Nobody was dead.
It took a moment for the crowd to work this out from the light curtain, and the confirmation came through Ekko saying it first.
"He knocked it away. Before it detonated. Metal rod or board—something connected with the grenade, the center of the blast was above bridge level." He was looking at the curtain. "I can see the angle in the smoke."
Caitlyn had been reviewing the same image. "There was a metal contact sound," she said. "About a half-second before the explosion. I registered it but didn't place it in time." She looked at Ekko. "The detonation point was elevated by approximately—"
"I didn't hear it," Ekko said. "But I can figure out what happened." He stopped. "He must have seen her hand go for the pin."
He didn't say what came next, which was that Ekko had been watching Powder's hands with the specific attention of someone who had grown up around the same person long enough to learn their tells. He just looked at the empty place in the light curtain where both of them had been.
Silco came to the bridge.
He found Jinx dying in the wreckage and picked her up with the careful attention of someone handling something that still has value. Around him: the smoke, the bodies, the law enforcement team approaching from the far side. He looked at the bridge. He looked at the upper city entrance of it.
On the upper city side, in the curtain, Vi stood at the alley entrance with Caitlyn injured beside her, looking toward the bridge, and the distance was exactly as far as the situation required to prevent her from going.
Vi, watching the curtain, knew what Vi in the curtain was calculating. The calculation had the same two factors it always had, and the same answer, and the answer was still wrong in the specific way of correct answers that are nevertheless wrong.
"Go back for her," she said, quietly and uselessly, to herself in the screen.
Curtain-Vi sent curtain-Caitlyn home.
Vi looked at the light curtain for a moment. Then she looked at Caitlyn, who was in the crowd three meters away, and Caitlyn happened to look back at the same moment, and both of them looked at the light curtain again with the expressions of people who have just done something they are going to think about later.
The scene changed.
Caitlyn's family manor, in the upper city, large and quiet in the way that family manors are large and quiet. Two people in a room. The curtain showed this with the careful non-specificity of something building toward a moment it intends to deliver.
The crowd watched with interest.
The curtain cut to Jinx on the operating table.
The purple liquid moved through her system in the way that the Shimmer compound moved through everything it entered: by insisting. The doctor had the expression of someone performing a procedure that the medicine's violence made emotionally complicated. Jinx's body processed the intervention by screaming, and then by reconstructing itself around the new capabilities, and then by the hallucinations.
In the hallucinations: Vi. Caitlyn. Both of them doing the thing the compromised mind produces when it needs to explain why it was right about everything being hopeless. Laughing at her. Choosing each other over her. The confirmation of the theory.
"I don't understand any of this," Mylo said. Loudly.
"Mylo," Vi said.
"I mean it!" He had the expression of someone who has genuine questions and has decided that now is the right time to ask them. "She's your biological sister. She has always been. The idea that you'd just pick some stranger you met and not want her anymore—does that even make sense? Has Powder ever acted like this? Not even once?"
"It's not possessiveness," Caitlyn said.
Vi looked at her. Something about the way she had said it. Like she had been thinking this for a while.
"She can't trust the love," Caitlyn said. "She knows Vi loves her. That's actually the problem. If she trusts that, and then finds evidence that it's conditional, then everything she's built on it collapses. So she can't trust it. Which means every gesture that looks like proof of Vi's love becomes a potential lie. Which means the pain of doubting it is constant, because you can't fix constant doubt with evidence." She paused. "Sevika's provocation worked because it didn't create a new fear. It gave an existing fear a story to attach to."
Sevika, in the crowd nearby, said: "And the story is: Vi doesn't love me anymore because she has a new favorite."
"That version is easier to live with," Powder said, from behind Vi. "It gives the pain a direction. It gives you something to be angry at instead of something to be afraid of."
Mylo looked at her.
"Are you sure those ten years didn't change something?" he said. Not as an insult. As a genuine question.
"I've always thought this way," Powder said.
Vi put her arm around her. "She has always thought this way."
The story moved forward.
Jinx recovered. Moved through the city. Found Caitlyn's house, found the window into it, and was behind Caitlyn with a weapon in what was, objectively, one of the more alarming ways to discover you have company.
Jayce said: "She's going to kill her."
"No," Caitlyn said. "Killing me doesn't prove anything. What happens to me isn't the question she's trying to answer."
She was watching the screen with the focused attention of someone who has been building an analysis and is now watching it run.
"She needs proof that Vi loves her," Caitlyn said. "Proof that doesn't require her to trust Vi's words. Something she can see without having to believe in something that might be false." She looked at the screen. "If Vi kills me with her own hands, in front of Powder, for Powder's sake—that's proof you can't argue with."
Jayce processed this.
"That doesn't make sense," he said.
"It makes perfect sense if you're the person who needs the proof," Caitlyn said. "It's not logical. It's emotional logic. Those aren't the same thing."
The story confirmed her prediction in the order she had predicted it.
Vi defeated the gang's remaining forces. Defeated Sevika. Came for Silco.
Jinx appeared behind Vi and rendered her unconscious.
The scene the curtain showed next was designed with the specific quality of a setting that wants to be understood immediately: the long table, the two captives in chairs at either end, the relics of the dead arranged at the empty places. Broken doll. Cup. The objects of people who had been real and were now past.
Powder watched the broken doll specifically.
Vi watched curtain-Vi's face when she understood where she was and what was being proposed.
