Squall tapped the letter against his arm, thoughts churning. He watched Ultimecia succumb to her own time compression, and yet written messages on the walls warned her return and students whispered horror stories about what happened in Galbadia. What continued to happen in Galbadia despite Quistis' best efforts. Dead headmaster, strangers popping in and out of existence, and now he had officials filing complaints about the Gardens' failing reputations. Everything that happened last year only aggravated matters and now people looked no further than Galbadia's chaos in their efforts to disown the Gardens.

"I have no proof," he told Rinoa as she paced his office. "I saw it, you saw it, Selphie and the others might have seen it, but that doesn't count for anything."

"Unless I can get a handle on this thing in Galbadia," Rinoa said.

"You shouldn't mess around with paradox energy. That's how Ultimecia died."

"Not necessarily."

"Time is dangerous, Rinoa."

"I can make it not dangerous. There's so much of it surrounding our planet that I feel it. I sense the distortions and I've almost got my finger on how it all warps together. If I can just put a pin in and stop it moving, then—"

"It's too dangerous."

"What did I just say?"

"What have I been saying?"

Rinoa stopped and pouted. "I'm better than Ultimecia. If I had the time and power, I could twist this entire place around my finger."

"That's exactly what she thought."

"No, she thought she wanted to break everything and allow the void free reign. Well, more than thought, I guess, since she did want that. But I don't know why and that's just weird. Have you spoken with the acting headmaster in Galbadia?"

"Not beyond formalities. They're distracted."

"For good reason. Have you met Zell?"

"He's been refusing visitors since Irvine disappeared."

"But you know he's—never mind."

"He's what?"

"Just resting. He needs his time, Squall, and we can't force him to heal faster than he's doing."

"Our doctors are better, anyway."

Rinoa giggled and put a finger up. "Only for now. I promise I'll make things better, okay?"

Squall wanted to press the issue. But he had work to do and half a dozen more officials to talk to. "Just don't get hurt."

"Wouldn't think twice about it!" She spun on her heel. "Be good for me and don't kill yourself with stress, okay?"

He waited for her to disappear behind the door before he picked up the phone and dialed the President's number.


Quistis wondered how Rinoa got between Gardens so fast. She must have timed her train rides just right.

"He thinks you're still in the hospital," Rinoa told Zell. "We can use that."

Quistis put a hand down. "You'll lie to Squall using Zell's injuries?"

"Why not?" Rinoa asked.

"It's unfair to Squall. Why not tell him the truth?"

"Because then he'd try to stop us."

"For good reason!"

"I'm okay with this," Zell said. "As long as I keep my piece of the action."

"You don't need one!" Quistis said.

Zell scrunched up his nose. "What do you mean?"

"I mean you shouldn't be out here having adventures! We're all idiots for keeping up all of this nonsense!"

Trey, Raijin, Fang, Deuce, and—screw it, she still couldn't name them all—went quiet. Quistis stood alone in her reluctance and it got worse every day. "I'm tired of making things worse," she said at length. "There's must be better ways to go about this than running about like headless chocobos."

"If we have time to optimize," Trey said, "that… would help."

Eight cast him a worried look and Fang asked, "No lecture this time?"

"Why would I lecture?" Trey asked.

"We can't let Squall interfere," Rinoa said. "And I'm willing to compromise for that. I can't let him get involved or we lose what stability we have between the gardens."

"That matters," Eight said.

Raijin thumped his head against the wall. "Why? We got monsters on our tails, you know! And actual bad guys! There's more important things to worry about!"

"Things that won't matter without civilization," Eight said.

Rinoa frowned. "Isn't that a bit of a leap?"

"I wouldn't say so," Deuce said.

Zell hit the table and got everyone's attention. "Screw it! Every time we try to make plans, people just get all mad and distracted! Settle on something and move on, dammit!" He winced and settled back.

"We're not telling Squall," Rinoa said.

Quistis pinched the bridge of her nose against a forming headache. "Fine, but you're the one that gets to break it to him when all's said and done. How's progress coming on the temporal stream?"

"Well," Deuce said. "Rinoa's been helping us sort out all the twisted cables and replacing them where they belong."

"The endpoints," Trey said.

Fang nodded. "Serah should handle the middle if we can get her here. It seems her growing affinity with time helps out with this kind of stuff."

"And what have you been doing, Zell?" Quistis asked.

Zell glanced at Raijin. "We've tracked the headmaster's last acts to Gadot and Yuj's friend."

"And?"

Zell swallowed and fidgeted his fingers. "We're not sure who killed him yet."

"Wonderful. And the rumors on Ultimecia?"

Deuce said, "Nothing. Mog can't find a single trace. At least that's kind of good news."

"Kupo!"

Quistis looked at Fang. "Amarant?"

"Still waiting."

