Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

Chapter 71: Everywhere at Once

For about two weeks, I let myself believe we were going to win.

I want to be honest. I knew better, even then. Xue Ningzhi kept telling me it was too quiet up north. Lu had gone dark in a way she didn’t like. The old clerk in me knew that a man who just learned how slow your salvation is doesn’t give up easily. But I’m a person. People hope.

And what was happening in front of me those two weeks was the most hopeful thing I had ever seen. I drank it down like water. I’d been thirsty my whole life.

Because the cloth was spreading on its own.

That was the part none of us had fully understood until we watched it happen. We’d woven Reedmoor by hand—me, Bai Qing, and Tao Tao’s Rememberers, thread by clumsy thread. But we didn’t have to weave the next town. Reedmoor did. The poor overlooked fen-folk, who’d just learned that no one among them was too small to keep, walked down the river to Sedgewater, the next town over, and started teaching them. Because once you’ve felt what it is to be held, you cannot stand to watch the people downriver go un-held. The cloth replicated itself exactly the way the healing had in Saltmere—soul to soul. No center, no bottleneck. A thing that fed itself and grew.

We lit one town, and it quietly went to light three more. Those three would light nine, faster than the family could have reached a fraction of them.

And the skies began to fill.

I’ll never forget standing in the dark on the road between the fen-towns, watching new stars come up—night after night—over places that had never held a single one. Every star, an ordinary nobody finally woven in: a washerwoman, a ferryman, a reed-cutter. Each one a soul the dark could no longer find. A whole region of empty sky, slowly filling with the held.

DING.

Mass remembrance. Spreading. Skies filling across the fen-country.

New stars tonight: more than I can count for you, talent, and I have never once said that.

Reach: a hundred nobodies, holding a hundred more, holding a hundred more.

A thousand years I have watched this sky lose names. Lose them, and lose them, and lose them.

And tonight, I am watching it gain them faster than I can write them down.

I lost Su Yue because the world was too small and forgetful to hold one bright soul. Look at it now. Look how big it’s getting. Look how it learned to hold on.

I think—I think we might actually—

The Scroll didn’t finish that one either. I don’t think it dared.

The most beautiful thing, the thing that broke me a little even amid all that hope, was Old Wen.

The reed-cutter.

The woman no one in Reedmoor had spoken to in forty years. The most invisible soul I’d ever met. Saved by a breath when her whole town finally learned her name. She didn’t stay home and rest in her newfound place. She picked up and walked downriver to Sedgewater with the other weavers. The most overlooked woman in the world became the one who went looking for other overlooked people—the ones at the edges, the ones nobody saw—because she of all people knew exactly where to find them and exactly what it cost to be them.

I watched Old Wen sit down beside a half-blind old man in Sedgewater that everyone walked past. She took his hands and said, "Tell me your name. Tell me one true thing. You are not too small to keep." The same words that had saved her.

I had to walk away so no one would see my face.

"That’s how it wins," Bai Qing said quietly, beside me, watching Wen work. "Not us. Them. The saved doing the saving."

For the first time since I’d known her, the gate-keeper of the overlooked looked something like at peace.

"If it just keeps spreading like this, Lin Bo—if it gets ahead of him—there won’t be a thin thread left in the world for the dark to pull."

"How long?" I asked. "To weave the whole world."

"Years," she admitted. "But it’s accelerating. Every town we light lights more. The curve bends up." She almost smiled. "We might make it."

And here is the thing I did, those two weeks, that I’m almost too embarrassed to write down. I let myself dream. I’d lie awake on the road under all those new stars and imagine it finished—a whole world woven, every overlooked nobody in it held so tight the dark could never find a thread again. A planet full of people who knew each other’s names, bad jokes, and the way they took their tea.

The exact thing I’d wanted my whole sorry life—back when it was just a noodle shop and a quiet street—to be known, to be held, to be un-loseable to the people around me. Except, handed out to everyone. The whole grasping, suffering, wonderful world finally learning to do for each other the one thing that beats the silence. A small loud life, the size of a planet.

I lay under the stars and let myself want it—all the way down, for the first time.

I let myself believe her. For two weeks, under skies filling with stars, I let myself believe we were going to outrun the dark.

That was the mistake. Because Lu had not gone quiet up north because he’d given up. He’d gone quiet because he was counting—counting the thin places left in the world. Watching the cloth spread, doing the same arithmetic Bai Qing was doing, and arriving at the same answer: if he waited, he would lose.

That every night that passed, the world grew a little harder to unwrite. That the curve was bending up, and there was a point coming—not far off—past which the dark could never win again.

So he decided not to wait.

It came at moonrise, and it did not come to one town.

Xue Ningzhi felt it first—went rigid in the middle of a sentence, her face draining grey. Then I felt it too. Then all of us did. Because you could not be a living soul on that whole continent and not feel it.

The cold attention that had followed me up the ladder, that had spread from me to everyone I loved—it didn’t reach for one thread anymore. It reached for all of them. At once. Everywhere.

A silence fell across the world like a single held breath. Not here, not Reedmoor—not the woven places—but everywhere else. Everywhere the cloth hadn’t reached yet. Every one of the thousand thin towns full of unheld nobodies that we hadn’t gotten to in time.

The dark stopped picking threads one at a time and simply closed its hand around the entire unwoven world all at once. A blanking so vast and so sudden that I felt a hundred places I’d never even been go dark in the same instant. Like a hundred candles snuffed by one enormous breath.

The reports started coming before the moon had cleared the trees. A village to the east, gone quiet. A fishing coast to the south, its whole harbor blanked between one wave and the next. A valley, a market town, a mountain hold—dark, dark, dark. Faster than any rider could carry the news. Faster than thought. The silence rolling out across everything we hadn’t finished.

It just kept coming. That was the thing my mind couldn’t wrap around. It wasn’t an attack with an edge to it. A front you could ride toward and meet. It was a tide, falling everywhere the cloth wasn’t. Every breath brought word of another place gone under.

Ji Lan was shouting names of towns at me off the threads of the movement, her storyteller’s voice gone ragged. Each name a place full of people. Each name a place already too late. Xue Ningzhi stood grey and rigid, doing the arithmetic out loud in a flat dead voice—he’s hitting every unwoven settlement on the continent at once—all of it, he’s spending the Editor’s whole strength in one night because he knows if he doesn’t, he loses.

The numbers she was saying were not numbers a person can feel. So I stopped being able to feel them and just stood there going cold.

And I stood in the road, the strongest man alive. Reality bending politely around me. I understood, with a horror I will carry to the end of my life, that I was one man.

And there were a thousand fires.

I could not reach even two of them at once.

The trap. The exact trap, sprung at last. Be the brightest light, and the dark only has to come for more darkness than your one light can hold.

"Which one?" Tao Tao was saying, her voice cracking. Gripping my arm hard enough to hurt. "Lin Bo. Lin Bo. Where do we go? There’s too many—we can’t—which one do we save?"

And I had no answer.

Because there was no answer.

Every place I chose to ride toward was a hundred places I was choosing to let go dark. I stood frozen in that road with my fierce junior’s hands shaking on my arm. For one endless moment, the strongest man alive could not make his legs move in any direction at all.

Because there was no direction that wasn’t also an abandonment.