"She could have killed Jinx," Mylo said, very quietly. "In the factory. When Jinx first detonated the bomb. Vi was already there. She could have—"
"No," the real Powder said.
"I know," Mylo said. "I know she couldn't."
The pistol changed hands.
"Please," curtain-Jinx said.
And curtain-Vi, who could not do the thing being asked, started instead to do the only other thing available to her, which was to talk. To say the names. To reach through the architecture of seven years of accumulated damage with the voice that Powder had trusted before any of it happened.
The names came from both directions. Violet. Powder. Vi. Jinx. The two versions calling for each other across the gap that had been built one bad moment at a time.
Silco's hand moved.
Curtain-Jinx turned and fired before she finished the thought about it, and when the gun in her hand was empty she came back to herself in a room with Silco on the floor and her sister looking at her with an expression that contained a great many things simultaneously.
"At that moment," Caitlyn said, carefully, "she wasn't Powder and she wasn't Jinx. She was a sister who saw someone point a weapon at her sister."
The room absorbed this.
The curtain moved to the rooftop.
The hex rocket was in Jinx's hands. She had built it exactly as specified, because she built everything exactly as specified and always had, and this one was for Silco, and Silco was gone, and the parliament building was across the water, and the moon was out.
She pulled the trigger.
The crowd outside The Last Drop erupted.
Not the crowd inside the tavern: the crowd outside. The lower city crowd, the people who had been watching for three days, who knew every name and had seen every episode and had their own accounting of the distance between the two sides of the canal and who owed what to whom.
The cheering had a quality of genuine catharsis to it, which was either understandable or terrifying depending on which city you lived in, and probably both.
Jayce was not cheering. He was looking at the parliament building in the light curtain and doing the math on occupancy at that time of evening and the yield of a hex-powered rocket at that scale.
Caitlyn was looking at the parliament building in the light curtain and thinking about her mother, who as a council member would have been in session.
The curtain went dark without showing the result.
"Why didn't it show—" she started.
It stayed dark.
Caitlyn turned and looked at Powder.
Powder's face, in the moonlight and the neon from below, had the same underlying geometry as the face in the curtain. The same eyes. The same mouth. The same blue.
"That's not her," Vi said.
Powder smiled at Caitlyn. Not with hostility and not with apology. Just a smile.
Caitlyn looked away. Quickly.
She noticed, looking back toward the group, that Liam and Shizuku were not there.
"When did they leave?" Jayce said.
Vander leaned in the doorway with his pipe. He looked at the empty sky where the light curtain had been, and at the crowd slowly returning to its usual arrangements, and at the children from two different parts of the city standing in a group and not moving apart yet.
"Show's over," he said. "How things actually go from here—" He gestured with the pipe at the general direction of all of them. "That's yours to sort out."
He offered the pipe to Jayce.
Jayce looked at it. Shook his head.
Caitlyn clenched her fists. The Nen gathered in her palms without her fully deciding to do it, which was the first time that had happened without Liam's guidance. It was small and imperfect and entirely real.
She held it and looked at it for a moment.
At least this was something she could actually hold.
Misu Mountain, west of the Kakin capital, in the mountain resort's courtyard.
The pavilion over the pond. The same pavilion Liam had been sitting in when the natural energy work started. The afternoon light was doing what afternoon light in mountains does, which is to become horizontal and gold and to make everything look like it has been arranged deliberately.
Liam and Shizuku were at the pavilion's edge. In front of them: Akane, sitting cross-legged, her butterfly ability already in the extended position, the golden wings spread in the specific configuration that opened the crossing to wherever it opened.
Liam held out the sleeve.
The space inside the sleeve released its compression. The mouse that had come through from the lower city's bar — caught opportunistically from the corner while nobody was looking, slipped into the sleeve before departure — dropped to the pavilion floor and sat there for a moment, confused by the change in ambient smell and air quality, and then recovered its priorities and ran for the garden.
"Bidirectional," Shizuku said. She watched it go. "And biological cargo from that world survives the transit."
"The sleeve doesn't care about origin," Liam said. "It cares about whether you were in it when I crossed."
Akane stretched, extending both arms over her head, the gesture she made when she was returning from an extended Butterfly activation.
The ability ran its reset. Liam had learned, after enough of these, not to predict what came back. The butterfly ability randomized each time she crossed back: whatever ability she returned with had something to do with the world she'd been in, but in the specific way that echoes have something to do with what made the sound.
She concentrated.
She materialized something. Small, boxy, rune-decorated, the approximate footprint of a large appliance.
Shizuku looked at it.
"Hex gate," she said.
Akane studied her own construction with the expression of someone who has been given a gift and is working out what it does. She activated it. The runes cycled. The gate opened, and through it: a flash of lower city light, neon and yellow and the specific palette of the rift.
The gate closed.
"It only goes back there," Akane said. She did not sound particularly disappointed. "One destination. The city."
Liam looked at the gate. At the flash of the lower city in the brief opening. At Akane's ability sitting there in the pavilion over the mountain pond, a piece of one world embedded in another.
"So," he said. "We have a door."
He was quiet for a moment, thinking about the people on the other side of it: a young Enforcer learning to hold Nen in her hands, an inventor with a prototype and a head full of ideas, a man with iron knuckles and a city on his shoulders, two sisters who now had the shape of what could go wrong and enough time to choose differently.
"The first backup world with a return address," he said.
Shizuku looked at the gate.
"They have five episodes left," she said. "In the curtain."
"Yes," Liam said. "They do."