If you stood on the bridge and looked, you could see exactly where one city ended and the other began.
The Upper City was all gold and blue. The kind of color palette that had been specifically chosen to suggest futures worth having. Hextech architecture climbed toward the sky with the cheerful confidence of a civilization that had solved at least some of its problems and was prepared to build upward on that foundation. The light there was clean. Even the shadows were shaped by deliberate engineering.
Then there was the Undercity.
The Undercity was gray and a particular green that had nothing to do with parks. It was the green of chemistry happening in air that should not contain that chemistry. The trenches that ran through the lower district were not a landscape feature anyone had planned. They were the consequence of centuries of decisions made by people who lived above them. At the bottom of those trenches, in the same way that life insists on establishing itself in the most inconvenient locations, a community had built something dense and layered and functional. Deep in the trench network was the Black Alley. And in the Black Alley, a man named Vander had spent enough years and absorbed enough blows to convince the neighborhood that things could be, if not good, at least held together.
His bar was called The Last Drop. Today it was empty.
The square outside it was not.
Everyone had come out to watch the light curtain.
The drinkers and the vendors and the people who simply lived nearby had all stopped what they were doing and tilted their heads back. The curtain hung in the air above the Undercity the same way it hung above Piltover: enormous, present, and entirely unpermitted.
It had started with the bridge. That alone was enough to pull people in. There was no one in the Black Alley who did not carry some version of that day. The blood and the confusion and the armed men and the sense, shared by everyone who had been there, of a situation that no amount of effort in the world was going to make turn out well. The curtain showed it the way a memory shows things: with too much clarity in the wrong places.
But the young sisters in the picture were familiar.
"That's Wei and Baobao," someone near the front said. "Vander's girls."
The crowd recognized them easily. Vi and Powder were not obscure figures in the Black Alley. They were the kind of children who were either going to be something or going to be a problem, and several people had held both opinions simultaneously at different points.
The curtain had moved on from the bridge. It was showing the Upper City now: four children crossing rooftops, working their way toward an inventor's house, doing the thing that Vi had been planning, apparently, without informing anyone.
Vander stood at the edge of the crowd with a pipe he had stopped smoking several minutes ago.
He watched the curtain show Claggor and Mylo wandering the inventor's lab. He watched Vi examine the notes on the small chalkboard with the professional attention of someone cataloguing a house before taking what she needed from it. He watched Powder, always slightly apart from the action, looking at the experiments and equipment with an expression Vander had seen on her face before, in other contexts.
He watched the crystal drop and the explosion that followed it.
He took one slow breath.
Then he leaned toward the tall woman standing to his right, Sevika, and said something quietly. Sevika, who had never needed much instruction, nodded once and moved through the crowd without drawing attention to the fact that she was moving.
The law enforcement officers hurrying past on the street ahead of the crowd did not notice any of them at all. Their eyes were on the light curtain. Everyone's eyes were on the light curtain.
In the Upper City, on a rooftop several streets from the explosion site, the law enforcement patrol passed less than two meters away from Vi and Powder and Claggor and Mylo and two complete strangers and did not stop.
They did not pause. They did not look. They walked past with the conviction of people moving through empty space.
"How," Vi said.
"Zetsu," Shizuku said. "Complete aura suppression. They can't sense us, which means their eyes don't find us. It's not invisible. It's just below the threshold of notice."
Vi looked at her hands. She had them wrapped, as she always did, because boxing practice left its marks and she had learned early that you maintained your tools. Since the young man had touched her on the rooftop, calling her "Spider Gwen" of all things, there had been something different about the way her hands felt. The wrappings were the same. The hands underneath were the same. But there was a warmth there that was not usually there, circulating like blood but slower and more deliberate, and it produced a specific quality of readiness she could not name.
The stranger stood a few meters away, watching the light curtain with the comfortable expression of someone who has come to see a film they have already seen.
"Who are you?" Vi asked.
"Liam." He gestured. "She's Shizuku."
"What did you do to my hands?"
