The worst class in the Apocalypse: Ctrl+C

The invitation arrived pinned to a dead man.

I want to be precise about that, because it set the tone for everything the Confessor would ever do, which was: nothing directly, and everything anyway. The dead man was a trader we vaguely knew, a harmless one, found at first light propped neatly against the mall's south gate like a delivery. He hadn't been hurt. There wasn't a mark on him. He'd simply — stopped, mid-thought, the way a sentence stops when someone crosses it out, and pinned to his coat was a square of clean paper, and on the paper, in a careful, patient, almost kind hand:

To the Copyist in the south.

You reached into one of mine and took something. I felt it. I feel most things.

I'm not angry. Gifts want to be gathered — that's what they're for. You've been gathering them yourself, in your loud and clumsy way, and I think you and I are, at heart, the same kind of collector.

So this is an invitation, not a threat. Come north when you're ready. Tell me what you're really building behind that noisy head of yours. I'll know if you lie — I always do — but I'd rather you came and told me true.

Take your time. I'm patient. I've read the ending of a great many people who thought they had more of it than they did.

— The Confessor

Nobody in the enclave could read the second-to-last line without going quiet, and I read it four times, and here is the thought I had, standing over a man killed as stationery:

He knows I'm building something. He doesn't know what. And he wants me to come tell him, because the one thing his all-seeing, everything-reading class can't do is read a mind that stays in the south and refuses to walk north.

Which meant the invitation wasn't confidence. It was a lure. He couldn't reach me yet. So he was trying to make me reach him.

"He killed a man to send a letter," Priya said, very quietly. "A nice letter. That's so much worse than a mean one."

"Yeah." I folded the paper and put it in my pocket, where the pen fragment was, which felt wrong and I moved it to the other pocket. "That's the whole brand. He wants us scared and impressed and thinking about him." I made myself stop thinking about him, which is hard, which is the point. "Reyes. Double the wall watch. Wick—" the kid had gone grey; he knew this handwriting in his bones — "you're off the wall and inside until I say. If they're hunting a ping, you don't stand where they can hear you."

"They're not hunting my ping," Wick said. "They're hunting yours."

He wasn't wrong. And two nights later, mine came to collect.

His name, I'd learn later, was Sabel, and he was better at his job than Halve had been — a ranger of the Confessor's, sent south to find the loud head and confirm it was worth the walk north. He didn't come to the gate. He came the way the Confessor's people come: quietly, at the edges, reading.

I felt him before I saw him, and that was new, and I had Surface-Read to thank for it — one percent of a telepath's own trade, turned back around. I was on the roof at dusk when I caught a thought that wasn't from anyone I knew, drifting up from the tree line three seconds late:

...there. that's the one. God, he's loud. the Confessor will want him whole.

I did not react. This is the hardest thing I have ever taught myself and I'm still bad at it: when you feel a mind-reader read you, don't think about the thing. Don't think about the pen. Don't think about the center. I thought, very deliberately, about noodles, and about whether Halloran had left a stove on, and I climbed down off the roof like a man with nothing behind his eyes, and I went to go set a trap for a telepath.

Because here's the problem with hunting me, and the Confessor's people hadn't learned it yet: a telepath reads what you're about to do. Sabel would feel my intentions a half-second before I acted on them, the way Wick felt where you were about to look. Against anyone else, that's unbeatable. You can't surprise a man who reads your plan before you make it.

Unless your entire build is not doing the obvious thing with power.

I found Sabel at the edge of the south orchard an hour later, and I want to walk you through the fight, because it's the first time my whole stupid arsenal got pointed at a person who could see it coming, and it's the best kind of puzzle.

Rule one: he'd read my intent. So I couldn't intend my attacks. I had to make them happen without deciding to — or decide to do one thing while a different thing was already in motion, set up in advance, running on its own.

Threshold Hum, first — before I even saw him. On the walk over, not thinking about the fight (noodles, stoves), I'd quietly sung three seams open in the orchard: a rusted irrigation grate here, a loose cellar door there, a drainage channel. I didn't plan to use them. I just opened them, idly, and forgot about them on purpose, so that when the time came there'd be no intent to read — just terrain I'd already changed, sitting there, harmless, until it wasn't.

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Rule two: Overlooked, but aimed somewhere new. I couldn't make him forget to see me — he wasn't hunting with eyes. But a thought is a kind of attention too, and I'd spent a week wondering if I could make a mind slide off me the way an eye does. So when Sabel's regard settled on my intentions, I put one percent of not-worth-noticing not on my body — on my plan. Just the small idea that whatever I was about to do wasn't worth tracking. It didn't hide me. But it made my intent boring, fuzzy, low-priority, the mental equivalent of a face you forget — and a telepath who can't quite be bothered to focus on your plan is, for a crucial half-second, just a guy.

