“Okay. I have my back to you.” I looked out over the grounds my first team had been decimated on, seeing each of the suits present in my mind's eye. Other than a few inevitable glances, I’d been doing my best to avoid it. Now I was forced to fully take it in. To remember and relieve every moment of what had happened.

Beyond the tracks, Steinbeck had caught the movement and began to pull his earbuds out. I signaled for him to stay where he was, and he got the message, shrugging and replacing the bud.

Somehow, I’d managed not to turn around. For all I knew, there was some monster mimicking her voice, luring me into dropping my guard. It was something in her voice that stopped me. The Sae I knew had been a proud person—bordering on arrogant at times. When she’d spoken—if it was her—the last two words, “Don’t look,” had been suffused with so much shame and pathos she’d sounded like someone else entirely. I’d been so convinced she was dead, just seeing her would have made all the difference when it came to silencing doubt. It felt like some Ancient Greek or Biblical parable, where the simple act of looking would cost me everything.

Still. Don’t look. Why wouldn’t she want me to look?

If it were me, and I’d been trapped in a dank, fetid dungeon for over a day, very little would stop me from racing out the moment the door opened. Gray-hair said he had no idea what happened to a User if they stayed in the area during a trial collapse. Only that he wasn’t sure whether they could survive.

Joshua Denborough came to me again, his flayed arm reaching up from the floor of flesh.

There were a million different possibilities between alive and dead. Each uglier than the last.

To add to the complexity, this sort of situation was not my strength. Interrogation, intimidation, manipulation, and shock tactics came easily. Gently coaxing a scared and possibly injured person into doing something I wanted, with no leverage to speak of, was entirely uncomfortable. While I understood the basics, it would be too easy to slip back into old habits.

Should I use Cruel Lens?

Something floated to the surface of my mind. An image of walking through middle-school corridors looking for my sister, eventually finding her stowed away in her locker, unwilling to come out. It would have been easier to force her. But I didn’t. I’d been uncharacteristically patient, enunciating carefully in front of the vent, so she could see and hear me. Eventually, I’d said the right thing, and she’d come out on her own. An aspect that hadn’t seemed important to me at the time, but Iris had taken me aside to thank me for later.

This was different. Sae was an adult and my sister was a child. But Cruel Lens was a bludgeon. Maybe a more subtle version of that passive approach I’d taken with Iris was the better course.

“Is Jinny really dead?” Sae asked. “I cracked the door to look out, once. Her body was gone.”

“Yes. I did everything I could, but she’s gone. Got her User core and hid it, just in case there’s a chance we can bring her back.”

“Do you think that’s really possible?” Sae asked.

I hesitated, then answered. “Probably not.”

“She was the best of us, I think” Sae replied. She sounded more distant than before, as if she was drifting away.

“What do we do now?” I asked, mindful to keep my voice low and gentle.

There was a long, painful silence before Sae spoke. “You showed up, like you said you would. Promise fulfilled. Now leave.”

I ignored the knee-jerk dismissal. If she’d really wanted me to leave, all she had to do was stay silent in the first place. “Are you hurt?“

“No.”

“We didn’t bring much in. How are you doing on food?”

“I’m fine, Matt… there’s plenty to eat.” There was a hint of revulsion in her voice. I ignored it, and all the horrible implications carried with it.

“That’s not what I was asking. Anyway, some businesses are opening up again, courtesy of selve circulation hitting the public.” I reached in my inventory and pulled out a bag marked with golden arches. “Had to drive all the way to Northside, but I got you something.” I held the bag out to the side and wiggled it.

“My favorite.” Sae said dryly. “How do I get the feeling you already knew that?”

I shrugged, opting for honesty. “Observation is my strong suit. People watching’s part of that. I’m not some freak, I don’t usually notice diet, but you stuck out a bit. Every few weeks, you’d ditch the perfectly composed salad and whip out a quarter pounder in the cafeteria while your friends acted like you were killing the cow in front of them.”

“God. What a stalker.” The accusation was a weak jab by her standards.

“Is it really stalking if I do it to everyone?”

“Who knows.” Sae said.

“Want it or not?” I asked, realizing I sounded like a grumpier version of Steinbeck.

“I could eat,” She confirmed, a bit too quickly.

I considered the current situation. My wheelchair was blocking the door open, and I was holding the bag in one hand. “Sae, hand to god I’m not fucking with you here, but I don’t know how to get this to you. That black water’s still on the ground and will bleed through the bag and ruin the food if I just put it down behind me. I’d check to see if there’s anywhere to place it, but I can’t turn around.”

“Just hold it there.”

Simultaneously, I sent a message to Steinbeck.

Had to hand it to his professionalism. Steinbeck didn’t blink or ask questions. I watched as he read the message, then immediately dropped into a crouch behind a cement pylon. A small hand mirror appeared to the side of the pylon, pointed towards the doorway.

I held the bag out further from my side. Suddenly, there was a presence behind me, unlike anything I’d ever felt. A quick blur of motion flashed by the fringes of my extended periphery, and the bag was gone.

Something about the exchange shook me. I’d never heard her footsteps in the water. She was there, for one moment, then gone. Across the tracks, the mirror was still hovering on the same place. Only now, it was vibrating somewhat, as if the hand holding it was shaking.

There was a rustling noise from further back in the hallway, followed by a gagging sound. “Ugh. Pickles.”

“Guess I’m a bad stalker.”

“Sorry. It’s good, Matt. Really… really good.” There was a muted noise that could have been a stifled sob.

The exchange hadn’t been quite as simple as it seemed. I’d positioned myself outside the doorway, intentionally holding the bag a few inches from the entrance. Sae had simply taken it instead of asking me to move the bag inside the doorway. I had no way of knowing if there was some psychological restriction or system fuckery binding her to the trial, but I now had confirmation that there was no physical barrier keeping her from leaving.

