Chapter 199: First Meal Together

They entered the memory of the camp’s first meal together.

Rain was falling on the decaying homes of old Grand Meridian. It slid down the walls and leaked through the roofs into cracked pots set out to catch it. The smell of rain had soaked into everything, mixed with smoke from a fire somewhere, and beneath it all was the faint smell of the food being prepared.

In the memory, the hotel’s lobby was half-destroyed and dimly lit by firelight. Thirty-one survivors huddled around a single long table made from doors they had pulled off nearby houses. On it sat twenty-four bowls of thin soup. Everyone was staring at the bowls.

A young man stood beside the table, his fingers stained with ledger ink.

"Aurel," Marcus said quietly.

The man didn’t hear him. He wasn’t a warden. He was just tired, trying to record what was happening with a stub of charcoal in his hand.

The sovereign echo stood behind him. No one in the memory knew it was there.

It was the color of shadow now, with frost along one arm, ledger ink spread across its stomach, and grave residue in its back. Its three remaining fragments glowed faintly beneath its skin.

"It started with him," the echo said. "One person in control of the record. One person to turn food into law."

Aurel’s ledger page changed.

WARDEN OF RATIONS.

Aurel stared at the words that had appeared on his page, and he didn’t like them.

"I didn’t write that," he said.

The memory tried to rewrite itself.

Everyone looked to Aurel to decide how they would all be fed. The bowls seemed to shrink, and the rain grew louder. Fear crept into the memory, and everyone began looking toward a single answer. Austin Veyron felt it too, the pull of wanting one person to decide for everyone. Even the children stared at Aurel, waiting for him to tell them something.

Austin Veyron wanted to throw himself into the memory.

He could seize the echo and tear it away. He could grab the ledger and tell them all what to do. He knew what the future held if they survived this night. All he had to do was tell them, and they would listen. He was right, so why wouldn’t they? That was what scared him most. Being right had never stopped the hunger from wanting more.

Veyra pulled on his arm.

"Name it."

"I want to help them."

"What would it make you?"

"The owner of what they choose."

Sable looked at all the frightened people in the memory. "Then we witness them. We don’t replace them."

"He’s my ancestor," Marcus said. "I always thought he was our first keeper."

His voice broke as he said it, as though he had never really thought about it until now.

"He may have kept the count," Tessa said. "That doesn’t mean he was keeping them."

The echo glided through the shadows around the table.

It reached out and touched one of the bowls.

Black-and-white constructs rose from the ground. They were made of bowls and spoons and torn ration packets, and each one held an iron key.

THE WARDEN ALLOCATES.

The constructs moved toward the starving people in the memory.

Rin shot an arrow at one of the keys, and it burst into black ink. But new keys appeared in the constructs’ hands. Orena stepped between the constructs and the table, holding her spear up to keep them from taking the food.

Veyra tore one of the ration packets in half. The construct holding it faltered, but more words appeared on the ground.

Austin Veyron could see what the echo had added.

The original memory had a recorder. The echo had added an owner.

"Target," Austin Veyron said. "The ration-warden ownership claim. Not the bowls. Not the people. Not the food count in the ledger."

"Witnessed," Veyra said.

"Witnessed," Sable said.

Austin Veyron laid his white root chain on the black-and-white words that read WARDEN OF RATIONS.

DEVOUR opened. The claim tasted like plenty of food to share, with only one person allowed to make the call.

WARDEN OF RATIONS.

He consumed warden.

The word disappeared.

The constructs stopped moving, and their iron keys fell to the ground. Aurel’s ledger went back to simply counting the food.

It still wasn’t a happy memory.

There were still only twenty-four bowls of food, and thirty-one people who were starving.

Aurel looked around at his fellow survivors.

"I can keep track of what we have," he said. "But I can’t decide it alone."

A woman near the door stood and raised her hand. She wore a ragged coat and had a baby sleeping in her arms.

"Then write down what people have stashed away," she said. "So we can see what we have to share."

An old man set two cans on the table. "Beans."

A hunter added some dried meat. Someone from the kitchen brought a pot of rice. More people came forward with what they had: half a loaf of bread, some root vegetables, a pack of rations, a little salt. No one had much to offer, but every one of them gave what they had.

Austin Veyron watched the food pile up on the table. None of it was much. Together, it was a lot.

They still didn’t have enough to share with everyone.

But they had more than they’d started with.

Aurel wrote down everything that was given and read it out loud. People argued about who should eat first. Some said the children should eat first. Others said the injured. Lena suggested that everyone get a smaller portion, except for those with a fever.

It was messy, but they were talking about how to share the food with everyone.

"Slow and confused," the echo said. "Dangerous."

Marcus looked at the echo. "Human."

"Your ancestor could have ended the conversation with one word," the echo said.

"He didn’t," Marcus replied.

In the memory, Aurel was listening to what everyone had to say. He hadn’t become wise just because he held a piece of charcoal. He had become helpful because he kept a count everyone could see.

Nyra held the heart shard out toward the echo.

"It’s trying to change the memory by adding an owner," she said. "The pieces left over from its other forms are tied to it."

Tessa and Ceryn looked over the original ledger memory.

"Our first rule is here," Ceryn said. "It isn’t a command. It’s a note at the bottom of the page."

They read it aloud.

NO BOWL OPENS WITHOUT THE COUNT BEING SPOKEN.

The echo flinched at the rule.

It was a simple rule, one that would help them share the food with everyone. Not perfectly, but it was a start.

In the memory, the people all nodded as Aurel read the rule aloud.

Austin Veyron looked at their faces. They weren’t happy, and they weren’t smiling. They were cold and starving, and some of them were angry. But they were making a decision together.

The ledger-ink fragment of the echo began to crack.

"You think you know what freedom is," the echo spat. "People are going to starve."

"Someone will," Austin Veyron said. "But they won’t be controlled by one person."

The echo attacked.

More grave residue spilled out of it and formed a wall around the table. The echo was trying to seize control of the food count before the people could finish making their decision.

Austin Veyron could see what lay deeper inside the memory.

THE FIRST COUNT BELONGS TO THE FIRST HAND.

It was trying to make history the property of one person.

"Target," Austin Veyron said. "The first-count ownership claim. Not the people who lived that history. Not the ledger it came from. Not our ledger today."

"Witnessed," Veyra said.

"Witnessed," Sable said.

Austin Veyron pressed his root chain against the barrier around the table.

DEVOUR opened. The claim tasted like someone smearing their fingerprints across a page to hide the names of everyone who had helped share the food.

THE FIRST COUNT BELONGS TO THE FIRST HAND.

He consumed belongs.

The barrier around the table shattered.

The ledger-ink fragment was ripped out of the echo. It didn’t go into Austin Veyron. It landed on the memory page as ordinary words.

The echo let out a scream.

The shock tore its body apart. The frost and grave residue were still attached, but it had lost the ledger fragment.

The memory didn’t become a better memory. The people were still arguing, and still sharing what little food they had with one another.

Marcus watched his ancestor finish his work and set down the charcoal. Aurel didn’t look happy, but he didn’t look as heavy as he had at the start.

"He didn’t save them by himself," Marcus said.

"No," Austin Veyron said. "He made sure no one person controlled them."

The ledger memory began to fade from view.

The damaged echo crawled through a black-and-white crack in the memory page and escaped.

The group landed back in the foundation room, beside the ledger that held the Freehold’s first memory.

The page was clear again.

Above them, the common ledger was slamming shut.

"The echo is in the route vault," Nahlia said through the relay. "It’s heading for our present-day public network."

The echo had lost its piece of the ledger, but now it was trying to claim the living routes.