Lin's shove sent him stumbling backward—not toward safety, but toward the precipice where concrete met nothingness. The pen's arc sliced through the air where his neck had been, its nib glistening with liquid that smelled like white-out and burnt copper. He caught the railing with one hand, his shoes skidding on frost that hadn't been there three seconds ago.
"Jump before they correct you," Lin screamed again, but her voice fractured into three overlapping frequencies—the present command, an echo from a deleted scene, and something worse: the flat narration of an omniscient narrator describing her actions in past tense.
The proofreaders advanced in perfect unison, their zippered mouths now forming different words:
**AMEND.**
**REVISE.**
**ERASE.**
Zhang stood frozen near the roof access door, his body flickering between solidity and pencil-sketch outlines like a character mid-redraw. One proofreader turned its mask toward him, the zipper teeth parting to reveal an abyss where a tongue should be. Zhang's scream came out as typed text, bold Courier New letters hanging in the air: *WHAT ARE THEY—*
Lin didn't let him finish. She yanked a Zippo from her pocket—*his* Zippo, the one he'd lost seventeen minutes ago in a timeline that no longer existed—and flicked it open. The flame burned blue. "The ledger," she hissed, thrusting the fire toward him. "Burn the fucking ledger!"
He understood. The brokerage statements in his pocket were more than numbers—they were *anchors*, the only things tethering their current iteration to existence. As the nearest proofreader raised its pen like a guillotine blade, he grabbed the sheaf of papers and held them to the flame.
The fire spread faster than physics allowed, consuming six months of fabricated transactions in heartbeat. The proofreaders shuddered as one, their gray suits pixelating at the edges. The rooftop groaned like a spine under too much weight.
Lin seized his arm. "Now jump!"
They fell backward over the railing just as the pen struck where they'd stood—not cutting, but *editing*, the concrete rewriting itself into a smooth plane where no ledge had ever existed. Wind tore at their clothes as they plummeted three stories toward certain death.
Then the universe stuttered.
His stomach lurched as gravity inverted mid-fall. They weren't descending toward pavement but *sideways* through layers of discarded drafts, past scenes that flickered like corrupted film: Zhang holding a gun that hadn't appeared in the published version, Lin weeping over a body that wasn't supposed to die, the heiress laughing at a joke that never made final edits.
They landed hard on a surface that wasn't ground but *page*—actual paper, thick and yellowed, their impact leaving crumple marks in the sheet. Lin rolled first, coming up kneeling on a paragraph that described her own movements. He stared at his hands, now rendered in stark black ink.
Above them, the proofreaders leaned over the edge of the physical book, their masks dissolving into the scribbled margins. One lifted its pen—
Lin slapped her palm against the paper. "Rewrite the anchor point," she gasped, pointing at a glowing line of text: *The transfer receipt fluttered to the floor.*
He didn't hesitate. Grabbing a discarded pencil from the margin, he scribbled over the sentence until it read: *The burning receipt seared through the floor.*
The page ignited beneath them. As flames consumed the paper world, the last thing he saw was Lin's grin—not relieved, but *ravenous*—before they fell through the ashes into somewhere even the novel had never dared to describe.