“Goddess recruited her own healer and is trying to find a way forward that isn’t picking a war with a whole reality. The heroes are banding together. Mortari is focusing on running the city and following their precious plans, but I don’t think that’s where it stops for them. They’re up to something else. The humans who have come through the end of the world with hate in their hearts are taking marching orders from the same young precognitive who predicted the end of the world two years in advance. Well, one order with some advice. We don’t know her aim yet, but she’ll be high up on our list. I want a Contessa of my own.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“She would be the person who saved the world once, and predicted this end of the world thirty-one years before it happened.”

“Thirty-one? How?”

Teacher smiled. “You sound interested in this. More knowledge comes with the role.”

William nodded.

“Give me a moment. Something to follow-up on,” Teacher said, walking around the table that Valefor was on.

William didn’t answer right away. This wouldn’t be easy. Major players. He’d been at a low point, contemplating how to read the graph that was his life. This—

He felt inside himself, to check that all was well. Those like Teacher and Valefor were dangerous influences, liable to work their way in and take someone over. He could check that he was free of trace influences by way of the same power that let him seize his own diseases and cuts and bruises and transfer them elsewhere.

He was aware of all of the faces of alternate William Gileses. The successes, the failures, the broken, the fearful, the triumphant. He couldn’t really see their faces or make out details, any more than he could know the nuance of grains of sand on a beach… but he knew how diverse they were.

It was in recognizing just how many different ways he could have turned out that he could shrug off the role and the identity, that William Giles who had sulked and kept his head down, trying to look tough while he waited for his family and church to find their feet and bail him out. That was gone, transferred away like any disease or cut.

He could become something else.

Teacher put away his phone. The man raised a wiry eyebrow at William.

“Let’s do this.”

“Let’s. To start with, we’re going to have to adjust slightly. I was just informed that while the security team at the prison wasn’t observing us… someone else was using those cameras.”

“That’s—”

“Not a problem,” Teacher said, smiling.

Gleaming 9.1