"You said two days!"

I was shouting at AEGIS again, even though I knew it wasn't her fault. None of this was her fault. It was mine, and that was why I was shouting.

"I said...two days, maybe less, if she doesn't succumb to her burns," AEGIS replied. She was cradling Lia in her arms, gentle as anyone had ever been, but still my sister seemed to labor in misery. Her breathing was ragged, and every breath which caught in her burned lips made my heart scream in my chest. Put her down! Spare her that pain! Anything to lessen her suffering.

"You said two days! And Tobias didn't last two minutes. Is Lia going to just sieze up and die like he did, AEGIS? I thought we had time! I thought we could do something!"

I knew I was just screaming at her. It was like I saw myself doing it, but couldn't stop. She was the one carrying my sister, she was the one with the medical expertise, she was the one who'd pulled us all out of the radiation before they'd turned into char like the corpse we'd left behind.

I'd done nothing but scream and yell and cry. I wasn't helping. But I couldn't stop. Every time I tried to, tried to force us a few steps forward, to...pick some random direction amidst all the brown and dust, and just...head go anywhere which wasn't here, anywhere there might be a portal home, where Lia could get to a hospital and be saved…

Every time I tried to take that step, I caught sight of the burns across her face, her arm swinging like a corpse's, and I was screaming again. Uselessly. Not even at AEGIS, not even at myself, not even at God.

Just. Screaming.

"Athan, come on," she said, with a gentle shake of her head that wouldn't reach Lia. "You're right that...her only chance is for us to find...something."

She also scanned the horizon. Same as I'd been doing for minutes now. And if she saw something other than the endless, dusty, dead expanse, it didn't show on her face. She took a deep breath, and then began walking with deliberate, even strides.

"Where are you going?" I shouted.

"This way."

"Why that way? Why not any fucking other way."

She took a deep breath and sighed it out slowly, turning to stare at me over her shoulder.

"I don't know, Athan. I don't know where we are, or where the portal is, or anything. But we know the portal isn't here, so we should walk."

"Just walk at random?" I was screaming again. "Just bumble around and hope that God's fucking kind enough to put a way home in our path, after all the fucked-up bullshit He's put us through?"

It was killing me to do this to her. I had just had the exact same thought, that walking anywhere was better than standing here. But somehow, hearing it from her mouth pissed me off. Everything pissed me off, I was so pissed and fucked and screaming, when all I wanted to do was die.

I tried to be like her, to take a deep breath, but my blood was pumping too hard even for that. I couldn't close my eyes without seeing Lia burned onto their insides. All I could hear was the silence that followed Tobias' last ragged breath, echoing forever in my head, the silence that was crawling across my sister.

I wanted to be sane and reasonable and proactive. And I just...couldn't. Lia was dying in front of me, needed me now more than ever, and...she deserved better than I was. I was just this mountain of ineffective trash, a filthy Exhuman who'd never been good at anything but killing people, no matter how much I pretended I always tried the opposite. I was worthless, not just to her, but everywhere. And right now was just the proof, the slap in the face that reality loved to give when you could take it least.

She'd die, and I would waste her last minutes doing nothing about it. The tiny glimmer of hope to save her was just a mockery, to give me one last chance to demonstrate what a failure I could be. To add one more onto the pile.

Gracefully, balancing Lia so that she wasn't stirred, AEGIS kicked me in the face, the bridge of her foot cradling my nose as I went down.

I stumbled from my back, looking up to see her standing there, leg still raised, lowering deliberately, gently, the hem of her short dress dropping like a curtain over a flash of pastel panties, the most colorful thing on this planet, shying away.

"Athan, with all due respect, get a fucking hold of yourself," she said, her voice still gentle. "Walk. Do something. Lia is not dead yet."

"DO WHAT, AEGIS?" I pounded my fists against the dirt. I was still impetuous and immature, just from the ground, now.

