The first episode ended.
The light curtain held its last image for a few seconds: the older Vi on a rooftop in the dark, looking out at the lit towers of Piltover with the specific expression of someone who has been told no so many times that no has stopped meaning what it usually means. Then the image faded to black.
Nobody in Jayce's apartment said anything for a moment.
Caitlyn had her notebook open. The entry at the bottom of the page was not a legal note. She closed the notebook.
Powder was watching the dark curtain and waiting for the next thing.
Vi had her arms folded and was looking at the wall. She had the feeling of having been briefly turned inside out in a public location and was processing this at her own speed, which was not fast.
Claggor said, quietly: "I had no idea the whole thing was going to go that badly if we'd actually done it."
"We didn't do it," Mylo said. "Nothing happened. That was a different—" He stopped. The distinction he was reaching for was clear enough in theory and was collapsing in practice.
In the city, the light curtain had paused between episodes the same way it might pause between movements of a performance. Vendors had appeared. People had dragged benches and stools into the street. Someone had set up a cart selling hot things.
At the Piltover Enforcers station, the officers had gathered at the windows. Three of them were debating whether the light curtain was a hoax, a magic demonstration, or something considerably stranger. A fourth was doing the math on the explosion scene and looking troubled.
"Marcus," someone said, "you're going to get in trouble if that thing is real."
Marcus, who was young and had not yet accumulated enough experience to know which observations to find funny and which to find threatening, laughed it off. He had looked at the scene where his counterpart made an arrangement with the man they now knew was named Silco and processed it as: that's not me, I would never, this is obviously fabricated. People who are going to do a thing rarely picture themselves doing it in advance.
Detective Grayson was standing at the back of the room with her arms at her sides.
She had not laughed.
The second episode began.
A snowy mountain. A blizzard. A woman and a small boy, lost in white.
The boy was Jayce.
Jayce, watching from a chair in his own apartment, went still in a way that was different from how he had been still before.
The scene played out with the economy of something that has been remembered many times and knows exactly which details matter. The cold. The failing visibility. The sound of the wind taking all other sound away. Then a figure in the storm, a stranger, someone who appeared with the unhurried calm of a person who had been walking in this weather for years and had come to a conclusion about it.
In one hand: a fragment of crystal, blue-edged, glowing faintly against the blizzard.
In the other: a staff.
The figure pointed it at the empty air and began to move it, tracing shapes that resolved into marks, marks that resolved into patterns, patterns that connected and filled with light. Blue light. The runes held in the air against the wind. They arranged themselves into a configuration that was clearly purposeful, that had the internal logic of a completed equation, and then the air inside them changed color and Jayce and his mother were somewhere else: a meadow, spring, warm.
The stranger was gone.
"Is that," Caitlyn said, softly, "why you've been doing this research?"
Jayce said nothing. He was holding his wristband in both hands. The fragment in it was the same blue as what had been in the stranger's hand, reduced and spent, but the same.
He had never told her this. He had not told anyone. The research he was doing was prohibited, which meant the reasons for doing it were also not something you shared with people who wore Enforcer colors, however friendly those people were and however much they might understand.
The curtain had told her in under four minutes.
The second episode moved forward. A public trial. A young man making a case to a parliament that had already decided its verdict, standing in the dock and explaining, without quite managing to stop explaining, why the research was not dangerous, why the magic was not magic, why the crystals were a scientific phenomenon and not a contraband artefact, why the progress they could make was worth the risk they were asking to be allowed to take.
He was expelled.
In the crowd watching the trial, someone standing near the back watched the young man's speech with the expression of a person solving a problem in their head while appearing to watch something else.
Viktor.
The real Viktor was not in the apartment. He was outside, somewhere in the city, and he had been watching the light curtain since the first episode began, and he had been doing so in the company of his professor, who was small and fur-faced and had been a fixed feature of the academic landscape of Piltover long enough that the students in the architecture department had debated whether to classify him as structural.
"Victor," Heimerdinger said. He had been saying this for approximately forty seconds without generating a response.
In the curtain, the Viktor from the trial scene turned away from the crowd and went and got the confiscated research materials from wherever the Enforcers had stored them and prepared to take them to the young man who had been expelled.
In the street, the real Viktor muttered to himself: "...to be someone's assistant for life?"
In the curtain, his counterpart said: "...to be an assistant for life?"
The words overlapped almost exactly. The timing was off by roughly a syllable.
Heimerdinger looked up at his student. Then at the curtain. Then at his student again.
"Victor," he said, very carefully. "What exactly are you planning to do?"
