...Heya. I've been stuck on the struggle bus, but I finally, finally managed to finish up this chapter ... like nearly two years after the last one. Sorry.

While I was doing a reread in July to get myself caught back up so I could finish this chapter, I went back and changed some stuff. The first chapter got the biggest change, and a few other minor things here and there are changed to be in line with the new chapter one. Now instead of Mr. Rider having Vanna test out NEVA when she doesn't really want to, she sneaks in and takes it for herself out of a desire to go back in time—and as a result, Mr. Rider ends up being mad at her for breaking the law as well, and she also doesn't have a gun in the beginning because he never gave her one. Aside from that, everything's the same. Aside from some typos that I fixed, because I somehow always find more every time I reread this.

Since it's been so long, here's a recap on some important points: While in Snowpeak, Vanna was captured by Mr. Rider and Zi. Just in time, Zi stands up to his dad and has Ooccoo warp Vanna (and her dog, Rade) back to Hyrule. Vanna is left with her voice turned off, and is aware that her battery is running low. She and Link recoup in Ordon for about a week before setting back out to search for Zi, who they hope will have brought the charger that can save her life, and they eventually find him laying in the Sacred Grove.


I had been prepared to feel so many things upon seeing Zi again. Angered betrayal and contented relief were my strongest guesses, but there were a slew of other clashing emotions that swirled beneath them. For how negative a great deal of them were, one of the most primary negative emotions was not one I'd considered I might feel: fear.

And that was exactly what I felt.

For a solid moment, I believed he was dead—but the fear didn't pass even when I fell to my knees at his side and took in the slightest up-and-down of his chest, because even though he was at least breathing, he looked so much worse up close than I could have imagined. Dark circles surrounded his closed, sunken-in eyes. His usually vibrant golden skin had turned sallow, was littered with cuts and bruises, and was clinging too closely to the bone underneath. He'd always been thin, never having filled out as he grew taller and taller, but he was on a whole other level now.

I could hardly reconcile the boy I knew with this almost-corpse. It was incomprehensible how he could have wasted away so fast in a week.

But even aside from all of that, simply seeing him left me with a deep feeling of what I could only describe as wrongness. On some level, I supposed I'd come to terms with the idea of never seeing him again when he'd walked out the door and left me to die—and even though he hadn't, really, since he'd come back to save me, the fact that I was actually seeing him once more was still hard to wrap my head around.

I was in a daze as Midna and Link came up beside us and started talking, and I didn't fully hear anything they said. I inferred they were talking about what to do with him, though, when Link scooped Zi into his arms and stood up. It looked ridiculous with Zi's long limbs hanging all over the place. It shouldn't have been possible for someone so much smaller to carry him, but Link did with frightening ease.

Midna warded off the marionettes that descended upon us as we navigated out of the Sacred Grove, and used her hand-hair to carry us past the chasms and up and over the cliff back to the clearing outside the Forest Temple. I stayed by Link's side, my eyes never leaving Zi for more than a few seconds while we took the path back to Ordon.

Ooccoo and her son were in Link's house when we entered it, rooting through the things he kept in his storage chest. She clucked and stuttered out a sheepish apology, but Link didn't seem to mind—he cut her apology short, asking her if she would warp us to Kakariko Village so we could get Zi seen by the village healer.

I had to tame my urge to run to Renado once we appeared in Kakariko. Link walked down the village at an agonizingly normal pace. I went a bit ahead with the silent justification that I needed to check if Renado was in the sanctuary first, which he wasn't, before I slowed to trail beside Link as he carried Zi to the inn instead. The extra time only allowed more worries to grow. A healer in a ramshackle inn had nothing on a doctor in a sterile hospital with all of my world's medical technologies at their disposal. Renado's potions might have helped Link's broken bones heal, might have helped Ralis recover from his illness, but nothing in this world could have saved Colin, and what if Zi was closer to Colin than he was to Link or Ralis?

That line of thinking brought me to something I'd been too stunned to fully consider—Zi had come here from our world, with NEVA. If Renado couldn't do anything, I could just send him back.

My relief at having a potential backup plan didn't last for long, though, because I looked at Zi's wrists to see if he brought one or two or even all three NEVAs along with him, and there was nothing beneath his tattered sleeves except cut-up skin. I then looked at his belt, thinking he might have stored them in his or my pouch, but he didn't have any pouches on him, either.

So, unless he could wake up enough to tell me where they were, that idea was out.

Entering the lobby of the Elde Inn was not the relief I wanted it to be. For a second, it was much the same as it had been when we'd left—relaxed, with everyone sitting around the biggest table together, simply talking among themselves—but that all flew out the window when Beth saw us and let out a wail.

"He's dead!"

Link's response was swift and resolute in the face of Beth's outcry. "No, he's not. He's still breathing. Renado—"

"Bring him upstairs," Renado said, already standing from his stool.

Luda was right on her father's footsteps, following him and Link up the staircase. She turned back to give me a look when I didn't come along with them. I just shook my head and hoped she would understand me not wanting to see potions being forced down Zi's throat or whatever else Renado was going to do to him. Beyond the more obvious reasons for not wanting to see anything like that, it would only make me wish he was being treated by an actual doctor all the more.

Despite Link's declaration that Zi wasn't dead and Renado's clear intentions to heal him, everyone left around the table continued to look like they really had just seen a dead person. Tears remained in Beth's eyes, Talo's face stayed scrunched in aversion, and Ilia continued to sit in total stillness. Though not consciously, I'd thought that the main reason Zi looked so terrible was that I was all too familiar with what he usually looked like, but their reactions confirmed that it wasn't just my bias making things look worse than they were. He truly did look like death.

