“We have to save Reska.”

  Thalia rolls her eyes at my blurted declaration. “Be serious. We’re not really going to have this argument, are we?”

  “Why shouldn’t we?”

  “For a long list of reasons,” she scorns. “That girl is a lost cause who doesn’t want to be saved, and nothing is getting saved if we don’t climb this tower. Melpomene could start the bonfire at any moment, Alice. We don’t have time to waste on petty sentimentality. The cycle is more important.”

  The cold, viciously pragmatic part of me agrees with her. Saving Reska would be an exercise in vanity if it cost the universe; she’d burn with the rest of us. But it still feels wrong to abandon her. I look away from Thalia, unwilling to face her scorn. I don’t have a real defense.

  Kiana stares at me, eyes burning holes in me. “You promised,” she says. “You asked me to help you save her. You told me you wanted to save her. Was that a lie?” I flinch.

  “Come off it,” interjects our fourth. Mordred has her arms crossed, expression unimpressed. “You should know better than anyone how hard it would be to reach that girl. Even if we should save her, there’s no guarantee we’d get the chance. We know our mission.”

  “You’re both so callous,” Kiana hisses. “It doesn’t matter to you how many girls get put on the pyre so long as you can feel an inch closer to putting out the flames, is that it? Reska is one of us! She’s our sister! And you would abandon her because it’s the safer path, the more convenient path. Just like that night beneath the castle.”

  Now it’s Mordred’s turn to flinch and look away. “That isn’t—that’s not the same at all. It’s different this time.”

  “Why? Because it’ll work this time? Because you don’t have to look her in the face? Go on, keep telling me why I’m not important enough to save!”

  Thalia looks bored with the whole mess. She taps one foot impatiently, twirling her knife idly. She doesn’t care how any of us feel about this.

  “Mordred,” I chime in before the argument can continue. “Tell me honestly: are you really okay never facing Contrition? Never facing Malice? You’ll be leaving everything unresolved if you climb that tower without at least trying to settle things with the both of them.”

  The warrior shard makes an exasperated noise. “Of course a part of me wants to meet my other self and fix what she broke. But I can’t set aside our goal here.”

  “Then don’t. This doesn’t have to be a dichotomy. Here’s the plan: you, me, and Kiana go beat some sense into the archdemons while our friendly neighborhood Adversary starts climbing the tower on her own.” I glance at Thalia and raise an eyebrow. “I mean, do you actually need us for the next part? You clearly don’t need our help to kill things or to navigate. What’s the harm in us splitting up here and reuniting after?”

  The Adversary frowns, but then she chews her lip and flicks her eyes skyward. “Could work, yeah. Got a few dozen floors to kill my way through before the gate. Alright, fine. If closure’s what you lot need, go on then. Just don’t take too long.”

  She vanishes into the tower without another word, leaving me with a grateful Kiana and a closed-off Mordred. The princess sidles up next to me and gives me a hug, which I’m not expecting and have a very brief, very minor panic over before awkwardly patting her back.

  I cough to hide my embarrassment and say, “She’s not wrong about needing to hurry. I’ll see if I can open a portal closer to the action.”

  Kiana steps away with a murmured, “Of course,” and I get to work.

  Contrition’s storm rages in the distance, swallowing the horizon and seeping into the sky and city. Tornados of flame spurt out from the central mass to suck up houses and pull in floating islands. Looking at it for too long puts a knife under my thoughts, a sharp edge prying open every bad feeling I’ve ever buried.

  I’m going to fail. I won’t be strong enough. I didn’t push myself hard enough.

  I’ll die alone. I never made the connections I should have. I had so many chances.

  I’ll never see Cheshire again. I wasted every moment that should have been precious.

  I tear my gaze away from the storm and focus on a clear spot near the edge of it, by a section of city ramparts still intact. I’ve never made a portal before in this life, but the Intercessor learned how to cross worlds and the Red Queen learned how to manipulate the Labyrinth. Both skills are applicable here.

  Muscle memory makes the process almost easy. I will two points to connect and the fabric of Pandaemonium obeys. This world knows me as its master, an heiress to the one who made us both. The portal pulls open cleanly and I step on through.

  Things immediately go wrong.

  I was supposed to emerge on top of the walls at the edge of the city, but instead I step out into the unpleasantly familiar imagery of the Demiurge’s clock tower: gears and pipes and gauges melting into each other in a meaningless sprawl. The scenery suggests the idea of machinery without properly performing it, like a half-remembered dream.

