The experiment worked.
In the light curtain, the hextech energy moved through the device in the way it was supposed to move, controlled, directed, channeled through the configuration of runes that the two young men in the makeshift laboratory had spent every available hour constructing. The force field opened. Small. Precise. Exactly the shape it needed to be.
Jayce, watching from his chair, grabbed the edge of his workbench.
In the curtain, his counterpart had the expression of someone whose world has just been significantly rearranged.
"I knew it!" Jayce said, loudly, to no one in particular. "I knew it would work—I always knew—"
Caitlyn, who had been skeptical of the light curtain for most of its runtime and had been losing that skepticism one accurate detail at a time, looked at Jayce's face and decided not to say anything for a moment. He had earned this.
She had come here to help him move equipment. She was going to have to have a very different conversation than the one she had planned.
Liam, who had been watching the hextech experiment sequences with a focused attention that had nothing to do with the plot, set down the experimental housing and looked at Shizuku. She gave him a small nod. They had reached the same place by the same route.
Jayce's memory was extraordinary. He had drawn those runes thousands of times over the years since a stranger in a blizzard had saved his life. The more times you draw something from a vivid memory, the sharper the memory becomes. The curtain showed exactly what he remembered because Liam had projected it from exactly that source: Jayce's own perfect recall, given light.
Liam smiled at nothing in particular. He had done the same thing, in a different direction.
On the other side of the room, nobody was celebrating.
Vi, Powder, Claggor, and Mylo had been watching the lower city storyline develop with the specific quality of dread that comes from watching something go wrong in a way you cannot stop because you are already sitting in a chair that you cannot leave. The Shimmer factory was underground. The workers were busy. The purple compound in the large tank moved like something that wanted to.
Vander was in there. Silco had him.
The rescue went in through the side. Vi's version in the curtain was fast and decisive and would have worked except for the part where it didn't work, which was the part where Silco had known they were coming and his Shimmer-dosed enforcer was waiting.
The real Claggor watched his counterpart drilling through a wall.
"We had it," the real Mylo said, quietly. "We had it. The hole was right there."
In the curtain, Powder appeared in the doorway.
She had the monkey doll.
The real Powder sat very still.
The monkey doll in the curtain had something new in it. Something blue, fitted in by careful hands into a device that had never worked right before. The crystals from Jayce's lab, the ones they had knocked off the table when they were here less than a day ago, the ones Powder had picked up and kept.
The doll landed among the Shimmer enforcer's feet.
This time it worked.
The explosion went through the factory in stages. First the doll. Then the Shimmer compound catching and flowering into purple fire. Then the secondary blasts, one after another. The Shimmer workers who had been at their stations were simply no longer at their stations. The steel caught and the ceiling moved and Claggor's version in the curtain had enough time to process what was happening.
The ceiling came down.
Claggor watched it happen without speaking.
Mylo's counterpart was caught by something else. Faster. He didn't have time to process anything.
The real Mylo was on his feet before the scene had finished.
He grabbed Powder by the collar.
"I knew it." His voice was not a shout yet. It was the version of something that would become a shout if he let it. "I knew you were going to kill us eventually. Every time, every time something goes wrong—"
"Mylo." Claggor's voice was flat.
"Don't!" Mylo turned on him. "Claggor, they showed you. We're both dead. We had the hole in the wall, we had the way out, and she—"
"You didn't have a way out," Caitlyn said.
Her voice had the quality of someone reading from a document. Precise, not unkind, but not considerate of the timing either.
"The Shimmer-dosed enforcer was still mobile after the explosion," she continued. "The wall Claggor was drilling through: exterior wall, fourth floor minimum. If you went through it, you either fell or you didn't make it to the hole before the enforcer reached you. There was no exit." She paused. "The explosion was not why you died."
Mylo stared at her.
Claggor sat back down.
"Then why," Mylo said, carefully, "are you telling me this right now?"
"Because you're blaming someone who was trying to save you."
"She killed us."
"She tried to save you with what she had. It didn't work. Those are different things."
Vi had pulled Powder against her side without making an announcement about it. Powder had her arms around Vi's waist. Neither of them was watching Mylo.
"You," Mylo said to Caitlyn. "Upper City girl. Is this you feeling good about yourself? Looking down on all of us from up here?"
"People like you," Caitlyn said, "are the reason teams fall apart."
Mylo threw a punch.
He did not land it.
"Sit back."
The voice came from across the room, easy, not particularly loud. Liam had not turned around.
Mylo's body sat back. His expression was the expression of someone discovering that their body has a different arrangement with the room than they thought it did. His feet stepped backward. His knees bent. He sat.
He looked at his own hands.
Vi looked at hers.
She had felt it the moment they arrived here: the warmth in her wrapped hands, the something that had been placed there without asking. She had been cataloguing it since. The way they had all walked through the Upper City in a row without choosing to. The way everyone had sat down in this room when Liam suggested it. The strings, and where they connected.
She said nothing. She filed it under: later.
"It's not over," Jayce said.
He was right.
The factory was in ruins. Silco's thugs were down. Vander stood in the wreckage with the particular posture of a man who has rediscovered something he buried years ago and is not happy about it. He was hit and bleeding but he was standing, and the standing mattered for about forty seconds before Silco came in behind him.
The dagger went in clean.
Vander caught Silco's throat with his free hand. The scene had a history in it that was visible in the way they held each other: two people who had once decided to go in different directions and had never fully resolved the question of which of them had been right. Silco drove the dagger in a second time.
Vander's right arm had never been the same since the day they had stopped being what they were. The grip that should have ended things did not end things. It loosened. The strength that had kept the Black Alley together for years and the strength that had tried to hold it together now came apart at the same point it had always been weak.
Vander stopped breathing with the expression of someone who has made the correct decision and knows it.
Powder arrived from the other direction, through the smoke, not yet understanding.
She had the smile of someone who has finally done the thing right. The bomb had worked. She was not a jinx. She had saved them.
The real Mylo looked at the light curtain and said nothing.
The real Claggor looked at the light curtain and said nothing.
The real Powder watched her counterpart find Vi. She watched the moment her counterpart understood, in sequence, what the correct tally of the explosion was. The victory. And the cost. And what the cost meant. She watched herself try to explain, try to frame it as something other than what it was.
"Mylo was right," curtain-Vi said.
The real Powder did not move.
"You're a jinx."
Vi's hands tightened around Powder.
In the curtain, the slap landed. The word had already landed before it. The slap was the punctuation.
The real Powder didn't look away from the screen. She couldn't. She understood every decision that led to every second of it, including the decisions that looked like mistakes and the decisions that looked like intentions. She understood because she had made all of them herself, in a slightly different order, and she knew what they felt like from the inside.
Curtain-Vi's face after it.
"Don't say that," the real Vi said. Her voice was quiet, almost for herself. Her eyes were red.
Powder turned her face up. Vi looked down at her.
She pulled her closer.
"Promise me," Vi said. "No matter what happens, we are sisters. Don't forget that, okay?" She touched Powder's face with one bandaged hand. "Even if I really said that to you someday, it's just anger talking. You know me. I'm an idiot who can only use her fists. When I lose my temper I say all kinds of things I don't mean." She took a breath. "But you follow me. Alright? I come back down fast. You're my sister. I can't leave you."