The light curtain episode ended with Jinx standing on the platform alone.
Everyone else was gone. Vi. Caitlyn. The hextech gemstone. The Firelight Gang. All of them swept away in the confusion of the firefight and the smoke, leaving behind only a girl with blue braids on an empty platform and the echo of a name she had screamed into the space where her sister had been.
"Vi? No—!"
Then dark.
The apartment was quiet for a moment after.
"That's not a trap," Vi said. Her voice was flat and controlled. "The Firelight Gang had their own agenda. I had no idea they'd be there. Caitlyn had no idea."
"I know," Powder said.
"She can't know that," Claggor said quietly, to no one in particular. "From where she's standing at that moment, everything she sees confirms what Sevika said."
"The Firelight Gang leader is Ekko," Powder said.
Mylo's hand hit his knee. "Of course! Where was he this whole time?"
"If Jinx recognized him," Claggor continued, rubbing the side of his face, "and then watched Vi and Ekko leaving together after years apart, and then the gemstone was gone—" He stopped. "I can't even blame her for reading it wrong."
Powder was sitting very still, watching the dark light curtain.
She had recognized the Firelight Gang leader earlier in the episode. She had not said anything, waiting to see if anyone else would say it first. She had a theory about how the end of Episode Four looked to the person standing on the platform alone with a weapon and a history of being told she was the problem, and the theory was almost entirely correct, and she had sat with it quietly for twenty minutes.
"All right," Liam said. He stood, stretched, and clapped once. "That's the session. The curtain continues tomorrow if anyone wants to be here." He looked at Vi. "Do you need me to take you back, or are you set?"
"We're not children," Vi said.
"No," Liam said, agreeably. "Jayce, before I go: if I asked you to build a small hexgate, what would you need?"
Jayce blinked. Then reached for paper.
He wrote quickly, with the focused efficiency of a man who has been thinking about this problem for years and has the list approximately memorized. The materials, the quantities, the specifications of the crystals. He tore the list off and handed it over.
"How are you going to get all of that?" he asked.
"That's my problem," Liam said pleasantly.
A breeze moved through the apartment from the balcony.
Vi looked up. Liam was gone.
"I keep missing how he does that," Mylo said.
The Philos manor was in the upper city where the older money lived, behind a wall that communicated its function without decoration.
The woman inside was pacing on the stone path that ran through the center garden, and her footsteps made a specific sound: the light, precise tap of alloy blades on stone rather than heels. The legs were mostly machine from the knee down. The rest of her was partially so: modifications done with the care of someone who had been making these decisions for a very long time and had developed a consistent philosophy about which parts were worth replacing.
In the center of her chest, through the gap in her coat, a crystal caught the light. Blue, alive in its own way, doing the work a heart was supposed to do and apparently doing it well.
She was watching the light curtain.
"Your feet," said a voice from behind her, "are going to be a problem in someone else's house."
Her eyes lit blue. She scanned. Nothing. The scan recalibrated, optical enhancement active, and she found it: a field of energy so dense and pervasive it had blended into the ambient air of the entire manor. Even the insects had gone quiet. The wind itself had stopped moving, as if it had decided to step aside.
The center of the field was her.
She had been inside it for some time without noticing.
A hand settled on her shoulders from behind.
She stepped forward, pivoted, and brought one blade up in a horizontal arc at neck height.
The blade made contact. She felt the resistance. Then no more resistance: the cut stopped moving inward at the dermis and would not advance.
She pushed. The hand on the blade pushed back, easy, no struggle.
"Excellent form," Liam said, from behind the blade. "You almost got me that time." He considered. "Almost."
Camille released the blade and stepped back. Her eyes had shifted to yellow: threat assessment mode, running the available data. Height, build, posture, energy field that covered a manor, a blade that had cut things considerably harder than human skin stopped by something she could not identify.
"Who are you," she said.
"Passing through. Curious about two things." He pointed at the crystal in her chest. "How does that work. And whether someone whose body is substantially mechanical can still learn to use aura."
Camille's eyes moved from him to the list in his hand, to the crystal in her own chest, to the light curtain still playing above the manor.
"And third," Liam said, reading her expression with the ease of someone who had spent a long time studying faces, "can someone like you be controlled by a specific technique I use." He appeared to decide this did not need to be said out loud. "The answer is probably yes. You have skin."
He showed her the list.
"Tuition fee for the answers," he said. "Materials for a small hex gate. Jayce has the specifications. Your supplier should have most of these in stock."
The Fugen Tavern smelled like yesterday's food and current occupation.
People had settled in for the afternoon: the bar doing its version of normal business while several people from two different city districts sat in the main room doing things that were not typical bar activities, including practicing the four Nen basics with varying degrees of focus.
