I paced along the red shore of the solid black sea. The sound of waves reached me, but the water refused to reflect any light and there were no wave caps. There was none of the general chaotic movement of an ocean in the dark that I could at least compare to sailing in the night kingdom. Only the place where the black met the red, a tide rolling in and out, slow as a cradle rocked by a careful hand.

The longer I watched, the less I could shake the feeling it was breathing.

V stood stone still at the center of my orbit, his cane clasped in both hands and Griffon perched on his shoulders. I never let him entirely out of my sight. The shore was stable, almost peaceful, but I didn't trust anything further than I could see it. Not when my first lesson was that forward was forward but backward could be forward too if hell felt like it. Both of us focused on the same problem. How and why the gate was gone were already solved. The android that sent him looking for the remains of the red dragon in the first place had closed one of his smaller rifts before. Whoever she worked for liked to keep the dimensions separated and would act to neutralize a big enough threat. Yet his grimace and the pinch at the corners of his eyes deepened every time I paced by him.

It took me longer than it probably should have to realize it was not the result of him processing our situation. That look was the dawning realizing that he did not have an answer for how we could get out of it.

"Nothing?" I ventured. He glared at me, but with more dread than anger. "How'd you get out last time?"

"I was guided."

"Can you—"

"No."

Okay then... Seemed to me neither one of us wanted to be stuck here but come to think of it he hadn't been especially forthcoming even with the scanner about the fine details of what happened to him the last time. Griffon had blabbed about a change in their contract and about V entering the basin, but he'd also called their return a miracle. Which was debatable. Extraordinary, yes. Miracle? Maybe from the bottom of the barrel. The hypothermia had been bad enough, but it was just a compounding problem on top of how weak V had been. Magical depletion was as dangerous to him as starvation.

Granted after the way he'd eaten that bird devil I doubted he'd be hurting for magic for a while.

There was no sky over the basin. Not even the sunless red one I'd started to accustom to. The sea began somewhere and theoretically ended somewhere, but the shore was the only evidence that the sea and air were not one and the same. My sense for magic was numb at this point. Fried by oversaturation. But I could feel something odd out there. Sudden dips and swells in passing and the smallest flashes in a spectrum I didn't think was visual but couldn't describe otherwise. And there was something else. Cold spots, like a draft from an invisible window.

I wondered if Jorinde and Jorindel still doing something on the other side. If only we could get in contact with one of them, maybe they could've re-opened it. Or maybe...?

"Holy shit," I breathed. "I can do it."

"What?"

"I can get us back." My fingers trembled against my forehead. "I have celebrant hardware. I've used magic. That means I should be able to conduct it. I should be capable of the festival process."

V and Griffon looked at each other, united in a rare moment of shared doubt. "Not to come down on your party, lady-bot, but messin' around with the celebrant thing is how we got into this mess in the first place."

"Doesn't that mean it's just as capable of getting us out?"

"It's reckless at best," said V, in a considering tone. "The experts were not able to do it without nearly killing me."

"It's not going to be the same thing. Not exactly." If I could've explained it better, I would have, but it wasn't like I had a manual to even explain it to myself. The best I could provide was my vague understanding of the mechanics and bubbling instincts entirely lacking any savvy vocabulary to back it up. "Moving you might not be possible. And the only magical part of me is my core, so if I tried to festival myself out of here, I'd probably die too. But we both passed through the portal when it was already open, right? I can feel something out there, and I don't know how I know this, but I can tell it's Jorinde and Jorindel. If I can send something to that side right as they're sending something through to this one, that should widen it enough for us to slip through."

"I see." He understood maybe half of what I said, but the principle made it through. "And if another rift is torn open?"

"Then we're back to square one but at least we can deal with it from somewhere that's not literally in hell."

He seemed distracted and I thought I'd lost him until he leaned on his cane with an annoyed loll of his head. "You can either grace us with your knowledge or embrace the ride."

Griffon noticed me slowly suck my lips in, struggling to figure out where the hell that fit into what we were discussing and hopped from V's shoulders to mine. "He's talking to Bones."

"Bones as in… the dragon? It talks now?"

"I am sure I mentioned it had become vocal," said V.

"Yeah, but I thought you meant like Shadow is vocal, not that it's been having a conversation with you!" Conspiratorially, I leaned closer. "What is it saying?"

