“No cage or caginess,” Chris said. “You had the project idea. Riley Davis knew the steps to take and talked me through them. I decided to do something else instead.”

“What was that something?” I asked.

“Insurance.”

“For?” I asked, my voice tense, quiet. My collarbone was radiating pain with every heartbeat, and my heartbeat was so heavy I felt like it was rocking my entire body. For us? For humanity?

“For me. You’re looking at it.”

The fur was becoming feathers. The way it changed color suggested it was more than normal hair or feathers. Alive from root to tip.

“Why the fuck why did you drop it?” I asked. “Did you not fathom what we’re trying to do?”

“I fathom,” he said. His tone of voice had changed a fraction with his ongoing transformation.

“I’m not sure I fathom the big plan,” Rain said. “But Victoria thinks it might work, the Warden leadership thinks it’s doable as a last ditch resort. I trust them. If you think it won’t work, I’d love to hear why. You’re pretty smart when it comes to stuff like this.”

“I think it might work,” Chris said.

“Then why?” I asked, with all the intensity I could muster with my collarbone as fucked up as it was.

“Because it might not,” Chris told me. “Because it requires you to have faith in everyone out there…”

He extended a knobby finger, tipped by a black nail.

“…And I don’t.”

“What do you think is going to happen, Cryptid?” I asked. “How is what you’re doing better?”

“What happened with the Simurgh?” he asked.

“Answer my questions first.”

“The scream tapered off. I don’t think she died. She left. From the state of you and your focus on this, you did enough damage to her that you’re fairly confident she’s not about to pull off her endgame.”

“Answer the questions, Chris,” Sveta said.

“I don’t trust the people out there. I do trust the Simurgh’s malice. That world she wants to create? Where everyone’s screaming? I can deal. I can keep my mind intact. A world with nobody to bother me, I can read books, comics, and catch up on old games for as long as I want.”

“Chris, there are so many things wrong with that that I don’t even know where to begin,” Sveta said. “That you think anyone could be happy or sane with zero human contact for that long…”

“Like the people you sent off to a prison world?” he asked. “No, I can manage, trust me. I know myself. And if I want company, I can pick someone and inoculate them.”

“The power dynamics would be so fucked up, doing that,” Sveta said.

“Not if I picked the right people. A tinker like Riley Davis here…”

“No,” Riley said, through the computers. “I don’t want it. Not the inoculation, not that life… not with you. If I could keep myself from coming after you for letting the world fall into the Endbringer’s clutches, I’d eventually lose it and come after you at some other points.”