The mural cracked along an old fault line, and from the fracture came light.
Not dramatically. Small, quiet, the way things emerge when they are not trying to impress anyone. Motes of pale blue gathered in the air in front of the goddess's painted image and found each other, condensing into something that had the shape and quality of a bird: slim-winged, the color of open sky, present with the specific presence of something that is always present but rarely chooses to be visible.
Shizuku tilted her head. "It's a bit like Jaku."
"You are very naughty, Miss Janna," Liam said.
The bird spread its wings. The pattern in the feathers extended outward, growing into something larger, and the larger thing had the shape of a woman: long hair, loose clothing, the quality of concentrated wind in a form that had decided, for a moment, to be local. When her eyes opened, the air in the small plaza arranged itself differently, as if it had been waiting to do so and had finally received permission.
Liam watched this happen with the attention he brought to things he was trying to understand from first principles. The energy here was clear and present and absolutely outside the category of anything he had learned to work with. He could see the structure of it the same way you can see through wavy glass: the form was there, the detail was not.
"You asked," Janna said, "what the difference is between you and the woman with the crystal heart. Compared with her beside you."
"I did."
She moved between them in a slow arc, trailing wind.
"I think," she said, with the particular amusement of someone who has found the perfectly accurate answer to a poorly framed question, "the most relevant difference is approximately two extra heads."
Shizuku looked up at her.
"Can you see them?" she said. "In their suppressed state?"
She did not wait for the answer. Her Nen shifted, the fox transformation responding to ambient natural energy the way it always did, and her features moved: the ears came first, then the hair deepened, the face lengthening slightly, the full fox emerging to partial degree in the way it did when she was actively engaging the natural system.
"And this?" Shizuku said. "You can see this directly?"
"The mortal body," Janna said, softly, "is a shell for what you are, not a definition of it. If you want to move toward what is not mortal, you might begin by releasing your attachment to the shell's current configuration."
She paused.
"Although," she added, with what sounded like genuine consideration, "three heads in the world I come from would attract significantly less attention than three heads in yours."
The walk back to the Black Alley took them through the middle layer of the lower city, where the bridges crossed the deep trenches and the neon from below filtered up through the grating and turned the air a mixed color that was not quite any single thing.
Above the city, the light curtain had resumed.
Liam could tell from a street away by the quality of the crowd noise: the particular combination of excitement and tension that meant the story had moved somewhere new. People were stopping, looking up, talking at each other. The light curtain provided the lower city with something it did not usually have access to, which was a large shared experience that everyone could see simultaneously, and the neighborhood was using it with enthusiasm.
"Can I accumulate enough aura to live forever?" Liam said, not to anyone specifically, in the way of a person following a thought they have been following for a while.
"It seems like the logic works," Shizuku said.
"Netero is a hundred and twelve. The accumulation ceiling isn't apparent yet. In theory, if the body sustains itself on internal aura production and the production outpaces the loss—" He stopped. "I don't know if there's a structural limit. Whether the human body has one."
He was quiet for a moment.
"And you accumulate death energy. Through the restriction." She glanced at him. "That keeps adding to the total."
"Yes." He was looking at the light curtain above them.
"Are you afraid of death?"
He thought about this genuinely.
"I've never died that I remember," he said. "The first death doesn't count because I was completely absent for it. I didn't experience it. I just woke up somewhere else."
"That might mean you're afraid of it," Shizuku said. "The Star Mark's resilience. The recovery from beheading. The restriction against killing for death energy."
"It might." He considered this. "Or I'm just pragmatic about not being dead."
"Those could be the same thing."
"They probably are."
She was still holding his hand, which she had taken sometime in the previous block without announcing it. They walked in the comfortable way of people who have long since stopped treating the proximity as something that needs to be negotiated each time.
"Your star mark," she said, "has remarkable self-preservation characteristics. More than seems necessary for the ability's stated function."
"I'm aware."
"I think the ability knows something about you that you haven't fully said out loud."
Liam did not have an immediate response to this.
The crowd outside The Last Drop had grown since morning.
Most of them were watching the light curtain. But some of them were watching Powder.
She stood with Vi and the others, taller than all of them now except Vander, her blue hair gathered in a long ponytail rather than braids, her face having the same architecture as the face in the curtain and none of the specific damage. The light from above fell on her and the people around her looked at her and looked back at the curtain and looked at her again, doing the comparison with the helpless repetition of people who are finding the same answer every time.
