The worst class in the Apocalypse: Ctrl+C

The enclave voted on whether to give me to the Confessor on a Tuesday, which I mention because I didn't know it was Tuesday until Halloran told me afterward, and it seemed important that a thing like that has a day of the week.

It started, as these things do, reasonably.

A man named Odell called the meeting. I want to be fair to Odell, because it would be easier not to be: he wasn't a coward and he wasn't cruel. He was a father of two who had watched a harmless trader get killed and pinned to our gate like a note on a fridge, and he had done the arithmetic that everyone in that atrium was doing quietly and only he was brave enough to say out loud.

"He doesn't want us," Odell said, to a hundred frightened people, and he didn't look at me while he said it, which I respected. "He wants the Copyist. He said so in writing. He's patient, he said. Which means every day Leo stays, that patience gets spent on us." He spread his hands. "I'm not saying hand him over. I'm saying — he goes north on his own. Or he goes anywhere. Just not here."

And here's the thing that made it hard: he was right.

Not morally. Practically. I was the lightning rod. I'd rung the bell. Everything the Confessor did to this place from here on would be, in the most literal sense, my fault, and every single person in that atrium knew it, and about forty of them were already nodding.

I stood there with one percent of a telepath's gift running whether I wanted it or not, and I heard the tops of their heads three seconds late, and it was so much worse than if they'd hated me.

I like him. I like him and I want him gone.He saved my kid's arm. He saved my kid's arm and I'm going to vote to send him away.I'm so tired of being brave. I just want one week where nothing comes.

Not malice. Just exhaustion. A hundred people who'd been afraid for six weeks, being asked to be afraid of one more thing, for one more person, and finding the tank empty.

I didn't argue. That surprised everyone, including me.

"He's right," I said, and the atrium went dead quiet. "I'm what's coming. That's just true." I looked at Odell, who had the grace to look back. "So I'll make it easy. I'll go. Tonight. I'm not going to make a hundred people carry a fight that's mine."

And then several things happened at once, and I've thought about them a lot since.

Halloran was on his feet first, seventy-four and furious, fist lighting for the first time in weeks. "The hell you will—"

Wick, who was fourteen and had lived his whole apocalypse as something to be handed over, said, "That's what he does. The Confessor. He makes you give people up. That's the whole trick, that's how he—" and his voice broke, and that was worse than the shouting.

Nour said, quietly, "He gave blood four times for a boy he didn't know."

And Priya said nothing at all, because Priya had positioned herself directly between me and the north door with her arms crossed, which was, I thought, an argument.

But it was Reyes who ended it, and he did it the way Reyes does everything, which is by being the least sentimental person in the room.

"No," he said.

Odell turned. "Reyes—"

"I ran this wall on sorting." Reyes's voice carried without effort. "Strong in front, weak behind, and the ones who can't fight go outside it. You all remember. I put a sick kid at the gate once and told myself it was math." He didn't look at me. He looked at his own hands. "And a man with the worst class in the apocalypse stood up in this atrium and told me no. And then he stayed, and he kept us fed, and he kept us armed, and he never once asked me to like him for it." Now he looked up. "This place stopped being a place where we hand people over the day he showed up. If we do it now, we don't survive it. We'll be alive. We won't survive it."

The vote went 61 to 39. I stayed. Odell voted against me, shook my hand after, and told me he'd be watching the north road every night, which was the most honest thing anyone said all week.

I did not sleep that night. Because sixty-one people had just decided to stand in front of a man who reads everything on my behalf, and I still didn't have the one thing I needed.

A door he couldn't open.

Her name was Maren, and she'd been in the enclave the entire time, and I'd never once noticed her, which — in hindsight — was the entire point.

She was the one everybody told things to. That's not a job; nobody assigned it. It's just that when people had something they couldn't hold — an affair, a theft, a thing they'd done in the first weeks to stay alive — they ended up sitting next to Maren, and they told her, and then they slept better, and nobody ever, in six weeks, heard a single one of those secrets come back out.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to NovelFire for the genuine story.

[Maren — Vault, Lv. 11]A minor mental class. Nothing given to her in confidence can be taken out of her. Not by pressure. Not by pain. Not byreading.The System notes: this is not a combat class. The System notes that it may be the single most valuable class in this enclave, and that nobody has ever once tried to recruit her for anything.

I found her the morning after the vote, sitting where she always sits, and I sat down, and my whole Copyist reflex was screaming — take it, take it, that's the door, that's the door — and I made myself put my hands flat on the table.

"You know what I am," I said.

