In the light curtain, Powder called after her sister until her voice gave out.
Vi did not look back.
The image held for a long moment: Powder alone in the street, reduced to the space Vi's absence had left, and Vi walking away from it. Then the scene moved on to the next thing.
Mylo let out a breath. He had been holding it for longer than he realized.
"She still has the nerve to cry," he said. "She killed everyone. She killed Vander. I honestly cannot—"
"Silco killed Vander," Claggor said. He pushed his goggles up. His voice was flat and precise, the way Claggor's voice got when he was delivering information that he thought needed to be separated from opinion. "Silco stabbed him. That's what we watched."
Mylo opened his mouth.
"And that's not Vander," Vi said. She had her finger pointed at Mylo. "And that's not Powder. And that's not me." She paused. "But if you keep going, Mylo, I will absolutely make it me."
The finger lowered.
Powder was quiet for a moment. Then: "She was scared. 'She' was scared that 'Vi' would never look at her again. She wasn't trying to explain. She wasn't saying it wasn't her fault. She just—" Powder stopped. Restarted. "She was afraid that was the last time."
Nobody said anything to this.
Caitlyn was listening with her hands folded and her notebook closed. She had been composing an internal catalogue all afternoon of problems she had previously considered significant, and finding, one by one, that most of them had begun to look different in the light of other people's actual difficulties. She had parents. Both of them. Parents who found her aspirations baffling and said so, which was its own category of frustrating, but who loved her without conditions. This was not a small thing. She had not been treating it as a large thing, but it was.
She said nothing about this. It was not information that needed to be shared.
Jayce, on the other side of the room, was watching the curtain with one hand on his knee and the other tapping an irregular rhythm against the bench. He wanted to be at the bench. He wanted to be doing the experiment. He had just watched himself succeed at the most important thing he had ever attempted, and there was a man in his apartment who apparently controlled bodies with single words and was using this power to make Jayce sit in a chair and watch drama.
This was not the afternoon he had planned.
The light curtain had moved forward.
Vi, alone in an alley, processing what she had done by not processing it at all: sitting in the dark, arms around her knees, leaking in the way that people leak when they have done something they cannot immediately face the dimensions of.
Then Silco stepped out of the shadows.
He did not hurt her. He had something else in mind, and the something else involved a drug administered from behind before Vi could turn around. Her vision blurred. The alley went soft at the edges. The last thing she saw before she went down was, somewhere ahead of her, Silco walking toward the small figure of Powder.
Powder did not run.
She looked at Silco for a moment. She looked at the direction Vi had gone. She looked back at Silco.
Then she walked toward him.
The real Mylo watched this. He sat with it. His jaw moved once, like he was going to say something, and then did not.
"Okay," he said finally. "Okay. I get it. She was protecting herself. I get it."
Claggor put a hand on his shoulder and left it there.
The light curtain went dark and then stayed dark.
Everyone waited. Nothing happened.
"Is that it?" Jayce said.
"For today," Liam said.
He had picked up one of the blue crystals from Jayce's bench while the curtain was running its final scenes and had been turning it in his fingers for the last few minutes. He looked at it now with the focused attention of someone who has been forming a hypothesis and is ready to test it.
He began to squeeze.
"Hey." Jayce was on his feet. "Be careful with that, those are—"
A crack appeared in the crystal. Blue light seeped from it.
"That thing will explode!" Mylo was already backing up. "Didn't we just watch an entire building go up because of one of those?"
More cracks. The light intensified. Vi pulled Powder behind her. Jayce stepped in front of Caitlyn, who immediately stepped out from behind Jayce.
The blue energy burst outward.
And then nothing. No explosion. No shockwave. No sound except the ambient noise of the city outside.
The blue energy was still there, contained in the air above Liam's open palm, pulsing with the urgency of something that had wanted to be an explosion and was being firmly informed otherwise. An invisible pressure held it in a sphere. It moved against the boundaries of the sphere like a liquid trying to find the exit.
Shizuku watched this from her position at the workbench. She could see the natural energy field Liam had shaped around the burst: a large, stable containment barrier, no visible effort required to maintain it.
"Well?" she said.
