Then I took a few steps back, and used the twenty seconds or so that were left to watch the fallout.

⊙

I stirred, and phantom pains danced around my body before mercifully fading.

“Everyone okay?” I asked.

I looked, quickly checking. Nobody was brain-dead, by the looks of it.

Candy had a cut on her forehead, but it was apparently from falling from where she’d been sitting on the desk.

A thousand horrible images danced in my mind in the span of a second. The dreams, the horrible insights. The agents, and the magnitude of what we were attached to.

Because the agents were only one small part of a much bigger system, the crimson landscape had been the real system, and the smaller agents had been capable of reaching to what I could well believe was close to infinity.

It was dizzying to consider the implications.

“World didn’t end because of us?” I asked.

“No,” was the deep, vaguely digitized growl from the door behind me, as angry as if the world had ended. I looked, and I saw Defiant standing next to a very alarmed looking Natalie.

“That’s good,” I said, quiet, with a calm I didn’t feel.

From Within 16.y

Months Ago

She stopped at the door, peering through the glass pane, and exhaled slowly, trying to calm her nerves.

She was surrounded by people who were so good at this. She had always been surrounded by people who were so good at this. But whatever genes were supposed to be imparted, whatever lessons were meant to be instilled, she still had to gather her composure before entering a room with people in it.

One person, in this case. The Wardens’ headquarters had some massive statues in the lobby, several stories tall, and this part of the second and third floors was essentially a series of catwalks forming half-circles around the statues, with a view of the lobby below. At this hour, long after most employees had gone home, there were only a half dozen people visible on the catwalks above and the floors below.

It made her think of the hospitals, doing her rounds.

She pressed her hand against the door but didn’t push, stopping to look at the tattoos, the clone-grown fingertips Riley had made for her. Bold black lines and spaces filled in with crimson. Gold tracery, far more fine, subtle but omnipresent, extending from the sun further up her arm. It was bolder than an ordinary tattoo might be, the gold close to actual gold.

A reminder. It still hurt every time. It still brought back memories of her lowest point.