I looked down at the ground. The flashing light was almost continuous, on for nine tenths of the time, flickering out for that last one-tenth.

“Crystal,” I said.

Crystal and my mom in Crystal’s kitchen, a surprising number of things boxed up and stored off to the side. Clutter reduced by… maybe twenty percent. Crystal was washing something in the sink. My mom was at the cutting board. I’d seen her cook before, and this wasn’t her usual self. Moving with deliberation, care, and still not getting carrots to coins of equal thickness.

She said something, and backed away from the cutting board.

Crystal used lasers, and finished the job in a jiff, before returning to the washing. I could see her expression, sad, and my mom, lost in thought as she hung back, no longer helping to make dinner.

Not so bad.

No deep betrayals. No horrifying weaknesses. Crystal was good.

“Did you ever figure out what Contessa’s failure states were, specifically?” I asked. “What was option A? One member of Breakthrough, suffering eternally?”

The scenes changed.

“If you ask here—” Tattletale said.

It was the room where the Wardens had confronted Teacher.

Rain pulling away from our group to stride into the door, silver blades in hand, and driving those blades into the door’s edges.

Second by second, Rain was overtaken by the portal energy, consumed by the silver blades that could set anything up to be sliced through.

“I think if you ask and find out specific answers, you’ll screw up Contessa’s odds and spoil things. Don’t ask for…” Tattletale trailed off.

For the particulars about the option we took?

Dinah was unreliable, Contessa was… if she was on the up and up she was playing with big moving pieces in a way that was awfully scary and hard to extend any trust to.

My family was a mess. Physically, mentally, emotionally.

We faced the end of the world, and… I wasn’t sure I trusted we.

We… Breakthrough?

I thought of the different names I could invoke.

Tristan and Byron? I had seen Tristan’s mad stabbing, in the trigger analogue.

Kenzie? I already knew she’d done some sketchy things before she knew better, and that the well of loneliness inside her was profound. She had never been dishonest about who or what she was.

Rain? I’d already seen that ugliness he would’ve wanted to hide. The maniacal laugh, as we’d reached the final stage of the dream. That made it so easy to understand how Love Lost could hate him, even now.

Sveta? I’d had glimpses, and I had ideas. Where she came from had always been important to her. I had seen her hometown, the black rocks. The place her art came from. Her original self, in a way, through the trigger analogues, run through a translation program from the original footage to ‘mall’.