Chapter 6 THE WEIGHT OF KNOWING
Zara POV
The Summoner's message was still in my vision when I got home.
I lived on the third floor of a walk-up on South Wabash, in a studio apartment that cost me exactly seventy percent of what I made at the gas station and was worth approximately forty percent of that. The radiator knocked. The window above the kitchen sink looked out at a brick wall with a faded mural of the Chicago skyline, which I had always thought was a uniquely cruel joke — a painting of the city you couldn't actually see from inside the city. I had loved this apartment once, before the accident, before guilt had taken up permanent residence in every corner of it.
I sat on the edge of my bed and let the Summoner's words sit in the air between me and the wall.
Your mother said you'd be difficult.
Present tense. Said.
I pulled up my RECALL and ran it backward — not on the mission, but on the hospital room. On Room 14B. Forty-seven days of visits, condensed now into what I could access: the last seventy-two hours. Her hand. The machines. Her eyes opening.
I ran it on her exact words and I listened for the thing I hadn't caught the first time.
They chose you because of what you carry. The weight. They feed on the weight.
She didn't say he chose you. She said they. Plural. And she didn't say what the weight was. She assumed I'd know.
I sat with that for a moment.
My whole life, people had described me as someone who carried things. My mother said it like a compliment — you hold on, baby, you don't let go. My scholarship advisor said it like a warning — Zara, you can't fix everything. The police officer at the accident scene said it like an observation — she's not crying, she's just very still.
I had been seven weeks inside a grief that should have cracked anyone open and I was still functional. Still reading. Still planning.
The System had called that an anomaly.
The Summoner had called that a reason.
I pulled up the orientation packet and went to the page I'd skimmed before — the one about Verdict Scores. Every Player started at one hundred. The score went up when you completed missions, absorbed Echoes, demonstrated what the packet called System-aligned behavior. It went down when you showed what the packet called deviation patterns. There was no list of deviation patterns. The packet skimmed past them in a single line, which was exactly where the real information was.
I went to bed at 2 a.m. having made a list of fourteen questions and not answered a single one.
I woke up at 5:47 a.m. to a knock on my door.
Three knocks. A pause. Two more. The specific rhythm of someone who'd decided to be recognizable instead of startling. I was up before the third set, hand already looking for something to hold, which was a reflex I hadn't had yesterday. I noted that. Filed it.
I opened the door.
Dorian was standing in my hallway in the same dark jacket from yesterday, holding two paper coffee cups with the careful attention of someone who had considered whether bringing coffee would look like an action and decided it was worth it anyway. His designation tag floated above his head, visible only to me.
DORIAN VOSS / PLAYER: BRONZE-VI / ECHO COUNT: 23
Player. Not Handler. Still.
"You said eight hours," I said. "It's been seven."
"I said I'd find you in eight hours." He held out a cup. "I didn't say when the clock started."
I took the cup. I stepped back from the door. Not an invitation — just a removal of the immediate obstacle. He read it correctly and came in, and I noticed the way he moved through a new space: cataloguing it quickly, registering the exits, the sight lines. Not aggressive. Automatic. The habit of someone who had been somewhere dangerous long enough that it became the baseline.
He looked at the wall above my desk. I'd been up until two, writing. Yellow sticky notes in a grid. Questions and threads. The Summoner's words. My mother's words. Dates.
He read it without touching anything.
"You work fast," he said.
"My mother was in the System." I sat on the desk chair and watched his face. "That's not a question."
A pause. He turned his cup in his hands. One slow rotation.
"What designation?" I said.
He looked at the floor. One second. Two.
"HERALD-01," he said.
The cold in my chest went absolute.
Herald. In the outline I'd built from the packet's gaps, Herald was listed once — a tier designation so old the packet treated it like archaeology. The first wave of Players. The ones who had mapped the Protocol's earliest structure. Her designation number was 01. First. Inaugural.
My mother had not stumbled into this game.
She had been in it from the beginning.
"How long have you known?" I said.
"Since your draft notification appeared in the Handler queue." He finally looked at me. Something in his expression was doing the slow, controlled work of someone telling the truth they've been carrying for a while. "Your file had a sealed link. I'm not cleared for it. But the designation tag in the seal was HERALD-01 with a parental relationship marker."
