Before the first ship launched, there was a conversation worth having.

  The Joker had used the word harvest in his initial briefing. Casually. The way someone uses a word they’ve been using for three hundred years without examining it. And the word landed in the Garden like a wrong note from an otherwise clean instrument.

  I felt the Diamond-White flare in my veins with a rebuke that was, I recognized, entirely mine.

  Elias raised his hand before I could speak. “He’s right. If we harvest them, we’re just the Iron Hegemony with a paint job.”

  I looked at the Five. Let them rebuild the doctrine from the ground up. Because the doctrine mattered. Not just strategically—the machine could run either way, cruelty or compassion both generated energy, we had proved that across a century of modification. The doctrine mattered because we were, all of us in that Garden, the product of what we chose to practice. And I had chosen, long ago, to stop practicing cruelty.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  What we were going to do, when we found a dying Net and a tyrant at its center, was this:

  The Architect would not dismantle the souls. He would dismantle the architecture around them. Bridge their reality to the Ring. Merge servers. No one loses their identity. Everyone gains stability.

  The Weaver would take their broken threads and weave them into the tapestry. A poet from a dead world becomes a poet in a living one. Their purpose continues—not resumed, but continued, as though the interruption had been weather rather than history.

  Sera would go after the jailers. Not the prisoners. She would fight the tyrants and give the freed their choice: follow the one who set you free, or find your own direction. That was how you built an army of the loyal rather than a collection of coerced.

  The Arbiter would ensure that every soul brought in through the Hunt received the full rights of the Ring. No second class. No fast-tracked forgiveness. The Choice, the Cradles, and the protection of the Prime.

  And the Joker—who had the good grace to look sheepish for about eleven seconds before his eyes started rolling dice again—would be the pitch man. The Ultimate Offer. We show up when their world is falling apart and we offer them a job in the Vanguard or a seat in the Garden.

  “Most of them will jump at the chance,” the Joker said. “We’re the only ones hiring in a dying multiverse.”

  He wasn’t wrong about that either.