"We're almost there."
Vi hauled herself over the rooftop's edge and turned around to check on the others. Behind her, working their way up the drainpipe with varying degrees of competence, came the rest of the crew: her little sister Powder, pale-faced and holding on with both hands and one knee; then Claggor, who had the build of someone designed by engineers to be good at this; and finally Mylo, who was making it look harder than it needed to be and complaining about it.
They were orphans, all four of them. Products of the Undercity, brought up in whatever gap existed between Vander's roof and the streets of Zaun. Coming to the Upper City to steal things was, in the grand tradition of everyone who had ever needed something they couldn't afford, a logical response to an unreasonable situation.
The house they had identified was a good one. An inventor's place. Inventors tended to leave windows open and doors unlocked and their attention pointed entirely inward at something they were building. Inventors were, in Mylo's professional assessment, excellent sheep.
Vi climbed to the peak of the roof and looked out over the city from the correct side of the bridge for once. Piltover. The Upper City. All its hextech progress and its clean streets and its people who had the luxury of only worrying about the problems they chose to worry about.
"Hey, Powder. Come see this."
Her sister scrambled up beside her and looked out. The city stretched in every direction. A floating airship moved overhead with the deep thrum of a vessel that had never once worried about whether it could afford the fuel.
Powder said "Oh."
The airship had someone on top of it.
Above the city, legs folded, face turned into the wind, Liam sat cross-legged on the upper hull of the airship and breathed.
He had been counting.
"Nine hundred and ninety-eight," he said, to no one in particular.
The number was not impressive enough. He needed a round thousand for the refinement cycle to close properly, and the universe had apparently decided this was a reasonable moment to interrupt him.
Something small and weightless settled on his shoulder. A presence he recognized before he saw it: Jade, currently taking the compact perching form she used when she had a comment to make and was too polite to make it out loud. Her jade mask tilted sideways.
"Right," Liam said.
He raised one hand, and the wide sleeve of his Nen construct shifted like a banner catching wind. The space inside the sleeve released its compression. A small distortion in the air beside him, barely visible, produced Shizuku, who had been in there since Liam departed and had not experienced any of the elapsed time.
She looked at the city below. She looked at Liam, who was not wearing clothes.
"It works for transport," she noted.
"At full priority override, yes," Liam said. "You moved with me. No lag."
"Interesting." Shizuku materialized Blinky. The vacuum fish produced a folded set of clothes from somewhere in its apparently bottomless interior.
Liam dressed. The airship continued its route below them, indifferent to the two people and one jade-masked apparition sitting on its hull.
Back on the rooftop, Mylo had gotten over the view and was pointing at the airship.
"One day," he said, gesturing with the confident authority of someone who has not yet had a reason to doubt his own ambitions, "I'm going to shoot that thing right out of the—huh?"
His finger was still pointing at the sky. He had found something else to point at.
Above the towers of Piltover, where the blue sky met the upper architecture, a rectangle of light had appeared. It was distant by any rational measurement of distance, but looking at it produced the exact sensation of looking at something directly in front of you. There was no comfortable middle ground. Either you looked away or it had your full attention.
The light inside the rectangle was dark red. Smoke and color. The shapes within it moved.
Then there was sound.
A child's voice, small and unsteady, singing a begging song. The melody was the kind that existed in alleys and on bridge corners and in the cold places where the city's ambitions left no room. The words were about cold hands. About having nothing. About asking, very politely, if anyone had a coin to spare. About the river and the other side of it and why the distance between them was the entire shape of a person's life.
Claggor pulled off his goggles. He stood very still.
"That's..." he said.
On the light curtain, the shapes resolved. A bridge. The connecting point between the Upper and Lower cities, which everyone standing on the rooftop had crossed many times in the direction that didn't involve being welcomed. Law enforcement officers moving through the crowd. On the faces of the buildings around the bridge, children had drawn ghost-faces in chalk. The officers were searching with the systematic attention of people who had been told to find someone.
The camera, if it could be called that, moved to the source of the singing. A small blue-haired girl with her eyes covered, held tight by an older red-haired girl, both of them walking forward in the specific way of people trying to be invisible while being unable to run.
