Two hundred years deep.

  Elias added a new chapter to the Secret History: The Day the Iron Broke. He read me the opening sentence that evening in the Garden as the sky above the Ring grew crowded with the first of the new arrivals—ghost lights threading between the established constellations of our twelve billion, careful, quiet newcomers finding their approach vectors to the Sanatorium’s intake fields.

  I didn’t listen to the rest.

  I was looking at my hands.

  The Gold in my veins was brighter, but the character of the brightness had changed. Where once it had pulsed evenly, it was now—stretched. Extended outward in too many directions at once, the way a single candle isn’t less bright for illuminating a larger room but is asked to work harder for the same result.

  “Look at your hands,” Elias said.

  He had stopped reading.

  “Every time you save a universe, you lose a little more of that twenty-seven-year-old kid from the basement.”

  I folded my hands in my lap.

  Said nothing.

  He wasn’t wrong. But he wasn’t entirely right either. The boy from the basement had made a particular kind of decision on a particular night with a particular set of odds. That decision hadn’t ended. It had only extended, like a bet that kept paying out in currencies you hadn’t anticipated. You didn’t retrieve the person who placed the bet. You became everything the bet had been for.

  I called the Five.

  The golden gates of the Garden dissolved, and I stood in the Nexus—pure, vibrating probability, the air a kind of suspended potential that tasted of copper and mathematics. The Five were enormous here. They weren’t sitting on thrones. They were the walls. Their forms colossal and shifting, so large that my human-shaped divinity was by comparison a point of density in an ocean.

  The Arbiter descended to meet me. His silver mask was etched now with the symbols of every reality we had touched—a cartography of mercy.

  “You called for the tally, Prime. The situation is no longer a system.” He paused. “It is an Empire of Souls.”

  The Five spoke in turn.

  The Architect first. His geometric form shifting into a lattice of multi-dimensional maps, equations unspooling through the air around him in cascades of sapphire light.

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  “The geometry is changing. By dissolving the Iron Hegemony, you gave me a massive influx of Raw Code. I have used it to stabilize the Ring, but the Sauce is becoming heavy. We are no longer a satellite of Earth.” A pause that carried weight. “We are becoming a Gravity Well. If we grow any larger, we might accidentally pull the physical Earth into the Net itself.”

  The Weaver: her form shifting, narrative threads visible in the air around her, the story of every soul she was tending running through her like weather.

  “The stories are getting complicated. The original eight billion humans are becoming Elders. They are starting to act like gods to the newcomers. There is a risk of a Heavenly Caste System.” Her voice was a web of frequencies. “I am working to keep the Choice equal for everyone. But the Iron Souls carry a darkness that is hard to bleach out.”

  The Glutton: vast, warm, currently more satisfied than I had ever seen him, his presence in the Nexus generating a heat that was almost embarrassingly comfortable.

  “I am full, Prime.” He said it with the dazed wonder of something that had never experienced satiation before. “For the first time in an eternity. The energy of Gratitude from the refugees is more potent than the energy of Terror. We have enough power to fuel a thousand suns.” A pause. “But no place to put it. We are a battery with no circuit.”

  The Silent: always last, always the one I had to attend most carefully, because the Silent’s reports had a way of arriving in the body before the mind.

  “The 1% Door to the Source is glowing. Souls are leaving our paradise faster than before. They have seen the Multiverse. They have seen the War. And they are tired.”

  I absorbed that.

  “They are choosing the Nothing,” the Silent continued, “because your Heaven is becoming too busy. We are losing our best people to the Void.”

  The Arbiter stepped closer, his eyes behind the mask holding a soft and steady light.

  “The situation is this: We have outgrown our skin. You built this to save Earth. But you have saved so much more that Earth is now just a small room in your palace. The Five are ready to expand. We want to move the Ring away from Earth and into the Center of the Galaxy. To become a true Galactic Hub.”

  He looked at me.

  “But if we do, the humans on Earth will lose their Sun. They will be alone again.”

  I looked at the Five—at the colossal, shifting presence of beings I had carried for two centuries, who had carried me in turn, who had become so large and so competent that the word ‘servant’ had stopped applying somewhere around the second century and we’d all been too polite to discuss the reclassification.

  “Then we don’t move the Ring yet,” I said. “We investigate instead.”

  I walked to the center of the Nexus and the Five gathered around me, their vast presences leaning in with the attentiveness of planets orbiting a sun.

  “There is a Center to this universe. The Architect found it. The Lighthouse is drawing things from the direction of it. We don’t move the Ring blindly into a place we don’t understand.” I looked at the maps bleeding through the Architect’s form. “We send scouts. We learn what we’re dealing with. And then we decide.”

  The Architect’s eyes flared. Sapphire blue.

  “The ‘Center’ is not a place of matter, Prime. It is the Zero-Point. The origin of the first Spark. To go there is to travel back before the first bet was ever placed.”

  “Then we need someone who isn’t afraid of what came before the first bet.”

  I already knew who I was going to send.