Derrick's right hand knocked first.
It remained attached to his body. It had no will.
The fingers bent on their own and made a fist.
The judgment on the third door lit.
`This hand killed the adjudicator.`
Derrick seized his right wrist with his left. It did not stop. The hand dragged its owner to the center of the chamber.
An execution sword rose from the floor—the sword from the first execution ground, which Cassian, wearing Derrick's body, had driven into the adjudicator's neck.
The right hand gripped it.
The adjudicator's body grew from the wall, its neck still unmarked.
"Kill him again," the door said.
Derrick's arm rose. Ines drew her sword.
"Will cutting it work?"
"Cut what?" Cassian asked.
"The hand."
"Is it your father's?"
"Yes."
"The room disagrees."
Red letters surfaced on the wrist.
`Collateral.`
Two names alternated beneath it.
Derrick Morn.
Cassian Crow.
As one darkened, the other faded. The door wanted only one person. It meant to attach sin and hand alike to a single name.
"Convenient," Viola said.
Blood ran from the neck bearing seventeen names. She held a contract before Derrick.
"I'll give back your innocence."
The hand stopped, its point an inch from the adjudicator's neck.
"The price?" Derrick asked.
"Become my executioner."
"For how long?"
"As long as your hand remains yours." Viola smiled. "For life."
The contract already contained its judgment.
`Derrick Morn is innocent of the adjudicator's murder.`
`All past sins of the right hand return to Cassian Crow.`
`All future executions of the right hand belong to Viola Wren.`
The past to Cassian. The future to Viola. Derrick received only the empty word innocence.
"A good bargain," Viola said. "Your daughter need not see her father as a criminal either."
Ines pointed her sword at the contract.
"Stay still," Derrick said.
"Father."
"My hand."
He said it for the second time. This time, the right hand did not listen.
It stabbed the adjudicator's neck.
The entire wall became the first execution ground: the snowy square, Cassian's severed head, Derrick's stolen body.
His daughter was watching. Young Ines stood in the crowd.
"My daughter is watching," Derrick said in the memory.
"Let her," the Cassian in the memory replied.
The present Ines heard it. Her sword hand shook.
Cassian did not apologize.
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"Sign," he told Derrick.
He pointed not to Viola's contract but to the guilty ledger beneath the door.
`A crime committed by a body belongs to the body's owner.`
"The fastest way requires your name."
"You want me to say I killed the adjudicator?"
"Your body did."
"You used it."
"Yes. My sin remained too."
"You left more in my body."
"Yes."
Cassian denied nothing. Derrick hated that more than forgiveness.
"A child selling innocence and a bastard shifting guilt. You both want my hand."
"I want the door, not your hand," Cassian said.
"That is why your offer is cheaper."
The hand released the sword. Before anyone could feel relief, the wrist bent backward. A bone pierced the skin.
Using that bone as an axis, the hand crawled out of Derrick's arm, flesh and tendons serving as five legs.
It ran on its fingers—not toward the adjudicator, but Ines.
After the adjudicator, she was the witness who had watched Derrick's face longest at the execution ground. Killing the daughter would reduce the past to one sentence.
`Derrick killed him.`
Erase the witness, and only that remained.
Ines struck. The hand caught the back of her blade and twisted her wrist the way her father had taught it.
Her sword fell. Five fingers closed around her neck.
"Do not cut!" Derrick shouted.
No one knew whether he meant his hand or his daughter.
Cassian drove his scabbard between the fingers. He used no edge, breaking them away one by one.
"Did you save me?" Ines asked when she could breathe.
"I preserved a witness."
"Of course."
"Disappointed?"
"Relieved. I have not lost a single reason to kill you."
The hand climbed Cassian's scabbard and caught his wrist. At skin contact, the name on its back changed.
`Cassian Crow.`
It tried to join his arm. Severed tendons stretched from Derrick like thread and wound around Cassian's bones.
"Return to your original owner," Derrick said.
"Which one?" Viola asked.
The hand answered by seizing Cassian's neck. It searched for the succession seam beneath his crown.
Cassian did not pull it away. He pressed it deeper into his neck until fingers lodged in the wound.
"What are you doing?" Adel asked.
"Letting it choose."
"That is not a person who can choose."