"Excuse me," Deuce said. "I need to go speak with Seven."

Trey stood. "Seven made it here?"

"Not quite. But the reception is poor, so I'll step outside."

Quistis watched her go. Once Deuce left earshot, Trey said, "King and Queen haven't been so present since we restored the link. They don't feel such a need to micromanage anymore and show more of a trust on our autonomy and proactivity."

Quistis redirected them to the matters at hand. "Let's change things up. Zell and Raijin, you work with Rinoa. Reds, get this thing figured out with Martine. Cie, talk to the students and see if there's a source for the Ultimecia rumors and if the students have picked up on these time shenanigans. Team, go."

Even the strange god-people learned her terminology by now and everyone dispatched.


Deuce overlooked Galbadia's yards from the top of the school, legs dangling over the side. Rocks formed clear shapes across the land, their muted colors the only contrast to the rusty stains left by the school. When they called it a garden, she imagined flowers and green like she saw in paintings from before the war.

But this reminded her of home. The striking red against worn grey brought out a vivid sensation akin to fear mixed with fascination and it often found itself associated with war and survival given the reminder of blood and dead things.

"Deuce, you're tuning out again."

She looked up and imagined Seven sitting with her despite having only her voice. "I don't lose track of what I find important."

"So, you don't think it's important to be ready with the rest of us?"

"I didn't say that."

"That bite to your words isn't like you." Seven's voice turned soft. "Deuce, where's your stoicism?"

"… I don't have it."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. I know you all and your triggers. And I know what drives you. I thought I knew it in myself, too, but… I guess not."

"And if that ain't just the way." If Seven were here, then she'd make a confused face because she never liked "sappy talks." "I guess I have to find out it for you, then?"

"You shouldn't."

"I will anyway. You've always followed Ace and been his right-hand girl. Is that it?"

"… I don't think so."

"Is it about the Cie gods uprooting everything we'd just built? About getting replaced?"

"We're not getting replaced."

"Damn, you sound sure of that one."

"Because I am. I know those people, Seven, and no combination of them could replace one of us. And vice versa. Some of you would be a lot better off if you could accept that."

"So, you don't feel displaced. Is it because nothing's going according to plan?"

Deuce swallowed hard and looked at her swaying feet. "Some things are going to plan."

"But your plans never failed. Not most of the time, at least. Did Mother never teach you to handle failure? Because you never failed?"

"I failed."

"Only once a cycle, though, if that."

"I knew how to follow orders. I didn't have to fail. I shouldn't fail."

"Deuce, we screwed up all the time. You just never had to answer for it. If this is your first time facing potential disaster, then hell yes, that'll get to you. If you never realized that we failed almost every mission we did, then yes, this will get to you. If you never realized that with every new development we adjusted and that with every bump our orders changed, then this would look impossible. But Deuce, we adjusted. And we'll adjust now."

"A couple new soldiers isn't the same as planets."

"It may not seem like it, but I could bring Eight in here and have him recite some principles to you that I'd hate to hear."

Deuce eyed the distance between her and the ground. "There's no way we're making it out of this unscathed."

"You realize we can't stay dead, right? I can't even hold onto a single freaking scar."

"But the people around us can. I know we deal in lives, but most of these people never realized what they signed on for."

"Did we?"

"… I think so."

"Ugh. Deuce, there's no such thing as a perfect ending. There's no S-Rank resolution to this mission, because there is no resolution. This is our job now and we'll be dealing with crap like this for the rest of our lives. Existences. Whatever."

"I don't want to keep ruining lives. Like I'm taking phantoma again…"

"No, we're ending Bhunivelze first thing and taking his. But after him, it's gonna be minor annoyances for the rest of forever. You're gonna have to get used to dissatisfaction, okay?"

"Is that all this is?"

"Hell, no. But it doesn't usually get much worse, and from the looks of things, it should even get better. Save the second-guessing until we catch a break in Valhalla."

"… I can do that."

"Then do that."

Deuce opened her mouth to respond, but the message ended. The red still looked sullen and angry, but now she saw the flowers decorating it.

And the bursting of a foreign soul into the world. Someone returned to Gaia VIII. Or… two someones?


Against Queen's strong suggestions, Snow burst through the barrier between him and VIII and landed with a thud in Galbadia's hallways. No students.

With a growl, he punched through reality again and again until he finally broke into VIII's line that connected with him and showed him life and people.

Snow ran past gawkers and giggling schoolgirls and chased that beacon of life that marked his friends, his pals, his family. Chased it out of the school and through the yard outside that held scattered marksmen practicing on dummies. He chased it into a room full of equipment where the NORA crew minus Lebreau worked away. Gadot cleaned out a rifle while Yuj typed something out on a computer and Maqui messed with some electrical equipment.