V made a permissive gesture, welcoming the dragon to go ahead. A smirk curled his mouth. Brimming with that private amusement that signaled he'd already made up his mind to do something that probably wasn't a good idea. "It says you are as much a fool as I am, and we are likely to get ourselves killed. However, if that does not discourage you, completing a festival will require a focus."

"There's no demons breathing down my neck so concentration shouldn't a problem."

Griffon snickered and leaned down over my head. "He means a magical focus. A tool to help you channel magic that also has the handy effect of tanking the backdraft if you screw it up."

Shoving his beaks out of my face, I held out my hand and materialized Humility. "The other celebrants use weapons to do that, so this should be fine. What's next?"

"It did allow your first use of magic." There was permission granted, though it didn't come without a small huff of distaste. "It says a physical incantation is required as well. As before, your combat routines should suffice as a catalyst."

"How does the dragon know so much about all this?"

"…Magic," V said after a too-long pause to listen that he'd clearly gotten bored of halfway through. "It all comes from the dragon's corpse in the first place."

Bit simplistic even for my tastes, but it was enough to ease my reservations. With my fists tight around the hilt of Humility, I stepped out into the sea to get closer to my potential targets. As soon as it rose over my boots, I hissed, but I wasn't sure at what. Was it hot? Cold? Not really, not quite. It was hard to say if it was even a liquid or not. The only thing I could conclude definitively was that wetter than the tarry, semi-solid goop the familiars could turn into.

"What exactly is this stuff?"

"The remains of the amniotic darkness from which all demons first sprang. As humans return to dust, so it is said that demons eventually return to the black basin. To be reformed and remade in perpetuity. Or so goes the legend." He followed me on attentive steps that never broke the surface. "Focus, and you won't sink."

I tried not to think about how casually he'd admitted I was up to my thighs in the source of every demon in hell. This was difficult, as a glance backward revealed the shore had disappeared behind us.

V's cane turned my head forward. His knuckles were white around the handle.

He couldn't survive this place forever either. If we could no longer back, that meant there was nothing to think about and the time for hesitation was over. It cost me my assessment of the basin as marginally less than solid, but I was able to get myself onto the surface. The disturbances around us flowed in and out in, invisible fireworks felt in bursts of crisp, wintry air. Dip. Swell. Flicker. Cold. Gone. Not one cycle lasted more than a few seconds.

"There's turbulence," I thought aloud. "Like a bubble forming, a second beforehand... If I can gather up the magic I want to send and complete my routine in time to catch it…"

V watched me puzzle through it for several minutes without interruption. With a sigh, he tucked his cane under one arm and adjusted my posture with a series of diligent touches, distributing weight here and pushing my shoulders into a relaxed draw position. "If you attempt this unprepared, you will be overtaken just like you did before."

Not my fault your magic's as hard to control as you are, was what I tried to say, but I what did was stare at him with my mouth open. This was more physical contact than I had in any memory that didn't involve him letting me carry him through the desert. He was bad at touch the way he was bad at apologizing or goodbyes, and more importantly, I wasn't good at being handled by someone who usually avoided casual contact. But there went his fingers, pressing on the sides of my neck to adjust my head with a matter-of-factness that sent all kinds of baffling signals shooting up my spine like the mercury in an old thermometer

"Is the target fixed?" I shook my head mutely. "Then you will need to bide your time until the moment of absolute certainty. Know your goal for what it is, and you will be answered. But this time, you must remain in command of it."

"Thanks. But uh… Can I... ask why you're holding onto me?"

"Because if you do what you did before, this will be a quick and violent experiment. Shall we?"

My tongue slid across my lips. I shifted as much as I thought I could get away with without undoing all his work on my stance and pretended he wasn't there. The output-increasing NFCS protocol began to run, surrounding me with dim golden light. At maximum output, that same surge as before crashed up into my basin yielded beneath me as I struggled to stay in control. There was nothing human about the magic the sword stored. V claimed it was his, but it didn't feel like him at all. It didn't feel like the pressure of maso or dragon magic either. This was an ultraviolet burst burning plasma through my wires and buzzing against my consciousness.

A scaled hand pressed into my stomach, keeping me upright. "Breathe."

Ventilation was unnecessary. My temperature was fine. I gasped anyway. It gave me something to focus on, something to move through my systems while I couldn't move anything else, not my body and not that aggressive magic either. The sinking stopped. At least for now, I had it stabilized.

Swells and cold spots surrounded me like fish brushing against the surface of a pond and disappearing back to its depths. Never in quite the right place. No rush. All I had to do was wait. All I had to do was breathe.

