“What was the message?” he asked.

“Answers,” she said.

That particular line, he remembered very well. He had harbored some quiet resentment, that Alexandria had promised him that she and the newly-formed Protectorate would offer their full support in finding Zach.

As it happened, those three answers she had just provided had all proven to be lies. Communication? No. She had hidden what she was and where her true allegiances were. Cauldron. She herself had stolen children, he would later discover.

Sending a message? No. It had been about controlling the message, and the PRT had lost control of that when Alexandria had died. The Wardens would fail to send that message at all.

He felt anger, still, but it wasn’t the dream handing him that same anger he had felt as a teenager, fighting this gang. It was anger at himself.

Relentless approached Alexandria as a boy wearing cardboard. He met her eyes in passing, his gaze hard.

Her eyes were pink, and caught his full attention.

No longer her. Should I interpret that to mean I can’t expect any more answers?

Chevalier looked away from her, past the rubble of the damaged wall, and into New Delhi.

At Behemoth.

In the moment he found himself despairing. Realizing that after a fight like this, they wouldn’t have what it took to fight for another twenty years, maybe not even ten, or five. The first fight against an Endbringer where his plan wasn’t to fight his best and wait for the Triumvirate to handle it. Because the Triumvirate had been broken. It was false.

And he was the one in charge. Chevalier.

Depression.

“Are the thinkers ready?” he asked, louder than necessary, grabbing people’s attention away from the distant Endbringer.

“Downstairs, right below us.”

All he could do was to keep fighting.

All he’d been doing, ever since that moment, was fight. That was part of the problem.

Downstairs, past capes, past staff.

To face down the villains they’d brought with them.

Lab Rat. String Theory. Black Kaze. Teacher. Glaistig Uaine.

He stood on a mountaintop.

The test. The point where we pushed through it all. Every decision we’d made came home when Scion attacked. We had to find solutions, wherever they came from.

Make our peace with that.

They’d warned the dreams would be bad. On a level, they had been. Seeing Zach. The shock of triggering again. The anger. The betrayal. The despair. The compromise.

He felt as though he could handle it. That it wasn’t the nightmare he’d anticipated. This was…

…It was only part of the story.

Scion’s light lit up the sky.

Chevalier stood on a rooftop, his eyes adjusting as that light dimmed. When it faded, he looked out over the city, and felt shock, once again. Shock at the responsibility. The scale. The sheer force of the threats arrayed against him.