The worst class in the Apocalypse: Ctrl+C

He came at dawn, alone, on foot, and he waved.

I want to put that first, because everything I'd braced for was wrong. I'd braced for grey coats and cold arithmetic and the flat institutional menace of the caretakers. What came up the north road was a soft-looking man in his sixties with a walking stick and a satchel, moving at the pace of someone who enjoys mornings, and when he saw a hundred armed people on a wall he lifted a hand and waved, the way you'd wave at neighbors.

[QUEST: The Confessor's Visit — ACTIVE][Vault: sealed word holding — 2 days 4 hours remaining][Focus: 8 / 8]Leo. Do not think about the plan. Think about nothing. Think about soup.

I thought about soup so hard my teeth ached.

"Good morning," the Confessor called up. His voice was warm and unremarkable, the voice of a man who reads the weather aloud. "My name's Aldous. I'd rather not use the other one, if it's all the same — it's a bit theatrical, and I never chose it." He stopped a comfortable distance from the gate, leaned on his stick, and looked up at us with genuine, patient interest. "I'm not here to hurt anyone. I know that's a difficult sentence to receive. But it's true, and one of the small graces of being what I am is that I never have to lie, and so I've rather gotten out of the habit."

Nobody on the wall said anything. Reyes had his hand up, holding a hundred people still.

"You," Aldous said, and he found me instantly, because of course he did. "The Copyist. Leo, isn't it? Would you come down and talk to me? Just talk. I'll stay outside the wall. You can stand behind it. I'm sixty-three and my knees are terrible; I'm no danger to a wall."

"Sabel's dead," I said.

"I know." And his face did something that, if I hadn't known better, I'd have called grief. "He walked three miles bleeding to warn you and then he pointed at Vantry instead of the woman, and I felt him do it, forty miles off, and I felt him find a door in himself I'd have told you wasn't there." Aldous shook his head slowly. "That was your doing. I've been turning it over the whole walk. Nobody's ever taken one back from me before."

"You killed a trader to send me a letter."

"Yes." No flinch, no excuse. "That was a piece of theatre and it worked, and I'd do it again, and you should factor that into everything else I say to you this morning." He gestured mildly at the wall. "You see the problem. I'm not a monster who's convinced himself he's kind. I'm a kind man who does monstrous things for reasons he thinks are good, and that's much harder to argue with, and I'm afraid you'll have to do it anyway."

I went down. Not through the gate — up, and along the wall's top, Clingstep quiet under my feet, until I was sitting on the rampart directly above him with a hundred people at my back.

Focus: 8/8. Nothing spent. I'd need every point, and I still didn't know for what.

"Ask your question," Aldous said, settling onto a chunk of concrete like a man at a bus stop. "You've got one you've been carrying since the letter. It's very loud. I'm not reading you, by the way — not properly. That's rude, and slow, and I'd rather you told me."

"Why do you collect people?"

"Ah." He looked pleased. "Good. Not how, not what do you want — why." He set his stick across his knees. "Because they're alone in there, Leo. Every one of them. Every person you've ever met is sealed inside their own head, alone, and they die alone in there, and every private thought they ever had dies with them and is never known by anyone." His voice stayed warm. That was the horrible part. "I can end that. When I read someone completely, they're known. Fully. For the first and only time in their lives, someone has seen all of it — the ugly rooms, the ones they'd never show anyone — and hasn't looked away."

"They stop being people," I said. "Sabel called himself a hallway."

"Some of them, yes." He accepted it without argument. "The ones I take badly. I'm not a careful man; I've been at this a long time and I've gotten sloppy and there are people out there I hollowed out because I was in a hurry, and I carry that." He met my eyes. "But I'd ask you to notice something, Copyist. You've got a hundred people behind that wall who each spent the night handing their worst secrets to a neighbor. Do you know why that worked so well? Why it took, so fast, so completely?"

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I didn't answer. My skin had gone cold.

"Because they were starving for it," Aldous said gently. "Because being alone in your own head is unbearable, and you offered them the one thing I offer, and they took it in a single night from a man they've known six weeks." He smiled, and it wasn't cruel; that would have been easier. "You and I do the same work, Leo. The difference is you asked permission. I've often thought about whether that difference is as large as everyone tells me it is. I've decided it probably is. It hasn't stopped me."

He's not wrong, said the System, very quietly, in the private dark. That's the trouble. Leo — he is not wrong, and he knows he isn't, and he will use that.

