Chapter 69 Starved

Mina’s workshop had a wall that used to hold schematics, and by Sunday evening it held eleven months of Lucas instead.

Damien had Bram pin every public miracle to it in date order, with the outcome written underneath in Mina’s blocky artificer’s hand.

’Eleven months of coincidences on one wall, yeah, laid out this way it stops looking like luck and starts reading as an invoice.’

The first six months were absurd, since the golden boy had walked into a rift collapse and out of a hijacking without a scratch on either occasion.

The seventh month held the gala, where a champagne glass cracked in his hand at the exact moment Damien annulled first.

After that the pins shrank, the outcomes cheapened, and three of them carried somebody else’s name written under the rescue.

"Every miracle after the gala costs him more and delivers less, which is a supply problem rather than a talent problem," Mina said, tapping the eighth month.

"He is spending capital he used to receive as income, and the expedition took the largest deposit he was ever scheduled to collect," Damien replied.

"Say all of that again in words an alchemist can actually put on an invoice," Isolde called from the workbench, distilling something that smelled like a crime in progress.

"His luck runs on other people’s misfortune, and I keep stealing the misfortune before it reaches him," Damien answered.

Isolde stopped the burner, turned around with the flask still in her glove, and looked at the wall properly for the first time.

"You have been telling me for two months that your intelligence sources are private, this wall is a public accusation," she said.

"The wall is arithmetic that anyone could do, which is the entire point of building it out of newspaper clippings," Damien replied.

’Everything on that wall is public, good, and Isolde can repeat every line of it without any of it leading back to a system.’

Blank sat at the top of the ladder through all of it, edges going soft and sharp by turns depending on which pin somebody touched.

Whenever a hand went near the expedition column, the creature made the tearing-page sound and flattened itself against the rung.

"Huh, your familiar hates the shelf column and could not care less about anything before the gala," Mina said, watching it.

"It smells script activity, which means the shelf breach carried more editorial residue than the whole first six months combined," Damien answered.

Nothing had opened in his vision since the memorial, which made the timing of the next panel feel less than accidental.

[Fate’s Favorite - observed feed efficiency: 74%]

[Bankruptcy progress: 19% → 26%]

[Estimated remaining current-scale luck spikes: unresolved]

’Twenty-six percent of the way to bankrupt in eleven months, okay, and most of that happened in the last six days, which is the only rate that matters.’

Damien wrote the two percentages on the wall’s bottom corner in pencil, small enough that a visitor would read it as a stock figure.

Bram arrived with the evening city papers and a face that suggested somebody had already been unpleasant to him about them.

"Three papers ran the interview, one ran your ceremony, the Arden family has hired a communications firm since Thursday," he said.

"Then they are spending money on something the script used to hand him for free, which is exactly what I wanted to see," Damien replied.

"Tch, you say that like it is good news, and meanwhile the firm has already called your father’s office twice," Bram answered.

The proof arrived the next morning, on a tram platform in Averill’s third district, filmed by nobody important.

A support column gave way at the eastern end, and Lucas was forty meters from it with a bag of groceries in his hand.

He went in anyway, held the sagging beam up long enough for two women to scramble clear, then walked out torn across the coat with blood running off his forearm.

Damien watched the clip eleven times before understanding what was wrong with it.

’Nobody watching, not one camera in that street, the beam actually cut him, shit, that was a real rescue with a real cost, the script did not arrange any of it.’

Nothing came back to Lucas for it either, since the clip surfaced from a shop camera three days later and the city had moved on by then.

[Voluntary act recorded: subject Lucas Arden]

[Fate’s Favorite return: minimal]

[Note: choice not scripted]

Mina could not see the panel over his shoulder, so she read his face instead and got most of the way there anyway.

"That expression is the one you make when a person does something your information did not predict," she said.

"He saved two strangers without an audience and got nothing back, while I spent months calling him a siphon with a smile," Damien answered.

"And now you have to hold a thought where he is both those things at once," Mina replied.

’He is the mechanism and he is a nineteen-year-old holding a beam, damn, and neither of those facts is going to make me stop bankrupting him.’

Divergence held at thirty-three percent through the whole week, which Damien found more alarming than a rise would have been.

The shelf breach should have pushed it past thirty-five, since he had overturned forty deaths and rewritten an entire calamity Chapter.

Instead the number sat frozen for six days, which felt less like stability than an office somewhere deciding what to do about him.

[Divergence: 33% - stable]

[Correction response: reassigned]

[Warped beast generation: suspended]

[Proofreader: assigned]

’Suspended, shit, it stopped sending animals, and things stop sending animals when they decide to send a person instead.’

Damien read the entry three times, then repeated out loud only the part that was safe to share.

"The rift response pattern has changed and I want every residue lock in this workshop rekeyed tonight," he said.

"You are asking for eleven hours of work off a hunch you refuse to source," Mina answered, already pulling the toolroll open.

"I am asking for eleven hours of work off a pattern that killed nine students last week," Damien replied.

She rekeyed every lock by four in the morning while Isolde restocked the cabinet with compounds that had no legitimate academic purpose, and Bram slept across the corridor outside.

Halcrest’s registry office processed forty-one visitor credentials that Monday, which was ordinary for a week after a public disaster.

One of them belonged to a facilities auditor named Wren Sable, carrying flawless paperwork for an employer that genuinely existed, with a photograph nobody at the office could recall afterward.

The auditor came through the eastern gate at ten past nine carrying a clipboard, wearing a gray coat that had collected no dust anywhere.

Two students said good morning and both remembered saying it, though neither could describe a single word of whatever answered them.

Blank came off Damien’s collar halfway through a lecture about rift stratification, went rigid against the desk, and made the tearing-page sound loudly enough for the row behind to hear.

’Not now and absolutely not in a room holding thirty people who cannot fight, damn, it has never done that indoors before.’

’It only does that for one thing, damn, this time the thing came through the front gate with a clipboard.’

Damien was out of the lecture hall before the instructor finished the sentence, taking the north stairs three at a time with Blank clamped to his shoulder.

The auditor’s route was already recorded at three checkpoints, and every one of them ran along the eastern corridor toward the artificer’s annex.

Toward Mina’s workshop, where eleven hours of freshly rekeyed locks were about to be tested by something that did not need to open doors.