What did Mirage say a second ago? I can’t heal it.

But I can minimize it. I can make you strong enough to bear it.

And then: Be well. A goodbye.

I look back at the people in the street. At the curtains—the ugly floral curtains. I touch them. They feel real. They feel as familiar as they look, because they’re my curtains, the curtains that have hung in the house my brother and I have lived in since we were kids.

Someone moves behind me.

I turn slowly. My gaze skims across the beige carpet, the chocolate-brown monstrosity of a couch, the piano. And, in the far corner with a bright red climbing harness slung around his waist and a coil of rope in his hands—my brother.

All impossibilities.

But my breath catches somewhere between my heart and my throat anyway, because it all looks so real. Realer even than the last hologram I saw of him. His hair is still wrong: now it’s too long, too shaggy. His face looks haggard instead of smiling, and his shoulders slump when he was always chiding me for the same thing, but it all looks so alive on him. Not like a memory of my brother. More like the person my brother might be today—if he’d spent the last year mourning me.

His eyes are glossy with shock, with disbelief. He squeezes them shut, hard, then opens them again, like he’s the one afraid he’s in a dream. “Marty?” he says. The word arcs into me like life. I’m scared to let it in. Scared to acknowledge the possibility that this might not be a construct—that Mirage could have somehow used the last dregs of his power to teleport me to the ground while he was crashing.

I force myself to breathe. I have to step sideways. I have to know whether he’s a construct, whether he folds into a flat fiction when my perspective changes. Desperation claws at me, tries to hold me in place, tries to tell me to just stand here, right here, for the rest of my life. That way I can believe he’s real, no matter what.

But Ty’s across the room before I can finish arguing with myself. He moves differently now too. He’s quicker, lither. The studious botanist brother is gone. In his place is this person who moves with easy grace, his worn climbing harness jingling at his waist. When he reaches me, the coil of rope drops to the floor, forgotten. His hands clamp on my shoulders like he’s afraid I’ll dissipate.

His hands. His hands. Their grip is painfully tight, impossibly warm, solid and real. He didn’t fold into a flat hologram when he stepped around the couch. My brother is real. My brother is alive. My brother is here—and somehow, so am I.