Imogen's arms were shaking.
Voyager was not heavy. He was ten years old and small for his age, his body still flesh and bone where the other children of the Far Beyond had replaced their limbs with metal. He should have been easy to carry. But Imogen's strength had never been her body. She had never trained to haul weight across a battlefield. She had never needed to.
She needed to now.
She had wedged the Barrett-11 sideways across her back, the rifle's stock braced against her shoulder blade and its barrel extending behind her like a narrow metal shelf. Voyager sat on the rifle, his legs dangling, his arms looped loosely around her neck. His eyes were still open. They had not closed since Mercury. They stared at nothing and everything, the pupils twitching with the constant, unending cascade of information that Hermes had poured into his skull. He breathed. His heart beat. But he was not there.
Imogen took a step. Her legs protested. Her shoulders screamed. She took another step.
The battlefield stretched before her in every direction, a hellscape of smoke and mud and bodies that had not yet been collected. She had emerged from the void into the open, no buildings to shield her, no alleys to slip through. Just the churned earth and the distant clash of forces too numerous to count.
She knew the Smoke War from Pisanio's lessons. The factions and the fault lines. I Corp employees moved through the smoke, their uniforms crisp even in the filth. K Corp's hired fixers fought in loose, brutal clusters, their weapons slick with insect blood. The Fourth Pack of R Corp moved like a single organism, their movements synchronized to the microsecond, their helmets gleaming with the precision of soldiers who had been engineered for nothing but war. The Thumb's Soldatos advanced in their rigid formations, their Capos shouting orders. And the Udjat wove through the chaos with the fluid grace of mercenaries who had seen everything and feared nothing.
All of them fighting for L Corp. For the new L Corp. For the Wing that would rise from the ashes of the old.
And against them, the old L Corp's defenders. The old G Corp's insectoid soldiers, their grey-blue uniforms torn and stained, their augmentations clicking and chittering as they threw themselves into the grinder. E Corp's hired forces, their weapons gleaming with the particular sheen of corporate funding. The remnants of a dying order, fighting to preserve something that had already rotted from within.
Imogen navigated through it all one step at a time.
A fixer lunged past her, his blade swinging toward a G Corp soldier. She ducked, felt the wind of the strike pass over her head, and kept moving. A Soldato shouted something at her in a language she did not speak. She ignored him. A group of K Corp hirelings sprinted across her path, their boots splashing through a puddle of something dark and viscous. She waited for them to pass, then continued.
Voyager's arms tightened around her neck. A reflex. Not consciousness. His mind was still somewhere else, still drowning in the flood of information Hermes had poured into it. She could feel his heartbeat against her back.
It was fast.
Too fast.
"I've got you," she murmured. She did not know if he could hear her. "I've got you. Just hold on."
She ducked behind the smoldering wreckage of a supply cart. Her lungs burned from the smoke. Her legs trembled with every step. The Barrett-11 dug into her shoulder blade where Voyager's weight pressed it against her spine. She wanted to put him down. She wanted to rest. She wanted to find Kamina and Shmuel and let them carry this burden for a while.
But they were not here. She was alone. And Voyager needed her.
She peered around the edge of the cart. The battle was shifting, the lines of conflict moving eastward. If she could just reach the ruined building on the far side of the field, she might find cover. She might find a moment to breathe.
She adjusted her grip on Voyager's legs. Her arms screamed. She took another step.
Imogen stepped over another body.
It was not the first she had seen. The battlefield was carpeted with them, the dead and the dying tangled together in the churned mud. But this one was looking at her. Its eyes were open, its mouth stretched into a final, silent scream, its chest split open by something that had not bothered to finish the job. The smell that rose from it was sweet and foul and clinging, the kind of smell that did not leave the nose once it entered.
Imogen vomited.
She barely managed to turn her head before her stomach emptied itself onto the ash-stained ground. The heave racked through her body, violent and uncontrollable, and Voyager's weight on her back made it worse, made her feel like she was drowning in her own revulsion. She spat. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Forced herself to look away from the corpse.
But there were more. Everywhere she turned, there were more.