  The autopsy table is broken, cold steel scattered in twisted pieces. Amid the shards, curled and still, is the bloody corpse of a girl with feline ears and glassy blue eyes.

  My breath catches and I reach out for her. I can’t stop myself from crying out, “Cheshire!”

  I wasted every moment I could have spent watching her smile and making her laugh. I rejected the only girl who could ever love me until it was too late, and now everything’s too late and there is only the end, and there is only regret.

  The body twitches, convulses, and a word screams from dead lips: “Alice!”

  I’m caught frozen between my need to hold her in my arms and my terror of what I’ve done to her. The corpse of Cheshire crawls toward me in erratic bursts of activity, limbs cracking with every jittering motion. Closer, closer, closer, and I’m still frozen, and in my mind plays a song that goes on and on and on—

  —only the end and only regret and only the end and only regret—

  —until with a cold gasp I wrench myself from the nightmare. This vision is Contrition’s work, it must be. I force myself to breathe, shut my eyes tight, and walk forward.

  The dead body never touches me. When the air changes, a warm breeze crossing my face, I open my eyes.

  The clock tower is gone, but Fata Morgana hasn’t replaced it. Instead I find myself standing on the edge of a forest, green hills rolling before me. I don’t recognize this place, but something about it scratches at the edge of my thoughts. If it’s not one of my regrets, is it another glimpse at Reska’s life?

  I blink and the scene changes. The same location, but now there are people, a few dozen figures in traveling cloaks. Some of them clutch at baskets and packs, others hold children close to them. All but two of them are running. Fleeing, more accurately.

  The outliers are familiar to me, though I’ve only seen them in dreams. Ruzica Kadic Bladesinger, duchess of Sun and Sword, cuts down a night horror with her ancestral blade. A flick of her wrist splits two more with pure killing intent. Another monster, an oil-slick beast of gangly limbs and gnashing teeth, leaps at her back and is punished for its hubris with spontaneous combustion in bright red flame. Zdenka of the Lidless Eye, crone lorekeeper of the court, closes her fist and the flames extinguish, and then with a wave of her hand the ashes of the beast cling to another and rot it to nothing.

  Dozens of misshapen nightmares still remain, more pouring in from a hole in reality. The rift is like an inkstain on a photograph, obscuring the terrain behind it in ways that defy perspective. It seeps into the grass, into the air, into the clouds above. This is a wound that will eat the world.

  I stare into the dark and past it to what I know lies beyond: the Abyss, graveyard of worms, where the Leviathans dream from death of cruel and insatiable hungers. The night horrors are their children, their foul and ravenous spawn. One method among many in their endless quest to resurrect themselves and return to a war they lost long ago.

  What do the Leviathans mean to the real story, though? The Adversary’s tale never mentioned them, so we have to assume they’re unique to this stage of the cycle. I don’t think they’re just a generic doomsday threat to motivate conflict.

  Melpomene is looking for something. Everything she does, everything she makes, is in service to that goal. In search of that answer. But it keeps going wrong. It always spirals, and she laid the tracks that brought us there but still the darkness stings her.

  The Leviathans aren’t worms, they’re a snake devouring its own tail, a self-inflicted collapse from consumption. They’re the teeth that bite the girl who grew them.

  I wonder what that makes Azathoth? Or have I already been told that secret?

  The duchess and the crone kill with speed and grace, but they can’t stop the tide. They’re buying time for the others to escape, knowing that the horrors will always run faster than the humans. How valiant. I think I’d like to see them fail, if only to enjoy their suffering.

  Instead, the rift suddenly shudders. A night horror passing through comes out crunched and misshapen, bleeding the black blood of the Abyss. The rift shudders again, stretching and distorting and seeming to tear at the edges.

  Then the rift implodes, sucking in the last of the horrors with it. When the inversion stops, the rift has become an ink-black marble in the hand of Homura Bloodfallen.

  This version of Homura looks different from how I’ve known her. There are bags under her scarlet eyes, and her skin is pale and slick with cold sweat. Her court attire is gone, but she’s not wearing her battle armor either; she’s clad only in a flowing black robe, plain and unadorned, with a hood left down.

  Homura pops the marble in her mouth and swallows it. A shiver runs through her, but the cold intensity of her gaze never breaks. She eyes the fleeing refugees, now stopped in their confusion, before turning her attention to Reska’s old teachers.

