The white web drew Styx and me in at the same time.
I expected darkness, lines from the System or Kane's voice. Instead, I felt cold stone beneath my palms. A siren wailed overhead, and beyond the city wall a herd was on the move.
Skyfall City was barely half its present size. There were no academy towers, northern slums or Guild square. Beyond the new gates stood wooden houses pressed close together, while people with no family insignia worked atop the wall.
I was looking up at them.
My hands had become a child's.
"Mum!" someone else's voice screamed through my throat.
A woman in a grey uniform stood at the outer gates. Beside her, a war bear growled. Protective sigils burned in the beast's fur, but it was backing away from the fire creeping through the dry grass.
The beast tamer pulled on the bond, forcing the bear to go beyond the wall and hold back the herd. The beast braced its paws against the stone. Each command sent pain through its body and through my childish temples.
I was looking through the eyes of ten-year-old Kane.
He stood by the steps and watched his mother try to lower the gates by hand. She needed several seconds. The bear could have bought them, but instead of going out, it turned and ran into the city.
The herd followed it in.
People were crushed by the steps. Roofs caught fire. Kane's mother vanished beneath a falling beam, and the boy kept calling for her until his lungs filled with smoke.
I tried to leave the memory. The stone beneath my fingers would not let me go.
The adult Kane stood beside me, clean and calm amid the fire.
"I did not invent the price of disobedience, Rex. I remembered it."
The child's terror remained inside me. It was harder to argue with than the patriarch in the square. The boy really had seen a frightened beast open the way for death.
"You could have ordered the bear out," Kane said. "One command, one loss, and hundreds of people would have survived the night."
The memory obediently changed. The bear stopped resisting, went out through the gates and took the first blow. The mechanism closed in time. Kane's mother climbed down from the wall and embraced her son.
The Crown held both versions side by side.
In one, the beast died.
In the other, the people did.
"Choose," Kane said.
Styx was somewhere close, but I could not see her. The smell of singed fur came through the bond, followed by a sharp metallic taste.
Not blood. A seal.
I looked at the bear again. A fine white line shimmered beneath the protective sigils. It did not run from the beast tamer, but down into the ground beneath the gates.
The beast had not simply panicked. Someone outside was already pulling it into the city.
I tried to show the line to the boy. The Crown struck me with pain, and the memory returned to the convenient version: the bear running, his mother dying, freedom becoming catastrophe.
Styx found the white thread and bit it.
For an instant I saw something else: the beast tamer shouting not "Forward" but "Stop"; the bear breaking its claws against the stone as it fought someone else's command; a man with the seal of the early Guild standing at the base of the wall.
Kane saw it too.
His face changed.
"That did not happen."
He said it too quickly.
The Crown had not created a false memory from nothing. For decades it had shown Kane the same fragment over and over, cutting out the detail that did not support his conclusion. He had built his life around a wound someone else had exploited before he ever did.
Styx appeared on my shoulder. Her wings trembled with white fire.
"Someone else's," she said.
Kane stepped towards the bear and covered the line with his palm.
"Even if the command came from outside, it was the lack of control that opened the gates."
He did not abandon his conviction. He simply rebuilt it faster than I had expected.
The wall caught fire again. This time the faces of people from the present-day city appeared in the flames: the girl with the weak heart, the dyehouse workers, the academy students. Kane forced me to watch them die after the bonds were broken.
"You demanded their consent," he said. "But even those whom nobody asked will pay for the consequences."
I had no ready answer.
The white web heard my doubt and pulled us deeper.
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