Still, we were at an impasse. Sae was completely withdrawn into herself, either unable or unwilling to volunteer more information.

“I’ll leave you alone, if that’s what you really want. But I have to ask. Why won’t you just come back with me? The suits are gone. It’s safe now.”

“Nothing is safe anymore. And even if it was, there’s nowhere for me to go, helpline,” Sae whispered. “My mom and dad—they barely tolerated me before. If I went back to them like this, they’d never forgive me.”

Nick’s place was unoccupied since the kidnapping, but seeing as how it was likely still on the suits' radar, that was probably a bad idea. My lip curled in irritation at the idea of Sae’s parents turning her away in a moment of need.

“Fuck ‘em. I have a whole goddamn region of people who owe me. The least they can do is help find a place for you.”

“I don’t want anyone to see me like this.”

“We can—“

“No. We can’t. You don’t understand.” She raised her voice, until it was a strangled cry. “You can’t possibly get what it’s like.”

“Then tell me. I want to understand.”

She struggled through it, voice breaking. “I waited… my entire life. To not look at myself in the mirror and hate what I saw. For my reflection to match the person I am inside. Slowly suffocating over a lifetime of living in someone else’s skin. And finally—finally, I got the chance to be who I wanted to be. I could breathe.”

Several things clicked into place. Least of which, the reason Sae felt so uncomfortable with the idea of going home.

“I knew from the moment I saw my title that the system was cruel. And I was right. It’s all gone. Everything I fought so hard for. And now… I’m suffocating again.”

It took everything I had to temper the rage growing within me. Just like with Astrid and Astria, the system seemed to enjoy doing this. Taking people's worst fears and throwing them in their faces.

“You’re right. I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like.” I tapped my fingers on the armrest. “But I’ll tell you this, Sae. I’m living evidence that the system can be beaten. I managed to stop an event that should have been inevitable. It’s neither perfect, nor infallible. We just have to find the loophole.”

“You really believe that, helpline?”

I nodded. “I’m not promising a fix. Or that whatever’s happened can be reversed. There’s no way to know for sure. But there’s a chance. And if there’s a way, we’ll find it.”

“I want them to hurt.” Her voice was raw. “The people who killed Jinny and kidnapped Nick. I want them to feel what we felt.”

“Now that?” I smiled coldly. “That I can guarantee. The wheels are already in motion. They’ll pay for what they did. One way or another. But for the best chance of that happening, I need you in my corner.”

“I’m not an idiot. I know you’re manipulating me.”

“Guilty as charged. That doesn’t make it any less true.”

“Jinny won’t be the last person we lose,” Sae said. Her voice trembled. “And from what little you’ve said, it sounds like you just went through hell. People stumbling over each other, squabbling over pieces of this shit-city. What are you even fighting for?”

I considered that. In reality, there were more than a few times I nearly gave up. What kept me going was the same line of thought that struck me in the beginning. “When was the last time you watched the news or pulled it up on your phone before the dome came down?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Me neither,” I admitted. “And I think it’s because we all learned to stop caring. Apathy as a defense mechanism. The people in charge never gave a fuck about us. Things rarely changed, and when they did, it was either too slow or directly to our detriment. But now, everything is changing. And there’s not a room packed with out-of-touch fossils driving that transformation. It’s us. Yes, there’s opposition, both human and otherwise, and an agenda beyond our capacity to understand. Yet, for the first time, we have the power to affect that change.”

My thoughts went to the Allfather, and the unique role I’d been entrusted with.

“I don’t know how it’ll shake out. Realistically, whatever we end up with could be far worse than what we had in the first place. But even if it drags us into the dark, I think we have to do everything we can to guide that change.”

“You might be delusional,” Sae groused.

“Entirely possible. Haven’t taken my meds for like three days,” I half-joked. Born Nihilist did an excellent job warding off my more harrowing symptoms, but I had no idea if it worked as a long-term replacement. When she didn’t laugh, I lowered my voice and prompted her. “Come back with me, Sae?”

“Okay.” Her voice was closer. She was standing right behind me.

Slowly, I turned around, affirming over and over again how necessary it was to not visibly react, no matter how bad it was.

My mind didn’t process the image correctly, at first. It almost looked like she was wearing a black diving suit, complemented by strange, stalagmite-ish shaped spikes of dark face-paint around her chin and jaw. Her face and hair were largely the same, but the entire surface of her eyes was dark red, with an almost octagonal pattern. Two appendages extended from the sides of her mouth, similar to mandibles.

It was only then, when I realized they were mandibles, that I realized the black bodysuit wasn’t armor. It was carapace, or chitin. She’d been changed in accordance with the theme of the trial. I looked down, and found that along with an extra joint her legs were unnaturally thin, and seemed to naturally bend backwards now.

“How bad is it?” Sae asked. Despite her fierce exterior, she looked uncharacteristically fragile, like the wrong word could easily blow her away. “I couldn’t see everything, in the water. Just bits and pieces. Jesus Christ, helpline, your face is frozen like it’s stuck that way. Fuck. Just say it… I’m hideous… right?

I wanted to tell her she was beautiful, but when she finally got a good look at herself, she’d probably assume I’d lied. She wasn’t monstrous, as I’d feared. Just foreign, and different, and difficult to describe. But we’re always our own worst critics, and what she saw in the mirror would be vastly different from my impression.

“Not at all. You’re still you. Still the friend who kicked this trial’s ass with me.” I pushed myself out of the chair, grunting from the pain and exertion. Then, I reached out a hand. When she took it, I pulled her out of the trial hall into me, and hugged her gently. She clung tightly back, sobbing a handful of times before she fell silent.

“Welcome back.”