  “The kingdom has fallen.” She quirks an eyebrow, but it’s not really a question. The evidence is right in front of her.

  Ruzica stalks forward and points her blade at the Intercessor. “I should have killed you that day,” the ex-duchess barks. “This is your doing, isn’t it? The brat may have been unstable, but she wouldn’t have murdered her father before you came along. What did you do to her?”

  Homura looks almost bored as the point of Ruzica’s sword comes to rest above her heart. She keeps her hands at her sides, a concession to caution, but her tongue is sharp. “I did nothing to the girl,” she lies. “This was the result of enemy action. I came to your kingdom trying to prevent this very outcome. Obviously, I failed. Just as obviously, you still need me.”

  Ruzica has too much self-control to press the blade further, but by the look on her face I can tell she wants to. “You know too much, stranger, and I’ve no reason to trust you. Why shouldn’t I kill you right now and spare us all your machinations?”

  “Because I’m the only person in the world who can close those rifts,” Homura says smugly. A beat passes, and then she tilts her head. “Or did you think your sword would have done the job?”

  Zdenka cackles. “She has you there, Bladesinger. But I have a question for our foreign friend.” Her gaze sharpens, though she keeps her voice light. “When did you become a demon? To manipulate the Abyss as you have, you certainly aren’t human.”

  “Three days ago,” Homura replies calmly. “A gift from one of my teachers. Or a curse.”

  “Ever the way,” Zdenka mutters. “Tell us, then, the secrets you’ve been keeping. And let us travel far from this place of ruin. Put that sword away, Ruzica, we need every ally we can scrounge if we’re to keep this sorry lot alive. The princess—queen now, I suppose—will not stop at the borders of our lands.”

  The former duchess glares at Homura one more time before sheathing her blade and turning away. “Wood and Cloud must be warned. Come.”

  They stride away together and the vision fades, returning me to Fata Morgana.

  Different from the others. No one’s memories, just history from an outsider’s eye.

  I’m still not on the walls, but I’m closer than I was expecting after that portal mishap. This city is a sprawling mess with no sense of distinct quarters or districts, so between me and the walls are clusters of structures in varying materials and shapes. Some of those buildings have been ripped out of the ground by the storm, debris left in their wake. The streets are twisting and crooked, no clean thoroughfares to guide travel.

  More importantly, I don’t see Mordred or Kiana anywhere. Contrition’s interference must have scattered us. They’re still my splinters. You won’t hide them from me, archdemon.

  I close my eyes and concentrate on how the two of them felt when they were still lodged in my soul. The vicious heat of Homura and the cold grief of Reska, filtered through me. Immediately I get a strong ping from nearby, what must be just a block away. That one feels like Mordred, and I can feel Kiana further away, closer to the storm.

  That seems dangerous. Okay, let’s move quickly.

  I take off at a sprint and gather power, ready to annihilate whatever gets in my way with all the tricks of three lives. Actually, why am I running? Flying couldn’t get us closer to the tower, but now I’m going away from the tower.

  The Red Queen enjoyed flying, so I borrow a touch of her form and sprout bat-like wings made of ethereal darkness. I leap into the air and flap my new wings, familiarizing myself with the muscle memory of a discarded timeline. The wind against my face is an exhilarating feeling, but I don’t have the luxury of reveling in it.

  From my bird’s-eye view I can see Mordred clearly. She’s surrounded by the Contrite.

  Contrition’s zealots, regular people driven mad by her influence and compelled to spread her influence as far as possible. A pack of them killed Bashekehi’s husband and disrupted the balance of power in Sanctuary, leading Esha, Averrich, and the Machinist to make a deal with the Beast. The Mourner they summoned ousted the Contrite, but the scars of their pact broke the old entente.

  And now it seems Contrition has been busy making new zealots. Some of the people attacking Mordred are covered in the heavy scarification I saw on the Contrite that fell victim to the Mourner, but others bear only superficial marks of harm. Fresh recruits drowned in Contrition’s song of regret. The old converts, which I assume came with her through her throne world, carry flails and ritual knives. The ex-citizenry carry kitchen knives and table legs.

  None of them are a match for Mordred. Vorpal cuts through a man holding a cleaver and the blood spilled by that attack stabs into three more Contrite as shards of red crystal. A dozen already lie dead at her feet, but there are dozens more swarming her location, the entire population of a city turned into a weapon.

