“Do you understand what this is?” Charen hissed, blasting Alison’s ear with a gust of icy breath. “This is how it could go; this is how it has gone. The Initiator has placed these thoughts within us.” And that “us” meant the Ice, which apparently wasn’t separate to Charen, as far as the woman was concerned, and the “Initiator” was…

“You mean the…thing, the Ediacaran?” The thing that made us all. The god of all the universes.

“It is telling us how we failed. But we have to learn! Nothing we have done has helped.”

Alison had just watched “The One Where Charen Kills Everyone,” and very much didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her.

She could see how to make this information accessible to Cam too, if only because Charen was giving her a roadmap. Cam would then be able to make it accessible to everyone else, even if he had to act it out, shadow puppets style, with his little legs.

And she wouldn’t be able to edit this “footage” either. It would come warts and all, so people would see her being shallow and selfish, being intimate, and all those other things that people hid from one another. She would be absolutely naked. They all would.

“Yes,” she told Charen. “Yes, let’s do it.”

“Be swift.” The hallucination, the couch, Julian, everything, was receding. “There isn’t much time.”

Then Julian, the real Julian, was shaking her, shouting her name. She’d collapsed on the floor, shivering violently, on the verge of hypothermia.

“Get everyone together,” she told him, croaking out the words. “In Cam’s room. There’s something you have to see.”

17/3.

I

In the end, Cam hadn’t needed to act out all their branching infidelities, treacheries and failures. Charen Volkovska had taken the initiative, gripping the forward compartment with a fist of winter to manifest a shimmering silvery screen of ice crystals forever drifting downwards while the images displayed upon it glimmered, luminous as old film.

There was a lot of noise at the start: complaints, demands, Khan insisting that she had work to do—you know, just saving the actual universe, nothing that couldn’t be interrupted, love. Rove was snarkily dismissive, wanting to return to whatever he was doing, a private plot that Alison already knew inside out. Except that plot needed Charen, and Charen wasn’t playing any more.