Then… silence. Music seemed like a distraction, so I got the rush of wind past the Wretch instead. I got the replays of conversations from earlier, with Big Picture and Ratcatcher included. I felt like I’d betrayed Sveta in a way by trying to give Big Picture the benefit of a doubt, and I felt like I’d betrayed myself because I hadn’t succeeded in finding any ground I could stand on where I could make sense of his actions. I prided myself on being a scholar, but people couldn’t be studied without becoming comfortable with a lot of gray areas, definitions, and unknowns, and I wasn’t that good at that.

What was my saying? Do what was right, do what was legal, do what I could do without regrets? ‘Right’ was where it went out the window because it felt wrong. It was disturbing, being in that studio, but not in a way where I could say rights, as in human rights, had been explicitly and intentionally violated. Fine, then default to law. Was it legal? It walked a line because ‘law’ included a right for victims to stand up to wrongdoers, and Case Fifty-Threes couldn’t. The courts had never been the kindest to parahumans. They couldn’t sue and they couldn’t step in or ask for rights or for their art not to be displayed when he took art he’d told them was for himself only or for a select audience and made it part of a gallery showing. He seemed to revel in that space between art and pornography, a space where it was also technically legal but pretty damn questionable beyond the technical.

Putting me smack dab in the ‘regret’ column.

On that same topic, I regretted not being just a little more protected against the cold. My mind was on the coat I’d picked up and put down while at the Wardens’ ‘Bunker’. Cold got to me even though I had the Wretch up, a creeping loss of warmth inside me as the environment eroded at my stores of energy.

I was cold and there was nothing I could do.

My friend was hurting and there was nothing I could do.

In the distance, I could see the shape of the Dauntless Titan. ‘Kronos’. Where portals riddled the city, taller than some buildings, slices of another sky against our sky, the titan was pure white, unmoving, with only a periodic distortion around it. The Simurgh came and went, and when she came, the light seemed just a little darker in the area around her roosting point.

He existed in Shin, and Shin was concerned. He existed in Bet. He existed in Earth N, in the corner world ‘Q’, and other scattered realities. We had every reason to believe he existed in every variant of our world, standing there, ignoring every stimulus, including one of the most evil creatures I knew of.