Chapter 94: THE LAST PEN

The room fell apart. The walls turned into mist and the floor vanished. I was standing on nothing, just floating in a gray, hollow space. In front of me stood the man with no face. He held a blue pen like it was a sword. He didn't look like a normal person. He looked like a storm of static, shaking and buzzing.

"You really think you won?" his voice asked. It sounded like a radio with bad signal. It was my voice, but twisted. "You beat the Author. But you forgot something. Stories don't end just because you kill the writer. Every story has an editor. And above the editor, there is always the reader. I am the one who decides what stays and what goes in the trash."

He swung the blue pen. A streak of light cut through the air. Where it touched, everything broke into messy scraps of code. I watched as buildings, forests, and roads from other stories crumbled into nothing.

"Sarah, move!" I yelled.

I grabbed her hand and jerked her back. A huge chunk of the floor shattered where she had been standing a second before. We were now stuck on a tiny, floating piece of rock. All around us, scenes from a thousand different books were dying. It was a graveyard of stories.

"What do we do now, Logan?" Sarah asked. She sounded scared. I felt a pit in my stomach. This wasn't the kind of fear the Author used to throw at me. This was real. This was the end.

"I don't know," I said. "But he can't get us if we aren't part of his story anymore."

"What does that mean?"

I looked at the blue pen. It wasn't writing; it was erasing. It was eating reality like a hungry monster.

"The pen," I whispered. "It owns the story. If he can change it, maybe we can too."

"We don't have a pen, Logan!"

"We don't need one," I said. I looked at the scraps of light floating by. They were ideas. They were beginnings of stories that never got finished.

I reached out and caught a glowing string of light. It felt warm, like it was alive.

"Logan, what are you doing?" Sarah asked.

"I'm rewriting," I said.

I looked at the man without a face. I didn't want to fight him. I just wanted to change him. I closed my eyes and pictured him as a normal guy. Someone without power. Someone who was just as lost as I was in the beginning.

The man swung the pen at my head. I didn't move. I pushed the string of light right into his chest.

He stopped. The blue pen fell from his hand and tumbled into the dark. The man started to shake. The blank, smooth skin of his face began to crack. A real face appeared underneath. I gasped.

It was me.

But it was me from Chapter 1. I looked young, terrified, and totally confused.

"Don't," the other me whispered. "If you change the story, you change yourself. You'll lose who you are."

"I don't care," I said. "I am not a puppet. I am not a test run. I am the one who finishes this."

I dived and caught the blue pen before it hit the dark. It felt heavy. It felt like it was pulling my soul right out of my hands. I looked at the scared boy I used to be and then at the pen.

I didn't think. I just wrote one word in the air: Stop.

The world froze.

The pieces of light stopped spinning. Sarah went still. The boy in front of me turned into a statue.

I held the pen up. The blue light was too bright to look at. I felt power rushing through me, but it felt wrong. It felt like I was being stretched thin over a million pages. I was everyone. I was the bus driver, the guard, the girl in the white dress, the reader, the editor. I felt every bit of their pain and joy. It was all inside my head, and it was crushing me.

"Logan, put it down!" Sarah’s voice rang out. She was moving again. She ran over and grabbed my hands. "It’s too much! You’re going to burn out!"

"I have to fix this!" I screamed. "I have to give everyone a happy ending!"

"You can't!" she said, crying. "You can't save them by becoming the machine! That’s what they wanted all along! They wanted someone to control the story so they didn't have to!"

She was right. I was turning into the monster I hated.

I looked at the pen. I could make everything perfect. I could make Sarah safe forever. I could make the world a paradise. But it would be a lie. It would just be another script for the readers to click on.

I looked at the frozen world.

"Okay," I said.

I didn't write Happy Ending. I didn't write Peace.

I aimed the pen at the heart of the machine, the big, glowing server that kept all the worlds locked away.

"I'm ending the subscription," I said.

I shoved the pen into the center of the light and twisted it as hard as I could.

A sound like the whole world breaking happened. The white light turned into a million colors, and then everything went black.

I felt Sarah’s hand slip from mine.

I felt myself falling into nothing. There was no ground, no story, no cage.

Then, I heard a voice. It wasn't the Author. It wasn't the Editor. It was a girl, soft and real.

"Hey, are you okay? You’ve been staring at that blank notebook for an hour."

I opened my eyes. I was sitting at a desk in a classroom. The sun was shining through the window. The room was full of students talking and laughing.

I looked down. There was a notebook. It was empty.

I looked up. The girl standing there was Sarah. But she didn't look like a character. She looked like a student. She had a pen in her hand, but it was just a cheap, plastic school pen.

"Logan?" she asked. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

I tried to speak, but my throat felt tight. "I... I think I just finished a book."

She laughed. "You haven't even started writing yet! Come on, let's go get some lunch."

She walked toward the door. I stood up to follow her, but my foot hit something hard on the floor.

I looked down.

Lying in the dirt, right where she had walked, was the blue pen. And it was still glowing.