they all turned toward Austin Veyron’s team.

Rin shot an arrow at one of the pens and hit it. The ledger construct caught the arrow and used it to write on the ground.

THE HISTORY BELONGS TO THE ONE THAT TELLS IT.

The lines stood up and formed a wall in front of Austin Veyron’s team, cutting them off from the ledger.

Orena stuck her spear into the ground and broke the wall before they were locked away from the ledger. Veyra faced one of the ledger constructs and destroyed its pen, despite her injured shoulder. Sable used her crown shard to erase the black-white writing on one of the ledgers and reveal the history underneath.

Austin Veyron noticed the wording running through the ledger constructs.

The echo didn’t have to destroy history. It only needed to be the one telling it.

"Target," Austin Veyron said. "The history-belongs-to-the-one-who-tells-it clause. Not the pages. Not the names. Not the archive."

"Witnessed," Veyra said.

"Witnessed," Sable said.

Austin Veyron placed his white root chain on the page that held the clause.

DEVOUR opened. The clause tasted like a library where only one person knew where the books were kept.

THE HISTORY BELONGS TO THE ONE THAT TELLS IT.

He consumed belongs.

The page construct collapsed in on itself.

The wall of black lines vanished. The ledger constructs dropped their pens and collapsed back into the ledgers they had come from. But the original ledger was still open, and the echo had already reached the first page.

It dipped its grave-covered arm into the ink.

The page changed.

Now there was only one name at the top of the page.

AUREL VANE — FOOD WARDEN.

Below the name were statements, as if he had made them to the people of the camp.

HE WILL GIVE YOU WHAT YOU NEED.

Marcus’s face turned pale. "He wasn’t a food warden."

He gripped the side of the pedestal so hard his knuckles went white. There was some connection between Marcus and Aurel that Austin Veyron didn’t understand, but it was clear Marcus knew exactly who the man had been.

"He will provide for your troubles," the echo said, its face made of black-white letters.

"There are more layers of ink on this page," Tessa said, pulling out the map copies. "It’s only showing one."

"One of these ledgers should have the same day recorded," Ceryn said, pulling one off the shelf. "Yes. This is the same day. It lists everyone who gave food to the camp."

Elena took the ledger from Ceryn and set it next to the original. Nahlia projected a copy of the route the camp had traveled. Marcus read the names off the page.

"Lena gave six bowls of food. Jorren gave three. Nima gave two. And Aurel just recorded how much we had left. We all gave what we could."

As the names reappeared on the page, the black-white letters disappeared, and the warden’s title began to fade away.

"There are too many of you to make a statement," the echo said.

"One person can lie more easily," Marcus replied.

Austin Veyron watched the echo shift from a worker to royalty to a child. It never knew which form to show the world, because history had never had only one person to tell it.

The ledger began to shake, and its page opened wider, revealing a black-white route. The echo had opened a path into the memory of the day the ledger was written.

"It’s trying to enter the memory," Nyra said, her heart shard lighting up and pointing toward the page. "If it can change what those people did that day, the foundation will believe it really happened."

The dark mark on Austin Veyron’s wrist began to pull him toward the page.

He could go in and stop the echo from changing the memory. It would only take him a second. He could do it and be back before anyone could follow.

Veyra looked at him.

"Name it."

"I want to enter that memory first."

"What would it make you?"

"The only person who can tell what actually happened."

"Then no one goes alone," Sable said, laying her crown shard on the page.

The ledgers in the foundation began to shake, and loose pages flew toward the original ledger.

"We need to keep the foundation doors open," Marcus said, looking up toward the hotel lobby. "We can all go in there together and see what we can find out."

Everyone placed their hands on the page, careful not to touch any of the words the echo had changed.

The original common ledger pulled them into the memory.

They landed in the first meal the camp had ever shared.