Chapter 92: Origin Record

The subway door wouldn’t unlock until Austin Veyron touched the faded signature line.

White light pulsed beneath his palm. Rusted metal folded inward on itself. The door swung open to stairs spiraling down somewhere they had never seen beneath Grand Meridian. The First Queen’s root mark burned on each staircase. Black hunger poured from the seams between them.

Calder hesitated at the entrance to the stairwell.

"This is where they turned us into candidates," he said.

Austin Veyron spun to face him. "You remember?"

"Bits and pieces. A voice. A decision I didn’t understand."

They stepped through the doorway together.

A circular room lined with glass cylinders greeted them at the bottom of the stairs. Most were shattered. Two held cracked red-gold dust. One contained a black seed hovering inside of a handprint the size of a child’s palm.

Nahlia began reading the text circling the floor.

’DEVOUR CANDIDATE RESERVATION: Austin Veyron.’

Heat flared across Austin Veyron’s wrist.

Memories replayed inside of the chamber.

A younger version of Vharra knelt beside someone Austin Veyron couldn’t see. Black smoke obscured the figure standing over them with seeds hovering over two of the cylinders.

"The Emperor requires competition," said the figure. "Give him appetites capable of choice."

Vharra stared at handprints etched into glass around the room. "They are too young."

"They will become accepted."

Austin Veyron remembered watching himself as a child standing next to his mother’s hospital bed. Ignorant to the white root mark tattooed beneath his name. Another memory plagued him with the image of Calder older but just as bewildered while reaching for a chain crown dangling above him.

Nothing about the seed ceremony had begun with consent.

The black hunger swirling inside of the glass chamber shifted.

Echoes erupted from each empty cylinder. Reflections of Austin Veyron or Calder that could’ve been. One wore a crown. Another wore a mask over its mouth. One clenched broken versions of the court in both of its hands.

’ACCEPT YOUR ORIGIN’, they whispered.

Rin sliced through the first echo’s throat. Veyra blocked another echo’s advance toward the candidate reservations written on the floor. Calder punched through the command line feeding the chamber, but more echoes materialized from the black dust inside of each glass cylinder.

Austin Veyron didn’t punch the seeds.

He punched through the reservation line surrounding his own name.

The Devour seed screamed.

[ORIGIN RECORD LOCKED.]

Austin Veyron slammed his palm into the white root mark painted on the floor and tugged upwards. Skin peeled away from the floorcommand beneath it.

’CANDIDATE MAY REFUSE SOURCE ONLY AFTER WITNESSING AN ACCEPTED SEED.’

Calder skimmed over the stipulations underneath Austin Veyron’s arrival command.

"There is someone else," he whispered.

A crack webbed through the third cylinder.

The echo of a face stared back at them from inside the black glass: a young woman with silver eyes and a crown of black roots protruding from her neck.

The Hunger Emperor’s voice filled the entire chamber.

’THIRD CANDIDATE: SABLE. SOURCE ACCEPTED.’

The Herald had never simply consented to serve the Emperor’s appetite.

She had submitted.

Each time the chamber repeated Sable’s name, another shockwave pulsed through the room. Every glass cylinder cracked open at once. Black tendrils shot across the floor toward subway lines branching off above them. The origin vault wasn’t just a record of every candidate the Emperor had engineered over the years. It was also a hub designed to activate every scout mark seeded throughout the city.

"Line yourselves up against the walls," Nahlia ordered. "Then seal the lines."

Roots shot from every wall painted white as the First Queen’s emblem. Black hunger only clung tighter around them, hungry to use the team as vectors toward the rest of New Kansas City. The entire vault fought against them escaping with knowledge of the other seeds.

Veyra pressed herself between the chamber and stairwell exit. Rin vaulted between cylinders, slashing black threads before they reached the ceiling. Calder scrubbed over his tracks at the center command node with shaky hands hovering above the shattered candidate line tattooed into his forearm.

"If I destroy this," he said, voice surprisingly calm despite himself. "It might activate another record close by."

"If we leave this intact," Austin Veyron pointed out, "it activates every scout mark across the city."

Echo versions of themselves materialized from inside the glass containers once more. One wore Sable’s crown slung around its shoulders. Another escorted Vharra’s chain necklace away between two hands. One of them looked exactly like Austin Veyron except its pupils were black holes.

’YOU ARE NOT NECESSARY FOR THIS FIGHT, THE ECHO SAID.’

