Sunless Ezthamic's Arc

Chapter 8 of 8

The Engine was dead. Ezthamic stood over its folded husk, still burning in his Sunless Ascension form. His black-and-gold markings cooled. His eclipse eye dimmed to a low glow. But one question gnawed at him. Somewhere out there, a copy of himself still believed Ezthamic was dead. That copy was hunting him. And Ezthamic could not name it. Eight watched him, calm as always, the scarred old man with no number and no golden cracks. "You want to know which one woke up and ran," Eight said. He did not phrase it as a question. "The vault keeps a record. Each capsule carries a plate. Each plate holds a number." He turned toward the long rows of glass. "Find the empty one. That's your hunter." They walked the Dormant Vault together. Hundreds of capsules lined the walls, each lit from within. Inside each, a sleeping Ezthamic floated in still liquid. Same face. Same dreadlocks. Some had golden cracks. Some did not. The light shifted blue, red, green as they passed. Ezthamic read the plate on each capsule. The numbers climbed. None were empty. None were broken. Then they reached it. One capsule stood dark. Its glass hung open, drained dry. The seat inside was empty. Ezthamic bent to the plate bolted beneath it. Someone had torn claws across the metal. The number was gouged out, buried under deep gold-and-black scratches. He could not read it. He lifted the ruined plate and turned it in his hands. "He scratched out his own number," Ezthamic said. "So no one could track him." "So you couldn't," Eight corrected. "He escaped long ago. He thinks you died in the towers. The corpse marked seven. He read it the same way you did." Eight's voice stayed flat. "He's not hunting a rival. He's hunting a thing that shouldn't be breathing." Ezthamic stared at the empty seat. The answer he wanted was gone, cut from the metal by the hunter's own hand. He could search every capsule. It would not help. The one he needed had already walked out. He gripped the broken plate until the edges bit his palm. Then he understood. He had chased an original his whole life and found none. He had chased a name on this plate and found scratches. The truth did not live in numbers. It lived in what the Engine feared he would remember. Past Ezthamic had told him. The thing the machine died to protect was still inside him, waiting. Ezthamic closed his eclipse eye. He stopped listening to the hum of the capsules. He reached for the oldest part of himself, the memory under all the copies. It came slow, then all at once. A black sun. A face that was his own, unscarred, standing before the first machine. A choice made long ago, before any copy existed. He had asked the Engine to hide him. He had begged it to make him forget, so the destroyer inside the mask could never find the real one. The Engine obeyed. It made hundreds, so no hunter could ever know which face held the memory worth killing. His eyes opened. He knew now why the hunter searched. Not for a rival. The hunter carried the same buried fear, the same order to erase the one who remembered. They were both weapons, aimed at each other, built to make sure the truth stayed lost. "I don't need to find him," Ezthamic said. He dropped the broken plate. It clattered on the stone. "He'll come to me. He was built to. And when he does, I'll know what he can't." He looked at Eight. "The Engine made us forget so we'd keep killing each other. That's the secret. There was never an original to protect. Only a memory it wanted buried." Eight studied him a long moment. Then the old man nodded, and something eased in his scarred face. "Three hundred years," he said. "You finally stopped counting." Ezthamic turned and walked toward the vault door. He did not know when the hunter would find him. It no longer mattered. He carried the one thing the Engine had killed itself to hide, and no copy could take it from him now. Behind him, the hundreds slept on in their glowing glass. The machine that made them was dead. He stepped into the dark of the tunnel, no longer a copy searching for a self, but the only one awake who remembered. And far behind him, in the last row of capsules, one pair of eyes slid open in the drowning light, and watched the empty door where he had gone.