The wind carrying them over the canal smelled pleased with itself.
This was not a thing that wind could usually be said to do, but Liam had been paying close enough attention to the local energy field for two days now to notice when it changed quality, and the field had a warmth to it since the arrow. Many people in the lower city had spoken Janna's name in the last twenty minutes. An old coastline guardian, weakened and quiet for centuries, being addressed by the people she had originally formed around: that had to feel like something.
"Even the upper class can't breathe," Mylo said, looking down at the green-tinted streets of Piltover as they passed over the canal.
"It'll clear," Vi said, watching the Parliament Building's green waterfall disperse into the surrounding avenues. "When it's gone, the city goes back to exactly how it was." She did not say this with any particular bitterness. It was observation. "Same as always."
"Unless the actual source gets cleaned up," Claggor said, pushing his goggles up.
Powder was not listening to this conversation. She was looking at the upper city from the air, at the scale of it, at the hextech structures and the light and the long horizontal distances between things that had room to be far apart from each other. She had seen it from rooftops. She had never seen it from here.
"We should call it Green Street," she said. "Just for this morning."
Claggor smiled. Mylo opened his mouth and then apparently decided this one was fine.
Caitlyn opened the balcony door before anyone knocked.
"No Enforcement watching the building," Shizuku noted, checking the street below.
"Because I told my mother the light curtain would continue today," Caitlyn said, "and my mother told the Council to wait and see."
Vi stopped in the doorway.
"You told them."
"I told my mother. The Council finding out is a consequence of having a mother on the Council."
"That's—"
"That's not how I define it," Caitlyn said, holding her gaze.
The temperature in the room increased.
Jayce positioned himself between them with the practiced efficiency of someone who has been doing this particular task for years and has developed a reliable technique. "She did it to keep the Enforcement off our backs for today, which it has, so—"
From Caitlyn's palm, a small ball of light appeared. Steady. Controlled. Not threatening. Present.
Vi's expression changed from confrontational to something more complex.
Mylo said: "Did she also practice overnight?"
"Don't compare us," Caitlyn said to no one in particular, and dissipated the light.
"Why do you look like me?" Powder said, from beside Vi, with genuine curiosity rather than offense.
"I was going to ask you the same thing," Caitlyn said.
Liam said, pleasantly and with the specific satisfaction of someone making a true observation at the correct moment: "Blue hair, excellent aim, highly perceptive, and both extremely fond of Vi."
"She's fond of Vi?" Powder looked at Caitlyn.
"Can you shoot?" Caitlyn asked Powder, redirecting.
"With a paintball gun," Mylo said, before Powder could answer. "A homemade one. We don't have access to—"
"Homemade?" Caitlyn's expression had moved entirely to a different register. "You designed it yourself?"
"And modified it. The first version had a rate-of-fire issue so I rebuilt the chamber and—"
Caitlyn crouched down and looked at Powder at eye level with the intense focus of someone who has found, unexpectedly, the rarest category of person: another one like herself.
"Come to my house sometime," she said. "My shooting range is on a mountain."
"A whole mountain," Jayce confirmed.
The silence that followed this contained Mylo and Claggor exchanging a look that covered a significant amount of ground in a short time about the gap between their respective circumstances and the shooting ranges available to the upper city's daughters.
"Does the invitation include Vi?" Powder asked, with the tone of someone asking a clarifying question that has at least two agendas.
Caitlyn glanced at Vi. Glanced away. Smiled. "Of course."
Mylo and Claggor waited to be mentioned. The moment passed. They were not mentioned.
Liam clapped once. Outside the balcony, in the sky above Piltover, the light curtain had returned.
Blinky produced popcorn.
Several buckets, several flavors, an arrangement of drinks. The buckets went to the people who were going to appreciate them; Caitlyn received black tea. Mylo and Claggor received one of everything, because Shizuku had made a reasonable assessment.
Jayce had not moved from his chair since the light curtain appeared. He was watching with the concentration of a man who has a very specific interest in the next several hours of programming.
The opening scene showed him several years older, in conversation with a small, ancient, extremely authoritative professor whose authority rested in significant part on the fact that he had been around long enough to watch several civilizations make the same mistakes. The conversation was about something new. Something that had changed the city, that was changing it, that was going to keep changing it. A large-scale version of the teleportation magic worked in the bar last night, built to move cargo airships across the world.
The Hex Gate.
Jayce sat forward in his chair. His notes were already open. In the margin of one page, he had sketched exactly this.
"My conjecture," he said quietly, to nobody in particular, "was right."
The older Caitlyn in the curtain was in a crowd. An Enforcement uniform. A celebration event. She was maintaining order at a perimeter, which was the definition of exactly the kind of task assigned to someone who has been kept away from anything that could provide opportunity or risk.
The real Caitlyn watched this with a quality of stillness that required maintenance.
She was not surprised. She knew her mother. She had known, for some time, that the path between wanting to be an Enforcer and being meaningfully one rather than ornamentally one was going to involve something other than her mother's direct support.