  And even that isn’t enough to do more than slow us down, so slowing us down is the goal. If she has a goal. I don’t know how lucid Contrition really is.

  Whatever the truth, we can’t afford this delay. I’m sure something in our arsenal can deal with a crowd of trash mobs quickly. The Red Queen’s area attack technique? The thorns were effective, but it relies on [Feast or Famine] principles to process souls. With the heart locket narratively spent, I’m not willing to risk falling into another fugue state.

  Something from the Intercessor’s playbook, then. That trick we picked up fighting the Children of Dust in the ruins of An Talamh?

  No, too destructive. Ah, I’ve got it: when we excised the Malicite infiltration on Charos, we crafted a special bow. That should work here.

  I pull from the Intercessor’s memories, picturing the weapon in my mind. The nature of Pandaemonium is that everything, absolutely everything, is material to be manipulated by a mage. Particles here aren’t made of quarks, they’re made of qualia, and a strong enough will can force any concept into any other concept.

  So the air in front of me isn’t air anymore, because I say it isn’t. Processed wood appears in my hand, a recurve bow transmuting from oxygen and nitrogen and whatever else those molecules were pretending to be. Iron sprouts like vines and twines into curving patterns, and then flowers of ruby gemstone bloom at the tips. All this happens because I demand it, and the fabric of reality knows only how to obey.

  I pull at an invisible string, nocking an arrow of crimson light. I aim straight above me and let loose. The arrow soars, and at the moment of its zenith it shatters into a hundred copies of itself that rocket toward the ground below.

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  The red arrows tear through flesh and bone, making mincemeat of the Contrite. They impact with enough force and power to sever limbs from bodies and pulp through brain and skull. And the only one unaffected is Mordred, the light passing through her as if she weren’t there at all.

  A single volley is all it takes to eliminate every single zealot in sight.

  I drop from the sky, landing gracefully beside Mordred, and I dismiss the wings and the bow. “Figured I’d lend a hand,” I say with a grin.

  She whistles appreciatively. “You’ve got power now, I’ll give you that.”

  “It feels great. Anyway, did you get thrown into a vision too?”

  Mordred sours. “I did. First it was a pit in the Abyss, a mountain of Reska corpses. Then I saw myself, in the days after the fall.”

  I grimace. “Same as me, then. Which means Kiana’s probably going through the same thing. Contrition attacked us all, interfering with the portal to separate us. I don’t even know if she did it intentionally or if it was just a side effect of her poison spreading through the city.”

  Mordred closes her eyes for a moment, seeming to concentrate, then opens them again. “Contrition is the only archdemon to have been cursed into that state, rather than striving for it willfully. I doubt she has any real control over her actions. My gut tells me all of this,” she says, waving at the corpses of the Contrite, “is incidental.”

  At that moment, another terrible wail echoes across the city. The anguished scream is closer this time, louder, and my body shivers as Contrition’s influence rakes against my mind and seeps into my thoughts.

  I should have been more honest. How many people die I lie to?

  I should have had more resolve. How many times did I give in to pain and frustration?

  I should have fought harder. How many of my failures could I have prevented?

  I bite my tongue and snarl in my head. Shut up, damn you. I get enough of this from myself, I don’t need the interference.

  Her curse doesn’t take hold, but it definitely feels stronger than it did before. Once we actually breach the storm, I’m sure it’ll be blasting at full power.

  Mordred grinds her teeth, then spits at the ground. “The worst part is the feeling of karmic irony. Homura made this monster, and now her copy has to deal with it. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Right.” I double check my sense of Kiana’s presence, finding her location unchanged, and point in her direction. “That way.”

  We make it maybe twenty seconds of running—Mordred can’t fly and I’m not going to carry her—before we fall into another vision of the past.

  Homura’s blade slides past pale blue silk and sinks into the flesh of a girl in a slender crown. The princess gasps, the air expelled from her lungs, and clutches at the sword with futile, insufficient strength. Homura tears the weapon from its victim and flicks the blade.

  The blood that scatters is black.

  Courtiers recoil, a mess of men and women clad in warm earth tones, their gold and silver jewelry speckled with glittering sapphires. Some of them look outraged, others look sick. In the crowd I spot Mordred, gaze locked on the scene, her lip curling in distaste.

  Prevara, curled in the body of the princess, twists its mouth and spits out, “Savor your victories, thief. She comes for you.”

