“The season very sickly everywhere of strange and fatal fevers.”

Truth had no idea where the words came from, or why he thought of them as the explosion drove him towards Sophia. She looked like she was ducking in slow motion, a sleepy bird in front of Truth’s terrifying reflexes. He tackled her, pinning her to the ground as the blast roared over them.

He was so used to fighting, it was a little surreal watching the people in the lab fail to react to a woman exploding. There were bodies on the floor. Some dead, some near death. Didn’t seem to be an intact talisman in the room either. He could feel Sophia starting to squirm. She had the good sense to be wearing discreet armor plate under her clothes, though given the circumstances, that wasn’t a good look. Was she working her arm around to pull a weapon on him?

It almost brought a tear to his eye. He had really raised her right. He hopped up. Sophia was still Level One. That was… normal, actually, but still not good. His cheek twitched. Actually, it was very good. She would have a harder time surviving the collapse of civilization, but she would survive the collapse of magic far better than the level threes and fours in the room.

Looking down at his sister, he could only silently salute the Medici ability to make literally anything a problem, and beat simple solutions to death with a shovel. Probably a stolen shovel, because blood will tell. He hesitated a bit on that last thought. He was being unfair. Sophia wasn’t like her brothers. She would engineer some kind of shovel-beast to do the beating for her.

He offered her a hand up.”Alright there?”

“Yes, thank you. Where did you come from?” She sounded shaky, which was fair enough.

“Other side of the room. Prof. C wanted to recruit me as a test subject, though I think that plan is now off.”

Sophia looked around the room, then gasped in horror. “Oh no, Professor!” She rushed over, patting him down. Truth kept a sharp eye on her. Had she hidden something in her palm before touching the professor?

“Off. Off! Call a doctor if you are so concerned. I have my potions, stupid girl! Damn! Who sabotaged me?!”

Cuinoird’s voice was thready, coming from behind the ruins of the lab bench. The walls were painted with the woman who had been on the table, as well as several of the people who had been around it. He didn’t know how many were still alive, other than Sophia, Cuinoird and himself. Not a high number. Time to be elsewhere.

“Yes, Professor, at once!”

She rushed out of the lab, Truth trailing along behind her. She went straight to the security call box, and reported the explosion. She then, to Truth’s mild surprise, did not return to the lab, but rushed back to her dorm, collapsed into bed and curled into a ball. She shook. It looked like she was choking down sobs.

Truth looked around the room. Two sets of bunk beds- a four person dorm. About middle of the pack as dorm rooms went, from what he had vaguely picked up over the years. Not a million miles from barrack rooms, if a million times messier.

She… hadn’t seen him at all. Since the moment she rushed over to the Professor, Truth had simply ceased to exist for her. He wasn’t deliberately hiding. It’s just that, these days, he had to make a conscious effort to let Level One’s see him. He could caress her, pat her head, hug her like he used to when they were children, and she would have no conscious awareness of it. The rules of the world would forbid it.

Sophia, his blood, the sister he loved and the sibling he was most proud of, was too far below him. Cultivation was a big piece of that, but so was… everything. The accumulated weight of his blessings, his spells, his understanding of the world. He was seeing layers to things that she likely didn’t have language for. Not because she was stupid. She was certainly a lot smarter than he was. Just because she didn't have all the information. Hadn’t experienced the same things he had.

He remembered Merkovah explaining the problems with obtaining wisdom by revelation. He had a very true, very accurate understanding of what was going on, but it was all filtered through his perspective and his life experiences. It would therefore be, for anyone he explained it to, some degree of wrong.

You couldn’t tell someone “the truth.” They had to see it for themselves. What a world.

So what, exactly, did he want? What, exactly, did he want to do here? All the arguments for not revealing himself to Vig applied triple to Sophia. Not only would it put both of them in unreasonable danger with no benefits, she was still enmeshed in Jeon society. She was still part of that system. A goddamn… university lab assistant.

Ohshit!ThatlabI’msupposedtobreakinto!

Truth jolted out of his maudlin musings. Hopefully he wasn’t too late! Truth lept away from Sophia’s bed and sprinted back across campus to Dr. S’s lab.

To his immense amusement, it looked like others had the same idea. A pair of aggressively ordinary looking twenty-somethings were disarming locks, defeating surveillance, and generally scraping anything of value into a cardboard box marked for storage. Truth stood back and “supervised.”

That’s right, my friends. You do all the heavy lifting. Be sure and leave plenty of evidence behind, you eager little devils you.

He was even more amused to see six more people “casually walk past” the office, then hide themselves nearby. What the Hell was going on in this university? In a fit of perversity, he let it play out for a while. The box traded hands three times before reaching the edge of the campus, where the thieves piled into a carriage. Truth decided to ride in the back.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Signal the client.”

“Done.”

They continued in silence. Truth let them get a few blocks from the university before yanking the steering wheel over and plowing them into a parked carriage. Nobody died, but the box “mysteriously” vanished while they were sorting themselves out.

Truth then merrily zipped over to one of the many dead drops around Harban, stashed the goods, rotated the flower pot on the ledge next to it until the sun painted on its side faced due east, and noted with a wry lack of surprise that it was filled with blue geraniums. Merkovah wanted to talk. Fair enough. Now, how to do that with any degree of safety?