She was just now seeing it rendered in detail in a light curtain above a city, which made it harder to hold with the same composure she usually brought to plans that might fail.
The curtain moved forward.
A port platform. A cargo transfer operation. From the airship's lower holds, shapes moved in the wrong direction: Silco's operation running a shipment. And from the shadows of the platform, a different group: flying boards, masks, coordinated and fast. The Firelight Gang, Vi said, without looking away.
The two forces met. Then from the smoke of the firefight, the airship's hold opened, and a figure came out.
She had blue hair in two long braids that reached her heels. Cloud-pattern tattoos on both arms, visible even from a distance. Across her back: a machine gun that had been modified past any standard specification by someone who understood machines from the inside and had asked only one question of them, which was how much.
She pulled the trigger.
The room watched the rate of fire in silence.
Caitlyn had forgotten, briefly, how to keep her professional assessment of the weapon from appearing entirely on her face.
"Pow-Pow," Mylo said.
"That's not me," Powder said, at the same moment that everyone looked at her.
"Not you," Claggor agreed. "But you were smiling."
Powder looked at her own face, as if trying to check from the inside.
"A little," she admitted.
"Not the bad kind," Vi said, pulling her close. "Mylo, close your eyes and practice."
The curtain moved to the aftermath. Years after Episode Three. Vander's bar under different management: Silco at the bar, and the girl with the braids at the table, and a conversation between them. Silco said a name. Not Powder. Not Pow-Pow.
Jinx.
Vi stood up.
"That bastard," she said, and the word came out flat and controlled in the way of something that has been held tightly for exactly as long as it needed to be and is now being released at a measured pace.
Mylo said, slowly: "Is it because she asked him to change her name? Or is it because he'd already decided to—"
"It's a knife," Caitlyn said.
Everyone looked at her.
She was still watching the curtain, not particularly loudly, in the tone of someone continuing an analysis they had been running internally for the last forty minutes.
"He saw a girl who had been left behind, who blamed herself for what happened, who was told she was a jinx. He recognized that shape because it was his own. Vander left him. Jinx was left by Vi. Both abandoned. He told himself the situations were equivalent."
She stopped.
Vi was watching her.
"But they're not equivalent," Caitlyn continued. "At the end of Episode Three, Vi hit her sister and walked away. That's true. But she was seventeen years old and had just watched two people she loved die in front of her because of the device in her sister's hands. She came back around almost immediately. She was already in control of herself before Silco even reached Powder. What Vi did was make a mistake. What Vander did was walk away from Silco permanently, knowing what he was doing, and never come back."
The curtain showed Silco and the girl who was now Jinx at the table.
"Silco doesn't love her. He loves a reflection. A version of himself that he's been carrying since Vander left. He looked at a blue-haired girl who'd been called a jinx and made herself small to apologize for existing, and he saw himself, twenty years ago, trying to get a dead man's approval." Caitlyn's voice had the precision of someone who does not often say what they actually think and is, for one careful moment, saying it. "The name he gave her is a description of what he needs her to be. Not what she is."
Silence.
Jayce's expression suggested he was revising his understanding of who his friend was.
"I've watched four episodes," Caitlyn said, very slightly defensively. "I observed. I drew conclusions. That's all."
"How did you get all that from four episodes?" Mylo said.
"Pay attention," Caitlyn said, "and it's in every scene."
The curtain moved on.
Older Caitlyn in a prison, visiting a prisoner whose jaw had been broken, finding the prisoner was Vi. The prison clothes. The years. The quality of a person who has been kept somewhere for a long time and has made the choice, available to people with this specific kind of stubbornness, to remain entirely themselves regardless.
Mylo had stopped talking.
Claggor had put his goggles on, which was the thing Claggor did when he needed something between himself and what he was watching.
"If we're watching this," Caitlyn said, "we can choose differently. Whatever decisions led here, we've seen them. They're not surprises anymore."
She looked around at each of them.
"There's still time. As long as there's still time, change it."
In the curtain, the older Jinx had found research notes. Jayce's research notes. She was reading them at speed, not casually. Her hands moved over the pages with the quality of a person for whom mechanical principle is a language they were born speaking.
Then the experiment. The hextech device in her makeshift space. The blue energy bursting and going wrong and becoming, for one uncontrolled moment, the exact shape of everything that had happened in a factory years ago.
She ran.
Claggor took his goggles off and set them on his knee.
Vi pulled Powder against her without making an announcement about it.
Powder, in her sister's arms, looked at the Nen she had gathered in her palm during the last half-hour without really noticing she was doing it. The small ball of light moved with the easy responsiveness of something that was already part of her.
She looked at the curtain.
She looked at the light.
She did not feel like the person in the curtain. She had watched every choice that led there and she knew which she had made and which she had not made and which she was going to make differently, now that she could see them in advance.
She held the light in her palm and thought: no. That is not me.
And meant it.