My desk was already gone from the triple office in efficient Chapel automation. My welcome gift notebook remained, placed on the corner of Alushex’s desk. I picked it up and tucked it away, stepping over Jadal Cai’s cadaver to do so.

“Explain this,” ordered Flinq, pointing at the spot where my desk wasn’t.

I didn’t want to go through that conversation again so soon. “Near Miss,” I said for the sake of brevity, and the Quad groaned. “What’s this about him not having a soul?” I pointed at the corpse.

Too many thoughts crowded my mind as if trying to protect me from the thing it really should have been focusing on. I let it happen, accepting the surrealness of the situation for the second time in almost as many days.

“First, pay.” She tapped the credit rod against my wrist. “I’d tell you to enjoy it, but apparently that won’t be happening. Second, it’s just not there. I checked the complete mission records over the last day; nothing’s come in at a match. I've put an alert out, but nothing there, either. I’m at a loss.”

“Well,” I suggested, staring at said mission’s unsightly remnants, “if you’re worried about him coming back, it might be worthwhile throwing this part in a fire.”

“I just don’t understand,” Flinq lamented, putting her head in her hands. She was still in her power armour, helmet off, although it had been cleaned. “He was pre-death. He should have a soul. If not for the immediate taking, then at least drawn here by default. Unless our information was somehow wrong, and he already died once before. It would explain the changes to the template.”

“Post-deaths don’t have souls?” This was news to me. Alushex's earlier insinuations suddenly made more sense.

Flinq shook her head. “One rematch only. Then they’re just like everyone else. Except, you know, not even slightly. And Jadal Cai’s just different.” She squatted in front of the body, crossing her arms intently across her knees. “But different how?”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“Of course it does. He’s a serial killer targeting the people we need to protect.”

“After we serial kill them first.”

“Obviously. What if he comes back?”

“We kill him again,” I said. “One rematch only.”

“Quite. I still don’t like it. He'll have growth going for him.” Placing her hands on her knees, she pushed herself back into a standing position. “I’m almost considering choosing an investigation aid for my next augment. But I worry it will spread me too thin.”

“What was your original plan?” I asked out of curiosity.

“Optimising Long Game. It’s powerful, but far too slow. It’s why I picked Fast Track at Tri. At Exalt grade, I can focus it on an augment itself. But even then, it’s still nowhere near enough. If I could just make it build potency faster, I’d be able to do practically anything.”

“Not at Par,” I mentioned. Nine times out of ten, augments 'only' – as if they were somehow inadequate – offered limited mastery. Only Exalts could refine down to highly specific control. Arches supposedly played by rules of their own.

Flinq had resumed speaking. “If I build it up enough, it can. In theory, it ought to be able to upgrade itself eventually. But it would be a nightmare of a wait.”

“Then that sounds like the way to go. Could you use it on Jadal Cai now for answers?”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“I could. But I won’t. Not when I’m about to reach Pen.”

“Fair,” I observed.

“That’s exactly what I aim not to be,” Flinq replied. She grinned at me.

I saw no trace of the stress and fear Alushex had displayed over advancement, and wondered if she had access to the same information. I wondered if she felt... hunger.

“So the only other thing we need to worry about is the incorrect missions coming through the Machine,” I said. “If it’s because of Near Miss, I don’t know if we can fix it. And if it is, I worry it will retarget me.”

“It's already been reported. And what hasn't will come," said Flinq. "We worry about retargets when we find them. Or you will. I assume I’ll rotate out as your supervisor after today. I won’t have Alushex to reminisce with, either.” She sighed. “I guess that’s how it goes.”

It did. Chapel life wasn’t entirely isolating, but friends came and went, never staying for long. We were trained and sent on missions alone, broken up and compartmentalised by group and tier, not even able to walk through the same staircase in the primary facility. Alone and always seen; the paradox of working for Fate.

The flipside was having the whole of the multiverse to tamper with, whether to make friends or play god. Lately, so focused on advancing, I hadn’t bothered with either.

Maybe that needed to change.

“The storm nexus on Irwol,” I broached, switching subjects. “A shaman’s summon, right? Jadal Cai seemed taken with it, but it never joined in the fight. What was that thing?”

“I assume it belonged to the local Rein,” the Quad answered. “Jash. I also wondered why Jadal wasn’t pressing the attack. But if he was up against that, I wouldn’t blame him for backing down. Jash must be fairly far along in his progress. The Chapel must have brought him to Irwol some time ago.”

“Unless it wasn’t his. I thought for a moment it might have belonged to Jadal Cai.”

The rogue Rein couldn't have acclimatised to the intricacies of a new universe that fast, even accounting for the possibility of post-death, but I couldn't deny I'd wondered.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. In any case, it didn't make a move on us or him. Jadal Cai wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

Perhaps so. But the Rein from the Black Waste had withstood a lot at the end. Against two Chapel operatives going all out, he hadn’t gone down easily. Or maybe just one and a half. The half being me.

Both our eyes were drawn to the body on the floor, and the room filled with an awkward lull. I had no further reason to be here. Excusing myself, I exited into the infinite staircase before I could be volunteered into viscera cleanup.

I ducked my head into the loading bay, but Imbertri wasn’t around. I tried asking Fate for her by name, and she wasn’t in the Chapel. I wasn’t quite desperate enough to abuse my privileges and petition the Machine. After several attempts to eliminate potential Near Misses, I gave up.

Home felt like the wrong place to be. So did everywhere else. Hundreds of universes into my life and I’d built connections in barely any, settling for drifting in and out, lacking roots and a solid presence. Even my presence on Creed felt ephemeral and shaky. I had a building to live in, and a nice one, but manses could be put anywhere.

Unable to settle on a conclusive destination, I slipped into the Interstice and hung restlessly in its timelessness. At least here I was free from the Chapel’s oversight, although that could also have been a lie.

“So, you are an Arch,” I acknowledged, words cascading into an endless aural drone around me. “It’s hard to believe. First of all, fuck you. I don’t care if you think you’ve been looking out for me or whatever other machinations you’ve put in play. Don't I get to decide? I’m not a vehicle for you to ride whenever you feel like playing games, and yes, I perfectly understand that irony.”

The wail was getting a bit much even for me, so I drifted away from it and started again at a quieter pitch. “You’re my core,” I whispered at it. “We’re supposed to work together. I don’t pretend to understand what you want or how Arches work, exactly, but I do know we should at least be able to do that. We fight and we fight, and I don’t want to keep living my life like this. I want to just… stop.”

The wail of the background drone undercut the message somewhat. I moved away again past a casual few thousand universes.

“Don’t you?” I followed up, to no response. “I’ve been trying all this time to force you to do my bidding. You’ve done the same to me. We can do better than this. We have to. Because right now we’re going nowhere, spinning in circles, and I can’t believe that’s what you really want from me. Try to work with me and I promise I’ll do the same. No more fighting. Please.”

The fog loomed back at me as I drifted through. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting.

“Case in point, this one’s for you,” I finished up with, feeling more than a little crazy. “Hit me with your worst. Wherever you want, no strings attached.”

What could it hurt? Completely at random, I picked a universe and stepped through.