When I came to, Imbertri was wearing different clothes and the floor was much cleaner.

I felt great. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d been a high-tech appliance, but there’d been a certain consistency about my previous standard of engineering my current shape surpassed.

Everything felt new and gleamed. I wasn’t used to being so clean, even after a shower. I resisted the urge to turn on my engine while Imbertri scrubbed down my panels and instead ran through my new features. Even the extra cupholders were there.

Palamanstri was back and watching intently, seated on a small footstool. “What if he doesn’t wake up?”

Imbertri grinned. “He’s there. He might take a while to charge.”

“I think I’m at about seventy percent,” I clarified, surprising myself along with them. My voice had changed. A little silkier in line with the new aesthetic. “Oh, that’s strange.”

Palamanstri let out an audible sigh of relief. “I wanted to make sure I hadn’t helped kill someone,” my fellow assassin said. “Well. You know what I mean.”

“Reins don’t count,” Imbertri agreed. She wiped off the excess water and wrung her towel dry.

Immediately I activated the new row of lasers. “Yes,” I cackled, aiming each individual turret in its own direction, much to Palamanstri’s alarm. Small blue pinpoints danced across the concrete walls. “Too bad I probably can’t take these with me.”

“You’d miss anyway,” Imbertri quipped.

I was itching to test out the upgrades, but needed to wait for full charge. A cable attached me to a perpetual energy generator lifted from some universe out there that specialised in it. Next time I'd ask for it to be built in. Moving from fuel to electric was a nice upgrade, though like everything else, it wouldn’t carry over between versal triggers. Our optimal strategy had been to include everything we could to see what did.

“How long has it been?” I queried to distract myself. “A day?”

The two agents shared a glance. “Four,” Imbertri said. “The Chapel has resumed operations. I had to build you around missions.”

“And the sigils?” I asked, mood darkening.

“Still there,” Palamanstri said.

Imbertri took up a spot next to the other woman cross-legged on the floor. “The consensus is that they aren’t doing any immediate active harm. Until they do, work continues.”

My charge was at eighty-five percent. “The investigation team hasn’t found anything?”

“They’ve found something,” Imbertri said. Her eyes darted sideways indicating our eavesdropper, and I understood. Later.

Before I could change the subject, the Chapel’s callsign sung in my head. “Speaking of,” I mentioned, “I just received a summons. I’m at ninety percent.” That was probably enough not to faint the moment I regained my feet.

“Wait,” Imbertri called out, jumping up. “Not yet. Let me get the charger.” She strode across the bay and crouched down by the socket, hand hovering over the cable.

“After our conversation, I rejoined the investigators,” she murmured up close. “It’s a rival House. Keep that close.”

Another House? One existed? Then we weren’t the only people with access to the multiverse, after all. And this other House, whoever they were, clearly knew about the Reins. I wondered what they were the House of. The notion preoccupied me until my charge had restored to a hundred percent. Imbertri gave me a pat, and retrieved the cable.

“Thanks,” I said, shifting human, then said it again.

Now I felt really strange. Lighter, without changing in height or bulk. Examining my arms, my skin seemed to be all one colour again. Brown, not blue. That was reserved for my nails, which I didn’t think was polish, and clothes.

Imbertri raised her eyebrows. “Well, there you go.”

“I’ll fill you in later,” I said, still startling myself at my own voice, and headed to the stairs. Unable to stop staring at my own arms, I almost bumped into the door.

I felt better than I ever had, like someone had injected a dose of energy directly into my veins. That they literally had was, hilariously, unrelated. I paused in the infinite staircase, letting the door swing shut behind me, and sprinted up a few flights of stairs as a test. I barely felt winded after ten. My balance felt surer, speed much faster, and reflexes quicker. Even the connections in my brain seemed to fire a little easier.

It was exactly how I’d imagined the transition to second-tier. Just... not.

“I suppose I can live with this,” I murmured, a smile tugging at the edges of my mouth. Much to my disappointment, my human form didn’t come with a built-in row of retractable lasers; there appeared to be some limits. But I wasn’t complaining.

I could have experimented for hours, but the callsign pinged again, reminding me I had a job. Bounding the rest of the way to the next landing, I propelled open the door and found myself face-to-face with Nysept in the stained glass hall.