She had lived her entire childhood behind walls. The Castle of Maidens had been a fortress of pale stone and high towers, its gardens manicured, its halls hung with tapestries that depicted battles rather than staging them. She had been a princess. The daughter of the King in Grey. Her meals had been prepared by servants. Her clothes had been sewn by hands she never saw. The world outside the walls had been an abstraction, a story told by faceless tutors who had never set foot in the Backstreets themselves.
She was a runaway now. She had fled the arranged marriage, fled the castle, fled everything she had been raised to become. Months on the road with Pisanio, sleeping in safe houses and running from her father's knights. Another month with the Great Kamina Office, fighting Distortions and Syndicates and things that defied classification. She had thought herself hardened. She had thought the worst was behind her.
The Smoke War laughed at her.
Even if Pisanio were still alive, even if he were here beside her, guiding her through this wasteland of corpses, it would still be disastrous. His sword and his wisdom could not shield her from the sheer scale of it. The thousands of bodies. The endless smoke. The screams that rose and fell like a tide, never fully ceasing, never fully fading. Such was the nature of this war. It had no mercy. It had no pause. It consumed everything it touched.
But she was still walking.
One foot in front of the other. Voyager's arms slack around her neck. The Barrett-11 digging into her shoulder blade. Her legs trembling. Her lungs burning. She was still walking. Because she was a member of the Great Kamina Office. Because Kamina had told her, in that absurd way of his, that she needed to live the life she wanted. A life of freedom. A life with principle. Not freedom without anchors, not principle without joy, but both together, held in balance, chosen every day.
She had known him for only a month or more. And already his voice was in her head, louder than the screams, louder than the fear.
Live freely, brat. But live as yourself.
She ignited her E.G.O.
[Effloresced E.G.O :: Wedlocked]
The burning robes wrapped around her body, their crimson folds bleeding to black at the hems. The crown of blackened wood settled on her head. The Barrett-11 melted and reformed in her hands, its surface rippling with contained heat. The strength that flooded into her was not much physical, not exactly, but it was enough. It was enough to carry Voyager. It was enough to run.
She ran.
The battlefield blurred around her. Smoke and mud and bodies and the distant flash of blades. She ran through all of it, her burning robes trailing embers, her crown flickering with eternal flame. She did not know where she was going. She only knew she had to keep moving.
And then she saw the civilians.
They were huddled in the lee of a collapsed wall, a dozen of them, their clothes marking them as Backstreet residents who had been caught in a war they had no part in. They were not soldiers. They were not fixers. They were simply people, and they were about to die.
The fixers advancing on them wore the colors of the Old L Corp's hired forces. Their weapons were drawn. Their faces were empty of anything but the grim men who had been paid to kill anything. One of them raised his blade. A woman screamed. A child clutched her leg.
Imogen tried to ignore it. Her mission was Voyager. Her duty was to the child on her back. She could not save everyone. She could not save anyone. She was one person, and she was already carrying more than she could bear.
But Kamina's voice was in her head. And the lessons he had drilled into her, the idiotic, impossible, wonderful lessons, would not let her look away.
She set Voyager down against a chunk of rubble. She raised the Barrett-11. The rifle turned molten in her hands, its surface rippling with heat and light and the particular fury of a girl who had been told all her life that the world was beyond her power to change.
She fired.
The combustible round tore across the distance and struck the lead fixer square in the chest. He did not have time to scream. He simply ceased to exist, his body converted to ash and scattered embers in the span of a heartbeat. The other fixers froze. They stared at the burning figure in the crimson robes. They stared at the rifle that was not a rifle but something older and more terrible. And then they ran.
Imogen did not pursue. She picked up Voyager and ran to the civilians.
"Are you…" She stopped.
Too many corpses. The fixers had been killing before she arrived. The woman who had screamed was still standing, but the man beside her was not. The child who had clutched her leg was alive, but the older woman behind her was sprawled in the mud, her eyes open and empty. The survivors stared at Imogen with the hollow, uncomprehending expressions of people who had seen too much to process anything new.
Imogen vomited again.
She bent over, one hand braced against the collapsed wall, and emptied what was left of her stomach onto the ash-stained ground. The burning robes flickered but held. The crown of blackened wood trembled on her head. She knew, in the rational part of her mind, that this war had ended. It had ended ten years ago. The old L Corp had fallen. The new L Corp had risen. The City had moved on.