Austin Veyron kicked it aside.

"No." He grabbed his hip with one fist and ground it against the chamber wall. "I am ready to do this."

That made all the difference.

He punched DEVOUR into the reservation command––not the seed’s core or heart, but through the capitalized words announcing someone else could access his mind if he ever lost initiative. Lights flared throughout the entire room.

’CANDIDATE RESERVATION DISPUTED.’

The black copy of himself screamed again. Calder took the opening and cut through his candidate line next to Austin Veyron’s.

’CANDIDATE RESERVATION DISPUTED.’

Breaking their candidate lines hadn’t immediately freed their seed cores from the vault’s controlling grasp. Stipulations written into the origin record reminded witnesses they could only deny consent after experiencing how an accepted candidate would react when given choice. But contradicting their reservation lines now only served to weaken the Emperor’s safeguards over their minds.

Nahlia found Sable’s approved candidate file within the third cylinder. Her past sat on the chamber floor staring back up at them, willing her empty eye sockets into focus. She hid somewhere between Austin Veyron and Vharra’s ages, knees tucked to her chest as if she were trying to disappear.

"What did he promise you?" Nahlia asked.

Sable met her eyes.

"He promised me a world where nobody could ever be abandoned by choice again."

Black veins tore through her shoulders and rearranged themselves into a crown.

"He was lying," Sable’s past continued. "But I accepted before realizing that."

The room began to cave in around them.

Visions of what became of the Herald once she accepted burned one final message into Austin Veyron’s mind. Coordinates populated across the floor opening new pathways to scout marks scattered across the city. An entire cluster congregated just past Grand Meridian’s northern wall.

’FIRST FEAST GROUND: THE HOLLOW CROWN.’

One of the Emperor’s seeds had accepted HIS source.

Austin Veyron hadn’t.

This was no longer theoretical anymore. Their opponent was real. No longer hiding behind layers of secrecy or subway tiles. There was someone fighting against them. A battlefield they needed to reach before he did. And eight more nights to give something worth sacrificing their lives for inside of that time.

Glass ceilings crumbled around them.

Obsidian water flooded down the stairwell tunnel as every wall folded inward on itself. Old route markers and subway tiles floated alongside it all, debris from every seed ceremony Austin Veyron terminated after discovering the Emperor’s past. Every copy of themselves materialized from the rubble reached for Austin Veyron and Calder, desperate hands attempting to drag them back down toward the cylinder containers.

Rin grabbed the first echo by its knees before it could strike. Veyra sliced through black hair tying back the crown from another copy of Calder. But the third echo, the one with Austin Veyron’s face, reached him first.

"Wait," it said, hand curled around his shirt collar.

Austin Veyron punched through its wrist.

"You will want hunger once everyone you care about starts dying," it said, voice muffled by Austin Veyron slamming his other hand into its forehead.

"Maybe I will," Austin Veyron allowed. "Doesn’t mean you get to make that choice for me."

He tore the echo away from their candidate reservation line and punched DEVOUR through the disputed access command for the last time. White light that exploded from within the chamber didn’t delete his record from attending. But it did wipe away whatever future he had left tied to THEIR king.

Calder punched through his own reservations beside him.

The origin chamber deposited them out onto the stairwell.

They ran up the stairs while the deactivated room folded into itself once more. Nahlia clutched the route map data chip. Seven brandished white emergency line they breached during the collapse. Vharra clenched the remaining black roots against with the last of the Echo still suppressed inside of her.

When they reached the sealed subway entrance, the vault sealed itself off behind them.

Every neighborhood above Grand Meridian remained untouched. But every black scout mark illuminated on Elena’s common ledger map. Every stray puzzle piece that refused to speak with one another rallied toward a singular destination past Grand Meridian’s northern border.

"The marks are carving us a path straight out of the city," Elena explained when they boarded the train.

Austin Veyron stared at the subway entrance and a white root mark painted beside it just inside of his own hand.

"The Emperor is bringing us to the Feast ground," Calder said.

"He is," Austin Veyron agreed. "We just don’t have to accept by his rules."

The Freehold would need scouts and route keepers still. Fighters. Everyone willing to come with them down whatever path lay past Grand Meridian. The next stage of this war wouldn’t be fought within the secrecy of a hidden court or underground city.

The next fight would bring them to the place the Hunger Emperor thought his chosen would kneel before him without question.