Liam came back through the door with Shizuku at his side.
Caitlyn was sitting at a corner table.
"Why is the young lady here?" Shizuku said, not unkindly.
"The upper city tour ran its course," Caitlyn said. "I found my way over." She had a cup of something in front of her that she had presumably ordered from behind the bar. She looked entirely comfortable, which was either natural confidence or something she had decided to project. "I wanted to see what the light curtain looked like from this side."
Liam looked around the bar. The regulars had accommodated the newcomers with the pragmatic hospitality of people who had decided that the last two days had been strange enough that one more piece of strangeness was not worth remarking on.
Shizuku raised her hand. Blinky arrived. The vacuum fish opened and produced a collection of boxes from Camille's supply chain, stacked in a quantity that implied she had been thorough. Twenty hextech crystals in the top crate, packed in insulating material, each one a compact blue sun.
The bar had been watching. The bar now stepped back as a unit.
"Those things explode," someone said, from the back.
Vander set a bottle on the bar. The sound it made was not loud but it had a quality that worked effectively.
The bar discussion level dropped one notch.
Jayce had already reached the crates. He was opening boxes with the contained excitement of someone opening something they have been waiting for without knowing when they would get it. He took the crystals out individually, held each one up, checked it against Camille's documentation.
"Perfect grade," he said, to himself. "These are perfect grade."
A head appeared above the bar counter.
White hair, dark skin, the specific wariness of someone who has been listening to a conversation from under the furniture and is now deciding whether to enter it.
The eyes went to Jayce. To the crates. To Liam.
"You're going to build a hex gate here?" Ekko said.
Shizuku looked at him. "The leader of the Firelight Gang," she said, to Liam.
"Future leader," Liam said. "Current version seems younger."
Ekko came out from behind the bar. He was not small for his age but he carried himself in the specific way of people who have learned to make themselves look larger through posture and stillness when the situation calls for it. He had the expression of someone who had watched several hours of light curtain that day and had spent most of them watching a version of himself operate.
"I gave Vi the information," he said. "About the apartment. The invention. I was the one who set that whole thing up." He was talking to the floor rather than to Liam, which was where the thought was going. "If the light curtain is real, then everything that happened after—"
"Is changed now," Liam said. "You've seen it. Everyone in the city has seen it. The decisions that led to that ending are not surprises anymore."
"That doesn't fix what almost happened."
"No," Liam said. "But it's a better starting position than most people get."
He raised one hand and tapped Ekko lightly on the top of his head, the same gesture, the same quality of transfer.
The heat went through the boy from the center outward. His breath caught. He put both hands out slightly, not grabbing anything, just feeling the air, finding that the air had more in it than it had had a second ago.
"Ask Vi and Powder what this is," Liam said.
Mylo's voice came up the basement stairs first.
"Something happened to Powder! She—Powder—"
He ran into the main bar and found several people already moving toward the stairs. Ekko came off the bar stool. Vander was already at the door.
The basement had a bed, a small table, a collection of their things. On the bed, the sheets were empty.
On the sheets: a monkey doll.
It was her doll. The shape, the material, the particular imperfection where the left arm connected: Powder's work. But on the belly of it there was a device that none of them had ever seen. A small counter, clean lines, the numbers moving forward in clean ticks. As they watched, the counter hit one minute. The small gong attached to the doll's arm moved and struck once.
"Where is she?" Vi said.
Claggor explained what had happened. They had been practicing in the basement together. Nothing unusual. Then they had turned around and she was not there. The doll was. They had not heard anything.
"The doll is Conjuration," Shizuku said. Her eyes were doing the focused thing. "I can see the technique in it. The timer is part of the ability. She made this."
"She turned herself into a doll?" Vi said.
"I don't think that's quite right," Liam said. He was watching the counter. "I think she went somewhere and left the doll here to tell us she'd be back."
"Specialization," Shizuku said. "No rules."
The counter moved forward. Six minutes. Seven. Eight. Nine.
At ten minutes, the gong struck. The counter cleared. A small hole opened in the monkey's belly and a ball of white light came out of it, rolled to the floor, and stood up.
It was not exactly Powder.
It was Powder in the way that a future is the same as a present: same materials, different configuration. Taller. Older, not by years but by something else. The braids were loose and longer. The expression was the same in structure and different in content, the way a face that has been through things is the same face and also not.
She looked at Vi.
Vi looked at her.
"I went somewhere," Powder said. "I wanted to see if I could."
She looked at her own hands. Then at the monkey doll on the bed. Then at the room full of people staring at her.
"I can come back," she said.
This appeared to be directed at Vi specifically.
Vi crossed the room and put both arms around her sister, which was now a slightly different geometry than it had been ten minutes ago.
Powder leaned in by exactly the same degree she always did.