"Something useful. You'll understand it later."
Vi decided to table this until she had more information.
"And the light curtain. You did that."
"Seemed worth trying."
Powder had not said anything. She was watching the curtain.
The scene in the curtain had moved to the aftermath of the explosion. The four children were being chased through the Upper City streets, which Claggor found both objectionable and personally embarrassing given that they were watching it happen. Mylo in the curtain was in full complaint mode, expressing, at some volume, everything that had gone wrong and assigning responsibility in the way Mylo always assigned responsibility, which was entirely and without qualification to the nearest available person.
In the curtain, Mylo said: "It's always like this when Powder comes along. Every single time. She's a jinx."
The real Mylo, watching, said immediately: "That's not me. That wasn't me. We haven't even done anything yet."
Claggor put his hand on Mylo's shoulder. "I said it too," curtain-Claggor said.
Claggor removed his hand from Mylo's shoulder.
Powder was watching the version of herself who was now standing with her back to "Mylo," having absorbed the word "jinx" the way a person absorbs something they have always been afraid of hearing out loud. The curtain-Vi said it was fine. Then curtain-Vi turned away and sighed, softly, in the specific way of someone who has said it's fine because saying anything else requires more than they currently have.
"You must have been pretty disappointed," Shizuku said to Vi, "when you lost everything."
"That's not Vi," Powder said. "And that's not me either." She said it carefully, like a person who has learned that certainty is a thing worth being careful with.
Vi said nothing. She had never been particularly fluent in the specific vocabulary of explaining herself.
"Of course she was disappointed," Liam said. "A clean haul from the Upper City, gone. And it was rare to begin with. You don't find a target that good very often." He paused. "That was Powder's entrance exam. Wasn't it."
Vi turned.
"You brought her because it was a good test," Liam said. "The kind of job that would show whether she belongs up there. Whether her eye for things is good enough to matter. You lost the haul. You didn't lose what you came for."
Vi stared at him. She had several responses available to her and rejected all of them.
Powder was very still.
"Tuition fees," Liam said pleasantly, "come in different forms."
He turned and walked toward the far end of the rooftop. Shizuku fell into step beside him.
"Well," Liam said over his shoulder, "are you coming?"
Vi absolutely did not want to follow. She had a very clear preference for not following strange men who had appeared from nowhere, applied mysterious warmth to her hands, made the entire city watch a light-show of her personal history, and then said things that they had no business knowing.
Her feet followed him anyway. So did Powder's. So did Claggor's and Mylo's, who exchanged a look that covered a considerable amount of ground in a short time.
The light curtain above the city had been Liam's experiment.
He had used Akane's Butterfly ability to step into this world, landed on an airship, and recognized exactly where he was. The natural energy here was thin compared to what he was accustomed to, but thin was still workable. He had tried shaping it into an Emission projection, a large-scale sustained cast above the city, and the technique had done what he suspected it would do: worked.
He was thinking of it as a natural energy Release application. Xianfa: Release. He would refine the name later.
Beside him, Shizuku was doing something more practical with wind. The natural energy interface had given her access to wind as a medium, and she was working through variations with the focused patience of someone who has found a new material and intends to understand its full range. Small currents shifted at her direction: a leaf redirected, a loose scrap of paper lifted and held. The Xianfa: Swift Wind was coming together the same way everything Shizuku worked on came together, which was steadily and without fuss.
She had also confirmed, earlier, that the wind approach worked as a suppression mechanism. The four children walking behind them had not been given a choice about it.
The four of them climbed down from the rooftops and crossed a section of the Upper City that Vi knew slightly and resented normally, and came to a balcony that Mylo recognized with a specific quality of dread.
It was the balcony from the curtain. The one that led to the lab. The explosion lab.
Liam stepped over the railing without ceremony. The balcony door was unlocked in the way that people whose minds are primarily occupied with complex problems often leave doors unlocked.
From inside the house, faint and carrying through the gap:
A young man's voice. A young woman's voice. A conversation already in progress.