In the light curtain, the older Vi left prison the way she had entered most spaces in her life: first, without asking permission.
A deep breath. Hood up. The cable car waiting with its ticket and its orderly departure schedule. She ignored it, stepped off the platform edge, and began to move through the lower city's layered architecture the way water moves when it has found every possible path simultaneously. Roof to beam to suspended bridge to roof, dropping between tiers and catching herself without slowing.
"Caitlyn," in the curtain, looked at the cable car. Looked at the retreating figure. Looked at her shoes.
She threw away the ticket and jumped.
"Is that real?" Mylo was staring at the curtain. "She actually kept up?"
Curtain-Caitlyn landed on the next level with her knees bent, breathing hard, expression confirming that she was reclassifying this activity under things I am doing once because I have to and never again. But she had kept up.
"She's a tracker," Vi said, watching the screen. "She fixes on a target and she doesn't let go. That's what she does."
"Thank you," Caitlyn said, from beside her, with a flatness that communicated she had found approximately fifty percent of that description complimentary.
Vi did not look at her. Caitlyn did not look at Vi.
Jayce looked at both of them. He looked at the curtain. He looked at Caitlyn. He processed the arithmetic of the situation, which he was fairly certain had the same answer Liam's comment had already provided, and filed it under information he already had.
The curtain moved.
Jinx at the secret base. The old one, the childhood one, the place with the arcade machine and the toys and the memory of a particular arrangement of two people that had since been scattered. She stood in front of the boxing machine that had Vi's name at the top of the high score list.
She loaded credits. Started the machine. Started hitting it.
The numbers climbed. Her scores went up. Up past the respectable range, past the competitive range, into the range that indicated someone was hitting with genuine intent. The numbers kept climbing.
They settled second.
The name at first: still Vi. Still the record set years ago by a girl with more muscle and considerably more experience playing this specific game. Unreached.
Mylo laughed.
"What?" Powder said.
"She's older and she can't beat the old record," Mylo said. "That's just objectively funny."
"Boxing games reward technique, not strength," Vi said, very calmly, in a tone that indicated she had thought about this before. "A high score means you've played this game more. It doesn't mean anything about the actual comparison."
Mylo raised both hands. "I laughed. That's all. I didn't say anything comparative. I laughed."
Vi watched the curtain.
The curtain moved to the Black Alley. Older Vi, recently sprung from prison, needing information. She had a contact in mind. She had a method for getting through a door that required a specific kind of cover.
She found Caitlyn. She assessed her. She circled her once with the careful attention of a person evaluating available tools.
"You've got a good figure, Little Cake," she said. In the curtain. To curtain-Caitlyn.
She pushed her gently against the wall, leaning in, asking in a low voice whether it was men or women.
The bar watching the light curtain looked at the real Vi and the real Caitlyn simultaneously.
Both of them were looking at the screen.
Then they looked at each other.
Then they looked away.
Liam, without turning around, was smiling.
"It's defensive," Caitlyn said, after a moment, ostensibly to no one in particular. Her voice had the quality of someone producing analysis to give themselves somewhere to put their attention. "She doesn't want to show weakness in front of—" She stopped. "In front of someone she's just met. The jokes are a screen."
Vi looked at Caitlyn's profile.
"That's what I thought," she said.
"I know," Caitlyn said.
The fight in the curtain was a good fight, the kind where both participants know what they're doing and are doing it at their actual best, which made the ending more significant rather than less. The second-in-command had something in her besides technique. She had a word.
Curtain-Vi went still when she heard it.
Jinx.
The name her sister had taken. The last thing she had called her, in the worst moment of the worst night. The thing she'd said in rage, meaning only to wound and being more accurate than she intended.
Her sister had kept the name.
The blow that landed while she was processing this was the one that opened her.
Watching from the apartment, Vi kept her hands very still on her own knees.
Powder was watching the screen and then watching Vi, in rotation.
"It doesn't mean she agreed with you," Powder said, quietly. "Keeping the name."
Vi did not answer immediately. When she did, she said: "I know."