  Homura shoves her hand in the open wound and pulls out a writhing, slimy parasite, its hundred suckered tendrils leaking black blood. The princess, long-dead, collapses in a heap. Homura squeezes the parasite in her grip until it, too, gives out, and she tosses the worm atop its host.

  Guards halt in the process of rushing toward their crown heiress, hands still tight around drawn swords and spears. They look on in horror and dread.

  Homura ignores them. She sweeps her gaze across the crowd and calls out to them, “Behold, you bastard lot who did not heed my warnings. This is the truth of the princess that urged you to caution and patience, long replaced by an agent of the enemy. Her promises were lies, her stillness a stagnation. If you follow her commands, you will die. Every last one of you, devoured by the horrors that spread across this land. You can hide in your castles and manors, surround yourselves with blades and strong arms, but what is strength against the tide that drowns the world? Death comes for you, Kingdom of Frost and Forge. And when it finds you, it will use you as it used your would-be queen.”

  This is another stage of the exodus. Fascinating, but also a distraction. Is there a way out of this vision, or do I have to let it play out?

  I slip into Hastur, watching my body from the outside, and examine the situation with my oversoul’s eye. I definitely can break out of the vision… but my sixth sense tells me there would be worse consequences for doing so than the minor time loss of sitting through it. Irksome. I return to myself and let the scene play out.

  A brave noble steps out of the crowd and addresses the woman who murdered their imposter princess. “What would you have us do? If the foe is as dangerous as you claim, what good will fighting do us?”

  “Here? No good at all. But if you follow me to the city of glass, to Fata Morgana, then together with all the world you might just stand a chance.”

  Another noble scoffs. “You would have us abandon our homes? Preposterous!”

  Homura, in the middle of cleaning her blade, stops and gives the man who spoke up a thin, vicious smile. “Your homes are already lost. Your realm is forfeit. Those who do not leave will be claimed. So I make you this promise, cowards of the court: I will kill you all just to keep warm bodies from the enemy’s grasp.”

  The vision ends as abruptly as it began, leaving me back in the city next to Mordred.

  She looks tense and uncomfortable. “Looking at myself from the outside is… unsettling. Especially knowing it’s not really me.”

  “My sympathies,” I offer. “I felt the same way seeing Homura for the first time in my dreams. Well, similar. I didn’t know what she was then.” I pause, and then I ask, “Did she kill those people?”

  Mordred flinches. “Yes. Of course. She killed hundreds of them to keep the rest in line. Went into their homes and slaughtered everyone who wouldn’t pick up their lives and flee to Fata Morgana with the rest of the exodus. They didn’t stand a chance.”

  The path her breed always walks, right? The ends justify the means, until the means start shaping ends. And then you get a Malice.

  I don’t say any of that, though maybe I should. There’s probably a lot I should say to Mordred that I’m not. That I won’t.

  “Let’s keep moving,” I say instead. “She can’t have many more visions to show us.”

  Our path to Kiana ends up paved in more corpses. The city is swarming with Contrite. I get to see some of their rituals up close as regret spreads viral through the populace. Every victim broken beneath the lash rises to take a lash of their own, exalting in blood spilled and penance extracted.

  Of course, they’re all figments. They’re just playing their part, mindless actors on a grand stage. But then, if I believe Thalia’s talk of Wonderland, so is everyone else. Bashe, Esha, Dante, all of them less than real. Should that make me feel better about abandoning them?

  It scares me how appealing I find that thought. What greater absolution could I find than the numbing embrace of solipsism? If I’m the only real person, then it doesn’t matter how many people I kill or betray or leave to rot. The man in the nightclub—his name, I swore I wouldn’t forget his name, but I made myself a liar—didn’t matter. He wasn’t a real person.

  Thalia claimed the magic system in this universe was a metaphor for suspension of disbelief. The mechanisms underlying your acceptance of an impossible action in a story. The people are like the characters in a story, existing only within the confines of the pages where they appear. The living jokes of Wonderland.

  But you still care what happens to those characters, even though you know they’re not real. That’s the beauty of a story, isn’t it? It’s a facsimile of reality, and a facsimile can still make you cry, or laugh, or fly into a rage. There would have to be something broken in me if I didn’t care. If I was like her.

  We find Kiana standing frozen in an empty weapon shop, anguish etched into every line of her face. A handful of Contrite have been skewered with as many pointy objects as would fit, no doubt the work of her protective shadows.

