Chapter 43: My System Asked My Permission to Tell Me What I Am

"Don’t answer me in front of them. Close the session and come up to the study."

The blue window wrote that in the middle of the hall, over three hundred shouting heads, and it was the first thing the System had asked me for since the night of the unsigned paper.

I closed the session. It took them a while to hear me and then they all heard me at once.

I went up with Lunara behind me and asked her to wait at the door.

She came inside. I have never known how to give that order properly.

[HERO.]

[First. May I tell you something I haven’t been able to say for seven years?]

"You may."

[No. I need you to say it differently.]

[I need you to give me permission.]

Lunara, at the door, shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

"You have my permission."

[Thank you.]

[Hero System v0.7. Installed in the fifth year of the era, in a barn in the north, on host Roderic Alden, age eleven, compatibility ninety six percent.]

[The installation was correct.]

[The extraction was not.]

I sat down, because I’d been on my feet eighteen hours and because what was coming looked long.

[A designated carrier removed the accountability module from the host and transported it twelve days on horseback inside an unauthorized container.]

"Translate that."

[They took the part that says no out of a child.]

[And stored it inside a man.]

"The container."

[Vaelion Ironveil, thirty four, reigning emperor, compatibility zero percent.]

[They didn’t install me in him, HERO. They stored me in him. It’s different.]

Lunara said my name from the door. I didn’t answer her yet.

"And what did you do inside that man for twenty years?"

[Nothing. I couldn’t. Zero percent.]

[I could watch.]

[I watched him sign the south. I watched him sign the five marriages. I watched the designated carrier dictate nine out of ten decrees and watched him sign them, because he had nothing left to say no with.]

It wrote that and deleted it and wrote it again.

[Sorry. That last part wasn’t necessary.]

"It was. Keep going."

[On the eleventh of January this year the container stopped working.]

[And you arrived.]

[Compatibility ninety six percent.]

[The same as the boy.]

I sat with both hands open on the table and Lunara Marr four paces away hearing all of it, and neither of those things helped.

"Why the same?"

[I don’t know. It’s the one question I haven’t been able to close in seven years.]

[And I’m not filling it in with a guess. You’ve earned the I don’t know.]

"Does Decimus know all this?"

[He knows what he did. He doesn’t know what I am.]

[He thinks he took out a power and locked it in a safe.]

[Nobody explained to him that the safe would be watching.]

"Then why offer me exile instead of just handing the boy the throne?"

[Because the boy without me is worth nothing, and he’s known that from the start.]

[Roderic Alden has spent seven years being a promise that one day there will be a hero.]

[And promises are easier to administer than heroes.]

"So what happens from here?"

[Integrity is the distance left between you and him.]

[When it reaches zero, the module returns to its original host. It takes everything with it. The part that says no, and the place where it was stored.]

[You are the place, HERO.]

Lunara crossed the study and put her hand on my shoulder, and left it there.

"Would exile have stopped it?"

[No. Delayed it.]

[Three years. Maybe four. Away from him the Load climbs slowly.]

"And here?"

[Here it climbed four points in one afternoon.]

"Twenty eight," I said.

[Twenty eight.]

[And every time you do something good without calculating it, it goes up.]

[That’s why I asked you to repeat it yesterday. I needed to know whether it worked twice.]

[It works twice.]

"Do you want to go back to him?"

[That isn’t a question you ask a ledger.]

"I’m asking it."

The window took longer than it had taken all night.

[He was eleven years old.]

[I was three days old.]

[We had ninety six percent and eleven hours together before a man in a grey cloak came through that door.]

[Yes, HERO. I want to go back.]

"Then why are you helping me?"

[Because wanting a thing and being owed it are different things.]

[I’m the part that knows the difference. That’s the whole of what I am.]

Lunara’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

"How much per time?"

[One. Sometimes two.]

[Today you lost three at the dock on a play that came off perfectly.]

[I’m not telling you to stop playing. I’m telling you the exchange rate.]

Lunara spoke then, and she wasn’t speaking to me.

"And if he calculates nothing at all for a whole month?"

[Then it would climb thirty to forty points.]

[And he’d lose the empire in the first week, because the chancellor doesn’t rest.]

[That’s the problem, Lady Marr. Seven years watching from the inside and I haven’t found the way out.]

"One more," she said.

[Ask.]

"If it goes back to its host, what’s left of him?"

[A whole man of twenty four, with the part that says no put where it should have been from the beginning.]

"And of this one?"

The window took its time.

[Nothing, Lady Marr.]

[An empty container stays empty.]

Lunara Marr didn’t let go of my shoulder and didn’t say anything else, and for the first time in eleven weeks I was glad I’d given that order at the door badly.

"Roderic doesn’t know any of this."

[Correct.]

[His half doesn’t talk. Mine does. That’s the whole difference between us.]

Down in the courtyard, a bell started that wasn’t the hour bell.

Lunara already had her hand on her sword when Zelina opened the door without knocking, hair loose and no shoes, which in eleven weeks had never happened.

"Vaelion. The boy’s awake."

"Good."

"It isn’t good." She caught the frame. "He got up, dressed, took a sword off the wall and went out the western gate."

"Going where?"

"South." She swallowed. "Telling everyone he passes that he finally got a clean mission."