But the image of it was here. It was too much. And she hadn't even reached adulthood yet.
And yet she kept walking.
The survivors fell in behind her, a ragged procession of the shell-shocked and the wounded. An old man with a gash across his forehead. A young woman clutching an infant to her chest. Two children who held each other's hands and did not speak. They followed Imogen because she was still moving, still burning, still standing when everything else had fallen. She did not know if they would survive. She only knew that stopping meant death, and she had not come this far to die in a war that had already ended.
Her mechanical eyes shifted. White to red. Blood began to seep from the corners, tracking down her cheeks in thin, warm lines. The world resolved into trajectories and vectors, the battlefield becoming a map of safe passages and potential threats. She could see the movements of distant soldiers, the arcs of thrown weapons, the gaps in the fighting where a large group might slip through unnoticed. The information flooded her brain, and her brain screamed in protest, but she held the floodgates open. She had to.
A fixer on the left flank, turning toward them. Imogen fired before he could raise his weapon. The shot slammed into the dirt at his feet, a warning, a line drawn in fire and sound. He scrambled backward and vanished into the smoke.
A G Corp soldier on the right, its insectoid eyes swiveling toward the group. She fired again, the combustible round carving a trench in the earth between them. The soldier chittered and retreated.
She could not kill them all. She did not have the strength. But she could warn them. She could make them understand that attacking this group would cost more than it was worth.
Voyager bounced against her back with every step. His breathing was shallow but steady. She could feel his heartbeat through the burning fabric of her robes.
And then she saw it.
It was not a creature nor was it a weapon. It was something between the two, defied the neat categories her mind wanted to place it in. The smoke around it was thicker, darker, coiled into shapes that suggested limbs without ever resolving into them. It moved without moving. It existed without existing. Looking at it felt like pressing her eyes against a wound in the world, a place where reality had been torn open and something else had seeped through.
Her mind staggered. The E.G.O. snapped off. The burning robes dissolved into embers, the crown of blackened wood fading to nothing, the Barrett-11 cooling to dead steel in her hands. She could not look away from the thing in the smoke.
She vomited. There was nothing left in her stomach, but her body tried anyway, convulsing with the sheer wrongness of what she was seeing. Behind her, the survivors began to turn their heads, their eyes drawn toward the same horror.
Imogen raised her rifle and fired into the dirt.
The shot kicked up a wall of dust and debris, a curtain of grey that blocked the view. "Don't look," she said. Her voice was hoarse, barely audible. "Keep your eyes on the ground. Don't look at it."
A voice spoke beside her.
"The source of the smoke. Downright hideous, isn't it?"
She turned. A man stood a few feet away, close enough that she should have noticed him approaching. She had not. He was tall and thin, his frame angular beneath a simple black suit worn over a white shirt. A black tie. Black trousers. Black loafers. In his hand, a long sword of the same dark hue, its blade catching no light. His skin was pale, his hair short and dark.
His face was simply impossible to hold in her mind. Her eyes slid off it like water off glass, refusing to settle on any feature, any detail. He wore a mask, she realized. It was black and featureless and it did something to her perception that made her brain refuse to acknowledge that there was a person behind it.
"You are wearing an odd mask, mister," Imogen said. The words came out between heaves, her stomach still rebelling against the thing in the smoke.
The man tilted his head. "You made me queasy. Well, I did vomit when I first saw it too." His voice was clipped and impatient, the voice of someone who had exhausted his patience and now spoke only because the situation demanded it. "Get used to this kind of scenery. We're going to be seeing it for a while."
"I don't think I can."
"No one thinks they can. That's not an excuse." He gestured sharply toward the smoke-shrouded horror with his sword. "I could say the same when I started. You adapt or you die. That's the only choice this place gives you."
Imogen wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "The Singularities that keep the City running. They all have a nasty truth or two hidden from the public eye, don't they?"
"That part I understand," Imogen said.
"Do you? Understanding isn't the same as accepting. You're still shaking. Your hands are trembling. Your eyes are bleeding." He turned his mask toward her, and even though she could not see his face, she felt the weight of his attention like a physical pressure. "Accept it faster. The people behind you don't have the luxury of your hesitation."