I stopped short, all the enthusiasm draining away to be replaced with ominous cold.

“You’re standing in the door,” the Sept declared, raising a finger to beckon me forwards. Her eyes blinked at me asynchronously.

Hesitantly, I stepped in and let the panel close. “I thought this was going to be a mission.”

“It is.”

I had to be in trouble. Worst, it could have been from multiple angles. I’d broken several rules over the past couple of weeks, given away my upgrade, and arguably compromised my loyalty to the Chapel.

Septs didn’t do mission briefings; it was a second-tier job. I didn’t actually know much about what they did, but figured it involved the high-level strategy regarding which universes needed saving and why, or determining where to source Reins. With the sigils appearing, I supposed the latter part had just been automated out of their hands.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Stained glass moved and shifted around the room as before. I focused on a panel at random, watching myself as a teenager run from a pair of snarling beasts only to be devoured.

Nysept followed my gaze. “You haven’t used your upgrade,” she noted, making another disconcerting blink.

“I… decided not to.”

She unfurled an arm towards me, extending the fingers in its upturned palm. “Would you like to give it back?”

I hadn’t realised that was an option, or I might have made a very different decision earlier.

“No,” I said awkwardly, not sure if my deal with Alusept would get him into trouble. “I’ve paid. It’s mine.”

The arm retracted. “If you don’t control your augments, they will control you,” the Sept declared, though I couldn’t detect a threatening note in it.

“Why are you briefing me on a mission?” I asked to change the subject, still thrown off-balance. “Isn’t that too junior for you? Is there some reason you’re singling me out?”

Did she know about Near Miss? If so, I wasn’t sure why she hadn’t said anything, unless she thought I was still in the dark. I prodded my core for a sign whether I should mention it, but as always, doing so achieved nothing.

Saying nothing seemed like the safer option.

“Jadal Cai,” said Nysept, breaking the tension by pacing in a slow circle around me. The stained glass moved with her, images breaking free of their frames and bleeding into their neighbours. I tried not to get distracted.

“That wasn’t my fault.”

“We know. And in the end, your actions were instrumental in eliminating him.”

I nodded.

“Except that you didn’t.”

This conversation wasn’t going well. The images bleeding into their neighbours were interfering with their stories, now. Teenage me scooted down a hole into the frame below, hands over his head to protect it, while the beasts chasing him were shot by an encroaching spaceship’s lasers.

“Uh,” I said, forcing my mind back on track, “we tried our best. Flinpen and Alusept couldn’t find the soul. I don’t even know how; that’s a second-tier technique. But I’m not qualified to hunt down a post-death. Is it even allowed?”

“Jadal Cai is not post-death,” Nysept stated. She came to a halt and faced me. “You failed to kill him.”

“We didn’t,” I retorted, annoyed at the insinuation. “He was extremely dead. Trust me, there was no ambiguity. If the soul escaped back into the multiverse, then there's only one way that works out.”

The Sept tilted her head at me, and I realised I’d overstepped my bounds.

“How many worlds have you been to and how many forms of power have you seen that you don’t understand how the senses can be fooled? Illusion. Regeneration. That’s at only the most basic level.”

“For a post-death, yes. But you just claimed he wasn’t. Pre-death Reins are idiots,” I defended myself, suppressing more anger at the unfair criticism. Post-deaths were too, albeit more powerful, but I left it unsaid.

“Was Jadal Cai? Was murdering several of our champions across untraversable borders the act of a simpleton?”

“I mean –” I began, but choked it off before I could dig myself in deeper. It had been my fault he’d escaped the Black Waste.

The general level of unfairness at any of these accusations threatened to boil over the diplomatic lid I’d been keeping on it. “He was barely on Irwol before we got there,” I petitioned my senior. “He wouldn’t have had time to pick up the local magic even as a post-death. Not to mention the locals are summoners, not illusionists.” I felt myself becoming more irate. “If something else was going on, I’m a first-tier. It never made sense to send me after him the second time. You’re the ones who wanted to keep the matter contained. If you'd wanted it done better, you should have sent someone more senior.”