"Which is why I want to see whom it attaches to."
The name trembled between Cassian and Derrick. It could not choose.
The door groaned in pain. The room demanded one owner. The hand itself had been split between two.
Derrick extended his severed wrist.
"Come back."
It was neither command nor plea. It was recognition of his own property.
The hand released Cassian, crawled across the floor, and rejoined Derrick. Tendons found one another and tangled.
"May I treat you now?" Adel asked.
Derrick watched three fingers that still refused his will.
"Not yet. I testify first."
* * *
Derrick's right hand stabbed the adjudicator for a third time.
Each thrust made the memory more exact: the angle of the blade, the broken ribs, the last sight of Derrick's face.
The world remembered a tool better than its user.
Derrick rolled up his right sleeve. An executioner's license tattoo marked his inner arm: a royal axe and seven-digit number.
The law called the hand Derrick's because of that tattoo.
His palm bore the torn burn scar left by the Debt Vault door. The vault held his hand as collateral because of that scar.
The license bound his body to the state. The scar bound it to debt.
"Sword," Derrick told Ines.
She did not move.
"What will you do?"
"I decide."
"I know. What will you cut?"
"The part the state insists makes it my hand."
"Cutting it destroys my evidence too."
Ines was preparing a complete execution of Cassian. The adjudicator's murder left in Derrick's body was crucial evidence. Remove tattoo and scar, and one line of her post-succession reconstruction collapsed.
"I know," Derrick said. "Give it to me anyway."
She did not hesitate long. She turned the hilt toward her father.
"Want me to hold it?"
"No."
"Treatment?" Adel asked.
"Ask me after I cut."
"Then I will wait."
Derrick took the sword in his left hand.
First he traced the edge of the license tattoo. He did not shave it thin. He cut deep into muscle so it could not reattach.
Black ink and blood flowed together.
He did not clench his teeth. He opened his mouth and screamed, refusing to decorate his pain with Cassian's silence.
He placed the severed tattoo on the floor. The right hand shook. The point aimed at the adjudicator lowered an inch.
Next came the palm. He pared away the remaining burn scar.
The door pulled back, trying not to lose its collateral. Derrick drove the blade deeper. Flesh tore from his palm. Three fingers stopped bending.
Adel stepped forward.
"I have not asked yet," Derrick said.
She stopped.
Blood ran into three judgment grooves in the floor.
Body. Will. User.
Derrick laid the license tattoo in the first.
"My body did it."
He signed in his blood.
He laid the burn scar in the second.
"My will did not."
He signed again.
The last groove remained empty. If he wrote Cassian's name, the door would read that as another act of Derrick's hand.
Derrick pulled the execution sword from the adjudicator. The hilt bore Cassian's teeth marks from the day he had bitten it while joining his head to his body.
Derrick pressed those marks into the final groove.
"Cassian used it."
The third signature remained in Cassian's trace.
One hand. Two wills. Three responsibilities.
The door trembled.
"Choose one."
The command came from the whole room.
Derrick raised his bleeding hand.
"No."
"One guilty party."
"All three are true."
"One innocent party."
"That too is a lie."
The door cracked.
No perfect judgment emerged. Exact inconsistency opened it.
* * *
An eye-shaped hole appeared within the crack, the same shape cut from the third-witness columns of the seventeen deeds.
It read the three statements.
First it swallowed `My body did it.` Derrick's right hand turned transparent.
Then it bit into `My will did not.` For a moment, Derrick could not remember whether he had truly resisted.
As it reached for the final sentence, Cassian thrust his sword.
He did not cut the eye. He cut between eye and sentence.
`Cassian used it.`
Only half remained.
`Cassian.`
The eye ate the rest. Who had used what disappeared.
"It ate the strategy," Ria said.
"It learned it," Cassian replied.
An auction bell rang beyond the door.
Viola was already standing on the other side.
"When did you get there?" Ines asked.
Viola opened her hand. A tiny glass vial held a black breath that struck its walls.
The last breath Ines had preserved to kill Cassian completely—the evidence caught when Cassian left Derrick's body.
Viola raised it to the light.
"The father chose the hand," she said. "The daughter chose the breath."
The auction bell rang a second time.
"Now it is my turn to sell."