"I don't know. I'm not you. We need to find the lab they described. We know it's underground. Can you use your powers like you did in Karu's house, to feel around down there? Or maybe your speed, to scout a perimeter around us? Or get your exoframe functioning again so you can bound instead of limp? Or maybe that trick you pulled off in New York, and levitate yourself with magnetism, to get a bird's-eye view?"

Her breathing was slow, even, as were her words. But despite how calm she was forcing herself to be, I could tell she wasn't just speaking down to me physically. She knew what garbage I was being right now, and she knew that Lia didn't have time for it.

And she was right. I was worse than useless right now. She was the only one who could help, and I was being an active detriment.

"So maybe pull yourself together, Athan. Just a little bit. If you want to have a chance to save Lia."

She was right. I...did. Did need to pull myself together. I needed to breathe and think and…

And pull myself together. I didn't have the words to think of it in any terms but what she'd said. I needed to be more than useless if I was going to help save Lia.

But I couldn't do that. I'd been trying. I'd been failing. All I felt was panic and infectious, stupid, blind...more panic, when I saw her. I couldn't just force myself to make sense.

"Just go," I said. "I'm...I'm useless. Please."

It wasn't eloquent, but she understood. She gave me a sharp nod...sharp as she could muster without stirring Lia.

"I'll find it. And then I'll find you, okay? Keep your phone on, with how dead this world is, I can actually track you by it."

"Thank you. Thank you AEGIS. I'm so sorry."

"I understand." She paused. "I'm going to hold onto her. I want you to get up and help me look when you can. I don't think just sitting here is good for you...but I understand. I'm going now."

And then she began away with long, even strides, much faster than before, and I realized again, it was me holding her back.

Hadn't I always been? AEGIS was so supremely competent. She was a perfect woman, by design, capable of anything, and anything she couldn't handle, she could adapt to. Given enough time and resources, she could even put herself into a new body or teach herself an entire new skillset to handle a problem.

And what did I do with my time? Learn some engineering nonsense that'd never help anyone? Train at fighting, so resolutely focused on beating Dragon, only to still lose to him because of my stupid exoframe, because of my stupid decisions to get myself mutilated? And then, after all that, didn't even commit myself to fight him in the end. Just our 'date'.

Every rescue attempt I'd made, every friendship I'd tried to protect, every world-doctrine I'd tried to rewrite, had any of it ever been for anything? Had things ever turned out better for my involvement?

As I laid there on the dust of another Earth, captivated by how useless I was in helping the one person closest to me, these are the thoughts that berated me.

Even if I'd never turned Exhuman, I wasn't that great a football player, I thought. Cal had given me a scholarship, but that didn't mean I'd ever cut it in the majors. Dad had once told me that only two percent of college players ever went pro, and he was convinced I was that two percent.

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At the time, I was young and stupid. At the time, I was following his plan, because he seemed like he knew everything, and I was just along for the ride in my own life. At the time, I thought, of course he was right.

If I saw clearly now, how rough that two percent was, how very, very likely it would be that I was the ninety-eight percent, was that considered growth? Or had I just grown cynical, disillusioned? What, really, is the difference between that and wisdom? Isn't knowing that you aren't good enough still knowing?

AEGIS said that if she got help, Lia had a ten percent chance at living. Playing pro had once seemed such a foregone conclusion for me, and this was five-hundred percent of that likelihood.

But the other ninety percent, that was nine-hundred percent more likely, still.

I closed my eyes and shut out the numbers. This had never been about numbers in the first place. I'd already beaten the odds just by being an Exhuman. One in a million. And then to have survived my first week? One in a billion. To have done all the things I'd done, to ascend through the XPCA, not once, but twice? To cause a global event in Japan, and escaped? To have destroyed Eryendria? To have been spaced by Justice and survived? Or to be the first human from our Earth to set foot on this one?

One in however many people there ever had been.

There were so many bad memories. All the lives I'd taken...or as I'd been phrasing it, 'been forced to take'. But that was just whitewashing my past, I'd done it and they'd died. The least I could do was call it what it was. I'd worked so hard to protect people, Steffie, Whitney, Karu, Tem, Moon, and Lia. And each time, I'd had to make choices, had to hurt others to get to them, to get what I needed to reach them.