Faced with my outburst, the Sept only stared at me evenly. “We are not sending you against Jadal Cai,” she stated, which deflated me somewhat. “That would indeed be unfair.”

The stained-glass images behind her were settling down, though not back to their original scenes. I spotted an attractive blue-haired stranger dragging off the corpse of an enemy, until realising it was also supposed to be me. It was a different blue.

Resisting the urge to touch my hair, I instead dug my thumbnails into my palms. It felt strange. “Then what is it?”

“The parameters have changed. There will be no more missions.”

I stared at her for a moment, but only found deadly seriousness. Surely I must have misheard. “What?”

“You’re being reassigned.”

She snapped her fingers and the infinite staircase opened. Flinpen stepped through it looking a little harried. She met my eyes only to bounce off them again without recognition, and nodded politely.

At her arrival, images of the Pen pushed into the stained-glass frames, edging out some of my two-dimensional avatars. Flinpen’s were somehow darker and grimmer despite containing fewer scenes of outright violence. Cages and adulation and bars.

“Flinpen has agreed to be your handler,” Nysept continued, causing the Pen to glance at me curiously. “This is a long-term assignment. You’ll be undertaking an infiltration.”

Flinpen made a slight cough. “I was given to understand I’d be working with Lamutri.”

Nysept didn’t respond.

“Hi.” I raised my hand.

Her eyebrows rose. “That explains where my budget went.”

“Both of you will be well-compensated,” Nysept said with the faintest trace of a smile. “Our task force has identified the likely source of the gateway sigils: an organisation capable of approximating the effects of World Slide. This isn’t one person working alone. The question is how. Either they have a World Slide, or have learnt how to duplicate or reverse-engineer it. We need someone to befriend them and work their way in.”

“And you picked… me,” I uttered incredulously.

“You have a Near Miss,” Nysept said in a light tone.

“Defective,” I stressed.

“Perfect to avoid discovery. You’re also –” she waved a hand at me, “– completely unrecognisable. If we're dealing with a double agent, that improves your chances.”

“And we’re still quarantined in terms of Fate,” Flinpen finished. “Or, more accurately, they’re keeping it contained in us.”

“Quite.”

“I thought that was the Jadal Cai issue,” I said facetiously.

Flinpen rested a hand on her hip. “Based on the timing, they’re probably related.”

I swallowed, keeping an eye on one of Flinpen’s stained glass avatars trying to lure mine into a cage. “I don’t know the first thing about infiltrating,” I said. “For that matter, do any of us? We go in, we kill people. We don’t tend to weave insidious plots and hang around.”

Nysept smiled. “Then figure it out. The Machine has identified a number of routes in, and we’ve selected one for you in alignment with Fate. It will be working with you.”

This was a big deal, I realised, in case it hadn’t already been obvious enough. There was no more powerful ally than Fate. I tried to ignore the fact Near Miss had overridden it now on a number of occasions.

“You’ll need to report to me once a day,” said Flinpen, taking over. “You’ll have direct access; no more loading bay. But don’t be seen. You’ll need to keep your augments hidden. All of them.” She pursed her lips. “If anything goes wrong, get to a door and find me; we can turn this into a standard mission if we have to. I’ll cover you.”

“But for now,” said the Sept, holding up a palm, “focus on the how and why. We need to understand who we’re dealing with before making a decision on how to deal with them.”

Imbertri’s words at the charging cable sprinted to the front of my mind. “A rival House,” I murmured. I raised my eyes to them both staring at me.

“They’re just a legend,” Flinpen said.

Nysept blinked. “They’re real.”

It was all she said before freezing, lips half-open as if poised to begin a new sentence. The eyes on her body simultaneously turned white, obscuring the pupils and irises, and her form flickered violently. Behind her, the stained glass images stopped what they were doing, as one turning to face Flinpen and me. Their eyes were as white and unblinking.

I edged closer to Flinpen, who edged closer to me.

Glancing between the third-tier and her images, I waited for the scene to unfreeze. It didn't. "What's going on?"

It was possibly my imagination, but the images in the frames seemed to be moving towards us, as if ready to step out of their frames.

“We should leave,” Flinpen leant over to whisper in my ear. I was all too happy to agree.