"You've known since I was drafted and you said nothing."
"I couldn't—"
"Handler protocol." The bitterness in my voice was new. I hadn't known it was there until it came out. "Professional neutrality. Mission performance metrics."
He said nothing.
"You're not a Handler anymore," I said.
The quiet stretched between us like something load-bearing.
"No," he said. "I'm not."
I looked at him. He held the look. And for one moment the careful architecture of his neutrality showed its seams — not collapsed, not cracked, just briefly visible, the way a building looks different at dawn when the light comes from the wrong angle.
"I need everything you know about HERALD designations," I said.
He set his cup down on the counter. Reached into his jacket pocket. Pulled out a folded piece of paper — actual paper, handwritten, which told me he'd known the System could intercept digital notes — and held it out.
I took it.
It was a list of six names. All HERALD designations. All with dates beside them — draft dates, and beside each draft date, another date. Release dates. Or what the System had called release dates.
Every single one of them had died within six months of their supposed freedom.
"They don't let anyone go," I said.
"No one has ever successfully exited the Protocol," Dorian said. "Every release on record is a wipe. They erase the Player's knowledge of the System, sever their connection to Breach Zones, and send them back into the world with no memory of any of it." He paused. "The System considers that freedom."
"And HERALD-01?"
"Wiped. Standard procedure. Approximately eight years ago." He looked at the paper in my hands. "She was the highest-performing Player in Protocol history. The Summoner personally oversaw her release."
Eight years ago. I was fourteen. My mother had come home from what she'd told me was a work trip — she worked in nonprofit administration, always traveling — and for three weeks she'd been slightly off. Quieter. Reaching for words she couldn't find. I'd thought she was tired.
She'd been rebuilt. Reprogrammed. Sent back with her real life wiped clean.
And then forty-seven days ago she'd died, and in the last seconds of whatever the coma had left her, something had broken through the wipe.
They don't let people go, and she had still found a way to warn me.
"She accessed the Protocol from inside the coma," I said. Not a question this time. A conclusion.
"That's my best reading of it," Dorian said. "The wipe shouldn't have been penetrable. That it was means one of two things — the wipe was incomplete, or she was strong enough to break through it." He looked at me. "I know which one I think is more likely."
I stared at the paper.
"She would have known what was coming," I said. "Drafting runs in families?"
"Not typically. But NULL designations don't happen randomly." He picked up his cup. "The System doesn't make classification errors. If it couldn't categorize you, it's because whatever you are wasn't in the model. And if your mother was HERALD-01 — the Player the System built its original model on—"
He stopped.
I finished it.
"Then I'm outside the model because I'm a variable the model was never designed to include." I set the paper down. "She didn't just play the game. She helped build it."
The radiator knocked.
Outside, Chicago opened its grey November eyes and started another day that had no idea what was moving beneath it.
My RECALL pulled up the Summoner's message, unbidden.
Your mother said you'd be difficult.
She'd known what she was sending me into. She'd known, and she'd warned me anyway, and she'd called me difficult like it was my most important feature.
I looked at Dorian.
"I need access to the HERALD records," I said.
"They're sealed above my clearance."
"I know." I looked at the list. "But I have a RECALL ability and twenty-three Echoes worth of dead Players' knowledge available to absorb. Someone in that pool was alive when those records weren't sealed."
He watched me work through it.
"You're going to absorb Echoes to access someone else's memories," he said.
"I'm going to absorb the right Echo," I said. "There's a difference."
He said nothing for a long moment.
Then: "Echo selection requires Handler clearance to access the available pool. I no longer have that clearance."
"But Sawyer does. Sawyer's Bronze-IV and six months in — his access tier covers the pool I need." I stood up. "Call him."
Dorian pulled out his phone. Paused with it in his hand.
"The Summoner is monitoring you," he said. "Every move you make toward those records is a move he's going to see."
"Good," I said. "Let him watch."
I picked up my coffee. The list of HERALD names sat on my desk.
Six names. Six players. All dead within six months of their supposed freedom.
My mother had lasted eight years.
I wanted to know why.