  “Kiana?” I call to her. “Can you hear me?” No reaction. I sigh. “Nothing for it, I guess.”

  I reach out and grab her shoulder, and predictably that sends me into the vision.

  “Trust you? How could I ever trust you!? You tried to murder me!”

  In a moonlit clearing amid towering trees, Reska shouts accusations at the black-robed form of Homura. Reska Shadowsun has abandoned her ancestral colors for the embrace of living shadow. Slick darkness covers her from neck to toe, her only garment a cloak of solid starlight. By the pale light of the moon, the entire forest floor is one great shadow churning with her anger and clawing gouges into tree bark.

  Homura stares down the nascent goddess of darkness. “I acted rashly. If you leave Prevara behind, I’ll make a binding oath on my role as Intercessor not to harm you again.”

  Kiana is watching this with wet eyes. Mordred steps into the scene beside me, takes one look at it, and blanches in horror.

  “You tried to murder me!” Reska screams. A tree snaps in half.

  Homura’s cool exterior cracks. For a moment, I see genuine pain written on her face. “I—please, Reska. I don’t want to fight you. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Come home with me. We can be together again. I… I still love you, Reska.”

  Mordred mouths the words, entranced by her counterpart.

  Reska’s anger vanishes and all the fight drops out of her posture. She puts her head in her hands, tears now running down her cheeks. “Why?” she asks in a small, grieving voice, like a child that can’t comprehend what she’s lost. “If you really loved me, why would you do that?”

  Kiana is crying now too. Her sobs are broken and ruinous.

  Homura looks down, unable to face the woman she hurt. “I thought it was the only way. I was wrong. I want to believe that I was wrong.” She looks up. “So please, Reska. Take my hand. Come with me and I’ll save us both. I’ll save us all.”

  She holds out her hand. Kiana and Mordred can’t look away.

  Reska hesitates. Grief and anguish war with yearning. For a moment—for one terrible, cruel, hopeful moment—she reaches out to take Homura’s hand.

  Homura smiles, victory in her eyes. A smile just an inch too satisfied.

  “No,” Mordred whispers.

  And Reska pulls her hand back, her anger reigniting. Betrayal in her voice, she cries, “You’re manipulating me again! Trying to use me, just like before! But it won’t work this time. I won’t fall for your tricks. If you love me, Homura, then your love is poison. I won’t drink it.”

  Kiana falls to her knees as the clearing is engulfed in swirling, thorny darkness.

  Homura’s face shutters closed, her eyes turning cold and soulless. “Then you leave me no choice. The next time we meet, Reska, I’ll have to put you down.”

  Darkness swallows the world. We return to the glass city.

  Kiana screams her grief on hands and knees. “No, no, no. I should have said yes, I should have said yes, I should have—”

  “Kiana.” Mordred kneels down in front of her and places a hand on each shoulder. “Kiana, listen to me.” Her voice is sharp yet wavering, her face drawn tight. “You weren’t the only one who made mistakes.”

  Kiana wipes her face on her sleeve and stares at Mordred, uncomprehending. Her body is shaking, wracked by shudders, and she’s clearly choking back more sobs.

  “If I… if I hadn’t betrayed you. In the castle, in the woods, a hundred times in my own head. If I hadn’t.” Mordred swallows, the words coming out halting. “If I hadn’t given up on you, then Prevara would have lost. I pushed you into its arms and I left you there. And I’m sorry. That version of me was too much of a coward to ever say the words, but I will. I’m sorry, Reska. I’m sorry for hurting you. I’m sorry for leaving you.”

  I’m expecting Kiana to lash out. A part of me wants her to hit Mordred, even. Instead, she wraps her arms around the other girl and pulls her into a hug. She laughs and cries and squeezes her tight, and Mordred goes stiff for a moment before slowly, carefully, like handling spun glass, she hugs her back. They cry together and hold each other.

  And here I am, the awkward third wheel to my own mental constructs.

  Forgiveness is a funny thing. I don’t like it. If there’s any part of me that should hate forgiveness and apologies and the whole concept of the thing, it should be that side of me called Homura or Mordred.

  What is an apology? Meaningless drivel. Words are all just lies. If I were Reska, if I were Kiana, I’d hate too strongly and brightly to ever accept something so stupid and pointless as an apology. How can a few words make up for hours and hours of betrayal and disappointment?

