Teacher, Legend, and the junior cape all disappeared in a wisp of blue dust.

Amid the commotion, one by one, the guns Antares had picked up dropped to the floor, some with mangled handles. After the first, Sveta caught them.

And on the terminal closest to the door that had disappeared, numbers adjusted. A red number declined to 87%, 85%… A white number ticked up. Nearly at 70%. A third looked eerily similar to Kenzie’s map of her control over the complex. Steadily and swiftly, she took full and total control of Teacher’s resources, and he had no idea what to feel about that, given what she must be feeling.

He got away and that confirms it’s option C, Tristan thought. The confirmation drove the point home, and emotions bottled up over days surged to the point he momentarily felt out of his mind.

That it was option C meant Swansong’s death was real, and another death was imminent or connected to all of this. Possibly fucking Byron.

“Legend will be fine,” Chevalier said, and he almost sounded convincing. “Let’s get to work. We’ll assume this is real, and that means there’s a hell of a lot to do.”

From Within 16.1

I woke up, my arm sliding across a file folder I’d left on my bed, with a stinging sensation I was sure was a six inch long papercut.

I made myself sit up and swing my legs to the floor without using flight, and I sat where I was, feeling the muggy, lethargic, slow sensation of being sick. I unwrapped bandages, and with some gentle prodding, I checked my arm and hand, where stitches still connected the flesh that had been flensed from finger and hand. It wasn’t puffy, and it wasn’t an inflamed red. The red line that had been tracing its way from the wound up my arm was gone.

After everything, after winter cold, damp prison hallways, skipped meals, injury, several periods of unconsciousness, about seven minor injuries and two bad ones, my immune system had thrown in the towel.

Five days. I’d decided I was okay with being sick for a set period of time, I’d scale down what I asked of myself by doing only one necessary thing a day, recuperate, find my equilibrium. Then I’d ease back into things or I’d go to the hospital. Not that hospitals were an easy thing to wrangle right now.

I was annoyed I’d moved the papers, so a stack of papers in one file folder had fanned out to smear into another file folder, to the point I had to figure out which belonged where. The folder to the right was Professor Haywire. Multiple personalities, with each personality living in one Earth. He’d gone full mad scientist and opened the first portal we’d known about. We’d later found out there was one in Europe and, apparently, the one in Cauldron.