Skill: Archivist

The overhead lights died all at once, and in the dark that followed a window the colour of a bruise unfolded in front of every face in the room.

Zara Haddad had been re-shelving a returns cart when it happened, the brass date-stamp still warm in her hand from the last patron she had checked out. One second the third-floor reading room of the Toronto Reference Library was its usual hush of laptop glow and turning pages. The next, every lamp went black, and the only light came from the panels hanging in the air. One per person. Purple-grey, soft at the edges, like a fresh bruise pressed under skin.

Nobody screamed. That was the wrong part. Forty people sat frozen with the light on their faces, and not one of them made a sound.

"Okay," Zara said, mostly to herself, because somebody in this building had to say something. "Okay. Stay calm. Everybody, eyes on me."

They did not look at her. They could not. She watched a teenage boy reach for his phone and stop with his hand halfway, locked, like a video paused. The panels held them. Whatever the panels were, they had reached into every person in the room and pressed a finger to the pause button.

Every person except her.

She did not understand that yet. She only knew her feet still worked, so she used them, stepping out from behind the returns desk toward the nearest table, toward the boy with the frozen hand.

His window flickered.

For half a second, less, the soft purple panel in front of him stuttered, and Zara saw what was behind it. Not words. Not a class. Raw text scrolling too fast to read, dense columns of symbols and numbers stacked like a ledger, and across the top of it a single header stamped in hard white capitals.

INDEXING.

Then it was gone, snapped back to bruise-purple calm, and her head split with a bright spike of pain behind the eyes. She tasted copper. She pressed the back of her hand to her nose and it came away red.

"That," she said thinly, "was not for me."

She did not know how she knew. She only knew, the way you know you have touched a stove, that she had just read something she was never meant to see, and that it had cost her.

The panels resolved.

The frozen room exhaled. Text bloomed across every window, clean and legible now, and a voice that was not a voice spoke inside Zara's skull in a tone of perfect, clipped politeness.

[INTEGRATION COMPLETE] Welcome to the System. Your world has been assessed and admitted. Every individual has been assigned a Class and a Level. You begin at Level 1. The System wishes you the best of luck. The System does not mean it.

The boy with the unfrozen hand read his window and laughed, a high wild sound. "Striker," he said. "I'm a Striker. There's a sword. Look, there's a *sword*."

Across the room a woman stood, and a spear of pale light formed in her grip. A man near the periodicals flexed his fingers and frost crawled up the table in front of him. Class assignments. Weapons. Forty people, and the System was handing out swords and spears and frost like party favours, Level 1 every one.

Zara looked for her own window.

It was waiting at the edge of her vision, patient, and she had just enough time to register that the word on it was not a weapon when the third-floor glass came apart.

Something hit the tall windows from outside, twelve metres up, and the whole wall of them burst inward in a glittering sheet. A claw came through first. Long, grey, wrong, and burning faintly along its edge with the same hard white letters she had seen behind the boy's panel.

INDEXING.

It dragged the rest of itself in after, and something heavy landed in the stacks and started dragging itself toward the noise.

The noise was them. The screaming had finally started, and the thing in the stacks loved it.

Zara dropped behind the returns desk and put her back against the solid oak of it, and for one full second she let herself shake. Then she stopped, because shaking was not a plan.

She read her window. She had to. Whatever was coming, she needed to know what she had been handed to fight it with.

[CLASS ASSIGNED] Archivist. Tier 1. Catalogue what you witness. Loan what you keep. The System notes this class has been issued once before. Good luck.

[ARCHIVIST] Catalogue: 7 slots at Level 1. Resource: Insight. You may store any skill you personally witness and lend it to another. You cannot wield it yourself.

She read it twice. The words did not change.

No sword. No spear. No frost. No armour, no attack, nothing in the entire panel that would put a single scratch on the thing tearing the periodicals apart eight metres away. Forty people in this room had been issued weapons, and Zara Haddad, who had spent nine years teaching strangers how to find what they were looking for, had been issued a library card.

"Everyone got a weapon," she whispered. "I got a way to copy and lend."

A spawn the size of a dog rounded the catalogue island, INDEXING burning across its hide.

She froze. It had not seen her. Its head, if the lump at the front was a head, swung toward the screaming end of the room, toward the Striker boy swinging his sword of light in panicked arcs. It went for the noise. It went for him.

Zara made herself small behind the desk and held the brass date-stamp against her chest like it could do anything, and that was when a hand closed on her sleeve.

She nearly screamed and bit it back. A man had crawled in behind the desk before she had. He was older, grey at the temples, and there was too much blood under him for any of it to end well. One of the spawn had already found him. His class window hung over him, flickering, fading at the edges the way the light goes out of a thing.

"You," he breathed. His eyes found hers and held on with the last of whatever he had. "Archivist. I saw it. Your window."

"Don't talk. Save it." She had no Mender skill, no first aid, nothing. She had a stamp and a card. She pressed her hand uselessly over the worst of the red and felt how warm it was.

His grip tightened, urgent, pulling her down to him. "Listen to me. It is not a game. It is a *catalogue*. They are filing us." A wet breath. "There was one before you. The one who said yes. Find out what he gave them. Find out what he gave them, or it ends the same for all of us."

"Who? Who said yes? Said yes to what?"

But his hand was already loosening.

Zara grabbed the date-stamp off the desk above her and shoved it into her coat pocket, because it was the only thing in reach that was hers, and because a librarian does not leave the desk without the stamp, and because if she did not hold on to one small ordinary true thing she was going to come apart.

The stranger's grip loosened, and the words the one who said yes hung in the smoke as Zara ran for the stairwell. Behind her, something heavy struck the stairwell door and the steel rang out down the shaft.