  But Kiana is hugging Mordred. They’re crying together and sharing their pain and getting better. How are they doing that? Why are they doing that? It’s not fair.

  Gods, have you ever felt more like a child? What a petty thing to whine about.

  Yeah, probably. I don’t know if I mean any of it, either. I probably don’t. That’s just how my brain is, sometimes. I don’t like it when other people aren’t suffering.

  I’m debating how to break up their little cry sesh without seeming like an asshole, but thankfully Contrition does my work for me. Three Contrite break through the window of the shop screaming penance at us. We murder them in very short order, obviously, but the shock is still enough to get Mordred and Kiana out of their moment.

  “Ready up, girls,” I drawl at them. “Our big number’s almost here.”

  We leave the shop behind and make for the storm. Whirling wind and crackling red electricity greets us, and we’re close enough now to see the walls.

  Then, because clearly this next stretch is just going to be nonstop chaos, a giant dragon crashes through the wall, and a dozen buildings, and passes out of sight.

  What the hell? Wait.

  A glance through the hole it made in the wall confirms my suspicion: the Royal Royale has begun. Malice, archdemon of hatred and sin, is mopping the floor with every other god and archdemon in Pandaemonium. Each of her four spiked arms holds a different weapon either carving through or parrying her numerous foes. Even her tail and wings, just as spiked and scaled, are being used as weapons to deflect attacks or knock back enemies.

  I’ve seen this happen before, through the eyes of the Intercessor. In that life I knew more of the figures arrayed against her personally, having encountered them in my travels. The faerie queens of Winter and Summer showed up in person this time rather than assaulting throne worlds, but they’re almost a background element than real participants in the fight, too focused on each other. Wonder, childlike and ethereal, floats around the battlefield out of reach of her would-be murderer.

  The rest of the archdemons—Indulgence, Acuity, Glory, Muse, and Nemesis—fight with everything they have and barely scratch their opponent. The golden rays of the gods above are already fading, attention stolen by Malicite attacks on their homeworlds. Without the Intercessor disrupting those cults, I imagine the situation is even worse for the gods of Pandaemonium than it was last loop. The great dragons have arrived in their colorful flights, but they face a different opponent: the Hierophant, the worm god clad in its mechanical monstrosity, answering the call of its master—or at least an agent of its master.

  Wicked laughter echoes across the field, audible even from this distance. Pulling myself into Hastur, I shift my presence closer to the battle. I need to see what she does next.

  Malice, red-eyed and baleful, her horns a jagged crown, is the platonic ideal of a demon. She forces her foes back with a sweep of blades, her vicious will overcoming every spell cast at her and every physical attack. She throws her chipped weapons to the ground and conjures new ones, sneering at the assemblage.

  “Is this the sum of you?” Her voice is the crumbling mountain and the death of a star, a song of nuclear hate. “Come then, you pale shades who claim the lot of Royalty. Bare your souls to me, and let us put an end to our maker’s works.”

  Malice brings all four blades together and they snap into one, melding into a monstrous greatsword of black crystal. She raises it high and dark energy pulses from it in waves.

  “[APOCALYPSE]!” she roars, and the world shatters.

  The landscape tears like paper and a thousand oil-slick terrors crawl up out of the black void pits left between disjointed shards of reality. Night horrors pour from rifts just like the ones that Malice closed when she was still Homura. With the Emissary dead and the Adversary occupied, Malice must be the last champion of the Abyss.

  Their Endbringer.

  I return to myself to find Kiana shaking me. I wince and brush her hand away. “Sorry, didn’t warn you,” I apologize. “Had to see that up close.”

  Kiana shivers. “Why? I can’t imagine wanting to be closer to that nightmare.”

  “She is that, I won’t argue.” I see Mordred stuck staring at her other self, the truth of it still sinking in. “I guess this is rougher for you, huh? Your original’s turned into a monster like few others. We’re going to have to deal with that, after Reska. Hey, maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll be exhausted from all the fighting.”

  Mordred turns away from the horror and mutters, “Or maybe she’ll be even stronger after gorging herself on their souls.”

  We race away from that grisly sight and toward the storm wall. The wind is picking up and the packs of Contrite are getting denser, so we must be getting closer. Another keening wail stagger us, the voices of regret even louder, but I pull through and help the others shake it off.

