The cabinet of files did not merely break; it exploded. Millions of white sheets of paper were thrown into the air, swirling about in what looked like an incredibly dense blizzard of paper.
The paper concealed the Snatchers and blinded them to their surroundings. The Snatchers hissed with confusion.
The leading monster came to an abrupt halt, veering off into nothingness before attempting to figure out why I was no longer running. It resembled a faulty machine attempting to repair itself. I did not provide any repair time.
"Ethan, what are you doing?" Silas bellowed from a distance down the alley. "If we don't run, they will terminate us!"
"I'm through running," I shouted with a voice that sounded much deeper and more powerful than it had previously.
The iron cuff on my wrist burned. The cuff vibrated and drew energy from my obscured thoughts and transformed the weight of my hidden truths into weaponry. The air around my fist rippled as if heat was rising from the ground.
As I stood frozen, I could hear the horrible sound of its long, needle-like teeth getting closer to the point where I could see the glimmer of the razor sharp metal that they were made from.
It never occurred to me to try to strike at it. I was going to create a real anchor.
I reached down and slammed my iron fist into the stone surface of the ground. The moment it made contact with the hardened stone, the earth shook violently, the purple glyphs illuminating the ground below me, and a massive shockwave of gravity exploded out from me, increasing the gravity of the alley by a factor of ten.
The Snatcher didn't just drop to the ground; it was instantly crushed into the ground.
It made a deafening crunch when it struck the ground and its body turned to a huge ink splot, laying flat like someone had stepped on it in an effort to flatten it out. Other monsters popped off the walls and were hurled into the ground along with all the other debris. Even the metal filing cabinets began folding up on themselves.
"Format," I whispered.
I turned my wrist so that the cuff would pulse and I could do what I had not been able to accomplish before, which was turn the dead, crushed monsters into flat, grey puddles of ink that were absorbed by the earth.
The storm of paper was starting to settle, creating a white covering over the alley where I stood, trembling and shaking. My arm had been battered and blistered from the weight of the cuff but I had managed to take control of it. For the first time I truly felt like I was holding the pen.
"You changed the gravity,"
Silas said. He came out behind a pile of crates to look at me, and his good eye was very wide with amazement. "That was not a trick, Ethan. You altered the fundamental laws of this place, and only the Council has the right to do so."
I was wiping the black soot from my face and said, "I just want them to stay down; am I nothing more than a rewrite?"
"You are a glitch with a hammer." From his initial glance to my newly issued Respected Glitch (my epithet), Silas now recognised the fact I had just signalled to every guard in the sector. "We need to get out of here – it's far too dangerous."
He pointed in the direction of a massive dark building in the distance, a clocktower built from a solid black shadow; the tower loomed above the white mist.
Silas declared, "The Archive of the Last Breath is a library containing every person's history, but it is heavily guarded. It is the only place where we can hide your signature. If we are permitted entrance, we may discover the reason for your deletion by the Council."
I gazed up at the towers and thought about how much it looked like a tombstone. "What if we get caught?"
Silas's expression was a small, sad smile as he said this. "Then we'll have just become one more story to be read about in a book."
As we started moving again, I could feel that the air had changed. Every little blink in the lights felt like something was looking at us. Any sound that came from the walls felt as if it were telling us to beware.
When we finally got to the end of the district, the ground started to become tangible/solid again like the blurry lines of the centre have been erased from our vision. So now we were leaving this partial, incomplete world and entering into cold, stone architecture with fences made of iron.
We had finally arrived at the Archive(gates of it). Sitting right outside of the gate there was someone I recognised.
It was a woman, dressed in green wool (she wore the same green that Sophie was wearing on the last day I saw her), reading a book as if she were sitting on a bench in the park, with her head down looking at the pages.
Sophie?" I yelled out. My heart absolutely froze as she looked up at me. There was nothing on her face. Instead of eyes or a mouth, she had a glowing computer screen, and green text scrolled down inside of it.
"Chapter 7" read the screen on her face. "The main character learns that he is actually dead."
"That's a Script-Doll!" Silas hissed and pulled a jagged piece of glass from his pocket. "Don't look at the screen, Ethan! It's a trap! If you can read the ending, then the events of the end are actually going to occur!"
I had already read it.
As soon as I read it, I felt my iron restraint change instantly into a heavyweight iron ball-and-chain. The ground turned into a large vat of black ink, and I started sinking quickly downward through it.