“This is Her Grace’s office? Chamber? Chambers?” Shoulders hunched to conserve space, Reeve looked around the room in which she stood, into which a small desk and four low stools had been squeezed.

“No,” Dusk said, “this is, or was, a broom closet.” She sidestepped around the desk. “I need no more.” She sat on one of the stools. “And I am no royalty and wish for no titles. After you abandoned us, Leaf, Thomanji’yheri, my sister, and I joined those who sought to stabilize the fragments of the empire left in turmoil by Helia’s overthrow of the Royal House. We were but a few of many—“

“—yet with time…,” Leaf said.

“—yet, with time,” Dusk said slowly, “our abilities,” she looked at Leaf and then gestured to the empty stools where Dawn and Thomanji’yheri would have joined her and Leaf when all were present, “came to be valued by our people.”

“I’m guessing the fact that you and Dawn can manipulate the code underlying this world didn’t hurt,” Reeve said.

“It did not hurt,” Dusk said wryly. “So we rose to be respected leaders.” Her face fell slightly and she looked tired. “I, in particular, was chosen by our people to lead us, at least for the time being.”

“And they gave you a closet to do it from,” Reeve said.

“They tried to give me a castle,” Dusk said. “I did not want it.”

“OK,” Reeve said, “a humble leader of the people. I can respect that. But will you please tell me what all’s been going on since I logged out? And where Dawn and Thomanji’yheri are? And Nyx, if you know. Also, I need to log out again, but I don’t want time to pass while I’m gone this time. Do you have any idea what would be keeping your world from being suspended while I’m out of game?”

Dusk pulled her heels up to rest on one of the stool’s crossbars, elbows on knees, and lowered her face to rub with her palms. When she sat up and leaned back to rest her head against the wall, she looked older to Reeve. She gestured to two of the stools, and Reeve and Leaf sat, Reeve’s knees pressing uncomfortably against the front of the desk. “You ask many questions, Reeve, when I had hoped you would be bringing answers.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know why time passed here. Since you last saw me, I’ve mostly been asleep or in school. Wait,” Reeve frowned, “you said it’s been eight years since we logged out?”

Dusk nodded her head wearily where it rested against the wall.

Reeve called up her UI and opened the detailed readout of game time and real time. She pushed the time range of the graph farther into the past. “Ohmagod,” she said. She closed her UI and refocused her attention on Dusk. “While I was gone, things were running almost three thousand times faster in here than they were in my world.” Reeve leaned back against the wall behind her. “I guess without any neural interfaces slowing the system, it was able to run faster. No actual decisions being made by players, so all it had to do was crunch a bunch of numbers to see how the pre-programmed characters in here played out their roles.”

Dusk’s eyes narrowed, and she leaned forward slightly. “No decisions?” She said quietly, and Reeve’s skin prickled in the way it did right before she realized she’d said something she wished she hadn’t. “When we were in the world to which Dawn sent us—“

“—Devon’s story mode world,” Reeve said.

“—Devon’s story mode world. You told me things of your world and ours. There is, no doubt, still much I do not understand of both those worlds, but with eight years to consider what you said and to explore my powers as a melióδin, I have learned and inferred a great deal.”

Dusk’s voice was no louder than when she’d started speaking, but it had developed an edge that made Reeve shift on her stool and glance at Leaf, whose own face shared some of the hardness of Dusk’s.

“You told me that we,” Dusk indicated herself and Leaf, “are artificial constructs, created by your people. And you now imply that we have no agency of our own—that we are simply formulas for which the final result is always predestined.” Dusk reached into the folds of her leather armor and drew in quick succession three small silver daggers Reeve had seen her wield before. She leaned forward and, deft and sure, began juggling the three over the surface of the desk, the weapons shining blurs while in spinning flight, only truly visible to Reeve when Dusk caught one briefly by its handle before sending it spinning again. “But are we any less free in our decisions than you?” Dusk was staring Reeve in the eyes even as she kept the blades spinning through the air. “I have found occasion in the last eight years to read your natural philosophies. There have been many libraries we have come upon in our travels—some partially sacked, some pristine—and they say much of this world…but of yours as well.”