  The storm flares, the physical manifestation of Contrition’s soul reaching out a tendril to pull another chunk of the city into its depths, and when the debris clears I see it: a massive stone gate, pulsing with an ominous aura and inscribed with strange symbols, the raging winds becoming a solid wall to either side of it. This must be the entrance to her throne world.

  In front of that gate is a familiar face, though it feels like a lifetime since I saw it last: a sin eater, like the one I fought on my very first day of being alive. The creature has the appearance of a stretched human with four arms, blindfolded eyes, and a perfect, angelic mouth. Its body is so covered in scar tissue that I can’t see any unmarked skin at all, the product of ceaseless self-flagellation with the scourge it carries in one hand.

  The biggest difference between this one and Bashe’s warden is that this sin eater is at least three, four times the size. A sin eater giant.

  At the edges of the crater between us, more Contrite come pouring in. They slip out of the storm and from deeper within the city, summoned in greater numbers than any encounter yet. A whole horde of ancient zealots and fresh victims. I wonder if the whole city is corrupted by now, or if there are still holdouts around the tower. Well, it doesn’t matter.

  It’s a funny thing, but I’m actually kind of excited to see this particular monster. The ghost was luck and the dogs would have killed me without that damn huntsman intervening, so in a sense the sin eater was the first fight I ever won under my own power, with my own skills and wits. And it was a brutal, painful affair.

  I want a rematch.

  “Kiana, Mordred, take care of the Contrite. The gatekeeper is mine.”

  They spring into action without argument, each taking one side of the field and carving through Contrite with sword and sorcery. I walk calmly across the ruins of the city. As I walk, I weave an Intercessor charm to repel the buffeting winds.

  The sin eater doesn’t have eyes to watch me with, but it can sense my approach. It stirs from its flagellation, rising to its full height and lowering the many-whipped scourge. I wave at it.

  That choral, too-perfect voice rings across the battlefield. “Do you know regret?” it asks me, just like it did before that day in the abandoned prison.

  This time I know the context for that line. I know the weight of it. I know the fear and anguish behind those words, the curse of a betrayer. The sins and failings of two women, my two sisters in artificial life, have haunted this universe for thousands of years.

  The last time a sin eater asked me that question, I laughed at it. I lied to its face, proudly insisting that I could never do anything wrong. I wasn’t capable of taking it seriously. Of taking anything seriously, really. I’m not the same girl anymore.

  “I do know regret,” I admit to the monster. “I know a whole lifetime of that feeling. Some days I regret ever being born, not that I really had a choice in the matter. I regret pushing away friends, allies, anyone who tried to reach out or get to know me. I regret all the pain that I inflicted on myself or invited, always telling myself that it was necessary. I regret the loneliness. I regret the suffering. I regret marching to an end that I didn’t understand. And I carry more regrets than just mine, too. I regret betraying the princess that I loved for a mission that I would fail. I regret turning my back on the woman who tried to save me from myself. If I could change it all, I think I would. I’d live a different life, walk a different path, make different choices. But I can’t change the choices that I’ve made. Even if I could turn back time, it wouldn’t erase those choices. I’d just be papering over them.”

  The sin eater spreads its arms wide. “Join us. Repent. Repent. Repent.”

  I reach the last stretch before the gate, the monster towering over me, and I put a grin on my face. “Now that… that’s not going to happen. See, the thing is, you’re all cursed. That regret you feel is devouring you, but it’s not changing you. You’re not moving forward, you’re just drowning in the misery. And me? I’ve got places to be. I’ve got a girl to save. There’s an infinite cycle of murdered Alices that someone has to fix, and that someone might just be me. So yeah, I know regret, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna join your cult and spend my last hours bemoaning my mistakes. Your penance won’t fix shit. Now I’ve got a question of my own to toss back your way: are you gonna let me through, big guy, so I can go see your boss and pull her out of this mess? Or is it violence, one more time?”

  The sin eater roars, stretching itself even taller and spreading its arms even wider. “Repent!” it screams, and then it brings the scourge down on me.

  I remember the pain I felt when a sin eater struck me, and this one is much bigger and looks much stronger. But I’m not the girl who fought that monster. I’ve learned. I’ve grown. I know what I really am, and what I’m not.

  I don’t even try to dodge the attack. I just watch it fall and smile.

  You’re not real, I dismiss it. You’re just a toy, and I am a gobbet of heavenly meat.

  When the weapon strikes my flesh it bounces right off. I laugh.

  “I’m coming for you, Reska. I’m coming to save us all.”

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