No one else saw the footprints. Of course they didn't. The System left its fingerprints for the person it intended to delete.
DEBUG PING: Invisible rails detected.Affiliated Entity: E.V.A. (origin unknown).Locked Route: Villainess.
Zion followed the ash-prints to the threshold of a door that architectural logic said should not be there. The west wing had been sealed under ten royal decrees and a saint's oath; even the servants' gossip avoided it like a scar.
Seraphine glided beside him, gaze flicking once to the prints, then to his face. She didn't ask what he saw. That was the first mercy she gave him.
"Your Grace," he said quietly, "I need ten seconds."
"Take eight," she said without looking at him. "A lady does not wait ten."
E.V.A.'s cursor cooled to a steady glow. Door is off-script. Risk: high. Reward: meta access.
SYSTEM CUT-INProgress: Route Hijack (0/5)Unlock: Glitch Step (iframe dodge) CLAIM? [Y/N]
"Y," Zion breathed.
The world stuttered like a skipping record and he wasn't there when a guard's halberd cleaved through where he had stood. I-frames: a ghost-thin invulnerability the length of a blink. He reappeared an inch to the left, heartbeat thunderous.
Awe + Threat again: the gift had teeth.
"Cute trick," Seraphine murmured, stepping through the halo of displaced air as if she had always planned to. "Don't waste it."
Guards surged. Regent Protocol crackled. The door that shouldn't exist was inches from Zion's palm. He pressed it.
The temperature dropped.
Inside: a corridor like a rail tunnel, candles guttering in perfect intervals, each flame the same height, the same weakness. In the distance, a rhythm: not drums keyboards. A click-click of typing from a century that hadn't been invented here.
ADMIN ALERT: West Wing quarantine intensifying.E.V.A.: Requesting permission to map.
"Map," Zion said.
The corridor unfurled into a ghost blueprint in his sight: nodes like station stops, lines of fate bending around a heart of frost.
A shadow moved inside the frost. It was not Maelor.
It was him.
For a moment he saw himself or rather, something that wore his voice pattern spun into code.
ENTITY: DEBUGGER (Identity Seed)Outcome Enforcer. Rollback Source. Future Fork of---ACCESS DENIED
The blueprint snapped shut as if someone slammed a laptop.
Seraphine's hand hovered by his sleeve, poised to seem like she wasn't touching him even if she was. "We are trespassing on someone's logic," she said idly. "Do you intend to steal it?"
"Yes," Zion said.
"Good," she replied. "Teach me how."
Choice Beat at the hall's first node:
[A] Retreat, preserve ceremony gains.[B] Push for meta, risk hard reset.
He pushed.
The corridor lurched like a train taking a switch at full speed. He and Seraphine stumbled and fell into a room full of snow-white paper dolls that looked like people he almost recognized.
Cliffhanger: One of the paper faces turned, and it looked like Seraphine's except it opened its mouth and sang patch notes in E.V.A.'s voice.