"Here's what happens now," Aldous said, standing, brushing off his coat. "I want the woman. The one holding your enormous secret — I don't know which she is, and I want you to appreciate what a rare sentence that is for me. Your haystack is very good. Genuinely. A hundred people all guilty, all hiding, all loud — my finder walked in circles. That was elegant."

"So you can't find her."

"No." He said it plainly. "So I'll simply read all of them."

The wall went very still.

"It takes about a minute each," Aldous said, apologetic, as if quoting a delivery estimate. "A hundred and eleven people, so — under two hours. I'll find her somewhere in there. And the ones I read on the way will be, I'm afraid, mostly hallways afterward, because a hundred and eleven in a morning is exactly the sort of hurry that makes me sloppy." He looked up at me with something that was almost pleading. "Or you open the door yourself. Show me the word. One reading, one man, and I walk north with what I came for and every single person behind that wall stays a person."

There it was. The fork.

The most beautifully built fork anyone had put in front of me since a throne room at the bottom of the world. Give me the secret, or watch me hollow out everyone you love, one minute at a time.

"You've thought about this a lot," I said.

"It's my whole life's work, and I'm very good at it, and I've had a seven-day walk." Aldous shrugged. "I'm told you're a man who refuses forks. I've been looking forward to seeing you try. But do consider, Leo — sometimes a fork is just a fork. Sometimes the world really does only have two doors, and the clever men who insist otherwise are simply men who took longer to choose."

[QUEST UPDATED — THE CONFESSOR'S VISIT]New failure condition: 111 hallways.Time to first reading: ~60 seconds.Focus: 8/8. Sealed word: holding.Leo — I have nothing for you. This one isn't in my rules to help with. I'm sorry.

Here's the thing I had, and it wasn't a plan. It was a sixteen-year-old's question.

What's HE doing while he reads?

So I watched. That's all I did for the next minute — the most expensive minute of my life — I sat on a wall and watched a man work.

Aldous walked to the gate. Reyes, who is braver than anyone I've met, stood in it. And Aldous put two fingers on Reyes's forehead like a doctor and went in, and I saw it:

His eyes unfocused. Completely. His weight settled onto the stick. His face went slack and distant, and his breathing dropped to almost nothing, and for fifty-eight seconds the most dangerous mind on the continent was somewhere else entirely — not standing at a gate, not watching a wall, not tracking a Copyist. Gone. Deep in the rooms of another man, walking hallways.

He wasn't multitasking. He couldn't. It was all his Focus. Every point of it.

For fifty-eight seconds, out of every sixty, Aldous was blind.

Huh, said the System, and I felt it lean forward. Leo. Log it. Log it properly.

┌─ [ENEMY ANALYSIS

— Aldous, "the Confessor"] ─┐ Class: Deep Reader — full mind access, ~1 min per subject. Focus cost:total. During a reading he is functionally absent — blind, deaf, unaware. Window: ~50 seconds of vulnerability per subject, followed by ~10 seconds of full awareness between. Constraint: He must be touching or near the subject. Weakness: He has never needed to worry about this. Nobody has ever been able to hurt him during a reading, because by the time you'd know he was reading, he'd already read you and known you were going to. Unless you never decided to. Unless the trap was set an hour ago and given away.

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

Fifty seconds. A window. A puddle.

And I couldn't use it — not yet, not for Reyes, because I had nothing set up. I'd spent seven days grinding a seal and drilling Focus and I hadn't laid a single trap, because I'd been so busy planning to hide that I'd never planned to hit.

Reyes came out of it and staggered, and Nour caught him, and he was — mostly — still Reyes. Aldous had gone gently. A demonstration.

"He's a builder of walls," Aldous said mildly, blinking back into the world. "And he's ashamed of a boy at a gate. He'll be fine; I browsed." He turned toward the wall, scanning a hundred faces. "That's one. Shall I keep going alphabetically, or would you like to pick?"

And then he did the thing I hadn't prepared for at all, because it wasn't strategy. It was cruelty, and it was aimed, and it told me he'd been reading the shape of me from the moment I sat down even if he hadn't been reading my head.

He looked past me. Up at the wall. At the one person up there who'd refused to stand anywhere except directly between me and the north road for the last six weeks.

"Actually," Aldous said kindly, "let's start with the girl who's frightened for you. She's the loudest thing in this enclave that isn't you, and I suspect she knows quite a lot about what you're carrying, even if she can't say it."

Priya.

Focus: 8/8. Sealed word: holding. Traps laid: none.

"Don't," I said.

"Then open the door," said Aldous, and he started walking toward the wall.