Caitlyn, from across the room, had the expression of someone choosing very carefully between several responses and settling on no response, which was the right choice.
The curtain showed Silco.
He had the girl with the braids in a basement with a river running through it. He was explaining something about identity. About what needs to die to make space for what replaces it. He had both hands on her head.
He pushed her under the water.
Vi was on her feet with something from the table in her hand before she had made a decision about it.
She threw it.
The object passed through the light curtain, as objects always did, and continued across the room.
"That's mine," Jayce said. He looked at the music box on the floor behind the curtain. He looked at Vi. He appeared to decide this was not the moment to make the primary argument about it.
The curtain moved.
The girl who surfaced was different in the specific way that people who have been remade are different: the fear was gone, which was progress, and the thing that replaced it was not peace.
Hextech work. Real progress. The same hands that had built bombs from available materials since childhood now had the theory to build things considerably more significant.
She went to the bar to show Silco. He wasn't there. Sevika was.
Sevika told her that Vi was alive. Was back. Was in the lower city.
Sevika also said: Vi had found a replacement.
"She knows," Caitlyn said, before anyone asked. "Sevika knows exactly what she's doing. She's been waiting for a moment to settle this, and she thinks this is it. She wants Jinx to explode. She said it specifically to produce that result."
Vi nodded. This was also what she thought.
Their thoughts had arrived in the same place at approximately the same time. They both registered that the other one had arrived there too.
Powder looked between them with the expression of someone watching a conversation that does not know it is a conversation yet.
The curtain moved into the final act of this episode.
A hiding place: an old apartment in the most dilapidated part of the lower city, the kind of building that had been standing for so long that it had stopped being maintained and started being preserved by inertia. Vi and Caitlyn inside. Vi hurt, the wound from the fight still doing what wounds do. Medicine needed.
Caitlyn had one valuable thing on her.
She came back with medicine and without the rifle.
She fed it to Vi. Careful, close, in the specific proximity of two people in a small space with a task that does not permit distance.
The curtain showed them looking at each other.
Powder covered her eyes.
Mylo made a sound.
"She looked at her mouth," Vi said, still facing the curtain.
"My mother is definitely watching this," Caitlyn said, facing the curtain.
She was correct. Across the canal in the Kiramman manor, Senator Kiramman was watching the light curtain from her balcony with a cup of tea that had gone cold. The light curtain, being large and present over the whole city, did not provide privacy as a setting for any of its featured participants. She watched her daughter and the lower-city girl look at each other across a mattress in a condemned building and put her forehead in her free hand.
Caitlyn, she thought, you absolute child.
Then Silco arrived.
The hiding place found. The calm broken. Vi and Caitlyn running.
From a high place above the city, someone had been watching for the smoke that matched the signal. She had kept the device through everything. She had not used it. She was watching for the moment that felt real enough to risk.
Vi saw it from the street.
The smoke was the same as she remembered. The signal was the same as she had taught her sister. The agreement they had made when Vi left for the assignment: if you need me, use this. I'll come.
She ran at the fastest speed she had.
The scene that followed had the weight of years in it. Curtain-Vi arriving at the high place, hearing the voice, the turn. The face.
The face that appeared: not Jinx's face. Not the one that had been in the factory and the prison and every bad story since. The one from before all of that. Open, startled, entirely present in the way of someone who has been braced for disappointment and is discovering it isn't arriving.
The sisters held each other.
Vi: she had not abandoned her. She had been taken. Thrown away. What she said in the factory had not been the truth. It had been the worst moment of a very bad night and she had been seventeen years old.
Jinx: everything changed. She changed too. She knew what she was now. She was not sure Vi could accept what she had become.
Powder, in the apartment, watched this, and her hands were around her knees, and she said, very quietly: "She was afraid her sister would look at her and see someone else."
Vi had one arm around her, the way she always did, quiet and without announcement.
Powder watched the curtain.
She knew every step that led there. She knew which ones she was not going to take, and she knew why, and she held the small Nen light in her palm and thought: that is not what happens to me.