The worst class in the Apocalypse: Ctrl+C

Every skill has an owner. I keep forgetting that, and it keeps almost getting me killed, and this is the chapter where I stopped forgetting.

Here's what I mean. When you copy off a monster, nothing looks back. A Tremor-Beast doesn't feel you take its earthquake. A Knitfly doesn't file a complaint. But a person — a person with a real class, a gift that's theirs — a person feels it when you reach in and photocopy their soul. I didn't know that yet, the morning I went hunting a thief. I was about to learn it the hard way, which is the only way I learn anything.

The enclave had been losing small things. A knife, a boot, half a ration pack, a spool of wire — the kind of thefts that turn a hundred nervous people against each other fast, everybody eyeing everybody, Reyes's careful order fraying over a missing spork. He asked me to find the thief, because "the worst class in the apocalypse" had quietly become "the guy who figures things out," and I'll take it.

The thief was a kid. Not one of Corin's — a stray, maybe fourteen, who'd talked his way through the gate two weeks back and had been surviving since by taking what nobody was looking at. His name was Wick, and I caught him at 3 a.m. in a storeroom with his arms full of other people's things, and the reason nobody had caught him before was that Wick had a class.

[Wick — Pickpocket's Instinct, Lv. 6]A minor mental class. He can feel the top of your attention — where you're about to look — a half-second before you look there. He steals from the gap.

Minor. But mental. And I stood in that storeroom looking at a scared fourteen-year-old with a small stolen soul-gift, and my Copyist reflex — the one that has never once asked my permission — leaned toward it, the way it leans toward everything.

And I stopped.

Because I'd never copied a person before. Not really. Not a gift. Everything in my arsenal came off a monster or a phenomenon — safe, dead-eyed, nobody home. This was a kid. A scared kid whose one advantage in a world that had ended was the little knack that kept him fed.

"You're going to take it," Wick said. Not a question. He'd gone very still, the way prey goes still. "That's your class. Reyes's copy guy. You're going to take the one thing I've got, and then I'm just — a kid who steals sporks. Go on, then." His chin came up. "Everybody takes something eventually."

And here's the thing. I could have. It would've been useful. But Sprinkles's voice was in my head, and Nour's, and the whole reason I'd walked away from Reyes's sorting a hundred chapters ago — that I know exactly what it feels like to be the one with the worst class, the one everybody's already written off — and I found I couldn't reach into a fourteen-year-old and take the only thing keeping him alive.

"No," I said. "I'm not going to take it. I'm going to hire it." I crouched down to his level. "You can feel where people are about to look. That's not a thief's gift, kid, that's a scout's gift. Reyes has been trying to post lookouts who can't see around corners. You can see around attention." I held out a hand. "Stop stealing sporks. Come work the wall. Real rations, a real bunk, and nobody takes anything off you. Deal?"

Wick stared at my hand like it was a trap. Then, slowly — the way you do when someone offers you the first non-cruel thing in a long time — he took it.

The System notes, said the System, quiet, that you just declined a free skill for the sake of a child's dignity. The System has logged this under a folder it does not usually get to use.

"What folder?"

"Reasons to keep him around."

So I didn't get my mind-reading off Wick. I want that on the record, because it's the whole point of what came after.

Wick, it turned out, knew things. Stray kids always do — they survive on the map of who's dangerous. And over his first week on the wall, feeding him properly and asking him nothing, he let one thing slip that made the back of my neck go cold.

"There's a reason I came here," he said, one night, watching the dark. "Ran to Reyes's wall, not away. There's a man out past the north districts. Collects people like me. Mind-classes. Finds anyone with even a scrap of a mental gift and — takes them in. Real friendly about it. And then you're his, and you don't leave, and after a while you don't want to leave, and after a longer while you don't remember not wanting to." Wick's jaw was tight. "He can read you. All of you. Not the top thought — everything. Every lie, every plan, every door you've got closed in your own head, he opens it and reads it and closes it and you never know he was in there." A pause. "They call him the Confessor. Because you tell him everything. You just don't remember confessing."

I sat with that for a while, in the cold, and I felt the shape of a problem much bigger than a spork.

A man who could read everything.

I had a secret the size of a hundred worlds folded up in the back of my head. A pen. A plan. A to-do list that ended at the center of the world. And somewhere out past the north districts was a person whose entire class was opening the doors I keep closed.

"Has he ever come this far south?" I asked.

Wick shrugged. "Not yet. But his people range. And they can feel it, a little — when there's a mind worth collecting. Like a — a ping." He looked at me sideways, this scared clever kid, and said the thing that would define my next month. "You've got a loud head, mister. If one of them gets close enough, you'll ping like a bell."

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I need you to understand that I did the next thing on purpose, and against advice, and I'd do it again.

Because I could not walk toward a telepath who reads everything with no defense against being read. Overlooked turned me down for the eyes of the world — but the Confessor didn't hunt with eyes. I needed something for the mind. I needed to understand how mental gifts worked from the inside, and the only way I learn anything is to have it.

I couldn't take Wick's. I wouldn't. But Wick knew where one of the Confessor's rangers worked a patrol — a man named Halवe, a low-tier telepath, one of the collected, sent south to sniff for pings. And a man who does the Confessor's work by choice, on purpose, hunting scared kids to feed to a soul-thief?

That man I had no trouble copying.

