Chapter 24 WHAT REMAINS
ZARA POV
Three days later, the Summoner walked into the coffee shop on Michigan Avenue where I was sitting with Sawyer and Delaney and ordered a black coffee and sat down at our table.
He looked like a man in his late thirties who had been indoors for a very long time. He had the pale, over-careful quality of someone whose body had been functioning at a maintenance level for years — kept alive by the Protocol's host protection rather than by any of the choices people make to sustain themselves. He was thin. His hands, wrapped around his coffee cup, were the hands of someone my mother's age.
His name, Delaney had told me after accessing the HERALD records, was Nathan Coe.
He had been twenty-three when he was drafted. Twenty-six when he took the host role. He was thirty-seven now.
He sat at our table without being invited because the particular thing that breaks in a person who has been performing omnipotence for eleven years includes the ability to wait for invitations.
"I didn't know the integration was non-fatal," he said. Not an apology. An accounting.
"I know," I said.
"I made a choice at twenty-six based on incomplete information, and fourteen people died in the Protocol before I found a successor candidate, and then I found you, and I spent—"
"Nathan." I said his name the way I'd once said Dorian's. "I know."
He looked at me.
"What you did to the Players in your Protocol," Sawyer said, with the specific quality of someone who has been maintaining a social filter for three minutes and has reached its limit, "is not something a conversation covers."
Nathan looked at him.
"No," he said. "It isn't."
Delaney had not said a word since he sat down. She was looking at him with the expression of three years of being held in a game by a man's decisions, and she was not making any of it smaller or more manageable than it was.
"Why did you come here?" I said.
"Because I need to understand what happens next," he said. "The Protocol is gone. I have no host protection. I have—" He stopped. "I have the memories of what I did for eleven years and no context for what a person does with that."
"That's not my problem to solve for you," I said.
He absorbed this.
"No," he said. "It isn't."
He finished his coffee. He stood up.
He looked at me for a long moment — this man who had spent eleven years building a game around me before I existed and who had, in the end, been outmaneuvered by a twenty-two-year-old with a dead woman's warning and a determination he'd misread as a resource.
"Your mother," he said. "She called you difficult."
"I know," I said.
"She wasn't describing a problem," he said. "I understood that when I met you. I just thought difficult meant manageable, eventually." A pause. "I was wrong."
He walked out.
Sawyer watched him go.
"That's not enough," he said.
"No," I said. "It isn't."
"He voided people. He held Delaney for three years. He kept Petra's kid—"
"Sawyer." I looked at him. "I know. What he did isn't erased. What happens to him for it isn't my jurisdiction. But there are people who can determine his accountability better than I can." I paused. "The Players he voided — I have RECALL's record of the Protocol's history stored in the original architecture. Every record. Every Player. Every action he took as host." I paused. "All of it is in the original architecture's data. Accessible."
Delaney looked at me sharply.
"You built a record into the release," she said.
"The RECALL profile that merged with the architecture wasn't just ability function," I said. "It was eleven years of Protocol history. Everything my ability had stored, plus the archivist's memories, plus the original design documents." I looked at both of them. "It exists. What anyone does with it is up to them."
Sawyer was very still.
"Every Player who was voided," he said. "Their families could know what actually happened."
"Yes," I said.
"And every Player who survived has a record of their contract, their missions, their Echo absorptions — everything the System denied them access to."
"Yes."
He looked at Delaney.
Something passed between them that had the weight of three years of separation and the specific resolution of people who have been separated by something enormous and are standing on the same ground again.
"Okay," Sawyer said. "So what do we do with it?"
I wrapped my hands around my coffee cup.
This was the part I'd been thinking about since the basement. Since the abilities drained and the System text cleared and I stood in the ordinary white light of a server room holding a choice I'd made and its consequences.
I was twenty-two years old. I was a night-shift cashier with a dead mother and a lapsed scholarship and an apartment above a dry cleaner that smelled like chemical solvent. I had no System abilities. I had no designation tag. I had no Verdict Score and no mission window and no Handler and no contract.
I had the most complete record of eleven years of the Verdict Protocol's operation that had ever existed, stored in an architecture that I could access without RECALL because the access wasn't an ability anymore — it was just knowledge, and knowledge was mine.
"Something," I said. "Something that actually helps people."
Delaney looked at me.
"That's not a plan," she said.
"It's a starting point," I said.
Sawyer produced a granola bar from his jacket and put it on the table in front of me.
"You think better when you eat," he said.
I ate the granola bar.
I started thinking.