There.

My routines did not require thought. They were background executables my body ran on its own, while I kept my focus on the turbulence ahead of me. On the magic built up and burning at the edge of my systems and the way it began to move with me rather than against me with ever completed swing of the sword. I breathed. The basin was solid beneath my feet. Processing power split between sight, fine motor, and celebrant hardware control. All operating together in a state I could only compare to battle fever. The gold light around me suffused with flickers of blue. V pulled along after me, matching my steps like a light-footed afterimage despite speed that would have dizzied anyone else. Dancing was supposed to be something like this, I imagined.

Four strikes in, and a cold spot opened before me. Five; the routine ended. Magic swelled over me. My vision turned into a kaleidoscope of hot blues as my targeting system focused solely on the invisible opening before me. I knew my goal, and the sword answered with a rush that drilled ahead, pulled us along with it in dizzying spirals, found its mark with a flash, and flung us through the unknown.

Our landing wasn't graceful.

V narrowly avoided getting crushed by letting me go and allowing himself to fall face-first into the snow. I tumbled several meters further and finally skidded and rolled to a stop on with Humility steaming beside me. There were bodies all around us. Arranged in a familiar scene of war already at its end. On this side too, everyone must have been fighting like hell.

This world was just as bleak as ever, but at least this darkness was blessed by uncountable stars.

"You alive, V?"

"Ostensibly," he grumbled, already up and brushing filthy snow from his coat and hair. "A graceless exit, but an exit no less."

I sat up, groaning as my body reminded me that hardware repairs were still very much a necessity. "Isn't there something you should maybe say at a time like this?"

"Your technique could use a little work."

I slapped a palmful of snow at him and got up.

Roswell had been flattened to a series of cracked concrete floors and broken walls. The old computer parts lay shattered and dusted by snow in corners, and all the lockers had been scattered like seeds. If any of the machine cores or that white sphere had survived, they were gone now. Dismembered parts of machines, androids, demons, and dragon weapons stretched in every direction. The stars were not the only source of light. Faint rays of distant spotlights crossed overhead. We weren't alone, but we were in the aftermath of at least a month's worth of all-out war.

Checking my internal time was useless. Hell had scrambled it and without something to re-sync to, I couldn't make a guess what the date was. "What do we do now…?"

A voice cut across the dark. "GOLIATH!"

Overclock fell over my senses like a magnifying glass. A serrated whip moved within my active proximity, connected to the arm of yet another of those goddamned snake demons slithering up out of a hole in the snow. Pops of rifle fire pinged off its head and chewed semi-effectively at its body. I closed the distance with my fists drawn, battering its exposed stomach until it bent double, and driving up with everything I had to shatter the tough black pyramid of its head. The neon lines vanished. It toppled without so much as a last twitch of its tail.

"Huh…" I kicked at it suspiciously. "Guess they really are stronger in hell."

"More's the better for us," said V. "You're not fully repaired."

"Repaired enough to get to work. I'm gonna go take stock of what happened here. Looks like at least part of Roswell's still standing. You should—" The words might as well have fallen out of my head physically. He stood there chewing busily with chunk of sizzling demon flesh in his hand. "How are you still hungry?!"

"Would it surprise you to know that magical consumption and physical consumption are not the same?" He swallowed and licked at the corner of his mouth. "Spares you the need to run off looking for lakes on my behalf."

"Is it even any good?"

"Not in the slightest." With a wave of his cane, he took a seat between the thorns that lined the snake demon's tail and tore loose another chunk of flesh. "I will be here."

Shaking my head, I ambled off in the direction the shout had come from. The android I found was an obvious scout unit. Filthy clothes, binoculars, relatively unarmed, white fabric tied around the hand for mid-distance signaling. She lifted her goggles as I approached, a wowed sparkle in her eye.

"Good job out there!"

"Thanks," I said with openly bewildered awkwardness. "Can I get a status report? I took a bad hit and my memory's messed up. I'm not even sure my internal clock is right anymore..."

"Sure thing! Way you fight, I'm probably as safe as I can get having you for company anyway. Let's see… It's currently 5 February 11947, local time 7:20 AM. Portal's been closed for twenty-nine days, enemy forces are down to a few hundred across all octants, and we're currently running recon ahead of all-units advancement to the inner perimeter for final extermination."

My mouth fell open, and I let myself stand there and look every bit as horrified as I hadn't been over yet when we reached Roswell. And now it was February? I'd been in hell for ten weeks? A shallow breath helped me remember to talk over the frost that crept through my veins.

