It blooms like a flower, just as she promised, and she smiles. She has rarely felt more alive than this. She wishes her other was present.

But their Foil, who belongs to the three faces just as much as March does, is quiet, watching, stalking. She watches, because her eyes are good. Because the three faces needed her eyes to be good.

March has been to this city before, ruined as it is. She knows the layout and she knows where she’s going. But the city is slow to unfold. She is left to remember the view of the city from when she flew over it, and is left to map that to the upper end of the city, which is standing straight up and is slowly on its way back to the horizontal plane.

She sees what she’s looking for, and she sprints.

The others, in turn, catch up. Noose has the line that gets the others from rooftop to ground.

Megan. Tori. Noose, Shiv, Banger, Matches. Ixnay is last, easy to miss.

“Who did we lose?”

“Bash,” Shiv says.

“Jace,” Megan adds. She sounds shaken.

“I’m sorry,” their March says, meaning it. She thinks of losing a cluster-mate. She imagines it would make the remaining years before the end so empty.

But her experience with that world was when it was alive. When most were connected to the Warrior-hub.

Using March’s thoughts and patterns, the three faces dwell on the subject. The best comparison they can use while modeling her head is that the world their March glimpsed, the point she truly became theirs, was a living world, one with endless access to information, resources, patterns. She wouldn’t have much access, except as a part of them, but there would be some things. An endless date in a library, where one had to ask for permission to view the records.

Now, with them dead, slowly burning out like coals, the connections not there, no hub to be visited?

Two people in a room with no light, no stimulation. Only words screamed and shouted at one another. The powers will burn out in time, but the data that lives on in the shattered network—that will last for quite some time.

‘Quite some time’—a set of words drawn from March’s memory of her mother. It bears a vastly different meaning, when they operate on the timescale of aeons as a matter of fact.

“Let’s make sure this isn’t for nothing,” March says.

Buildings collapse as the city returns to its normal shape, but the order that things were twisted up isn’t the order they’re untwisted. The smallest of the Dragon-craft are busy helping to support and save. To gather up wounded. One flies in the direction of the scar.

The other, it flies here. March’s Megan touches Ixnay’s shoulder.