Liam studied the contained energy. "It's close," he said. "The quality is close to natural energy. But the properties are off." He turned the sphere slightly. "The way it wants to interact with things. The way it conducts and discharges. It's like natural energy that has been pushed through a Transmutation filter. Different fundamental character. Same source."
"Transmutation type," Shizuku said. It was not quite a question.
"Natural energy, Transmutation type, hextech magic. Three names for the same thing, just from different angles." Liam nodded slowly. "That's workable."
"Can you absorb it?"
"Let's see."
The sphere began to shrink. Not dispersing, not exploding: shrinking, the energy pulling inward and becoming denser as it was taken in. The blue light diminished. Head-sized to fist-sized to egg-sized to the tip of a finger. Then it was gone.
Liam closed his hand and opened it again. Empty.
Jayce had been staring. He had the expression of a man watching a demonstration of physics that his entire education had not prepared him to classify.
"You know magic," he said.
"He controlled all our bodies with two words," Mylo said. His voice had the dry quality of someone who has been unsettled and has decided that sarcasm is the appropriate coping mechanism. "Of course he knows magic. What did you think that was?"
Liam held his palm upward and let the natural energy concentrate. Blue points of light drifted toward his hand from the ambient field, slowly at first, then with more purpose. They collected, condensed, and packed themselves together with the characteristic reluctance of a process being done in the wrong direction. The energy resisted the crystalline arrangement. He applied pressure of a specific kind and it stopped resisting.
He opened his fingers.
A blue crystal sat in his palm. Identical in color to the ones on Jayce's bench. Identical in the quality of light moving inside it.
Jayce was speechless.
"The magician on the mountain," Liam said. "The runes he used." He set the crystal on the bench next to the others. "They're not the same as what we call divine script. But they're doing the same job. Different notation, same underlying principle. He was drawing on transmuted natural energy and directing it through inscribed patterns." He looked at Jayce. "You've been doing it from memory. Very good memory."
Jayce looked at the crystal, then at Liam, then at the crystal again.
"I've been trying to recreate it for years," he said.
"You already have," Liam said, and pointed at the experimental housing on the bench. "You just don't fully know the language yet."
"Right." Liam clapped his hands once. "That's enough for today."
"Today?" Caitlyn said.
"I thought we'd come back tomorrow. Same time. Continue watching." He gestured toward the empty sky where the light curtain had been. "There are more episodes."
Jayce said, immediately and firmly, that he did not want to watch any more episodes, he wanted to do the experiment, which he could now do because the curtain had just shown him the exact configuration required, and no unusual amount of time had actually passed—
"Miss Kiramman."
Caitlyn had been composing her response to the "tomorrow" proposal. She stopped.
"If what happened here today doesn't reach anyone who wasn't in this room," Liam said, "then I think tomorrow is perfectly manageable. We came quietly. We'd like to leave quietly."
Vi pointed at the empty air where the light curtain had spent several hours being visible to all of Piltover. "That was quiet?"
"Only you know it has anything to do with me." Liam was perfectly comfortable with this framing. "As long as Miss Kiramman doesn't mention it to anyone irrelevant, it stays quiet. As for our intentions: we happened to pass through, found ourselves in your world, and thought the introduction was worth making. That's all this was."
Caitlyn looked at her own hands. She had spent the entire afternoon unable to leave a chair she had not chosen to sit in. "This is not how friends are made," she said.
"What about this?"
Liam snapped his fingers.
The effect was immediate and physical and entirely unlike anything any of them had experienced. Every pore, every channel, every point in their bodies where something had been holding itself still: everything opened at once. Heat moved through them from the inside out. Not painful. More like the sensation of standing up after sitting down for too long, but everywhere, and all at once, and much more significant than that.
Claggor steadied himself against the doorframe.
Mylo looked at his hands.
Powder made a sound that was not quite a word.
The room looked different. Not the furniture, not the light coming through the window. The people in it looked different. Liam and Shizuku stood wrapped in something that was neither light nor shadow but had qualities of both, soft and moving and present. Jade, on Liam's shoulder, had the quality of something woven from the same material as daylight.
Liam opened his palm.
A ball of air gathered, shaped itself, and became a cloud. A golden cloud, warm, softly lit from within, hovering above his hand like an answer to a question nobody had thought to ask yet.
It hung in the air of the apartment and turned slowly.