"You're the copy man." Maren was maybe fifty, and unremarkable in the specific way that had let a hundred people trust her with the worst nights of their lives. "You've been looking at me since yesterday like a man looking at a life raft."

"I need what you have." No point being clever. "There's a man in the north who reads everything. Every door you've got closed, he opens. And I'm carrying something that — if he reads it — a lot more than this enclave ends." I made myself say the next part. "I could take it. That's my class. I could sit here and copy you and walk away and you'd feel it and there'd be nothing you could do."

"I know," said Maren, mildly. "I've known that since you got here. I've been waiting to see if you would."

That landed harder than it should have.

"I'm asking instead," I said. "Please."

Maren considered me for a long, long moment.

"My gift doesn't work the way you think," she said finally. "I'm not a lockbox. People assume I just — don't tell. That's not it. When someone gives me something in confidence, it stops being sayable. Not by me, not by anyone reading me. It becomes a thing that has no outside." She tilted her head. "But it only works on what's given. Freely. That's the whole engine, copy man. Nobody's secret is safe with me unless they chose to hand it over. You can't seal what you're still clutching."

And I understood, then, what she was actually telling me, and it went through me like cold water.

"You want me to tell you," I said. "The big one. Before you'll let me copy it."

"I don't want anything." She was so calm. "I'm telling you how the door works. You want a door nobody can open. Fine. But every door has a lock, and the lock on mine is trust, and you cannot copy a lock you've never once used." She folded her hands. "So. Do you have anything you've ever actually given to another person? Or have you just been carrying it alone since the sky broke, and calling that strength?"

I sat in a mall food court across from a fifty-year-old woman nobody notices, and I found that my hands were shaking, and I told her.

All of it. The pen. The Root. The hundred worlds folded together. The first rule I hadn't read yet. The Author, and the bookmark, and the to-do list, and the two hundred ridiculous parts, and the fact that I was going to spend myself — memory by memory, the color of a kitchen, a name, a face — to write one true thing the size of a world, and that I was terrified, and that I hadn't told Priya because she'd already heard me not-say it and it had made her sad in a way I couldn't fix.

It took an hour. Maren didn't react once. When I was done, she nodded, and something in the air between us closed, soundlessly, like a hand.

[The secret has been given. It is now unsayable.]The System — which has been carrying this alone with you since the beginning — notes that it has just become, technically, the second thing in this world that knows and cannot tell.The System notes that it is relieved, and does not wish to discuss it.

"Now," said Maren. "Go on."

And I copied her.

[Skill copied: Vault (1%)]Source: Maren — human. She felt it. There was no violation, because it was given.Effectiveness: one percent.Leo. At one percent of Maren's gift, you can make exactly one small thing unsayable. Not a plan. Not a life. One thought, roughly the size of a keyhole, sealed so that nothing — no reader, no Confessor — can take it out of you.You wanted an unopenable door. You have been issued a keyhole. Grind accordingly.

"One keyhole," I said out loud.

WARNING: Human source. Copying a mental class rings. Somewhere north, a patient man just learned the Copyist in the south acquired aprivacygift.He now knows you have something to hide. And that you know it.

Of course. Of course he does. You can't take a step in this world without it costing you the step.

I tested it that night, and here's what one percent of a Vault gets you: I sealed a single stupid thought — the card I'm holding is the seven of clubs — and made Priya, Wick, and every reader in a hundred miles unable to take it out of my head. That's it. That's the whole skill. I won a hand of cards against a fourteen-year-old who can feel where your attention goes.

Wick was furious. It was the best forty seconds of my week.

"It's a keyhole," I told Sprinkles on the roof, later. "The Confessor's coming for a vault and I've got a keyhole."

You have a keyholetoday, said the cat. You had a lighter, once. You had a coffee you couldn't spill. It looked north, into the dark. Grind it. Every day. Seal something small and stupid and useless, over and over, until a keyhole becomes a door, and a door becomes a room, and a room becomes the one place in creation a man who reads everything cannot go.That is your next two hundred parts, Leo. That's the real grind. Not the earthquake. Not the strength.The privacy.

I nodded slowly. It was, weirdly, the most hopeful I'd felt since the letter.

And then Sprinkles said the other thing, the one I hadn't thought of, and my blood went cold.

One more matter. Its ancient eyes were flat. You gave your secret to a woman. Freely. It is unsayable now — she cannot tell, she cannot be read, she cannot be broken. That is real.But Leo.The Confessor collects people with mental gifts.And you have just made a fifty-year-old woman nobody notices into the single most valuable mind on this continent.

Down in the atrium, Maren was sitting where she always sits, listening to somebody's worst night, unremarkable, unnoticed, and holding the end of the world behind her eyes.