Chapter 70 Proofread

The first reversion happened in the infirmary at nine forty, to a second-year whose shoulder had been set and healed four days earlier.

She was signing her discharge form when the bone came apart again under the skin, in exactly the place it had broken on the shelf.

Nothing hit her, no floor gave way beneath her, and the healer who closed that fracture personally stood there insisting she must have misread her own chart.

’It did not hurt her, it un-healed her, shit, that thing walked past the infirmary six minutes ago and put a week back where it found it.’

Damien reached the corridor with Blank flattened against his neck, and the gray auditor was already two floors above them logging fire exits.

The second reversion took a filed record out of the registry office, a transfer authorization that three clerks remembered stamping on Tuesday.

The folder sat where it belonged with the stamp simply absent, the clerk who pressed it went pale before apologizing for a mistake she never made.

"Man, nobody in that office is lying and every one of them now believes they are incompetent," Mina said, meeting him at the annex stairs.

"That is the design, since a construct that erases small things also erases the confidence of everyone who noticed," Damien answered.

Blank rode his shoulder with knife-sharp edges, turning toward doors a half second before they opened, which made it the only functional alarm in the building.

The creature stayed silent near the auditor itself, then produced the tearing-page noise every time they crossed a spot where something had been unwritten.

’It is not tracking the body, it is tracking the seams, yeah, so the joins between real events and their scripted versions must leave a smell behind them.’

The third reversion arrived inside Mina’s own workshop, it took the thing she loved most in the room.

Her primary tempering vise, rebuilt over two months, tuned to a tolerance the academy did not officially permit, sat on the bench in its factory state.

Scratched, standard, ugly, with every one of her modifications gone and the tool-marks of her own hands wiped off the housing.

Mina stood in front of it for eleven seconds without speaking, and Damien watched a woman decide not to cry in a room full of witnesses.

"Two months of work, and my scanner finds no residue or heat anywhere, while the maintenance log claims it was never modified," she said.

"The log is the point, since it did not break your vise, it edited the fact that you built anything," Damien replied.

"Then it is not attacking the workshop at all," she answered, and her hands stopped shaking as her brain took over.

"It is attacking authorship, and yours is the largest unauthorized change in this building except mine," Damien said.

The academy’s response to three impossible incidents in one morning was, inevitably, to convene an inspection panel.

Four faculty, two facilities officers and a clipboard reached the artificer’s annex at eleven to determine whether Mina Park had falsified her equipment records.

’Of course, a construct rewrites her work and the institution investigates her for lying about it, which is honestly the most human part of today.’

Damien followed the auditor for forty minutes before that, keeping his distance, doing nothing whatsoever.

He kept the saber clipped, left the brand unused, and pushed the Eye of Reckoning no further than its first band, since a passive read returned question marks anyway.

[Eye of Reckoning: subject unreadable]

[Classification: Proofreader]

[Threat assessment: unavailable]

[Do not engage until intent is known.]

The gray auditor walked the eastern corridor at a constant pace, paused outside three doors, and wrote nothing on the clipboard it carried everywhere.

The thing was unfailingly polite, stepping out of students’ paths, holding a door for a girl with an armful of coils who thanked it and immediately forgot doing so.

’Twice past the workshop without going in, damn, so the reverting follows some order, and my name is apparently further down that page.’

The pattern assembled itself while Damien walked one floor below the thing that was rewriting his year.

A shoulder healed on the shelf, a transfer authorization filed after the breach, and a vise rebuilt by a scholarship student who was scripted to lose her prototype.

Three people knocked off their assigned pages, quietly edited back toward the roles a story had written for them.

’It is not hunting me, it is tidying up around me, shit, the script cannot delete the anomaly yet, so it is going after everyone I moved.’

The inspection panel had Mina standing at her own bench answering questions about tolerances when Damien walked in and sat on the window ledge.

"Mr. Sterling, this happens to be a closed equipment review carrying a signed attendance list," the senior faculty member said, a bald man with a maintenance badge and a tired jaw.

"Then close it after you write down what I am about to say, since you are going to want the timestamp," Damien replied.

He named the tool, which was the calibration bar in the second rack, third from the left, marked with Mina’s initials on the collar.

He named the modification, which was a channel cut for residue conduction that no facilities officer had approved in writing.

He named the minute, which was eleven forty-one, four minutes after the auditor’s logged route would bring it past the annex’s northern wall.

’Eleven forty-one, and if the pattern holds it takes the newest unauthorized change in the room, okay, and if I am wrong, I look insane in front of a panel that already dislikes me.’

The room enjoyed a full three minutes of the bald man explaining, at length, what he thought of theatrics from students with press coverage.

At eleven forty-one the calibration bar rang once against the rack, quietly, the way metal rings when it has been struck by nothing.

Every initial on the collar had vanished along with the conduction channel, leaving the bar exactly as it left a factory nine years earlier.

Six faculty and two facilities officers stared at a tool that changed in front of all sixteen of their eyes.

"Somebody write the time down before anyone in here starts arguing about it," Damien said, into a silence with a fizzing quality to it.

The bald man wrote the time down, then kept going, since his hands had already started, and produced a full description underneath.

"Ah, sir, the maintenance log for that bar is showing no modification history at all now," the junior officer said, holding the terminal out with both hands.

"Then sign what you saw before the log convinces you that you saw nothing, since that part usually takes about an hour," Damien replied.

All eight of them signed it, which meant that for the first time in the academy’s history there existed a stamped institutional document recording a reversion.

[Hidden achievement: Witnessed on Record]

[System Points: +900]

[Note: Corrections prefer unobserved edits.]

’Nine hundred points for making eight bureaucrats sign a piece of paper, yeah, that document is worth more than the fight I am about to lose.’

Mina locked the workshop after the panel filed out, which meant the residue locks, the physical bolts and the three artifice barriers she had rebuilt overnight.

"My authorship records live in the eastern cabinet, including every registration I ever filed on a joint design," she said.

"Then that cabinet is where it goes, since the largest unauthorized thing in this building is your name on work the script gave to somebody else," Damien answered.

"Hah, I am the biggest edit in Halcrest and I have been worried about my vise," Mina replied, pulling the goggles down over her eyes.

The corridor lights outside the workshop dimmed by about a quarter, which was not something the building’s wiring could do.

Blank dropped off Damien’s shoulder onto the bench, producing a sound nobody had heard from it before, low and continuous, closer to paper held over a flame.

’That is a different noise, shit, six weeks of tearing pages and now it has found something worth a whole new sound.’

The workshop door opened with the bolts unmoved and the barriers silent, letting the gray auditor step through holding its clipboard.

Damien had Verdict drawn with the Sinner’s Brand ready before that door finished swinging, standing himself between the construct and the eastern cabinet.

The Proofreader ignored the cabinet entirely, along with Mina, his blade, his stance and his face.

It looked at the tally on Verdict’s flat, where two hundred and eighty points of Debt from a training session sat recorded in silver light.

Then it reached out one gray hand toward the numbers themselves, the tally began, very quietly, to go down.