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Reeve felt a sense of vertigo as she remembered that libraries in the game world included both books related to the story mode and public domain titles, because some gamers preferred to read or study in-game. How much, Reeve thought uncomfortably, could a sapient AI learn about the real world from all those books?

“I,” Dusk continued, “know of your atoms and molecules and laws of physics. And from everything I have learned, it seems that your world is just as predetermined as mine. Since the moment of the ‘big bang’ that set the pieces of your world in motion, everything that has transpired has been the result of fixed natural laws. Your thoughts and actions will play out in accordance with those laws. There is no room there for randomness, for deviation.”

“But…,” Reeve’s head spun, “that’s different.”

“I see no difference,” Dusk said. “We both exist within rule-constrained systems. And our thoughts and actions are simply the natural results of those systems playing out over time within the rules that have been set.”

“I don’t believe that,” Reeve said, an uncomfortable feeling in her stomach.

“The world does not care what you believe,” Dusk said. The blades still spun above the table. “But perhaps you and I agree on one aspect of this dilemma. We may not have true control, true free will, and we may not know how our predetermined lives will play out, but,” Dusk leaned back, withdrawing her hands, and the three blades fell to embed themselves with a thnk, thnk, thnk in the desktop, “if we stop playing the game, whether by true choice or because it is our programmed path, we will contribute nothing, and we will have no role in the outcome.” Dusk leaned forward again. “Is that the predetermined world in which you want to be trapped?”

“This…,” Reeve felt like she couldn’t think straight and restarted. “But, I’m real,” immediately she felt her skin prickle again, but she didn’t know what else to say.

“Yes,” Dusk said, “you may have physical mass in one of the worlds in which you exist, but is that of any significance? Would it have mattered to you that Helia had no innate physical mass if she had escaped this world and taken control of a mechanical construct that granted her incorporeal will physical agency in yours?” Dusk plucked one of the daggers from the desk. “And does it even matter if neither of us truly has free will? If our actions could have been divined at the moment our worlds were initialized on the simple basis of a number of rules that could predict every moment of time thereafter? Because, in this moment, if we do not choose to act,” she gestured to the dagger she held and the two still embedded in the desk, “the daggers fall.” Dusk looked down at the dagger she held in her hand. “So, choose your words more carefully if you will speak to me of my ‘preprogrammed role.’ For in that role, I have spent the last eight years making untold decisions—many monotonous, some of life and death—as I toiled to help the residents of this land.” Dusk shook her head, again looking tired. “And don’t forget…your path in your world and my path in mine may both be predetermined by someone else’s set of rules…,” with her right hand, Dusk raised the dagger and flicked it toward Reeve’s chest, causing Reeve to flinch and begin to raise a hand. Almost simultaneously, Dusk snapped the fingers of her left hand, and the shimmering blur that had been the dagger streaking toward Reeve froze and hung suspended inches short of Reeve’s leather armor, “…but, in this world, I can bend the rules to my will.”

The three long-separated companions sat in silence.

There was a knock on the door.

From where she sat, Leaf pulled the door open a few inches, which was as much as she could without she and Reeve rising from their stools, and spoke quietly to someone without. After a few seconds, she closed the door and said to Dusk, “Mustakqa has returned from Sillicaos. She wishes to provide a debrief on the situation there.”

Dusk rose and plucked the dagger from the air, then pulled the other two from the surface of the desk and returned all three to their hidden homes in her leathers. “Excuse me,” she said.

Both Reeve and Leaf rose to begin clearing the room so Dusk could squeeze her way out.

“Leaf can answer your questions, Reeve. I will find you in the morn.” She left, and Leaf and Reeve seated themselves again.

“That got weirdly dark really fast,” Reeve said.

Leaf gave a not entirely sympathetic nod and used one hand to pull her long hair from behind her back and down the front of one shoulder. “Dusk shoulders a heavy burden,” she said, “and your first brief visit to our world and your much longer absence left her with many questions she had to ponder, mostly alone. Let me answer your questions at least. You and Dusk can dispel any ill feelings between you in the morning.”

“I’m not even sure I’ll be here in the morning,” Reeve said. “My dad could pull me out at any moment.”

“Then all the more reason for me to speak plainly,” Leaf said.