He shifted his weight a bit. The wind was blowing through the alley, and it felt nice. It was cool, with what would be the first hints of spring, but Earth Bet wasn’t really in a state for ‘spring’.

“They’re not inclined to let you out, Jacob. They intend to collapse the effect and kill you in the process. They’ve already started elsewhere. You’re second to last, and at the rate they’re going, accounting for travel time, it will be another seven weeks, and three days. In the meantime, you get your ruins. You get your blood. You get to be king of your own desolate little world.”

He looked back at Sveta.

She motioned for him to continue.

Sighing, he kept talking, “I’m not sure what to say, and I don’t like not being sure. For much of my life, including the glimmers of my father’s life that I sometimes remember, your Kurt, I knew exactly what I was doing and where I belonged. I had goals, I met those goals.”

The man within the time effect writhed, hands clutching at his opening stomach wound as if he could stop it from happening. He staggered, and hurled himself against the invisible wall, cracking his head open. It was quick and violent enough that Five was startled.

The time loop carried the man back to his prior iteration.

“I know what you might say, if you were still Jacob. But what about the golden man? What about Scion? We were supposed to stop him before this happened. We failed there. I think this is where we confess that we, and I’m speaking for my brothers, myself, and my father… we didn’t really care. Our goal was to understand the world, bring it into a kind of order, and see if we couldn’t counteract you. Deep down, I don’t think my father wanted to defeat you, or he might have tried. Good thing, too, because those instincts of yours… they’re something more, according to the after-action reports in the Wardens’ files. He would have died trying.”

The man flung himself into the wall again. Cracking his head open. Five didn’t jump, this time. He waited for the man to cycle back to awareness.