We found him two nights later, working a checkpoint on the north road, reading travelers' surface thoughts to decide who was worth "inviting." I got close — Overlooked keeping me boring, Clingstep keeping me high — and I watched him do it, watched him skim the tops of a dozen frightened minds, and I did the thing, and for the first time in this whole apocalypse, the source felt it.

[Skill copied: Surface-Read (1%)]Source: Halve — telepath, collected, ranking under the Confessor.Effectiveness: one percent. You perceive one person's single most recent conscious thought, delayed ~3 seconds. No plans. No depth. The top one, late, and — the System notes — it is always garbage.WARNING: Human source. He felt that. Somewhere, a man who reads everything just got a report that reads: "someone copied my collection." You are now, in a small way, on the Confessor's map.

Down at the checkpoint, Halve's head snapped up. He looked around — right past me, because Overlooked was earning its keep — but he knew. You could see it. The specific violation of a man who'd just felt someone reach into his soul and walk off with a photocopy. He didn't find me. But he'd tell the Confessor there was a Copyist in the south.

I'd wanted a defense against a mind-reader. Instead I'd rung the bell.

"Worth it," I muttered, retreating over the rooftops.

Debatable, said the System.

Here's the reward, and the joke, and the reason I don't fully regret it. One percent of mind-reading is pathetic, and I found out exactly how pathetic on the walk home when I tested it on Priya.

There's a three-second delay. And then, in Priya's mental voice, clear as a bell:

...why does he look so pleased. oh no. he copied something. what did he copy.

Accurate. Unhelpful. I tried Halloran, dozing at the gate: did I leave the stove on. there is no stove. there has been no stove for six weeks. did I leave it on.

"It's garbage," I told Priya, delighted and horrified. "It only gives me the last thing someone thought, three seconds late, and it's always the dumbest thing in their head."

"So it's useless," she said.

"That's what I thought too." And then — because it's always the same question, not what a skill is, what it's for — I found the angle three days later, at a trade negotiation with the Northside crew.

I couldn't read their leader's plans. Surface-Read doesn't do plans. But every time she made an offer, I caught — three seconds later — the top thought that floated up right after she said it. "That's my final number," and then: he'll take it, I've got two more coins than I'm showing. "We don't have any fever meds," and then: don't let him see the blue crate.

It's not that surface thoughts are shallow. It's that they're unguarded. People armor their plans. Nobody armors the reflexive thought that follows a lie three seconds later, because nobody knows it's there. I couldn't read minds. I could read tells. And that, it turned out, was plenty.

We walked out with the blue crate and two well-hidden coins.

[Surface-Read → Lv. 7.]You reliably catch the 'tell' — the unguarded thought that follows a lie. Not a mind-reader. A lie-reader, three seconds late.

But the part that mattered wasn't the negotiation. It was that I couldn't turn the thing fully off, and so I started hearing what people don't say.

Nour, three seconds after she smiled and said she was fine: I don't know how much longer I can be the only one who says no when Reyes wants to ration the sick.

Halloran, laughing at his own joke: I miss my wife. I miss my wife.

Wick, on the wall, brave and fed and safe for the first time in months: don't let the Confessor take this one too.

Priya, once, when she thought I was asleep: don't die on the pen thing. please don't make me watch you spend yourself on the pen thing.

I didn't tell any of them I'd heard. That's the rule I made. But I gave Nour backup at the next ration meeting. I asked Halloran about his wife, and let him talk for an hour. I told Wick, quietly, that nobody was taking anything off him ever again, and I'd make it true.

And Priya I just — didn't die on the pen thing. Not yet. It was all I could give her.

┌─ STATUS ─────────────────────────┐

[Surface-Read] — Lv. 7 (7%) — lie-reader / unguarded-thought reader (3s delay)Skills total: nine. First skill copied from a human.Ceiling reminder: one thought, late, no control. The least glamorous telepathy in the multiverse.Consequence reminder: the Confessor now knows a Copyist is in the south. Every human you copy from here on has a name, a grudge, and a good memory.

└──────────────────────────────────────┘

Sprinkles found me on the roof, later, and did not approve of me, sideways or otherwise.

You rang a bell you can't un-ring, it said. There is now a man who readseverythingwho knows you exist. And you, Leo, are carrying the single most dangerous thought in this city folded up behind your eyes. It looked at me, ancient and flat. When the Confessor finds you — and he will — he will not need to torture you. He will simplyreadyou, and learn about the pen, and the center, and the plan. And then the caretakers will know everything.

The cold of that went all the way down.

"Then I'd better get very good," I said slowly, "at not being worth reading. At being boring. Marginal. Overlooked." I turned the idea over — the volume knob, the anti-Heat, the skill that made me too dull to notice — and saw it, for the first time, as more than a way to dodge a Redactor. "I've got a skill that makes people's eyes slide off me. I wonder if I can make a mind slide off me too."

Nowthat, said Sprinkles, and something in its cold old voice almost warmed, is the first genuinely useful thing you've said all week.

I looked out at the north districts, where a man collected souls and read every door people kept closed, and I thought about the door I had closed — the biggest one, the pen, the whole shape of the end of the world — and I made myself a promise.

He was not going to open that one.

I just had to learn to be forgettable all the way down.

"Give me a while," I told the skyline.

But this time it didn't feel like a joke. It felt like a countdown.