The worst class in the Apocalypse: Ctrl+C

The Footnote had said ninety seconds. It lied. We had about forty.

The Redactor net came down into the tunnels the way ink comes down a page — not falling, spreading, a dozen crossed-out shapes bleeding through the walls from every direction at once, and where they passed, the tunnel behind them stopped being a place that had ever contained anyone. I felt it with the seam-sense: the world going smooth and unspecific in their wake, like a paragraph selected for deletion.

"Down," the Footnote said, already moving, coat flaring, and for a thing that had been a footnote for a hundred years it moved like a rumor. "Not away — down. Away is the page. Down is the margin. They can read a straight line, boy. They've never been able to read a scribble."

I didn't understand until I followed it, and then I understood everything.

The Footnote didn't run through the tunnels. It ran through the seams — the gaps between them, the dead spaces, the places the ledger's attention had never bothered to fall. It went where the map wasn't. And I — off-ledger, un-catalogued, a walking hole in their careful page — could follow, because the margins recognized their own.

"Priya, my hand—" She took it; her shadows could carry her over gaps but not through the nothing the Footnote ran along. Sprinkles flowed ahead, at home here in a way that made a horrible new sense: the cat had been living in these margins as long as it had been tired. And I opened our road as we went — five percent of Threshold Hum, singing grates and dead seams open a half-second before we hit them, singing them shut a half-second after, so the net closed on smooth walls where a door had been and found nothing to select.

It nearly worked clean.

Then the Footnote screamed.

I'd never heard a caretaker make a sound like that. It stumbled, and I saw why: a Redactor had found it — it, not me — and its crossed-out line was reaching for the one being in these tunnels it had spent a hundred years unable to cite. Because the Footnote had spoken to me. It had let itself be quoted. And the instant a footnote gets cited, it stops being too small to redact.

"Go!" it rasped, already thinning at the edges, already going unspecific. "I made my peace with the margins a century ago, I don't need a—"

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Here's the thing about the choice they kept building for me. They kept making it this or that. Save yourself or save the ally. Reach the switch or lose the guide.

And I have spent my whole garbage apocalypse refusing to pick from the menu.

I didn't fight the Redactor. You can't fight an eraser. But a Redactor hunts the brightest discrepancy in reach — that's the whole of it, that's all it is — and standing four feet away, thinning at the edges, was a hundred-year-old smudge, and standing next to it, glowing at maximum, off every scale there was, the largest hole in the ledger in a hundred worlds, was me.

So I stopped hiding.

I let go of every filter I'd learned. I opened the Call and the Hum and the Clingstep all at once, all raw, and I did the one thing I'd spent five chapters learning not to do — I let myself be seen, I turned the discrepancy up until the tunnel rang with how off-the-page I was, and I said the oldest thing in the oldest language, the thing every hunting creature and every eraser understands:

There's a brighter one. It isn't tied down. It's right here.

The Redactor's line snapped off the Footnote and onto me.

And I was already gone — Clingstep, up the wall, into a seam I'd sung open a half-second before and sang shut a half-second after, the eraser's line closing on smooth stone where a very bright, very stupid man had just been.

We came out into the deep dark, the four of us, in a place so far down the margins that the ledger's attention was a rumor of a rumor. The net couldn't follow. Not here. Not yet.

The Footnote sat down hard against the wall, edges slowly re-specifying, becoming a definite shape again, and looked at me with a page-face that couldn't hold an expression and held one anyway.

"You drew it onto yourself," it said. "To save a smudge you met an hour ago."

"You're not a smudge," I said, catching my breath. "You're a citation. Get used to it."

Sprinkles made a sound that, in a cat, would have been a laugh, and in a hundred-year-traitor caretaker was something with no name.

He does that, the cat said. You'll find it's the whole of him. It is extremely inconvenient and I have stopped trying to stop it.

The Footnote was quiet a moment. Then it pulled itself upright, brushed a century of dust off its coat, and pointed down — always down — into a dark so total even my seam-sense frayed at the edge of it.

"Then earn the citation, boy," it said. "The center of the city is that way. Not the road you sealed — under it. There's a way to the switch that runs beneath the whole net, through the oldest margin there is." It almost smiled. "I should warn you. It's where they put the things they redacted but couldn't quite finish erasing. The half-crossed-out. The nearly-gone."

Priya groaned. "Of course it is."

"Your four," the Footnote said, gently, and Priya went very still. "The mall's four. The ones you can't remember to mourn. They'll be down there, Copyist. Waiting to be read."