"You're the Copyist," Sabel said, stepping out of the trees, smiling the patient collector's smile. "You're going to try something clever. I can feel you deciding to." He tapped his temple. "I always feel you deciding. Save us both the—"

And the cellar door I'd opened an hour ago, and forgotten on purpose, and never once decided to use, dropped him waist-deep into a hole he never saw me plan, because I hadn't planned it, I'd planned it an hour and a lifetime ago and let it go.

He read my surprise as fast as his own. But surprise is slower than a trap already sprung.

Might, next — no intent, just reflex. I didn't decide to hit him. I'd learned, farming that skill, to find load-bearing points by feel, automatic, below thought — and the orchard's old irrigation arm hung on one rusted bracket right over the cellar, and my hand was already on the release before my forebrain caught up, one percent of a Bruteling's strength into the one bolt that mattered, and the whole iron arm swung down and pinned him in the hole. Not to hurt him. To hold him. To take the one thing a telepath needs, which is not being stuck waist-deep in a cellar with a pipe across his chest.

"Now," I said, crouching at the edge of the hole, while he thrashed and read the absolute lack of a next plan in my head because I genuinely hadn't made one yet, "let's talk about your boss."

I didn't hurt Sabel. I want that on the record too, because I'm building a habit and the habit matters.

I read him instead — Surface-Read, one percent, the tell three seconds late — while I asked him questions and watched the unguarded thoughts float up after his careful answers.

"Does the Confessor know what I'm building?" No. Just that it's big. It's driving him mad, the not-knowing.

"Can he reach this far south?" Not yet. Range is the whole problem. That's why the letters. That's why me.

"What happens to the minds he collects?" — and this one came up slow, and ugly, and I wished I hadn't asked: nothing happens to them. that's the horror. they just stop being anyone. they get so read there's nothing left that's private, and a person with no private rooms left isn't a person, they're a hallway.

I sat with that.

"How'd he get you?" I asked.

And Sabel, pinned in a hole, telepath and hunter and the Confessor's man, thought — three seconds after saying nothing at all — I don't remember choosing it. I don't remember choosing anything. I've been a hallway so long I forgot there used to be doors.

I let him go.

I didn't take his skill — I already had the pathetic version, and taking his wouldn't have made mine less pathetic, and mostly I just didn't want to reach into one more hollowed-out person and grab. I lifted the pipe with one percent of a Bruteling's strength, and I pulled him out of the hole, and I pointed him north, and I said the only true thing I had.

"You had doors once," I told him. "I can't give them back. But you don't have to go add somebody else's to his collection. There's a wall three miles south that takes people who want out. That's a real offer. Tell the others."

Sabel looked at me for a long moment with something surfacing behind his eyes that hadn't surfaced in a long time, and then he walked north anyway, because that's where the leash pulls, and I let him, because you can't drag a person to freedom, you can only leave the gate open.

[No skill copied.]Skills used: Surface-Read, Threshold Hum, Overlooked (novel application: 'plan-dulling'), Might. Four, in concert, against an enemy who reads intent — and you beat him bynot intending.The System notes you have discovered the one counter to a telepath: set your traps in advance, forget them on purpose, and act on reflex. The System notes this is deeply you.

That night the whole enclave felt the north pressing on it, and I climbed to the roof, and Sprinkles was waiting with the specific stillness it saves for when the stakes have actually moved.

You beat a hunter who reads intent, it said, by learning to fight without intending. That's good. That's necessary. A pause. It will not be enough for the Confessor.

"I know."

A ranger reads what you're about todo.The Confessor reads what youare.Every door, all at once, deep. You cannot 'forget on purpose' hard enough to hide the pen from a man who reads the room it's kept in. The cat's cold eyes found mine. If he ever gets in range of you — really in range — he will open the biggest door you have, and he will learn about the center, and the plan, and then the caretakers will know everything you know, and everything you're for.

"So I keep him out of range."

For now. But someday your road goes north, or his comes south. And when it does, 'be forgettable' won't save you, because he's not going to overlook you. He's going toreadyou, completely, on purpose. Sprinkles let that sit. You need a door he can't open, Leo. Not a hidden one. Anunopenableone. And I don't know what that looks like, and neither do you, and that's the thing you should be grinding toward now, under all the party tricks.

I looked north, at the dark where a patient man collected souls and turned people into hallways and killed the harmless as stationery, and I thought about a door he couldn't open, and I didn't have the faintest idea what that would be.

But I've started every single thing in this apocalypse not knowing what it would be. One percent of a lighter. A puddle. A fence of colder. A door.

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

The invitation was still in my pocket. Come north when you're ready.

Not yet, I thought, as loud and boring as I could manage. Not for a long, long while.

And somewhere far to the north, I hoped, a patient man heard nothing worth the walk.