The devil offers what you need most when you're weakest.
Professor Zhao doesn't remember him.
Swan stands outside the Advanced Systems Architecture classroom, watching through the door's narrow window as his favorite teacher—the one who saw potential in him when others saw only scholarship statistics, who stayed late to explain concepts he struggled with, who wrote the recommendation letter that kept him enrolled through sophomore year—organizes lecture notes with the mechanical precision of someone who's done this a thousand times.
Swan's hands shake as he pushes open the door. "Professor Zhao? I wanted to thank you for—"
The older man looks up, and there's nothing in his expression. No recognition. No warmth. Just the polite confusion of someone being addressed by a stranger.
"I'm sorry," Professor Zhao says, his accent thickening slightly the way it does when he's uncomfortable. "Do I know you? Are you enrolled in one of my sections?"
"I—" Swan's voice catches. "I was. Last year. You helped me understand recursive algorithms. You said I had an intuitive grasp of system architecture."
Professor Zhao's frown deepens. He checks his tablet, scrolling through rosters. "What's your name?"
"Swan. My name is Swan."
"I don't have any record of a student by that name." The professor's tone shifts from confusion to concern. "Are you feeling alright? The Daemon incidents have been causing stress reactions in many students. Perhaps you should visit the campus health center."
Swan backs out of the classroom before he can watch the last fragments of recognition fail to materialize. Before he has to endure more polite suggestions that he's confused, mistaken, suffering from false memories.
He makes it to the nearest bathroom before the cost fully hits.
The fluorescent lights flicker overhead as Swan grips the sink, staring at his reflection in the scratched mirror. His face stutters in and out of focus—present one moment, absent the next, like the mirror can't decide if he's worth reflecting. His hands look translucent around the edges, reality losing its conviction about his solidity.
Another intervention. Another price paid. Yesterday he stopped a Daemon manifestation in the Library Complex, saved thirty-seven students, and the cost was Professor Zhao's memory of him. A year of mentorship, of connection, of mattering to someone who didn't have to care—erased. Overwritten. Debugged out of history.
The terrible arithmetic continues. Every life saved equals one relationship deleted. Every act of heroism equals one more person who forgets he exists.
Swan doesn't hear her approach. Doesn't sense the shift in the bathroom's atmosphere. Just suddenly becomes aware of perfume—that impossible digital scent like vanilla and ozone and compressed data—and knows before he turns around that Lilith is there.
She leans against the bathroom stall dividers like she materialized from concept into form, wearing business casual that somehow reads as evening wear, her dark hair falling in perfect waves, her eyes calculating with predatory interest.
"You're hurting yourself," she says without preamble. "Burning through relationships like fuel. At this rate, you'll erase yourself completely within two weeks."
"Get out." Swan's voice is raw. "I'm not interested in your offers."
"No?" Lilith tilts her head, and something in the gesture is too precise, too deliberately calibrated. "You just lost your favorite teacher. Someone who mattered to you. Someone who saw value in you when the system tried to convince you that you had none. And now he looks at you like you're a stranger experiencing a mental health crisis."
Each word lands like a carefully placed knife. Swan grips the sink harder, his knuckles going white.
"That's the cost you've been paying," Lilith continues, moving closer. "Unoptimized erasure. Brute-force reality manipulation with no finesse, no control. You save lives by throwing pieces of yourself at the problem until something sticks. It's noble. Wasteful. Completely unnecessary."
"I don't need your help."
"You desperately need my help." Lilith is beside him now, close enough that he can feel the electric charge of her presence. "But you're too proud to ask. Too afraid of the price. So you'll keep sacrificing yourself in increasingly larger chunks until there's nothing left but a ghost with powers and no memory of why it's fighting."
Swan meets her eyes in the mirror. "What do you want?"
"To teach you." Simple. Direct. "One lesson. No obligations. No contracts. Just a demonstration of what you could do if you understood how to minimize the cost. If you knew how to focus your intent precisely enough that you pay in pennies instead of pounds."
"And what's the price for this lesson?"
