I fell into and across the recess, that looked like a spike from a certain angle. Or that was both. I could see just how bad the injuries were in the faces and facets, magnified large by the broadest, flattest planes.

I came to a stop, panting for breath. I reached for my shoulder where I’d been scratched—and found my shoulder intact.

My hands explored my face and arms. No burns. No wounds.

“I was being tongue-in-cheek before, about the awe and admiration,” I said. “But now it’s for real. You’re… scarily good at that.”

“No shit,” Sveta said.

“I’ve been here before,” Damsel said, as she headed over toward Tattletale. “Spent a while here when I was dead. You learn your way around.”

The light danced around like a subsurface lightning bolt. Images were illuminated.

And I could see others. Reflections that weren’t me and weren’t us. Glimpses of the real world, pale in the midst of those flashes.

This was it. The system. The source of powers.

As vast as Earth was. Maybe more so, if each piece of the landscape had multiple interpretations and variations, depending on how you approached it.

How the hell do we find Teacher in all of this?

The able-bodied joined Sveta and I. The kids all holding each other’s hands, clinging to one another. Love Lost. The injured awaited Damsel’s attention.

Everyone a little haunted, traumatized a few times over.

We’d… we’d revisited our starting points. The traumas that plunged us into this world. And by Candy’s words to the others, I was pretty sure there had been a point or two there where just about all of us had resigned ourselves to our deaths. We’d faced the visceral ends of our journeys. The end of the vast majority of parahumans—death at the hands of powers.

Starts and endings, all faced together.

And this… I looked out at the landscape. Is everything that was in between.

From Within 16.11

I watched as Damsel re-positioned Byron. He was propped up to be kneeling, and she held his face with the tops and flat sides of her fingers, which were blunt, like the tops of kitchen knives. Her face remained close to his, her hair swept over one of her shoulders so it wouldn’t drape him.

By small measures, she changed the angle of his face, her eye watching as the reflected scene changed. Byron, hospital room. Byron, injured. Byron, staring off into space with tears trailing down his cheeks. Byron looking grim, in what might have been the Shin prison.

Tristan watched, his arms folded, his expression serious.