Snow stumbled to a halt, missing the thrill that used to come from such exercise. "Maqui's okay?"

"I'd say not," Yuj said.

Maqui didn't appear to register that they were talking about him, absorbed as he was in the soldering of wires.

"What happened?" Snow asked. "Why won't anyone tell me?"

"Because they don't know," Yuj said with a wave. "None of us do."

"Nothing happened," Maqui muttered.

Gadot slammed his gun on the bench. "The hell it didn't!"

"I'm fine, really!"

Snow knelt by Maqui's side. "You sure?"

Kid refused to look his way. "Yeah."

"We're honest with our family, you hear me? You understand that we don't hide things from each other?"

"I don't want to talk to about it."

"That's exactly what Hope said before he blinded himself. You gonna do something stupid, Maqui? Did you forget our motto?"

"Gods are no match for NORA, I know."

"And you realize that they're not match for you, too, right? You understand that we're all in this together, right?"

"Yeah. I haven't left Gadot or Yuj yet, have I?"

"And I'm proud of you for that, good job not running away from the team. We haven't split the party. That's good. We're great."

"But we're not, are we?" Maqui looked up at him and Snow made out healing cuts and bruises in his face, faint enough to be at least a week old. But shards could have sped the healing process up. "We're failing, aren't we?"

Snow snatched Maqui's wrist and earned a hiss. "Heroes don't fail. They suffer setbacks. We're stronger than this!"

"Ow!"

Snow chilled the inflammation in Maqui's wrist, and the kid relaxed with relief. "We'll make it go away, buddy. But you gotta stay together."

Maqui calmed with the cold and shut his eyes. "I still don't want to talk about it."

"Just don't do what these other idiots do without their shards, kid, don't—don't do anything stupid."

"We won't let him," Gadot said.

Yuj nodded and stuck a weed in his mouth.

Snow gripped Maqui's shoulder and leaned in. "Promise me."

"I—I promise."

"What's this you're making?" Snow released him. "Another gadget for the shop?"

"Why would I worry about my shop here?"

"You remember Lightning's tech?" Yuj asked. "The stuff that made her fly?"

"I used it once or twice, yeah."

"We lost it after Cocoon's fall," Maqui said. "Like a lot of stuff."

"Even with Academia on the job?"

"If they restored it, then it was after our time." Maqui finished splicing his wire and messed with Yuj's computer screen. "Maybe Hope would know."

Snow grimaced at the reminder. "I doubt he'll talk about it anytime soon."

"We don't need Hope," Yuj said. "From what I hear, he can only talk space management and paradox calculations. Like a physicist, you know?"

Maqui powered on the wire and it sparked. "He knew hardware, but he didn't like engines and oil. Always preferred theoretical stuff."

"He would have done a good job with software systems," Yuj said.

Gadot finished with his rifle and pulled Snow aside. "When are you gonna stick around, boss? We could use you down here."

"I'm not done out there, yet."

"Will you ever be done?"

Snow drew up short at Gadot's intense look. "I don't know. I don't think this is a short-term deal."

"And we are?"

"I don't know how it works yet, but I doubt there's gonna be a goodbye. Anyway, I gotta go again. Take care of each other for me, guys. And wrap that thing in a bow when you tell Lightning! I wanna be there!"

"Not like we're going anywhere," Yuj said.

"Hey, hey!" Gadot said. "No one's stepping into that vortex of time that's surrounding this place! We're playing it safe and ain't nobody gonna see it differently!"

"We're safe," Maqui said.

Yuj cracked a smile. "We're doing what we can here. Join you in the war soon, boss."

"And when we meet again," Gadot said, "you'd better drop that deadbeat tendency of yours. And take your own advice because you look like hell."

Snow readied himself to jump again. "I would, but I've gotta show you up somehow."

"Hey!" Gadot shot him a rude gesture of the fingers.

Snow saluted and jumped into the cosmos.


Palom dropped through reality and slammed through the flimsy barrier between worlds. He tasted rained grass and the mist of home. He woke up in dry sheets and unfamiliar clothes, surrounded by healers wearing the sigil of someplace familiar.

A woman in white directed the healers, lit in blinding gold. Healers crowded around him and people fussed over him like he was some specimen.

He faded in and out of consciousness. When he next came to himself, the room darkened. They must have pulled thick curtains over the windows. Candles flickered nearby as the only source of light and he wondered why they'd black out the room like that. Unless he slept through the day?

The woman in white sat beside him alongside a man with a sickly pallor. "Palom. Can you hear me?" she asked.

Rose… "Yeah," he tried to say, but all he felt was a garbled, thick-tongued, groan.

"Do you remember what happened?" the man asked.

Palom remembered anger. Being told he wasn't necessary. And leaving to go… go somewhere… His thoughts caught on loose branches. Blown about like cloth in a breeze. He couldn't think straight.