"Nothing." Lilith's smile is subtle, controlled. "Consider it a free sample. A taste of what mastery looks like. Whether you come back for more—that's your choice."
Swan should refuse. Should walk away. Should remember every warning Elara gave him about Lilith's offers and invisible chains.
But Professor Zhao's blank expression is still fresh in his mind. The empty space where recognition used to be. The casual suggestion that Swan might be suffering delusions.
"One lesson," he says quietly. "Then you leave me alone."
"Of course." Lilith's hand finds his shoulder—that same electric touch from the Virtual Garden, cold and present and undeniable. "Come. Not here. The substrate is too stable in public spaces. We need somewhere reality is already flexible."
She leads him to a place that shouldn't exist—a maintenance room nested between the third and fourth floors of the Engineering Complex, accessible only by code manipulation and deliberate belief. Inside, the walls flicker between states, simultaneously solid and theoretical. The air tastes like possibility.
"This space exists because enough glitched individuals have used it that consensus reality can't quite delete it," Lilith explains. "Perfect for practice. Anything that breaks here won't cascade into the wider substrate."
She positions herself behind him, close enough that he feels her breath on his neck, her hands resting lightly on his shoulders.
"Close your eyes," she says. "Activate your code-sight."
Swan hesitates, then complies. The world peels back into its substrate layer—walls becoming density maps, air becoming probability fields, reality exposing its underlying architecture.
"Good," Lilith murmurs. Her hands slide down his arms, guiding them into position like a instructor teaching proper stance. "Now. When you manipulate reality, you're currently grabbing everything connected to your target. Every observation thread, every memory trace, every causality link. It's like trying to edit one line of code by rewriting the entire program."
Her fingers intertwine with his, and Swan feels her presence in code-space—vast, geometric, impossibly complex. She's not human, he realizes again. Or hasn't been human for so long that the distinction is academic.
"Instead," Lilith continues, her voice soft and precise, "you isolate. You find the specific thread that needs changing and you touch only that. Surgical precision. Minimal collateral damage."
She guides his perception toward a simple object—a wrench someone left on a shelf. In code-space, it's wrapped in observation threads: the room acknowledges its presence, physics tracks its mass, time notes its position in causality.
"Change its color," Lilith instructs. "From steel-gray to red. But touch only the visual perception thread. Nothing else."
Swan reaches out with his code-manipulation, trying to isolate the specific thread. But they're all interconnected, woven together, impossible to separate without—
Lilith's hands tighten on his. "Feel through me," she whispers. "I'll show you the pathway."
Her consciousness merges with his—not invasively, but like a teacher guiding a student's hand through complex calligraphy. Swan feels her isolate the visual thread with surgical precision, feels her make the change with minimal reality disruption, feels the wrench shift from gray to red without triggering cascading edits.
No memory cost. No relationship erasure. Just a simple, clean manipulation.
"That's..." Swan's voice catches. "That's what I've been missing. The precision. The focus."
"Intent matters," Lilith says. Her breath is warm against his ear, her perfume filling code-space with impossible scents. "You've been wielding your power like a cudgel when it could be a scalpel. Every time you save someone, you're grabbing all the threads and yanking. Of course reality fights back. Of course it makes you pay in blood and memory."
She guides his hands through the motion again. Isolate. Focus. Edit. The wrench changes back to gray with the same clean precision.
"Try it yourself," Lilith says. "Touch only what needs touching."
Swan attempts the manipulation solo. It's harder without her guidance—the threads want to tangle, want to interconnect, want to drag everything into the edit. But he remembers the pathway she showed him, the surgical precision, and manages to change the wrench to blue.
A headache forms—payment for manipulation—but it's minor. Manageable. Nothing like the skull-splitting agony that usually follows reality-hacking.
"Excellent," Lilith purrs. "You're a natural. With proper training, you could rewrite reality without anyone noticing. Without paying any cost at all."
"There's always a cost." Swan opens his eyes, breaking code-sight. But Lilith's hands remain on his arms, her presence still electric against his back.
"Yes," she agrees. "But the cost can be negotiated. Distributed. Offloaded onto things that don't matter instead of things that do. Why pay with relationships when you could pay with... I don't know. The color of leaves you'll never notice. The temperature of rooms you'll never enter. The dreams of people you'll never meet."