"…How many of us are left?"

"At ease," she said encouragingly. "We came away from this one with a definitive victory. There's still over five thousand of us. Most of the heavy casualties ended up being the dragon weapons."

"Is Theta alive?"

"The Commander? Yeah, she's fine." Comprehension lit her eyes. She gave an understanding nod accompanied by a wide smile. "I get it, you must be one of those specialty units too. That explains it. I didn't think we had a second YoRHa in play."

The frost spread. Expanding in cold shards through places I thought hell had deadened. "…A second YoRHa?"

She tilted her head. "Man, you really got knocked around, didn't you? You don't remember the YoRHa that was riding around on the dragon? Unit 9S?"

Forcing my motor control to not lock up, I rubbed at the back of my neck and winced at the dip I felt beneath my skin. "I probably need a major repair. There's a crack in my neck plate…"

"Oh shit, you took way more than a bad hit. You sure you don't want me to at least call for a field medic or something?"

"No, I'm ambulatory just… out of sorts." The stars were beautiful and the world below them was sharp as cut glass. Open, yet paradoxically claustrophobic with the recollection that Briar Rose was still out there circling beyond my sight like a carrion bird. "Is that YoRHa unit still around?"

"Haven't heard from him since the Titan-class devil showed up. I know he was pretty messed up after that, but I'm pretty sure he was fully repaired. I hear he got in a fight with the Commander when the portal closed, so I couldn't tell you where he is now." She frowned and set a hand on her hip. "You shouldn't be fighting in that condition. Can I at least give you directions to the nearest repair station?"

"Yeah, actually. I think that'd be a good idea."

Overload vibrated through my sub-routines as I stalked off. 9S should never have come here; he had no idea what was going on out here. Why was 9S here? Why would he have come here in the first place? If there were five thousand androids around, there must have been an official mobilization to deal with the gate. Would he have joined the descent? If he was the only YoRHa here, did that mean he'd failed after getting to the moon?

Too many unknowns. I needed more information. I needed to infiltrate.

"Bad news?" V asked.

There was nothing good to say, so I ignored him and grabbed Pod 042. "Stay low and don't move. I'll be back."

My cloak had been lost to the river and V's supply bag was likely just scraps of burlap somewhere in this field. I grabbed a new one from the first body I could find, throwing it over my shoulders and more importantly over Pod.

"Pod 042," I said softly. "Can you confirm a signal for Pod 153?"

"…NO SIGNAL DETECTED."

I ran my hands over my face and swallowed. "9S' black box signal?"

"…ONLINE."

My head swam with relief I couldn't slow down for. That took the worst-case scenario off the table, but it left plenty of nasty possibilities open.

Ducking beside a broken-down heap of junk of demon parts and machine heads, I materialized Humility and pressed my forehead against it. Shadow had to be with 9S. Theoretically, I should have been able to locate her the same way I could V I focused on the magic in the sword and tried to pinpoint the most similar signatures. V stood out, but just like in hell, the air was oversaturated with magic. I strained until my head felt like it would split open, and ended up dropping the sword with a cry that was as much of pain as it was frustration.

Everything beyond a few dozen meters was noise. I couldn't find Shadow. But I needed to know where 9S was and failing that, I needed to know where Theta and Scheherazade were. So I did it the long way.

The inner perimeter was exactly what I needed. Sparsely populated with plenty of androids who had grim, on-guard demeanors. I couldn't afford to stay long, but I requested a diagnostic and at least let someone handle the replacement of my damaged plates. During that time, I played at being a unit that had just rebooted after Titan-class devil and was suffering a major memory problem. Awareness of the situation built quickly from a dozen blocks of organizational intel that connected to my own knowledge of hell and the night kingdom's logistics, but I homed in on a few main points.

First: Everyone who had been at Rosell during the attempt to send V home was alive. Jorinde, Jorindel, Theta, and Scheherazade. Second: Theta had put out a global call passed directly from the lunar server to all receiving signals. That was probably where 9S became aware of the situation. No android had access to that level of comms, especially not from a place as tight about communications as the night kingdom, but maybe she'd talked Briar into putting her message out there. Third: No one had seen her recently. She was still reachable, but all anybody knew was that she was making a full battle report to command and it was complicated for some reason.

"A scout mentioned a specialty unit," I said carefully. "One of Theta's. Did Enforcer Gamma end up coming here or something?"

