The Sending dissolved the moment it hit the Ring’s atmosphere.

  Its job was done. It unmade itself with the quiet efficiency of something that had never needed to exist longer than its purpose required. The Gold I had poured into it dissipated into the Ring’s general reserve—diluted, spent, a contribution to the collective warmth that twelve billion souls generated without knowing where it came from.

  The Joker’s skiff tumbled onto the landing pad.

  Smoking. Covered in Universal Ash—the residue of the Zero-Point’s attention, the specific grey coating that remained on things that had been close to the Nothing and come back. The skiff looked like something that had been very thoroughly considered by the universe and returned with reservations.

  The Joker climbed out.

  He stumbled. Caught himself. Stood.

  His eyes were not spinning.

  They were wide. Fixed. Humanly terrified in a way I had never seen from him—the Joker whose natural habitat was the edge of the possible, who had made a philosophy of being unimpressed by danger, who wore audacity the way other people wear comfortable shoes.

  He looked at me.

  I was pale. My hands were shaking with the specific tremor of extreme metabolic expenditure. Where the Gold had been, there was now a faint, silver Frost running through the channels of my veins—not gone, not dead, but changed. Like scar tissue. Like the mark of something spent and not fully replaced.

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  The Joker looked at the frost in my veins.

  He looked at the pale where the Gold had been.

  And the Joker bowed.

  Not a mock bow. Not the theatrical, exaggerated deference he deployed when he was joking about hierarchy. A deep, slow, genuine bow. The bow of someone who has just understood the full cost of something done for them, who is choosing to acknowledge it without diminishing it with words.

  He was quiet for a long time.

  “You came for the Canary,” he whispered.

  “The Canary would have come for me,” I said.

  He looked up. His eyes were still wide. Something in them—the fracture lines of someone who has been close to the Nothing and is still recalibrating the dimensions of the world.

  “Boss.” He reached into his coat. “I didn’t come back empty-handed.”

  In his fist, black and vibrating with a rhythm that matched the Golden Ring—its own heartbeat, its own geometry, distinct and ancient and impossible—was a Black Cube.

  Not large. The size of a child’s toy. The kind of thing you could put in a pocket.

  The kind of thing that felt, when it sat in the room, like the presence of everything that had ever existed before the first net was ever built.

  The Architect appeared at the edge of the landing pad. His geometric form had been flickering red since the moment the skiff hit the landing surface. He stared at the Cube. His equations went very still.

  “Prime,” he said. His voice was trembling. The Architect, whose voice had never trembled in the full duration of our acquaintance, whose entire mode of existence was the subordination of emotion to precision. Trembling. “This isn’t just matter.”

  He looked at me.

  “It’s the Original Script.”