Imogen stared at the featureless mask, her vision still swimming from the thing in the smoke. The blood from her eyes had begun to dry, leaving stiff trails on her cheeks. Behind her, the survivors huddled together, their faces pressed to the dirt, their hands over their ears.
"Why do you fight in this war?" she asked.
The man did not turn toward her. His voice came flat and hard, the voice of someone who had been asked this question too many times and had worn the answer down to a single sharp edge. "To get a permit. A place in the Nest. That's all." He paused. "And what's your reason, kid? What's a child doing in a place like this? You're too young for it."
Imogen's hands tightened on the Barrett-11. The metal was cold now, the E.G.O. gone, the weight of the rifle settling back into her aching shoulders. "I have no reason."
"No reason?" The mask tilted. "You're standing in the middle of a wing war, carrying a child on your back, leading a column of survivors through a battlefield, and you have no reason? That doesn't make sense."
"Does the world make sense?" Imogen's voice rose slightly, cracking at the edges. "Has it always been this irrational?"
"It has always been that irrational," he said. "The City doesn't run on reason. Reason is just a story people tell themselves so they can sleep."
Imogen looked down at her hands. At the rifle that had killed a man not ten minutes ago. At the blood that was not hers, dried in the crevices of her fingers. "Then the lives I took. The fixer I shot. They're dead because the world was just being irrational?"
"I can't answer that question for you, kid. That's yours. It'll sit with you longer than any answer I could give."
He turned away. The smoke swallowed his silhouette almost immediately, the black suit and the black mask and the black sword all dissolving into the grey.
"That is That and This is This," he said, the words hanging in the air behind him. "You'll figure out which is which eventually. Or you won't."
And then he was gone. Imogen stood alone with the survivors and the child on her back and the question still burning in her chest, unanswered.
They found the building an hour later. It was a warehouse, abandoned and half-collapsed, but its basement was intact and its walls were thick enough to muffle the distant sounds of battle. Imogen led the survivors down the stone steps one by one, her legs threatening to give out with every stride. When the last of them was inside, she lowered Voyager from her back and set him gently against a stack of empty crates.
His eyes moved.
The pupils, which had been fixed and unseeing since Mercury, contracted. Focused. Found her face. And then his eyes began to tear, but the tears were not water. They were glass, tiny crystalline shards that fell from his lashes and struck the stone floor with faint, musical clicks before dissolving into nothing.
"Ah," Imogen breathed. "You're finally awake."
Voyager blinked. The glass tears kept falling. "I hate how colorful this world is."
Imogen frowned. "What are you saying?"
"When you mix all the colors of paint together, you get black." His voice was distant, dreamlike. "You've created a substance that subtracts. That absorbs all the colors. Too many colors. Too many views. Too many worlds stacked on top of each other, all bleeding into the same space." He pressed his palms against his eyes. "I saw too many colors. I saw all of them at once."
Imogen knelt beside him. "But you also don't want a world that only has one color. That would be quite dull to live in."
"Most people in the City think the world does have only one color," Voyager said quietly. "Their own."
He lowered his hands. His eyes were red-rimmed but clear. He looked at the survivors huddled in the corners of the basement, their faces gaunt and empty, their clothes stiff with dried blood and smoke residue. Then he stood. His legs were unsteady, but his voice was steady enough.
"You," he said, pointing to the old man with the gash across his forehead. "What is the world like?"
The old man looked up. His voice was a rasp. "A grave. We're all just walking toward it. Some of us faster than others."
Voyager pointed to the young woman with the infant. "And you?"
"A thread," she said. "It binds me to her." She looked down at the baby in her arms. "If the thread breaks, there's nothing left."
"And you?" He pointed to one of the children, a boy no older than seven.
"A box," the boy whispered. "The lid is closed. I don't remember what the outside looks like."
"A ladder," said a woman with a torn sleeve, without waiting to be asked. "You climb and you climb and the rungs never end, and you can't see the top, and you can't see the bottom, and your hands are bleeding but you can't let go."
"A coin," said a man with a bandaged arm. "It spins. Heads you live. Tails you die."
"A mirror," said another woman, her voice hollow. "Everywhere I look, I see myself. Not who I am. Who I failed to be."