"Dunno who that is, but a lot androids from Theta's original command post are in Octants 1 and 5. This one's Octant 4, just follow the perimeter west."

In Octant 5, I found dozens of units from Satellite Гримизна, and they all mentioned one name that replaced the creeping ice in my body with freshly boiled blood:

Tau.

Her raw combat capability was even lower than a scanner's. She was a defense-heavy type designed around her primary functionality. To infect androids. In a fight against machines, she might have been able to make use of herself in the same way a scanner could be surprisingly destructive via hacking. But machines, while not absent from the field, made up maybe 15% of the remains I'd seen. The primary enemy had no ability to be infected by logic virus analogs. There was no reason for a unit like her to have been anywhere near a battlefield like this one, yet everyone who mentioned her said she'd been running in and out like a scout unit. Which also didn't make any sense.

Her pleasantness might be natural, but Tau was a lazy shit by design.

On the bright side, I also found Jorinde and Jorindel in Octant 5, and wasted no time snatching them out of sight and gripping both of them up by their throats.

"How the hell did you…" Jorinde choked.

"Celebrant hardware," I beamed cheerily. "You guys were doing festivals on this site, so I did one from the other side and what do you know, it's not that hard to widen a narrow gate when it's already open."

"You had no experience," Jorindel wheezed. "You could've torn the portal open all over again!"

"I'm a fast learner, and hell is a compelling motivator. All pleasantries aside though, tell me where 9S is." I pulled them in close, almost cheek to cheek with both so they could hear me clear. "Or I will snap your goddamn necks."

Both shook their heads urgently. "We don't know, we don't know!"

"He's been in a lock state since the gate closed, and we've been out here trying to send all this demonic energy away the whole time!"

"What do you mean lock state?"

"Like maintenance mode but without any internal access. They had to, he tried to kill Theta after the gate was closed. Nobody could get him to calm down! He was omnicidal!"

That didn't sound like the kind of rage 9S could keep up for thirty days. Especially if Accord was the one who closed the portal. I knew what it was like to be considered his enemy. While he could get explosive in the moment, give him a moment to think and 9S had the single-mindedness of a welding torch.

My grip tightened until their optic lights sputtered. "Where would they have taken him."

Both slapped feebly at my forearms. "Node #21! Node #21! Just keep going east from Octant 1!"

"Thank you very much." I dropped them both.

V was right where I left him, dead center of all the Octants, ground zero. I snatched him off his perch without even slowing down. A half second of surprise and his dragging feet caught up to my pace.

"Something's amiss," he guessed.

I hesitated, but there was no point. Being back didn't solve the problem of what to do now. We had no leads, no idea where to go at all. Just like in hell, the shore was gone and the uncertain darkness ahead was the only place we could go. I understood a little, beyond the sentimentality of it, why V jumped into hell rather than stay and focus on a problem he most likely couldn't have solved.

"9S is here," I confessed stonily. "He came to the night kingdom. He was right here when the portal closed."

It was odd to see the version of V that appeared with this news. Now that I could stand to look directly at him, he really was every bit as simple as I was. When someone came along and refused to let him be alone, he couldn't help himself. He had no defenses at all, strung along by a single emotion that spun out into a dozen more complicated ones at every turn because he couldn't digest how straightforward his gut reaction was. The smug attitude and a haughty mouth both failed him. There was only the open door of his face, through which I watched the lights dim and the whirlwind stir.

The shock was more water than ice at first, rippling out until it struck against the obvious problems. I was pulling him like I was trying to get us outside the range of a bomb. Pod 042 was not attempting to contact Pod 153. Whatever joy he got out of the obvious case that 9S had come looking for him only made it a further drop for him to fall as he remembered everything that came before our trip through hell.

"Shadow should be—"

"I tried. I can't get a good read in all this…" I grimaced and gestured weakly around. "Noise. The good news is I know where he should be."

"And the bad news is?"

"It's one of Briar's nodes, and Tau might be involved."

He stayed calm. That was the part that scared me most. His face remained a focused, unreadable mask even though I could feel his temper building like a gravity well at my side. He brushed my grip away and kept up with my pace on his own.

We passed through the inner perimeter unbothered save for demons who had the misfortune of being in our way. The second perimeter was a throng of military installations and the ambient heat of approximately six hundred androids operating in the same space. The line was being held there, and in our attempts to leave it we inadvertently drew the attention of the chain of command, who demanded an explanation.

