Harbinger Three sighed. “Then you have an alphabet. A connects to B connects to C. And you tend to end with X, Y, Z. Sometimes there’s a wrinkle in the works. And A connects to L, G, E, B, R and—”

“No numbers!” Swansong said.

“It’s a word,” Harbinger Three said, at the same time Harbinger Two said, “Not a number,” and Harbinger Five said, “It isn’t!”

“Carry on,” Victoria said. Swansong audibly harrumphed.

“Connects back around to A,” Harbinger Three said. “And it connects to P, P again, L, and E. But the underlying structure is gone. ‘A’ flounders, trying to find a connection to anything. And in the process, it finds a connection to P, O—”

“Enough,” Victoria said. “I appreciate the explanation, but I’m too tired to have people spell things out for me. Abbreviate?”

“Like a localized, misspelled apocalypse,” Harbinger Five said. “You get things meant for endings at the beginning, like Z, and that connects to E, which connects to everything, and a few steps later… nothing. Houses of cards that shouldn’t stack up that do, and cards that should that don’t. But they will, by process of natural selection, form their own wills. As we see here.”

“He thinks?” Capricorn asked. His armor was in tatters.

“We think he’s been thinking this whole time,” the Harbinger said.

“Fuck,” Capricorn said. He blurred. He shifted, tattered red plate armor to tattered blue scalemail.

“Fuck,” Capricorn said again. “Nobody deserves that.”

“And now we get to see what that all added up to,” Harbinger Two said.

“No numbers,” Swansong said. “No math terms. ‘Added up’.”

“Wholly accidental,” the Harbinger said, before turning to wink at one of his brothers.

There was no humor on any other faces.

The Dauntless Titan stood in the ruins of Brockton Bay, mostly unmoving. He or it was there in Earth Gimel, and he was there in Earth Bet at the same time. He was in an equivalent location in Earth Cheit, in Earth N, and every Earth they were aware of, as well as many they weren’t.

⊙

He reached out, his range unfiltered now by a bubble of compressed time. He deciphered everything he’d tallied up as answers he needed to seek out.

He found what he was looking for, and he reached out. Not gently enough. His efforts at speaking were blunt, and destroyed more machines than he could easily count, in many worlds.

Better not to move. To wait.

It took nearly eight hours. But Dauntless’s son came. The boy drove in a truck, and he reached the perimeter that capes and other forces had gathered as a just-in-case measure.

They let Addison through, along with Addison’s wife. Not Mo, which disappointed Dauntless, but a pretty young lady with a child in her stomach.