Viktor did not answer immediately. In the curtain, his counterpart had found the confiscated materials and was carrying them under his coat. The scene cut to the expelled young man, sitting in a rented room with nothing left to work with, and then to a knock at his door.
"I don't know," Viktor said. "I suppose it depends on whether this is prophecy."
Back at the police station, the second episode ended and the third began.
The beginning of the third episode was brief and clean and hurt efficiently: Vi, understanding what the message tube actually was, taking it before Vander could use it, preparing to walk to the Enforcers and provide the explanation the Upper City wanted in the form of herself.
The officers at the station watched this with the discomfort of people who are used to being the ones who make these situations happen and are less accustomed to watching what they look like from the other side.
The third episode moved fast. A Shimmer-enhanced soldier emerged from the lower city and hit an Enforcer with the casual completeness of something that has no concept of what force is appropriate because force has stopped being a concept it uses. The Enforcer went down immediately. The scene cut to a street where Grayson's counterpart lay in a spreading pool of blood with her eyes still open.
The station went quiet.
Everyone looked at Grayson.
Grayson looked at the curtain for another second. Then she reached across and picked up her hat.
"Someone apply for a search warrant," she said. "I know it's procedural and I know the procedure is tedious. Do it anyway. If that purple compound exists in the quantities the curtain implies, we need documentation before we go in." She turned to Marcus. "Get your equipment."
"Yes," Marcus said. He took one more look at the light curtain, which had moved on to something else, and went.
In Jayce's apartment, the third episode was producing a different kind of silence.
The curtain had reached the scene where the group left Powder alone in the house. Not by mistake. Not because they forgot her. Because the rescue required moving fast and quietly and Powder, by an unspoken and unanimous arithmetic, was the reason the last operation had produced an explosion.
In the curtain, Powder stood in the empty room and called out. No one answered. She waited. She understood. The understanding produced something in her that was not grief exactly, but was the shape that grief leaves in a person when it has passed through them enough times to carve channels.
Mylo, watching, grabbed the real Powder's shoulder. "Hey. That doesn't happen."
"It hasn't happened yet," Claggor said.
"It won't—" Mylo stopped. He looked at the curtain. The version of him in the curtain had called her a jinx.
"The promise," Caitlyn said, not unkindly, "becomes the problem. If you bring her next time and something goes wrong, you've confirmed it. If you don't bring her, you've lied. The earlier conversation doesn't prevent this. It sets it up."
"You already said that," Vi said.
"I'm saying it again because the situation is saying it again." Caitlyn turned to Powder. "What do you think happens next?"
Powder looked at the curtain. She did not answer.
Vi took her sister under her arm, the way she always did, which was without ceremony and without announcement. Powder leaned in by approximately two degrees.
Jayce had turned from the window back to his workbench, because watching the curtain show his future successes and probable disasters required a specific kind of calm that was currently not available to him and his hands needed something to do.
Shizuku had already moved to the bench.
She had picked up the metal housing from the hextech experiment setup, the one designed to test the energy output of the crystals, and was examining the runes etched into its surface. They were the kind of marks that looked like notation at first glance and felt like something with more structure on the second.
She brought it to Liam.
"These runes," she said. "They're similar to what we've seen before."
Liam took the device and looked at it properly. The marks were precise. The combinations were internally consistent. There was a logic to the spacing and the directionality that he recognized from contexts it had no business appearing in here.
"Similar," he said, "but not the same."
Shizuku looked at him.
"That's not a useful observation," she said.
"I know." He turned the device. "I'm still looking."
He set the device on the table and picked up one of the blue crystal spheres instead, weighing it in his palm. Shizuku had already noticed what he was now confirming: the quality of energy stored inside it was not aura. It was not produced by a person. It had the ambient, pervasive, drawn-from-everything character of the natural system, compressed into a dense and stable form.
The teleportation array on the snowy mountain. The stranger with the staff. The runes that connected to each other and formed a configuration that could move two people out of a blizzard.
Liam set the crystal down and picked up the experimental housing again. Shizuku settled against his side, looking at the same thing he was looking at, close enough that he could feel the particular quality of attention she brought to problems she was genuinely interested in.
In the curtain above the city, the hextech experiment was running. The version of Jayce who existed in some branch of what the world might become was watching the same crystal he was watching do something different than it had done before.
Liam studied the rune combinations carefully, tracing each sequence.
"The magician on the mountain," he said. "The runes he used."
Shizuku nodded. She had already followed the same line of reasoning to the same place.