Five stared at the man, watching his head move, eyes blinking slowly, face contorting, before everything snapped back to its prior position. The light was bright, but it wasn’t the eyes that had to adjust. It was the mind, which would tick forward unimpeded toward a time when this landmass was underwater.

Except… there was nothing there.

Broken, cringing, inarticulate, the man struggled, wincing as an invisible blade dragged across his midsection. The blade was withdrawn, time passed, and the man, no longer Jacob or Jack or anything resembling either, was cut open again.

There were one or two moments where the roving gaze of the man fell on Five’s own eyes. Locked gaze.

I know you, he thought. If there was anything there, I would see it. A microscopic dilation of the pupils. Something. And if you don’t recognize me…

There’s no point. No words that can be exchanged.

Dissatisfied, Five turned away.

“Leaving already?”

For an instant, he thought the voice was Jacob’s. Then calculations asserted themselves, and let him triangulate the fractional difference in the sounds each ear heard, identifying the source. The voice was too familiar.

Sveta was perched on one of the hands in the alleyway, three hundred and sixty-seven centimeters above the ground.

“There’s no point,” he told her. “He’s not there anymore.”

“People visit graves, even if they don’t believe the person is there looking down on them.”

“Or up at them, I imagine,” he told her.

“I’m loving the snark,” she told him. “Now go give it a shot, Five. You wanted me to help you break out of your mold and see if we couldn’t get you to a better place. This is me doing that. Go. Vent your emotions. Go be angry. Or connect to the part of you who liked the part of him that was friendly or decent. If that was ever a thing.”

“This, standing at thirty-four point oh-seven-nine-six degrees north, one hundred and eighteen point three-six-one-two degrees west, is a boy named Five who does not do emotional.”

“Give it a shot,” she told him. “You came all this way, and you said he won’t be here for that much longer.”

Five turned, and walked back over to the man.

“I don’t know if you heard,” he said. “They’re going to kill you.”

The man briefly met his eyes, still too lost in his own head to recognize anything, or respond to anything.

“Breaking time effects apparently creates a ninety-four point one percent chance that the person or people within trigger or second trigger the instant they’re out. We’re not seeing many more broken triggers, but they’re still wary, still making sure they can communicate with the person on the other side and prepare them.”