We returned to the Garden.

  Jasmine. Stone. The perpetual warm setting-sun of the Ring’s inner sanctum. Elias’s hands on my arm as I walked—steady, unobtrusive, the particular quality of presence that says I’m here without saying I noticed you need help.

  Sera was waiting. She had been tracking the entire operation through the Link and had been calculating, I suspected, the specific intervention she would make if the Sending failed and I went down. She looked at the frost in my veins and the faint tremor in my hands and decided something, very quietly, that she didn’t say aloud.

  The Architect placed the Black Cube on the low stone table between the benches.

  We stood around it.

  The five of us. Board members in the original sense—not the formal sense, not the title, but the essential one: people who had been carrying this thing together long enough that the carrying had become its own kind of infrastructure.

  The Cube vibrated.

  Its rhythm matched the Ring. Not coincidentally. Not by proximity. Exactly—the same frequency, the same periodicity, the same specific signature that my heartbeat had generated for two centuries and that the Ring had learned to breathe to. As if the Cube had always known where I was. As if it had been waiting, at the Zero-Point, for the specific quality of my Gold to arrive and acknowledge it.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “The Original Script,” the Architect said again. Quieter now. He was using his careful voice—the voice he used when the precision was the only thing holding the vertigo back. “The rules of the game before the first Net was ever built. Before the first Sufferer ever placed the first bet.” He looked at me across the table. “We can use this to rewrite the ‘Unless.’ Or we can use it to see Who dealt the cards.”

  The Joker, sitting on the bench with the ash of the Zero-Point still on his coat and the wide, reintegrating expression of someone rebuilding their awareness of the world from the inside out, looked at the Cube with the eyes of a gambler appraising a hand he’s never seen before.

  “Rewrite the Unless forever,” he said slowly. “True Retirement. The architect gets what he’s always wanted—a perfect reality that doesn’t need us to keep it running.”

  He paused.

  “Or. We open it. We see the face of the Original Dealer.” Another pause. “The Ultimate Truth.”

  He looked at me.

  “Or we bury it in the Garden. Because some bets are too big even for us.”

  The jasmine moved. The Ring hummed overhead. Twenty-five billion souls going about the business of their continued existence, entirely unaware that three feet away from me was a piece of the beginning of everything.

  I looked at the Cube.

  I thought about the twenty-seven-year-old in the basement who had looked at a one percent chance and said deal.

  The man who had held the weight of fifteen billion souls for ten years and called it purpose.

  The Sufferer who had built a Heaven out of the material of what he had survived.

  I was still him.

  I would always be him.

  And he was not someone who left the ultimate card unturned.

  “Give me the Cube,” I said.