I'd made the decisions to put myself and my friends first, I understood. Everyone we killed in Japan, they were casualties of my choices to pursue Moon. It wasn't because they were throwing themselves at me, or because of some fucked-up culture of Exhuman hate.

I killed them. Because they were between me and what I wanted. That was all there was to it. That was what Karu had been trying to explain to me, ever since her breakdown. She was right, all along. Intentions didn't keep people alive, throwing my lives at others' wasn't selfless, helping others because doing so felt good, and doing so because I felt bad were not the same thing.

I felt bloated. Stupid. Immature. Why had all of this hit me now, when Lia's life was hanging in the balance? And how long had I been denying the reality of who I was and why I operated, instead of accepting the truth? After all my talk on the subject, I was still in blind denial all along.

When I sat up, I felt lighter. I realized I was breathing regularly again. My head was still spinning with all the thoughts that had coursed through me, but much of my feeling had seemed to drain out of me, carrying a lot of my ego with it.

I was insignificant, selfish, and immature. But I was also one of the two people on this rock who could help Lia. If there were obstacles in my way, I'd kill them, because Lia meant that much to me, not because I was being forced to or had no options. I could be honest with myself about that.

I stood up, and stumbled. My exoframe had taken some serious punishment from the radiation. I flipped open the service panel and put those engineering skills I'd picked up from Whitney to a purpose. Some of the diodes and circuits had degraded, some of the wires had gone brittle and burned. I did what I could, massaging infinitesimal amounts of electricity through the circuits' pathways and scouring blockages, melting tiny blobs of solder off of connections and onto the boards to bridge whatever damage I couldn't manage. Salvaging lengths of wire from some connections to mend others.

I was just happy that AEGIS was built to be shielded against radiation. If her systems had gone up like my legs, Lia would already be dead.

It was sloppy work without tools, but when I stood up, I stood up successfully. I took a deep breath, and then started the opposite direction AEGIS had left.

My head felt shockingly empty and light, and I didn't want to see Lia and cloud it up again. I felt like thoughts had been pushed out of me, and in their place was just direction. I had a simple task, and I could do that, and I could worry about everything else later. For now, find the portal, everything was riding on that.

I made it maybe twenty feet before I had to stop, and found my emotions again.

Tobias was here, exactly as we'd left him, along with the other corpse AEGIS had found in the crater. He seemed...at once, dried-out from the burns, but also seeping blood, black, cracked flesh, with seething red beneath.

Thinking more clearly now, it was obvious that he'd taken a lot worse burns than Lia had. AEGIS had pulled me out of the crater first, then Lia, then him. And she'd made a mistake there -- if she'd been thinking clearly, she'd have remembered I was immune to radiation and pulled me last. Lia might not even be in danger if she was pulled first, but that was neither here nor there. AEGIS loved me most, and so she saved me first, and I'm sure that she was beating herself up about it even now.

But she was still doing her best for the people who were left, and so should I. All I could offer Tobias was an apology, and the thought that he probably would have wanted to be left on another world, even if we couldn't bury him, before moving on.

I'd just turned to go when I heard scraping in the dirt, and turned, finding AEGIS there, a little out of breath, her eyes wide.

"Hide!" she hissed.

I blinked at her, not sure where there even was to do so. But I followed her lead as she bounded carefully to a shallow impression in the ground and lowered Lia into it, before the two of us dropped to our chests beside her.

"Hide from what?" I asked.

"Shh."

We laid there, a tumult of thoughts buzzing in my head, as we peered out over the two dead bodies.

I understood AEGIS' insistence on hiding and quiet. It made perfect sense if there was something here. What I didn't understand was what could possibly even be here. This world was completely ruined, as far as I'd seen, just dirt and glass, even much of the natural geography blasted away so much that I couldn't tell where in America we were even supposed to be.

