CHAPTER 6: THE PRICE OF SEEING
Magnus Rook came to the academy the way important men always seem to arrive in places they don't belong — unannounced until an hour beforehand, and by then already expected, as if the building itself had known before we did.
He came as a guest speaker, officially, to unveil a new recruitment initiative for what the Bureau was calling its Elite Awakened Program. In practice, he came to walk the halls slowly enough that everyone would have time to notice him noticing them, and to stop, eventually, in front of me.
"Jace Rowan," he said, like he was trying the name out loud for the first time, though something in the way he said it told me he'd said it before, privately, more than once. "Tactical thinking under pressure. I read the report on the F-rank incident. Impressive instincts, for someone the interface still lists at level one."
"Thank you," I said, because my aunt raised me to say thank you even when the compliment felt like it had teeth in it.
"I'd like to extend a personal invitation to the Bureau's development track. We could use minds like yours."
He smiled while he said it, warm and unhurried, the kind of smile that photographs well and means nothing at all, and my eye, without asking my permission first, peeled back a layer of that smile the way you'd peel a label off glass. Underneath it sat a thin sheet of data, deliberate and constructed, laid over his actual expression like a mask worn so long the wearer had forgotten it was a mask at all.
I didn't say what I'd seen. There wasn't a version of that sentence that ended well for me. I just said I'd think about the offer, and he nodded like a man who already knew what my answer would eventually be, and moved on down the hallway to charm someone else.
*
I stopped sleeping properly after that. Not dramatically — no nightmares worth describing, nothing I could point to and call an event. Just a slow erosion of the ordinary comfort of not-looking. Once you've seen the seam under one smile, you start looking for seams everywhere, and the Hollow Eye, unhelpfully, was happy to keep finding them.
I saw a thin boundary line around Milo one evening while he was laughing at something Lyra said, and spent a full minute convinced he was hiding something from us before I realized the line was nothing more sinister than the ordinary, private grief he still carried about his mother — a boundary, not a lie, and I had no right to go looking at it uninvited. I saw one around Lyra too, tighter and older, wrapped close around whatever she kept locked away about her father, and made myself look away before the Eye could pry it open without asking.
"You need to stop," Lyra told me, the third night she caught me staring at nothing in the common room, jaw tight in the specific way she got when she was worried and didn't want to call it that. "Whatever you're doing with that eye right now. Stop."
"I keep thinking if I look one more time, I'll find her."
"And if you don't? If all you find is more of this?" She gestured at me, at the hollowed-out exhaustion I clearly wasn't hiding as well as I thought. "You're not going to save anyone like this, Jace. Least of all yourself."
I told her I'd be careful. I meant it when I said it. I've since learned that meaning something and being able to do it are not always the same skill.
*
The rescue mission came two days later — a training exercise gone wrong in one of the lower-rank simulation gates, a squad trapped in a looping section of the dungeon that reset itself every few minutes with no clear trigger and no visible exit. Lyra went in with the response team. I wasn't supposed to be there at all. I went anyway, because staying outside a gate she was trapped inside had never once been a real option for me, whatever the rulebook said about first-years and unauthorized entry.
The loop had her. I found that out the hard way, watching from just outside its boundary as the same ninety seconds played over and over — Lyra reaching a doorway, the door resetting, Lyra reaching the doorway again, no memory of the previous attempt visible on her face, caught in a groove worn smooter each time it repeated.
I used the Hollow Eye to find the break point. Once wasn't enough — the loop's structure was subtler than anything I'd read before, layered in a way that made the first pass useless and the second only slightly better. I kept looking. Each time I did, the interface exacted its toll without ceremony or apology.
[MEMORY DEDUCTED.]
The first pass cost me my favorite meal — not the name of a dish, exactly, but the memory of caring about one, the specific warm certainty of having a favorite anything. The second cost me the particular, ordinary memory of my first day of school, gone the way a photograph goes when you leave it too long in direct sun, the color bleaching out until there's only a pale rectangle left where a moment used to be. I kept looking anyway. Lyra's ninety seconds kept resetting. I didn't have the luxury of stopping to grieve what I was losing in real time.