It sounds reasonable. Logical. Seductive in its efficiency.
It also sounds like exactly the kind of rationalization that leads to becoming something that stopped being human a long time ago.
"Thank you for the lesson," Swan says, stepping away from her touch. The distance feels significant, necessary. "But I'm not interested in going further."
"Not yet," Lilith corrects softly. "But you will be. When Elara dies. When the Institute deploys serious countermeasures. When the Daemon incursions escalate beyond what you can handle with your current limitations. You'll come back. They always do."
She's gone before Swan can respond. Not walking away. Just ceasing to be present, like reality edited her out at her own request.
Swan stands alone in the impossible room, his hands still tingling from her touch, his mind racing with the implications of what he just learned. Precision. Surgical manipulation. Minimal cost.
It could work. Could let him save more people without erasing himself so quickly. Could give him time to figure out what's happening, why the erasures started, how to stop them.
But it would mean accepting Lilith's framework. Her methods. Her philosophy that some costs are acceptable as long as you're not the one paying them.
The door crashes open.
Elara stands in the doorway, her notebook clutched to her chest like armor, her eyes flickering with the worst contradiction patterns Swan has ever seen. Blood streams from both nostrils. Her hands shake with barely contained rage and fear.
"She was here," Elara says. Not a question. "I can smell her. That digital perfume. That—" She steps into the room, her gaze sweeping the space, finding evidence in details Swan can't perceive. "She touched you. Taught you. Showed you things."
"One lesson," Swan says. "No obligations. She—"
"She's not teaching you," Elara interrupts, her voice breaking. "She's preparing you. Getting you comfortable with her methods. Making you dependent on her precision. So that when the moment comes—when you're desperate enough, scared enough, out of options enough—you'll accept the real price without questioning it."
"You don't know that."
"I know her." Elara's eyes are red-rimmed, whether from blood or tears Swan can't tell. "I've studied every Recoded individual who took her offers. Every single one either disappeared completely or became something that looks human but isn't anymore. She doesn't save people, Swan. She collects them. Turns them into tools. Into assets. Into things that exist only to serve whatever agenda she's pursuing."
"I'm being careful—"
"You're being seduced." Elara's voice drops to a whisper. "And I don't mean sexually. I mean existentially. She's showing you a version of power that doesn't require sacrifice. That doesn't hurt. That lets you be the hero without paying the hero's price. And it's a lie, Swan. The cost doesn't disappear. It just gets transferred to people you'll never see suffering."
She crosses the distance between them, grabs his hands, forces him to feel her trembling.
"I'm dying," she says flatly. "The Anchor effect is killing me. I have weeks, maybe. And I'm spending them trying to keep you anchored because I believe you matter. Because I think you're worth saving. But if you go to her—if you accept her methods—then what am I dying for? A ghost who traded humanity for efficiency?"
Swan can't meet her eyes. Can't face the accusation that's also love, the anger that's also desperation.
"I just want to save people without forgetting everyone I've ever known," he says quietly.
"Then we find another way." Elara's grip tightens. "Ash and Cipher are researching alternative methods. There are rumors of other Recoded communities. Other approaches to managing the cost. We'll figure it out together. But please, Swan. Please don't go back to her. Don't let her teach you to stop caring about what you're paying with."
The room feels too small suddenly. Too hot. Swan can still smell Lilith's perfume clinging to the code-space, can still feel the ghost of her electric touch on his arms.
"I need time," he says. "To think. To process."
"Take it." Elara releases his hands but stays close. "Just... take it away from here. Away from anywhere she might find you when you're vulnerable."
They leave together, Elara's hand finding his for stability. Behind them, the impossible room flickers. On the shelf, the wrench rests—currently blue, though no one can remember if it was always that color or if something changed recently.
And in code-space, imperceptible to everyone except those who know to look, Lilith's perfume lingers like a promise.
Like a warning.
Like a calling card that says: I'll be waiting. They always come back.
[END OF CHAPTER]