"A flame," said an old woman clutching a shawl. "Small. Getting smaller. But it hasn't gone out yet. That's the only thing that matters."
"A story," said a young man with a bruise across his jaw. "Someone else is writing it. I don't know who. I don't think I'd like them if I met them."
"A wall," said another child, a girl with dirt on her cheeks. "There's something on the other side. I can hear it. But I can't get over."
"A door," said the last survivor, a man who had not spoken since they left the battlefield. "It opened once. I walked through. I've been trying to find my way back ever since."
Voyager stood in the center of the basement, the glass tears still falling from his eyes, shattering silently against the stone.
"That's ten," he said. "Ten people. Ten worlds. All of them are true. All of them are real. All of them living in the same City, bleeding the same blood." He turned to Imogen. "This world is convoluted. It's too much. It's always been too much. But if you try to make it one color, if you try to force it into a single shape, you lose all of this. You lose the thread and the flame and the door. You lose the ladder and the mirror and the story."
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. The glass shards clung to his skin, glinting in the dim light.
"I don't know if I can carry all of it," he said. "But I'd rather carry too much than too little."
Voyager's hands were trembling from his own thoughts.
"I will create a machine," he said. His voice was soft but steady. "Or something similar. Something that can make the City think toward a single thing. A single purpose. A single direction. A hive mind. A single consciousness. Everyone, everywhere, thinking toward the same goal. Then we could reach the untouchable. Then we could actually do it."
Imogen stared at him. "That's wrong."
"Is it?"
"You'd erase everything." Her voice was rising, cracking. "You'd erase all of it. The thread and the flame and the door. The ladder and the mirror. You'd crush every gentle world that exists just to make one that points the way you want it to point."
"I'm not crushing anything. I'm unifying it. I'm making it so that…"
"So that no one gets to choose." Imogen stepped closer to him.
Voyager's jaw tightened. "It wouldn't be a cage. Everyone working together instead of fighting each other. Instead of wars like this. You've seen what the world is. How can you look at all of this and say we shouldn't try to fix it?"
"Because fixing it by breaking everyone into the same shape isn't fixing it."
"Then what's the alternative? Let it stay like this forever? Let people keep dying in wars they didn't start? Let the City keep grinding everyone into dust while a few people at the top decide who lives and who…"
"Voyager." Imogen's voice cut through his. "Stop. Please. Just listen to me for a moment."
He stopped. His hands were still trembling.
"I know people whose worlds are gentle," Imogen said quietly. "Pisanio. He served my family for decades, and when I ran away, he came with me. Because he believed I deserved to choose my own life. His world is gentle. It's built on loyalty and love. Kamina. You've met him. You've seen how he is. His world is loud and impossible and full of holes, but it's gentle. It's so gentle that he'll throw himself into any fight if it means protecting someone who can't protect themselves. Shmuel. His world is gentle too. It's cracked and patched and held together by spite and duty, but it's gentle. He hates the thing that replaced the person he loved, and he carries that hate every day, but he doesn't let it make him cruel. He chooses to be gentle even when it hurts."
She looked at Voyager. "If you make the whole world into a single mind, you'll lose all of that. You'll lose the gentleness. You'll lose the choice. You'll lose the thing that makes those worlds worth protecting."
Voyager opened his mouth. Closed it. His eyes were wet with glass.
And then a voice spoke inside his head.
"You already know that's not true."
Voyager stiffened. The voice was warm. Soft. Familiar in a way that made no sense, because he had never heard it before. And yet some part of him recognized it immediately.
Voyager's mind reeled. He was still standing in the basement. Imogen was still looking at him, her expression shifting from pleading to confusion. But he was also somewhere else. A white place. An endless space where the voice echoed softly, patiently, without judgment.
The white space shifted. Color bled into it, warm and vibrant, and suddenly Voyager was standing in the tent on the rooftop of Asan's House of the Star. The telescope loomed above him. The colorful cushions were scattered across the floor. The lamp in the corner cast its golden glow.
Curiosity was there. He was hunched over a workbench, his black hair falling across his face, a spanner in one hand and a half-assembled gear mechanism in the other. "Pass me the calibration wrench, would you?" he said, not looking up.