Mylo turned from the light curtain to the rooftop. Then back to the light curtain.
"That's you," he said. He was pointing at Powder. "Wei. That's you and Powder. That's even the song Powder sings."
"What is that?" Claggor stared up. "Who made a moving picture book with your faces in it?"
"That's not a picture book," Vi said.
Her voice had changed. She was looking at the light curtain with the expression of someone who recognizes the room they're standing in even when they've never been in it before.
"That was what happened," she said. "That day. On the bridge. When Powder and I found Vander. And then—"
Powder was breathing fast. Her fingers found Vi's hand and held it.
And then their parents had died in the armed conflict between the city's two halves. On a bridge that had been there for both of them.
In the light on the curtain, a man fought off the law enforcement officers and turned to find two girls standing in front of a pile of corpses. The man was Vander. He looked at the sisters. He looked at his bloody gloves. He pulled them off, dropped them, and picked up both girls and carried them back the way he'd come, toward the Undercity, toward the city with nothing, with the grim and unargued resolution of someone who has just made an irreversible decision.
There was no title card. No announcement.
When young Vi, being carried over Vander's shoulder, looked back at the Upper City towers through the smoke with something that was clearly and specifically determination, the image went dark. Then Vi's own voice came back:
"We're almost there."
The scene returned to the rooftop, present-day, with Vi climbing over the edge and turning to check on the others.
The light curtain had the attention of the entire city.
People leaned out of windows. Passersby stopped and patted each other on the shoulder and pointed up. Patrolling law enforcement officers put their hands over their eyes against the glare and stared. Hot tea and biscuits appeared on windowsills as if everyone had made the same decision simultaneously. The city of Piltover had collectively decided that whatever this was, it was worth stopping for.
The curtain continued. It did not ask for anyone's permission.
It showed four children in the Upper City, climbing a drainpipe to a rooftop.
"That's right now," Mylo said.
Vi recognized it. They all did. There were their faces, in the light above the city, in a moving picture that apparently included the scene they were currently standing in, watching.
Below them, a young man and a young woman had stopped in the street carrying a box of equipment between them. The young man was watching the light curtain with the expression of someone who has just recognized the interior of a room.
"That's my lab," he said.
"Jayce," the blue-haired woman beside him said, "we were already going there. Stop standing there and let's go."
"But it can't actually—"
"It clearly can, because I'm watching it happen," Caitlyn said, already moving. "Come on."
Jayce caught up, apologizing to every pedestrian he bumped into on the way, which was a significant number because the street had filled with people who had come out to watch the spectacle in the sky.
The curtain showed the children finding the inventor's lab and recognizing what it was from the notes and chalkboard equations. It showed what happened next, which involved an experiment they had absolutely not been planning to interfere with and an explosion that was, in the strict technical sense, their fault.
"We didn't do that yet," Claggor said.
"It might mean we're going to," Powder said quietly.
The noise started below them before anyone could discuss the philosophical implications of a prophetic film visible to the entire city.
A law enforcement officer looked up. Then another. They saw four children on the rooftop. They compared the children to the children in the light above the city, which showed these exact four children in the context of the explosion that had not happened yet.
"It's them! Those four from the screen!"
"They caused the explosion!"
"The explosion hasn't happened yet," said a younger officer, reasonably.
"It doesn't matter when it happened, catch them!"
"Yes." "Yes." "Yes."
Vi looked around the building.
There were officers on every approach. The ladder was covered. The neighboring rooftops had someone on them already, because whoever had organized this response was thorough. The escape routes she could see were, taken together, not escape routes.
"Wei?" Craig said.
Mylo said: "We didn't even do anything yet."
Vi knew the answer, which was that this did not matter. The light curtain had given a thorough preview of their day, the law enforcement officers had watched the preview, and due to the specific causal structure of the situation they had been, in a meaningful sense, already caught for a crime they hadn't committed.
She was still looking for a way out when she heard a voice from behind her.
"Hey. Spider Gwen. What exactly are you looking at?"