“Then why don’t you go?” I asked. “Can you reach out for help? Um, we need a biotinker—”

“You won’t find any,” Chris said.

“Or… fuck it. My sis—”

I paused, mid-sentence.

She’d been there in the fighting, hadn’t she? It felt like a fleeting thought, or something that could have been a false memory. Was that before or after the Mathers Giant thing resolved?

I couldn’t remember what had happened to her, and the fact I couldn’t remember came with a heaping of dissonance. It was like having a body that didn’t line up, my self-image as a pretty high schooler at stark odds with a wretched, sprawling mess of flesh and tangled limbs, enough to take up every bit of space on a couch, with some hanging over armrests and spilling out to rest awkwardly on the floor.

“You won’t find her. She won’t cooperate,” Chris said. “You don’t get it. This is the Simurgh winning.”

Horror swept over me, belated, a smooth transition from the dissonant horror that was so tied into those two years of memory.

“Victoria,” Sveta said. Bringing me back to reality, just a bit. She was at the doorway.

“Bio-tinker. Or my sister. Or the means of getting Riley and her project to the epicenter of everything.”

Sveta nodded once, then made her exit from the room, rushing. The door slid closed, banging on impact.

A momentary silence followed.

“It won’t be that bad,” Chris said. “Not for a few generations. That’ll be because she’s lulling us into a false sense of security, but eh. We’ll be dead after that.”

“I don’t think you have any conception of what it’s going to be like,” Rain said.

“Being mind controlled, in a fucked up society driven by even more fucked up systems? I’ve endured that ever since waking up on the eve of Gold Morning. Implanted instincts, until I reached the lab where I was forced to fill my head with the original Lab Rat’s memories and experiments. Two years, pretty much. All while this city pretended to be functional.”

“I can tell you that you’re way off because I’ve lived it my entire life, until a month ago,” Rain said. “Your two years is easy, compared to that.”

“No, it’s not easy at all,” Chris said. “But it’s better than oblivion, and that’s what Victoria’s plan amounts to. You chose living over oblivion when you decided to wake up and keep going, every day you lived with the Fallen. You made the same damn decision I’m making right now.”

“There was hope, then. There’s not hope in the Simurgh’s world.”

“I can recall the very therapy session when you said it felt hopeless, Rain,” Chris growled. “But you kept going. If I respected you for anything, it was for that. Survival first.”