The apartment was exactly as the light curtain had shown it.
This was the detail that had rattled Caitlyn more than anything else since she arrived. Not the projection in the sky, not the crowd it had generated, not even finding Jayce standing in his kitchen holding a very good sandwich and looking like a man who has just been confronted with a philosophical problem he did not ask for. All of that was manageable. But walking through the door and finding the note on the small chalkboard in the exact position the curtain had shown it, finding the half-eaten sandwich on the exact table, finding the blue magic crystals laid out in the exact arrangement, the nose-hair clip Jayce had left next to his measurement instruments for reasons she genuinely did not want to know: that was the detail that made the hair on her arms stand up.
She had dismissed the law enforcement officer at the door with the combination of a family name and a confident tone that had been handling these situations for her since she was twelve. Then she closed the door and looked at Jayce.
"Tell me about the crystals," she said.
Jayce, who had been staring at his wristband with the expression of someone trying to solve a problem using only willpower, looked up. "Caitlyn, I don't know how—"
"The crystals, Jayce."
What followed was less a conversation than a professional interrogation conducted by someone who had not yet received a professional license for it. Caitlyn had, over the course of her life, developed certain instincts about gathering and organizing evidence, and those instincts did not turn off when she walked into a friend's apartment any more than they turned off anywhere else. Jayce had long since learned to answer the questions in the order they were asked.
They were halfway through the second answer when the balcony door opened and six people walked in.
"All right," Liam said. "That's enough."
He clapped his hands once. Vi and Caitlyn both turned from glaring at each other to glaring at him, which was a different distribution of the same energy.
"Sit down. Both of you."
He waved a hand. The wind that had been waiting patiently on the other side of the balcony door found the opening and pushed it all the way back. The light curtain was perfectly framed in the gap: still running, still visible against the blue sky, still projecting its relentless account of things that were going to happen.
He pulled a chair over, sat down, and resettled Jade on his shoulder. She tilted her jade mask with the patience of someone who had seen this exact situation before and was waiting to see how it resolved this time.
"Think of it as a theater," Liam said.
He did not ask anyone to sit.
Caitlyn found herself sitting. So did Jayce, with the expression of a man realizing that his willpower was not, in fact, the relevant variable here. The four children from the Undercity arranged themselves in a row with the resigned coordination of people who have tried and confirmed that their bodies have a currently different opinion about this than their minds do.
Star Marks were like that.
In the curtain, Vander's bar.
"Wei" was sitting at the table while her adoptive father talked at her with the measured patience of someone who has converted past anger into something more durable. The Upper City did not forgive property damage casually. A house blown up was a provocation. A provocation was an event with consequences that arrived in the form of law enforcement officers and decisions about who was going to absorb those consequences.
"Wei" listened with her eyes on the floor.
When Vander turned to go, "Wei" said, quietly: "It's going to be fine, though. Right?"
Caitlyn laughed.
It was a short laugh, the involuntary kind that escapes before you make a decision about it.
Mylo turned in his seat. "What's funny?"
Caitlyn glanced at Vi. "You know how to be afraid of something."
"That's not me," Vi said. She had her arms folded and her eyes on the curtain and the particular quality of stillness that meant she was telling the truth and did not like that she was telling the truth.
The curtain moved on.
It showed Benzo's shop in the lower city, Vander meeting an old friend in the cramped space between the shelves. The old friend wore Enforcer colors. Her name was Grayson. She had the bearing of someone who had spent enough years navigating an institution to know exactly how much flexibility existed inside it and how to use that flexibility without anyone important noticing.
The conversation was practical. There had been an incident in the Upper City. Someone needed to provide an explanation. Grayson was not asking Vander to surrender children. She was asking him to find an arrangement that would satisfy the formal record without producing a result that either of them wanted. She handed him a message tube.
Vander took it.
Caitlyn stared at the screen.