Pioneer handed it to him without a word. She was seated at the terminal, her white hair tucked behind her ears, her mechanical fingers flying across the keyboard. "The thermal expansion coefficient needs to be recalculated. You used last week's figures."
"Last week's figures were perfectly adequate."
"Last week the ambient temperature was two degrees lower."
"Two degrees is negligible."
"Two degrees is the difference between a functional lens array and a shattered one."
Curiosity groaned. "Fine. Recalculate it. But I'm blaming you if we fall behind schedule."
"You blame me for everything."
"That's because everything is your fault."
Voyager watched them argue. The scene shifted. He was in the common room of the orphanage. The mechanical orrery was spinning in the corner. The framed diagrams of constellations hung on the walls. And he was playing chess with Pioneer while Curiosity and Opportunity argued about something in the background.
"You're not concentrating," Pioneer said, moving her rook.
"I'm concentrating," Voyager replied.
"You're not. You left your queen exposed."
"I'm luring you into a false sense of security."
"You're losing."
"It's just simply strategic losing."
Pioneer's mouth twitched. It was almost a smile. "That's not a thing."
"It's absolutely a thing. I read about it."
"You read about it in a book you made up."
"The best kind of book."
The white space returned. The voice was still there, patient and warm.
"You see? This is what you'd lose. Not just the arguments and the chess games. The feeling of it. The warmth. The friction. The gentle chaos of minds that don't agree with each other but still choose to stay in the same room."
Voyager was silent.
"You said you wanted a world with one color. But you've never lived in that world. You've only ever lived in this one. The one with too many colors. The one that's convoluted and messy and exhausting. And you love it. You love the arguments about calibration. You love losing at chess. You love the way Curiosity steals your pudding and blames it on Opportunity. You love the way Pioneer pretends not to care and then stays up all night helping you finish your projects."
"I do love it," Voyager whispered.
"Then why would you destroy it?"
"Because the untouchable is more important than…"
"Than what? Than the people who would touch it with you?"
Voyager closed his eyes. The glass tears were still falling, but they were slower now. Heavier.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know anything anymore. The #@%$ showed me everything. And it was too much. It was too much, and I thought if I could just make everyone see the same thing, if I could make them all look in the same direction, then maybe…"
"Then maybe it wouldn't be so heavy to carry alone."
Voyager said nothing.
"You don't have to carry it alone. That's what the others are for. That's what Curiosity and Pioneer and Opportunity are for. That's what Imogen is trying to tell you. The world is convoluted because it has to be. Because a single color can't hold all of it. Because the gentleness you're trying to protect can only exist when different worlds are allowed to touch each other without consuming each other."
"Then why would you destroy it?"
"I'm not destroying it," Voyager said.
"I told you. I'm not destroying it. I'm preserving it. If everyone moves together, there's no war. No children carrying other children through the mud."
"You'd preserve the shape of things by erasing the people inside them."
"That's not what I said."
"It's what you meant."
"No," Voyager said, more sharply. "It isn't. You're putting words in my mind. That's not the same thing."
"A hive mind isn't the same as a prison," he continued. "People in a hive mind still experience things. They still perceive. They still…"
"Do they choose?"
"They choose collectively. That's still choice. That's a more…"
"Is it?"
"Stop interrupting me." His voice cracked slightly. He steadied it. "A collective will is still a will. It's not erasing individuality. It's… it's coordinating it. Organizing it. Like a machine. Every part doing its function. Every part necessary. Every part…"
"Replaceable?"
Voyager stopped.
"Every part," the voice said gently, "interchangeable. Because if they all think the same thing, if they all want the same thing, then any one of them could be any other one of them. Curiosity could be Pioneer. Pioneer could be Opportunity. You could be anyone. Anyone could be you."
"That's… that's not what I…"
"Is Curiosity's laugh replaceable?"
"That's…"
"Is the way Pioneer pretends the chess loss doesn't bother her replaceable? Is any of it replaceable?"
"You're being…" Voyager's hands balled into fists. "You're framing this to make me feel like I'm attacking the people I care about. But I'm not. I would never…"
"You're not trying to hurt them," the voice agreed. And there was something in the agreement that was worse than contradiction, something soft and patient and sure. "Of course you're not. You never try to hurt anyone. That's never the intention. It's only ever the result."
Voyager opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"That's not true," he said.
