Malachi watched Zero from beneath the frayed brim of his hat. The boy trembled—not just from cold, but from the weight of being. His violet hand pulsed in the dark, drinking the light around them.
To Malachi, Zero wasn't just a boy. He was a ticking bomb of raw ink.
Malachi struck a wooden match. The friction hissed faintly, like a whisper of pain. He didn't light his pipe. He watched the flame eat the wood, turning it to black ash. To him, the world was words burning to make space for white.
"Will I always be like this?" Zero asked, his voice fragile. He stared at his right hand, now so translucent he could see the dust beneath it.
"You're lucky, boy," Malachi said, his voice dry like rustling paper. "Some fade from their feet up, disappearing without a trace. You at least have a hand that can fight back."
He moved to a window covered in yellowed newsprint and placed his hand over his chest beneath his coat. The ink in his veins was thickening, turning to heavy silt.
I'm drying out, he thought. If we don't reach the Black Ink Exchange soon, I will turn into cardboard.
He looked back at Zero. The boy tried to cover his violet hand with cloth, but it dissolved immediately on contact with the mist.
Does he know who he truly is? Malachi wondered. Does he know that Silas didn't give him this hand as a gift, but as a curse? Or am I just a tool in a story Silas never finished?
A flashback hit him: a lavish office, a hand with a gold signet ring signing a Deletion Order for an entire residential sector. A younger Malachi looked at the Author:
"Sir, there are children in those pages."
The Author's reply was cold:
"Children are filler. Erase them."
Malachi snapped back to the present as a distant crash shook the building.
"The thermal audit has begun," he said, springing to his feet with surprising grace. "Loomis is closing in. He's erasing streets to trap us on an island of paper in a sea of white."
He gripped Zero's shoulder.
"Listen closely. We're heading to the Forbidden Sector. The ink there hasn't been touched for centuries. We either drink from it… or vanish trying."