Predictably, V wasn't in the mood to talk. Griffon fired off a warning shot in the form of ball lightning that sent the group in our way bounding into ditches and behind barricades to be out of the resulting bolts. He passed right through while sparks still crawled along the barbed wiring. The whispers I heard from the ditches about the Blue Bird of Normandy were not lost on me. I hoped they spread. In this strict military environment, it would keep other androids out of our way.

The third perimeter was largely empty. Repair tents and artillery and some complicated set ups I assumed were R&D hubs. None of them offered us any resistance. We hopped into the first truck we came across and I came as close to flooring the gas as I dared. Jorinde and Jorindel hadn't specified how far we had to go, but a freshly plowed road lit by half a dozen spotlights extended in the right direction. In the distance, the slow red glow of radio towers strobed within a smear of trees on the horizon.

It wasn't a long drive, but it did stop abruptly.

A second truck sat mangled and burnt out right outside the treeline. There was a body on the ground. We got out to investigate, but the face beneath the light coating of snow raised several upsetting questions as well as the hairs on the back of my neck.

"Tau…?"

"You should not touch it."

Scheherazade rounded the remains of the other truck with her arms crossed and unexpected agitation written loud across her face. I circled around Tau's body, staying close at V's side more out of instinct than visible cause.

"What the hell is going on?"

"A great deal." She nodded toward Tau's body. "It is infected. You should not touch it."

I danced back. "Logic virus?"

Pulling the axe from her back, she tilted Tau's head face down into the snow and pushed her hair aside. An ugly silver and black scar stretched from her ear to her nape, where a steel flower had monopolized all the plugs in the back of her neck.

"Briar Rose…" V mused, flipping his cane over his fingers slow as a building storm cloud. He pointed it beyond Scheherazade, at the woods. "Node #21?"

"It is within."

"Is 9S there?" I demanded.

"Presumed."

V stepped forward, and Scheherazade stepped directly into his path. The area was still saturated with magic even out here, but the pressure that built around V felt like it would crack every plate in my body like thin fish bones if I got too close. An aura formed between them, and I couldn't tell if it was my systems frying by proximity or if a major reaction between her magic and his was building.

"You must not," Scheherazade warned. "The magics of hell have warped the night. They have warped Briar. Look closely."

V and I shared a glance, and I clicked Pod 042's light on.

A stone's throw from us, the trees were...churning. Lengths of thick black cable slithered between the branches and encircled the trunks like eels forming a black web from their bodies. Chunks of them lay on the grown where Scheherazade must have tried to hack her way through, but I couldn't find a single dent or break. The needles dripped from the pines. Melting and mercurial as the branches locked together in slow motion. There was an eerie sound to the air, but it wasn't the wooden creaking and cracking I remembered from the similar display I got in hell. It was a sort of glassy buzz that reminded me of fluorescent lights on the edge of shorting out.

"The woods are..." My eyes widened. "They're all Briar, aren't they? What is it doing?"

Scheherazade's hands clenched against her arms, and she shook her head.

V laughed humorlessly. "You've been locked out... But that has no bearing on us. Move."

She shook her head more urgently. "The gods breathe, and Briar blocks my way. You must not enter."

"...Fern," he called, twisting his cane almost playfully in his hand. "Find 9S."

My gaze flicked between the two of them. Scheherazade wouldn't hurt him, but that was no longer my only concern. "What about you?"

"I'll entertain Scheherazade awhile." His voice made me wonder if it was possible to see a tornado in the dark, or if it would only announce itself by its destruction. "Go."

Thinking that he may have made the same face when I called him out using 9S as bait, I shuddered.

Scheherazade didn't try to stop me. True to everything I remembered, V was still the only concrete thing in her sight. Everything else could be sacrificed. The cables that refused her parted for me, and I stood before the invitation with a leaden feeling in my chest. The gate had been open for a month and hell had slipped through and it was a lot more mechanical this time. I looked up just to be sure the stars were still there and darted inside. 9S was important to V. I didn't want to see V lose him. That was enough reason to go by itself. But there was more than that too. There were things I wanted to say to that nosy scanner who couldn't leave me alone and said stupid things like 'you belong with us'. It took me a long time to believe that. Now that I did, I understood the inverse to be true as well. He belonged with us. The three of us belonged together. I wouldn't let Briar have him any more than I'd let it have me.

As I ran through the woods alive with righteous possessiveness thrumming through me, the buzzing sound I'd picked up grew clearer.

All around me, for as far as the forest stretched, the trees were humming.