I found the break on the fourth pass — a single unstable thread in the loop's structure, the kind of flaw that doesn't show up until you've failed enough times to know exactly where not to look. I reached through it, dragged Lyra out by main force at the exact half-second the loop would have reset around her permanently, and the whole simulation folded shut behind us like a door slamming on an argument that had finally run out of things to say.
She hugged me the moment we were both clear. I didn't recognize her.
Not entirely — I knew her face, knew the shape of the relief in her voice, knew, distantly, that this was a person I was supposed to feel something specific and important about. But the memory of my father's face, gone in the same pass that had bought Lyra's freedom, had taken something adjacent to it with it, some anchor point the Hollow Eye apparently needed to place feeling correctly, and for one long, terrible second I stood there being hugged by someone whose name I could recall and whose meaning to me I couldn't quite locate.
She felt it. Of course she felt it — she pulled back, searching my face for whatever had gone missing behind my eyes, and I watched the relief drain out of her expression and something harder take its place.
"You don't recognize me," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I do. I just—" I didn't have a way to finish that sentence that wouldn't have made it worse.
"You can't keep doing this," she said, and her voice cracked on the word doing in a way I'd never heard it crack before, not even in the archive with guards closing in. "You don't get to decide, alone, every single time, what piece of yourself you're willing to trade for the rest of us. That's not a sacrifice, Jace. That's a decision you're making about other people's futures without asking them."
"If I hadn't done it, you'd still be in there."
"I know that." She said it like it cost her something to admit. "I know that, and I'm still angry, and both of those things are allowed to be true at the same time."
We argued the whole walk back to the academy gates, low and furious and careful not to let the argument spill out into anywhere the staff could hear it, and at the end of it she still took my hand, because being right and being finished weren't the same thing either, and neither of us wanted to let go first.
*
That night, alone, a memory unlocked in my vision that I hadn't asked for and didn't recognize the source of — not the Hollow Eye's usual cold, clinical interface, but something warmer, deliberately placed there by someone else's hand.
My mother, younger than I could otherwise remember her, holding me against her shoulder in a room I didn't recognize, saying four words directly into my ear like a secret she was afraid to say any louder.
Don't trust the system.
I sat with that for a long time before the second message arrived, and this one didn't come wrapped in warmth at all.
[LYRA VOSS HAS BEEN FLAGGED: FAULTY SUPPORT DESIGNATION.]
I read it twice to make sure I hadn't misunderstood the words, and both times they meant exactly what I was afraid they meant. Whatever had marked me for erasure weeks ago had apparently decided Lyra's continued presence beside me made her a liability worth flagging too — as if loyalty itself were a bug in the code, something to be patched out before it spread.
A final line surfaced beneath the flag, cold and precise, offering me a trade I hadn't asked for and didn't want.
[DO YOU ACCEPT ERASING LYRA VOSS TO RESTORE YOUR MOTHER'S MEMORIES?]
I stared at that question long enough for the numbers around it to blur, my mother's four whispered words sitting right beside it in my memory like an answer she'd given me years before the System had gotten around to asking.
I didn't need long to decide. I needed exactly as long as it took to feel disgusted that the question had been asked of me at all — as if grief for one person could be honestly weighed against the erasure of another, as if a system that measured people in exchange rates like this had ever once understood what either of them was worth.
"No," I said out loud, to an empty room, to an interface that couldn't hear my voice and wouldn't have cared if it could. I typed the refusal anyway, watched it register, and felt something in the air around me shift the instant it did — not relief, exactly. More like the specific quiet that follows a door slamming somewhere out of sight.
The System didn't respond kindly to being told no.
By morning, both our names sat flagged in a registry neither of us had access to read, and somewhere in the Bureau's towers, I had no doubt at all, Magnus Rook was already deciding what to do about it.