She had looked up to Grayson when she was young. The image of an Enforcer who genuinely believed in something: not the institution for its own sake, but the idea underneath the institution, the reason someone might have built it in the first place. She had held that image carefully for years.
She kept her face still. She had practice at this.
Vi, watching the same scene, had a different reaction written across hers that she also was not going to discuss.
The curtain moved to the bar's basement.
Mylo was listing grievances. Claggor was trying to find a diplomatic middle position and not finding one. The loss of the haul from the Upper City sat in the room like a third party that everyone was pretending wasn't there. The blame for that loss was being assigned, and the assignment was happening loudly, and the word used was "jinx."
"That's still not me," the real Mylo said.
Claggor studied the ceiling.
In the curtain, curtain-Powder was outside the door. She had been there long enough. She turned and went.
The real Powder watched her counterpart absorb the word and leave, and said nothing.
"She thought the nice things were the performance," Powder said, eventually. "And this was the truth."
Liam did not comment on this. Neither did Shizuku.
The curtain showed the reconciliation: "Vi" and "Powder" outside, talking, the specific repair work of two people who have known each other long enough to know which words matter. The scene was warm. It resolved correctly by all visible measurements.
Caitlyn watched it. She had a notebook, because she almost always had a notebook, and it was open.
"The problem isn't resolved," she said.
Mylo opened his mouth.
"Not a criticism," Caitlyn continued, in a tone that did not adjust for the fact that this sounded exactly like a criticism. "An observation. This version of Vi doesn't address the actual source of the conflict. She gives her sister an expectation instead. Which works perfectly, until it doesn't." She paused. "If the same situation comes up again and she brings her sister, the sister may struggle the same way she did today. If she doesn't bring her, the conversation they just had in the curtain becomes a lie. And a lie is enough to turn every reassuring thing she's ever said into part of the same lie. Retroactively."
The room was quiet.
"The conflict isn't resolved," Caitlyn said again. "It's been given a delay."
She turned and looked at Powder directly, with the particular quality of attention she brought to things she wanted to understand. "What do you think?"
Powder looked at the curtain. Her counterpart in it was smiling now.
"You wrote this play," Vi said. "Congratulations. You should be a detective."
The sarcasm was working hard and producing uneven results. Caitlyn let it pass. She had noted the non-answer.
The scene in the curtain changed.
A basement. Lower city, deep enough that the light coming in was borrowed from somewhere else and arrived already tired. A man sat across from another man whose face had the specific quality of someone who had made several important decisions a long time ago and had been building on those decisions ever since. His name was Silco. The person across from him was not a friend.
Between them on the table: a small cage. A mouse in the cage. A glass vial of something purple.
The scientist, thin and expressionless, opened the vial. A few drops went into the cage. The mouse drank them because that was the nature of the experiment. For a few seconds nothing happened.
Then its muscles expanded. The change was rapid and specific and extremely unpleasant to watch. The mouse became something that a mouse should not be able to become. The cat in the adjacent cage learned this in a way that was educational for everyone observing and not good for the cat.
Jayce, who had been watching the light curtain with growing technical fascination and growing human discomfort, had perspiration forming at his temples.
He did not get a chance to think about it further, because Shizuku had crossed the room to his workbench and picked up one of the blue crystal spheres he had set out for his next round of experiments. She was looking at it against the light from the balcony door, turning it slowly.
Then she turned to the metal device on the bench next to the crystals. It was an experiment housing, designed to test the controllability of the energy inside the crystals, etched with the kinds of precise markings that looked like notation and felt like something more specific.
Shizuku looked at the markings for a long moment.
She brought the device over to Liam and pointed.
"Is this," she said carefully, "divine script?"
She turned back to the blue crystal sphere, still in her other hand. The light passing through it had a quality she recognized from a different context. Not quite aura. Not produced by a person. Ambient, environmental, inexhaustible.
She weighed it in her palm.
"Natural energy?"