"Isn't it?"
"I would find a way to preserve what matters. The personalities. The individual…"
"How?"
"I'd… there's a method. If you could isolate the neurological patterns that correspond to individual identity and encode them within a shared…"
"A cage with personalized wallpaper."
"A solution!" His voice rose, and the white space rippled around him at the sound of it. He felt the ripple. He did not like it. He lowered his voice and spoke again, more carefully. "A solution that no one has tried because no one has had the capacity to attempt it. I have that capacity now. #@%$ gave me that capacity. The information is in me and I can use it to…"
"To do what?"
Voyager paused.
"The method requires what, Voyager?"
"It requires someone who understands what is worth preserving," he said. "Someone who has lived in it. Someone who knows which parts of the world are worth…"
He heard himself. He stopped.
"You were about to say," the voice said, gently, "which parts of the world are worth keeping."
The glass tears fell. One. Two.
"That's not what I meant," Voyager said. His voice was smaller.
"Who decides which parts of the world are worth keeping?"
"I… the method wouldn't require…"
"Who decides, Voyager?"
"I would build in…" He exhaled, frustrated. "I would build in safeguards. Principles. Non-negotiable parameters that…"
"Your parameters."
"Someone's parameters have to…"
"Your principles."
"Someone has to…"
"Your definition of worth."
"Would you rather no one try?" His voice cracked again, and this time he didn't steady it. "Would you rather we just leave it? Leave the battlefield? Leave the old man with the gash in his head and the woman with the infant and the boy who said the world is a box with the lid closed?" He pressed his hand to his chest, to the place where the flood of #@%$ ' information still burned, a sun he'd swallowed whole. "I saw everything. Do you understand what that means? Everything. The births and the extinctions. The civilizations that made ours look like a sketch in a margin. And they all fell. Every single one. Because they couldn't agree. Because they couldn't move in the same direction at the same time. Because they were too busy being different from each other to survive."
The white space was quiet.
"So yes," Voyager said. "My parameters. My principles. My definition. Because someone has to. And I am the only person on this entire planet who has the information to do it correctly."
A pause.
"Are you sure?" the voice said.
"Yes."
"You don't sound sure."
"I am sure," he said. Too fast. He knew it the moment the words came out. He said it again, slower. "I am… sure."
Voyager wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. The glass shards clung to his skin, cold and light, refracting the white emptiness of the space into a hundred tiny prisms. He stared at them.
"Will it?"
"Yes."
"And the trembling?"
"Side effect."
"And the ripple in the space when you raised your voice?"
Voyager looked at the white around him. It was still, now. But it had moved. He had felt it move.
"I was agitated," he said. "That's a… the mind affects the observed space. That's physics. That's not a sign of anything except elevated emotional…"
"Voyager."
"Stop saying my name like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you already know how this ends." His voice had gone strange. Thin at the edges. The specific thinness of someone holding a position that has started to feel less like firm ground and more like ice. "You don't know how this ends. You can't know. The future is non-linear and even with everything #@%$ gave me I can't fully…"
"I know," the voice said.
Voyager was silent for a long moment.
"I'm going to find a way," he said. "Whatever you say. Whatever Imogen says. Whatever anyone says. I'm going to find a way to make the world move in a single direction. And when I do, when it works, then everyone will understand. Then the glass will stop and the trembling will stop and the ripple will stop because I'll have fixed the thing that caused all of it in the first place."
"The world," the voice said.
"Yes."
"You'll fix the world."
"Yes."
"And then you'll be fine."
"Yes."
A soft sound. Not quite a laugh. Not quite pity. Something between the two that Voyager did not have a word for and did not want to find one.
He came back to himself in pieces.
The basement first. The smell of cold stone and old wood and smoke that had crept in through the cracks in the walls. Then the survivors, their quiet breathing, the old man still pressing a cloth to his forehead. Then Imogen, kneeling in front of him, her expression poised somewhere between alarm and the particular exhaustion of someone who has been worried about him for long enough that the worry has started to feel like furniture.
"I was thinking," he said.
"I was thinking," he said again. He looked at his hands. The glass tears had dried on his skin. He flexed his fingers. The trembling was still there, finer now, almost imperceptible, but there if you looked for it.