He smiled up at the sun for a moment, then felt the smile drain away. That had been a diverting few hours. A nice little distraction from the fact he left his sister traumatized, sobbing and alone in her dorm after her first (hopefully her first) multiple murder. Sophia wasn’t like Truth or Vigor. She was a tough kid, a slum kid, but she wasn’t as nakedly homicidal as her brothers. So what could have driven her to do that?

In the long run, Hell, in the medium run, it really didn’t matter. None of this mattered. Nothing in that cardboard box really mattered. All that mattered was finding the girl and cracking the System. Maybe hunting the people who saw themselves ruling the world after the fall. He didn’t think he much liked their vision. Wouldn’t be too hard to clear out some high level bureaucrats and “ancient families.”

He couldn’t clean the board entirely, but maybe he could clear some room for the smaller rats to stand. Learn how not to eat each other. Maybe.

So what did he want? If he wasn’t going to eat his fellow rats? Or at least, try to eat them less. What was he going to do with his shiny new revelation? His little piece of a secret the world itself seemed to want suppressed? It came down to what he wanted and what he needed. He wanted the sibs and Etenesh, and himself, to have some kind of good tomorrow. It’s what they needed, too. But he was creaking. He knew he was coming apart under the strain and isolation.

It was the situation before he found himself on five years bed rest in a well. Winding himself up, further and further and further because he was the only one who could fix things. Only one who could keep the sibs safe. If literal demons from HR and his Starbrite bosses were telling him, explicitly and in no uncertain terms, to get a date and take a vacation, then he needed one.

Well. There was no beach holiday during the revolution. But maybe he could go hug his sis. It was dangerous. And it was greedy. But if he really believed it would all break down without him, it was necessary.

He walked back to the dorm. No longer noticing that he was moving faster than the stop and go traffic on the road. Not seeing the way people just got out of his way instinctively as he breezed past them. It had all become normal. He was becoming acclimated to power. Not the social power of The Prince. The power in his own hands.

He appeared at Sophia’s dorm room again, and was about to let himself in, but hesitated. He could see multiple, redundant locks and security mechanisms on the door. She would not respond well to being surprised. Truth smiled slightly, and knocked.

No answer.

He knocked again.

There continued to be no answer.

He knocked out the tune of a song he remembered hearing as he drove through the Free State. He probably didn’t nail it, but he figured it was pretty close. He was reaching minute two when the door was yanked open by a visibly pissed off Sophia, with a visible asp wand in her hand. Always good to see. She squinted at him a bit before asking-

“You are the guy from the lab. Why are you here?”

“To see you, mostly.”

The asp wand got raised higher.

“I have a boyfriend.”

“Oh great! I have a girlfriend. I think you will like her. I sure hope so, anyway.”

This seemed to throw her for a moment.

“Are you… after some kind of polygamous arrangement?”

“With you? Gross. And no, my girlfriend would absolutely, one hundred percent, not be okay with that. And I respect that.” Truth shook his head with the serious look of an older brother winding up a younger sibling.

“You turn up at my apartment and call me gross. Fantastic. Go away.”

“You aren’t gross. Wait, are you gross? Doesn't your boyfriend mind?” Truth asked.

Sophia was getting visibly more irritated, but then, to Truth’s amazement, she took a deep breath and calmed herself down.

“Who are you, exactly?”

Truth gave a crooked little grin. “That is a matter of some dispute, philosophically and legally. And a very long story. May I come in?”

“No. Why have you come to see me?” Her eyes narrowed.

“Because I’m not really hanging in there well. I’m starting to come apart. Actually, I have been coming apart for a while now. And I could really use some company.”

“Shook up after the explosion?” Sophia asked, her eyes getting a little softer.

“Something like that.”

She hesitated, then nodded. “You can come in, but you sit in the chair. I’m taking the sofa. Just keep your distance and we’ll be fine.” She waved the asp wand. Truth nodded, thankfully.

They sat. Sophia looked around, clearly not knowing how this was supposed to go. “Do you want a glass of water or something?”

“No thank you.” Truth fidgeted. How do you tell someone you came back from the dead? “So. You wanted to know my name?”

“Yes, that’s probably a good place to start.”

“Well, there’s a lot of people that call me Johnny Wells, or Tommy Bells. In any case, I’m a certified Talisman Maintenance Technician.”

She snorted a little at that.

“And the Talisman maintenance bit is true. But the name isn’t.” He took a deep breath. “And this is where I start running into legal trouble.” She waved her hand, encouraging him along. He grasped around for some way to prove his identity.

“One day, that pedophile pimp Thierrie lured you towards an alley with a cigarette. Your oldest brother turned up seconds later with an empty beer bottle and chased him off. A couple of days after that, Theirrie vanished, and a couple days after that, your oldest brother broke through to Level One, and less than a month later passed his SAT’s and emancipated you all and took you to live in the Tier-C apartment of his dreams.”

Truth was rambling, speaking quickly. “And his name was Truth Medici, and he died on an op for Starbrite. But he didn’t stay dead. He did a shitton of body cultivation, and changed his face and physique. And now he’s come home.” Truth was almost gasping by the end. “Hello Sophia. I’m back. And you have a lot of questions for me.”