But Rosa was here. She could heal him, right?

"Return." He had to get back to Leonora and the others, but his mouth felt dry and clunky.

"You're home, now," said the man.

"Fight back." He thought other words but only air escaped. Damn! "What." It took every fiber of his being to force the word out. "Happened."

"Listen, Palom. Your headpiece was cracked when you arrived. We brought Mysidians here as fast as possible and they did what they could, but we're having trouble restoring the connection."

Of course, they couldn't fix it. They were just the useless idiots back home.

Cecil took a deep breath. "We don't know where you came from, or why you showed up when you did. Do you remember what happened before you left?"

"No." Warmth in his eyes and tickle in his nose. He rubbed at his face with the back of his wrist and cursed himself. His muscles ached and his eyes stung and his bones threatened collapse, but he knew better than to give in to the pressures of his body. He was better than that. He was always better than that.

Until an image of Leonora came to mind. A woman who always seemed so much stronger than he. A cheerful, grounded mage, and a powerhouse of magic and wisdom. She always said he did better when he ate.

His breath shook and his eyes felt wet. Rosa pulled him into a warm embrace.

"I'm not fighting," he said.

"Good. You need to heal."

No. That wasn't the point. "Porom is fighting."

"Where is she?" Cecil asked.

"Don't know." She wasn't as involved in the latter stages of Bhunivelze's plans as he was. Maybe she was okay. Maybe she was dead in a ditch somewhere. His heart dropped. She didn't have as much energy to blow as he did. She hated headpieces. Never shut up about it. Went on and on and on about infusions and how much better they were. She might be dead for it.

And Leonora was in a worse place. She was on Gaia VII. Near Bhunivelze.

Palom pushed Rosa away and tried to stand.

"Hey." Cecil placed a hand on Palom's shoulder. It weighed a ton. How much metal went into gauntlets? Did Cecil even wear gauntlets? "You just about died getting here."

"Can't—don't stop me."

"When will you learn to take care of yourself? You won't live long if you keep this up."

Palom tried to push Cecil's arm away, but Cecil held fast.

"You turned yourself to stone, twice, without knowing whether or not anyone would save you. You jumped headlong into a teleportation device when you only had an inkling of what it did. When the other mages got the news that you just about killed yourself traversing planets, they treated it as an everyday occurrence."

"They don't. Work. People. Mysidian people. They don't think."

"Palom," Rosa said. "Cecil and I think that you might be looking for an escape from the village."

"No reason." Why couldn't he talk right? Why did it hurt so much to think? Why couldn't he keep one line of thought?

Rosa heaved a sigh. "Would you give yourself time to recover? The more forgiving of yourself you are now, the better your head should heal."

It was his head. His head would figure it out. "No time. I shouldn't waste it."

Cecil said, "Palom."

"What?" Palom snapped and regretted it.

Cecil's face turned hard. "You'll get yourself killed. It's a miracle that you haven't, already."

"Not stopping."

"Not until you're cold with your ancestors?"

Rosa stiffened.

"Some of the dead fight. Us. With us."

"Does that mean you're ready to join them?" Rosa asked.

"I'm not dead. Not yet, got too much to do."

Cecil held his ground. "Things you will do better at if you recover." He was more like Porom then Palom remembered.

"Palom, we're trying to talk it through," Rosa said. "Discuss the options and figure out a plan of action. From there, we can—"

"I can't stay!"

He tried to stand, only for Cecil to move and grab his arm. "You keep saying that."

"Let go!" Palom tried to pull away, but Cecil forced him back. "They're not—won't—get anywhere without me!"

"Calm," Cecil said. "You might fall."

"I'll fly!"

"Could you?" Rosa asked. She looked as disbelieving as the smallest-town Troians. As the—the Leonora people. The people Leonora came from.

Palom met Rosa's disbelief with cold determination. Summoned all the magic he could muster and lifted. But his limbs lost strength and his head turned heavy.

When he woke, he found himself leaning against the wall, sitting back on the accursed bed. His eyelids were heavy. When he opened them, he found Rosa watching him with a lift in her cheeks.

"How long was I out?"

"Minutes. Will you be rational, now?"

"…I can't. Leonora."

"Where is she?"

"In danger."

"Then we need to find her," Cecil said from out of view. "I will go with you, but only after you've recovered. That sounds reasonable, yes?"

A spark of rage in his chest and Palom scratched at his itching eyes. "I need Mysidia. It's the only place I can get the magic."

Rosa nodded. "If that's the way it has to be. Rest, and we'll see how you do come morning."

"No—rest!"

Rosa leaned over him and Palom struggled to lift himself. She pushed him back down and pressed a finger to his forehead before whispering an incantation.

Dreams took him.