Love Lost’s expression changed, as she leaned closer to Rain, until Gilpatrick worried she might hurt the boy. He stepped in, and she stopped.

“I don’t think we could, Nicole—Love Lost,” Rain said. “I don’t think I could cut you out of the room, or stop the dreams. We’re too enmeshed.”

“Try,” she rasped, her eyes glittering.

“It might kill you, or leave you stranded here. Or… something. It could leave you and me and Colt like the Capricorn brothers. Except… With chunks of each other left inside each other. I could separate them because they were just tacked on. There’s been no integration, no information sharing, no interrelated experiences.”

“Show me,” she said. “Let me see.”

“I…” he said, staring at her. In the background, more crystal was cracking and sloughing off. “…don’t really trust that you wouldn’t do something.”

“Wow,” Marcial said. “She jumps in there to save your life and this is the treatment she gets?”

“Uhhh,” Colt said, her eyes wide. “I kinda agree with Rain. She would.”

Love Lost scowled, then turned away.

“So… that was doable, because we have a good concentration of people here and a very cut and dry addition to this puzzle,” Rain said. He looked so nervous. “It’s a good test run—”

“One where you targeted us and brain damage, chunks of us left inside each other, and being stranded were possibilities,” Diaz said.

“For me as much as you. More than you. I’m—Love Lost, Colt and I, we’re integrated,” Rain said. “We don’t have a lot of time. The defenses are down, and there’s stuff I can be doing. I just need to find—”

He touched the crystal, then looked over the chasm at the lowest-tallest point of the hill.

“—Down there.”

“What’s down there?” Gilpatrick asked.

“Each island is a separate network. They broke apart and stopped being able to form bridges when Scion died. We want access to that network.”

“How do we get over there?”

“I think…” Rain said. “If I had to choose one part of my experiences I don’t need my—or our agents to keep to use against us…”

He touched the crystal.

The images, stuttering, often frozen, all changed, everywhere near them.

To a woman, not far off from Gilpatrick’s age, but so wispy, frail, and pale that she looked older than she was. Her eyes were cold, her mouth thin-lipped. Even though it was just an image, she managed to look down on everyone present.

“Might get—is getting a bit fucky,” Rain said.

The image spread, taking over the surroundings. It crawled across the ground, so that faces, stretches of face, and the woman’s cold eyes, all took individual facets of the landscape around them.

“Christine Mathers,” Kelly said.

With those words, like she had been invoked, scenes on nearby crystals showed a young Rain kneeling on a bedroom floor, while the woman held him by his hair, jerking his head this way and that while she screamed.