When Powder noticed someone looking, they looked away. Quickly.
"The deterrent effect of Jinx is significant," Shizuku noted.
"She's twelve," Vi said, from nearby, in a tone that indicated this was still not a fact she had fully integrated.
"She's twenty-two," Mylo said.
"Physically," Vi said.
In the light curtain above: the older Ekko and the older Vi, recognizing each other in the Firelight Gang's base. The hug. The base built around a living tree in the lower city's depths, full of people who had chosen forward motion over bitterness. The light came in from above and made it look like somewhere that had decided to be a place of hope despite all available evidence pointing in the other direction.
Ekko was watching himself with the expression of someone evaluating a decision they haven't made yet.
The scene changed.
The bridge. The moment the light curtain had been building toward since Episode Three.
Everyone in the crowd who had been following understood where they were. Certain confrontations have a shape that announces itself in advance, and this one had been announcing itself for several episodes: the hextech gems, the law enforcement blockade, the three figures trying to cross, and from the shadows above the bridge, a pair of eyes watching from a position that made everything look exactly like what it was not.
Liam watched the recognition happen in Powder's face as the curtain showed Jinx making the arithmetic of the scene and arriving at the wrong answer: Vi, Caitlyn, Ekko, the gems, the bridge, every element pointing toward the same conclusion, and the conclusion being the one thing that Jinx had been afraid of since the factory.
She had been replaced.
She had been lied to.
Powder's grip on Vi's arm tightened once. Then loosened deliberately.
The butterfly bombs scattered across the bridge, beautiful and impossible in the way that terrible things are sometimes beautiful, and the law enforcement officers found out what they were in a way that was not survivable. Jinx walked through the aftermath humming a childhood song, picking up what had fallen, and then looked up and found Vi looking at Caitlyn.
The Gatling gun.
"Look away," Mylo said quietly, to no one in particular.
Nobody did.
Ekko on his hoverboard. The skidding metal blocking pistol fire. Two people who had grown up together in the same basement arriving at the same bridge to have the conversation their divergent histories had been building toward for years.
He had her down. He was hitting her. The fist that hesitated had the specific quality of a fist that has remembered something.
Whatever he saw in her face, or she saw in his, in the pause: the light curtain didn't fully explain it. That was probably honest. Those moments tend to resist explanation.
Jinx's thumb found the pin.
The bridge erupted.
The crowd was quiet.
Mylo was not laughing. He had the expression of a person who has just recalculated something about someone they thought they had categorized correctly.
"The little guy really built all that," he said, after a while. Not sarcastically. Just as a fact that hadn't settled yet.
" Firelight Gang," Claggor said. "Leader."
They both looked at Ekko.
Ekko was looking at the ground.
"Why didn't she come to me?" he said. Not loudly. Not quite to anyone. "After everything happened. Why didn't Powder—why didn't she find me? We could have built the base together."
The crowd around them had its opinions.
"Because she was with Silco," someone said.
"Silco took her in," someone else said. "You repay the hand that feeds you. That's what we do down here."
"She was loyal," a third voice said. "Whatever you think of what she did, she was loyal."
"How is loyalty to that one-eyed bastard what we do down here?"
"Where was her so-called friend when the factory blew up? The screen didn't show that part, did it? It didn't show where Ekko was while she was alone."
The conversation went around in the way that conversations about things people care about go around, which is circularly and with increasing conviction on all sides.
Ekko stood in the middle of it and said nothing.
Powder, who was behind Vi, was watching him.
"Fool," she said, too quietly for most people to hear.
It was not unkind. It had the quality of someone saying the most accurate word and being somewhat fond of the person it described.
Vi looked at her.
Powder was still watching Ekko.
"He's asking the wrong question," she said. "The question isn't why didn't she find him. The question is whether either of them knew the other one was still looking."
She thought about this for a moment.
"She was alone for three years," Powder said. "If you're alone for long enough, you stop expecting to find what you're looking for. You stop looking." She paused. "That's not loyalty to Silco. That's what happens when you've given up on the alternative."
Nobody in the immediate group had a response to this.
On the bridge above the lower city, in the light curtain, the smoke cleared and the body lay still and the pocket watch was broken on the ground, and the crowd around The Last Drop was quiet in the specific way of people who have just watched something they would rather not have watched and cannot quite look away from.