It was possible there were other survivors, like Ajax and Celia. But if so, why would we hide? And then, there were the robots who came through the portal, I supposed--

I figured it out just as they came into view. Two of them, hovering on trails of blue plasma, rippling across the landscape about as fast as a brisk jog. They were lumpy things, covered in bulges which were crested with sensors, short antennae sticking out of them at all angles, and some cables hung from their exterior, connecting different parts of the machine to itself while draping under them like a cape.

They moved with intention towards the bodies, and as they approached, I saw that amidst the cables swaying under them was also a set of manipulators. Efficiently, precisely, they took opposite ends of the charred body and picked him up with spindly silver arms, hovering back the way they came without hesitation.

Why they'd come here, why that body and not Tobias, how they knew it was here, or we were here, or we weren't here, I didn't understand.

But what I did get, what was clear as anything, was AEGIS and I rising in unison once the drones were a fair distance away, scooping up Lia, and launching ourselves after them, mimicking their pace to maintain this distance.

I didn't need to know who or what they were. They were fulfilling some sort of purpose in recovering the dead that I didn't care about. But they were taking the body from this nondescript piece of charred Earth to some other place, and the only reason for that would be if there were something there. Whether it was a crypt or a city or just a pile of charred bodies, we'd find something.

And that was a fuckton better than all the nothing around here. So we ran.

For most of ten minutes, we jogged after them, keeping them in sight but not getting too close. With the number of sensors sticking out of them, I had to assume they'd seen us by now, but if they had, they gave no indication. Steadily they went, hovering over shallow hills and down trenches without pause, their cargo swinging in the air between them.

Until, at once, they were gone. They just dipped low, dropped out of our sight, and didn't come back up.

AEGIS swore and increased her speed, and I doubled that. It took me twenty or thirty long strides to reach where they'd vanished, and I very nearly shot right over it, having to crack my heel against the ground to stop myself, with the breaks and stabilizers of my exoframe being some of the systems I'd salvaged to get it working again.

But I understood. We wouldn't be able to follow them in there, certainly not at a distance. But that hardly mattered, compared to what else was in there, I knew.

AEGIS joined me in a second, and let out a small "Oh!"

"It's just like they described," I said.

It had once been gleaming silver, and I knew that a few floors under the surface, it still would be. But from here, it looked more like an antlion's trap, a simple funnel of dirt, almost completely obscuring the straight lines and harsh metal surfaces of the punctured underground structure.

The way the drones had gone was almost like an entrance, a caved-in hole of twisted metal, exposed wires and pipes and structure, punched straight through by an attack from the old war, or by desperate survivors who'd clawed their way in after. Or maybe even before.

But teeming under the surface, those survivors had found no more salvation than the surface offered. Deadly robots, a swarm thick enough to constantly probe through the portal. The portal we needed to get Lia home.

AEGIS whispered, "The lab. Ramanathan's lab."

"We must have been meant to find it. By Mage, I mean."

"It was pretty close. Do...you think there's a reason for that? Like, the angle-gate we took, it was pretty close to the portal that the robots come through...um, back on Earth. Do you think that kind of proximity applies on this end as well?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know the first thing about how proximity works when we're talking dimensions and 'probability-space' and any of that junk. But it's here, and so were we so...either yes, or it's just another amazing coincidence that makes me think Mage is behind it all."

She nodded, but didn't say anything further, just began a careful hands-free descent, her toes flexing for grip with every sandy step. I went down ahead of her and gave her whatever support I could offer.

"Thank you," she said, as we touched down on the flat surface, the barren world now just a crack in the ceiling above us. "For...for um,"

"No, I get it," I said. "I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry too, for yelling at you."

That made me snort. "You were definitely not the one yelling."

"Well if my arms weren't full...I would have been."

We paused, a lot of things going unspoken. I had to wonder if I would have been able to let those words go by without saying them, just a few short hours ago.

But I was changed, and our situation was dire. What we didn't say would have to do, as we both turned towards the darkness of the next floor down and entered into the parallel-dimension Ramanathan's Lab.