“Your time in jail is my time in jail. I don’t think you’re going to do it again.”

“Not with this. Barcode. Prevention.”

“This was always more for your sake than for mine, Tristan.”

“Is your punishment going to be you being frustratingly vague for the rest of the time we’re stuck together?”

Byron shook their head. “You punished yourself enough. I don’t want to dwell in that time, so I’m letting it go. I forgive you, little brother.”

“Little? Don’t be that fucking cliché, By. Minutes.”

“I thought it’d get your goat.”

“Uuugh. Torture, torture. How is it that we get along best when everything’s gone most thoroughly to shit? Gold Morning and we reconcile. You decide to give me this weird pseudo-forgiveness. Tonight, prison breakout, mind control, and we have a nice chat.”

Tristan swapped. There was a moment of thought before Byron shrugged their shoulders, then switched back.

“So vague,” Tristan grumbled.

“It’s not pseudo-forgiveness, Tristan. I have days when I’m angry and days I’m not dealing at all. You know I have nightmares, I freak out. But that doesn’t make it pseudo. It’s forgiveness, little brother. I might have hated actually going to church, but that doesn’t mean I hated the lessons.”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be that easy.”

“It’s not, Trist. Let it go before I change my mind, you know? It’s an ongoing work, but it’s a work I do for me as much as I do it for you. So… take it without arguing.”

Byron switched to Tristan.

Tristan didn’t argue.

“We’re good,” The barcode guy said. “We’ll see you soon, then? Unless you need something else?”

Tristan paused.

“What?” the guy asked.

“I was thinking we might be able to do business… but I need to talk it over with my brother, first.”

Gleaming Interlude 9

The tower extended from the floor of the valley to the stratosphere, a gleaming testimony to the power of patience, persistence, and inhuman nature.

Most would have expected the structure to be sealed, or for the layers of overlapping metal along its exterior to be welded to one another. It wasn’t the case here. The entire facility was channeling heat, air, and atmosphere up, while it channeled the lack of those things down, and the design of the facility caught the air in the same way the curvatures of an airplane’s wings did. The edges of the tower seemed to glow, even, because of the air that ran concurrent with the fanned-out plates that stabbed upward, concentrating atmosphere and heat around the tower exterior, as well as its interior.

High above, where the sky was transitioning from the light blue of day to the near-black of night, the peak of the tower was topped with a diffuse, flower-like bloom of the lighter blue. The exhaust or output. The peak was so high as to be invisible, but the venting wasn’t.