He had looked for it every minute since Mercury. He was very tired of finding it.
"Did you hear what I said?" Imogen asked.
"I heard you."
"And?"
Voyager looked at her. He thought about what to say. He thought about the voice, and the way it had said alright with that soft, between-things sound, and the way that single word had felt like a door closing rather than one opening. He thought about the parameters and the safeguards and the principles that would preserve what mattered. He thought about Curiosity's laugh and Pioneer's almost-smile and whether they would still exist, specifically, specifically Curiosity's laugh, in the world he was imagining.
"I'm still going to try," he said.
Imogen stared at him. "Voyager…"
"I know what you think. I know what you said. And I've considered it, and I understand your reasoning, and I disagree." He stood up from the crates, his legs unsteady but holding. "A gentleness that can be ended by a war isn't a gentleness that can be trusted. A world this fragile isn't a world worth…"
He stopped.
Felt something shift.
It started in his chest.It was more like the sensation of two tectonic plates discovering they occupy the same space and deciding to resolve the dispute badly. Something in him wanted to agree with Imogen. Something in him had already agreed, somewhere in the white place, looking at the glass tears on his hands, listening to a voice that knew him in a way he hadn't given anyone permission to know him. And something harder, colder, the part of him that had swallowed a sun and hadn't stopped burning, refused.
The refusal won.
But it won badly.
The E.G.O. came.
It arrived the way a storm front arrives, not all at once, but as a change in atmospheric pressure. A feeling that the air had made a decision. His right side went cold first, a cold that was not temperature but something older, and then the cloak appeared.
Half a cloak. The right half.
It fell from his right shoulder and stopped at the center of his body, the fabric edge running a clean vertical line from collarbone to heel, as if an invisible seam divided him into two selves and only one of them had committed to the manifestation. The fabric was not fabric. It was deep, saturated, the purple-black of the space between stars, threaded through with points of light that did not flicker. They moved. Slowly. The way stars move when you watch them long enough, travelling, always travelling, along arcs that predated human memory. Nebulae drifted through the fabric in slow, breathing clouds of pale violet and deep blue. A small galaxy rotated at the hem, unhurried, its arms curling inward and then back out.
[Volatile E.G.O :: One Who Travels]
The glasses came next. They tore from his eyes. Two lenses, frameless, glass so clear it was almost invisible except for the light it caught. They rose to his eye level and then began to orbit. Slowly at first. Then with gathering purpose, describing ellipses around him, occasionally passing close enough to his face that someone watching might have thought he was about to catch them and put them back. He never did.
The glass tears from his eyes fell differently. They fell in small lines, bending toward the orbiting lenses as though something was adjusting the local gravity, and when they struck the lenses they shattered into even smaller fragments that scattered outward and dissolved into the fabric of the half-cloak.
He stood in the basement with one side of himself wrapped in the cosmos and one side in a child's clothes, and the line between them was perfectly, precisely, disturbingly clean.
Imogen took a step back. Not fear, she had stopped having room for fear. But the instinct of someone recognizing a new kind of threshold.
The survivors did not move. They watched with the hollow expressions of people who have already processed too much today and have filed this under the same folder as everything else.
"Voyager," Imogen said carefully.
"I know," he said.
"You should…"
"I know." he said. "I know what this means. I'm aware of the clinical definition."
"Then stop."
"I can't."
"You can."
"I can't," he said, and the precision in his voice was not anger, not exactly. "I have committed." He exhaled. The orbiting lenses adjusted their trajectories slightly. "I can't stop wanting the other thing as well. Both things are present and neither of them will yield" He gestured at himself. The half-cloak stirred with the motion, the nebulae within it shifting.
Imogen looked at him for a long moment.
"The other thing," she said quietly. "The thing you can't stop wanting."
Voyager said nothing.
He didn't answer.
The orbiting lenses caught the dim light of the basement and threw tiny constellations across the stone walls. The survivors watched the stars move across the ceiling. Something in the shifting light had reached them, a place that responds to beauty before it asks what beauty is doing there.
Voyager stood in half-wrapped in a time that was not his but had decided to keep him company anyway, and did not answer Imogen's question.
Because the answer was yes.
And answering yes would mean something that he was not ready to mean.