Sitting down with them at the table, I resigned myself to do the only thing I could do at that moment: wait.

Time passed in a tense silence, but at least it passed. Renado, Luda, and Link eventually returned downstairs, and they did so with good news and bad news.

The good news was that Zi didn't appear to be grievously injured. His cuts and bruises were superficial enough that Renado's potions made quick work of them, and none of his bones felt broken. While Renado couldn't rule out any internal bleeding, he didn't think Zi had any, which at least was better than when he'd been certain Colin did. Zi's main affliction was a severe case of dehydration and starvation—and so long as he didn't have any unseen injuries, if he was continually given water and slowly reintroduced to food, Renado thought he would be fine.

The first of the bad news was that Zi was still unconscious. Renado believed he would come to when he was further rehydrated, but I worried it was a sign of brain trauma and not just one of severe dehydration. In more bad news, Renado could guess as to why Zi had deteriorated so quickly, and his guess was troubling. He felt, as I did, that even if Zi had gone the entire last week without a lick of food, it should've been impossible for him to lose so much weight in such a short amount of time. The only plausible explanation to him—an explanation I should've thought of, given this crazy world—was magic. He simply didn't know what magic had affected Zi, beyond it being dark.

And those words were close enough to make me realize what it had to be. It wasn't just dark magic—it was shadow magic, from that cursed shard of the Mirror of Twilight that was hidden somewhere in the grove where Zi had been. It lined up all too well with what the shard in Snowpeak had done, how it had drawn in monsters to the area and sickened an innocent person unlucky enough to be nearby it.

With Renado having nothing more to say about Zi and the children keen to change the topic to something less disturbing, I silently excused myself from the table and beckoned Link to come upstairs with me, already scribbling down my revelation in the notebook.

I finished writing as we made it to the doorway, as I looked in and saw Zi lying on a bed with a blanket pulled up to his distressingly prominent collarbones. Holding the notebook over for Link to grab, I walked to the bed Zi was on and sat next to him. There was a little more color in his skin than there had been, and his eyes weren't quite as sunken in, but he still looked awful. If he'd looked like death before, he looked like near-death now. It was an improvement to be sure, though not enough of one for me to feel he was out of the woods yet.

"That ... might not be it," Link eventually said.

At his voice, I peered over at him, sitting on the bed next to us with the notebook in his hand.

"It does make sense," he went on. "But... I was thinkin'—there's this old story I remembered, about people gettin' lost in the woods and ... decaying. Until only their bones are left, and they become Stalfos."

I turned my gaze back to Zi, back to his face that looked only a thin layer of skin away from being nothing more than a skull. Compared to Yeta who had come down with a cold from being near a mirror shard, Link's suggestion lined up with Zi's state even more—and was all the more terrifying, because Yeta was at least able to survive being transformed by the mirror, but I knew firsthand that killing Stalfos did not return them to the people they might have once been.

Link quickly seemed to realize where my mind was going, and went right to assuage my fears. "But he's not lost anymore. We found him, so he'll be fine. And if you're right, and it's the mirror shard... We got him away from it, so that shouldn't be able to do anythin' more to him, either. He's safe here."

I only shrugged, longing but unable to believe him. Just because Zi was away from the source of danger now didn't mean that irreparable damage couldn't already have been done to him.

A few more moments passed in silence before Link was standing and reaching to grab my hand that didn't have little cuts and splinters from the marionette I'd punched. "Let's go back to Snowpeak. Check on Yeta, see that she's okay even after what the mirror did to her. And then we can go back to the ranch, hang out with Rade and Epona and the goats, and later on bring Rade back here to meet the kids. Just ... get your mind off things. Sittin' around won't help him, or you."

That all sounded nice—especially seeing Yeta to confirm if any effects from the mirror lasted—but I didn't like the idea of leaving Zi in the condition he was in. What if things got worse while I was away?

"He'll survive," Link said. "He has to, so he can help you survive, right? And the fortuneteller already said you will. So..."

'So he'll be okay,' was how he wanted me to interpret that—but he'd left out an important part beforehand. The fortuneteller had said I would survive if I stayed on the right path, and I still had no idea what that path was. Leaving him could've been the wrong path.

But I came around to Link's side, anyway, because really, how could I be of help merely sitting next to Zi? I had no potions or medicines to give him, no instruments to examine him with. Whether or not I was here wouldn't make a difference to his survival. The only thing that would be affected by my presence was my own mental well-being, which was already in dire straits.

'Let's go.'


Even having acknowledged the pointlessness of sitting around, it still took a while for it to feel like leaving wasn't the wrong decision.

Visiting Yeta was a big help with that, along with helping my fear of Zi not recovering. Although I couldn't know for sure, not having known her before the mirror fragment had sickened her, she seemed to be back to her normal self. She was talkative and bouncy and happy, a far cry from the version of herself that I'd met before. Yeto was very pleased with her recovery, as well. They asked us to go sledding with them to celebrate, but at that point I still had enough reservations about being away that spending time doing something for fun felt wrong.

Instead, we went back to Ordon from there. The way Rade reacted to seeing me again, you would've thought I'd left him for weeks rather than a single night. He ran excited laps around the ranch while the goats and Epona grazed, and Link, Ooccoo, and Junior and I settled in the grass. After a bit, Link seemed to suddenly remember my hand, and he did his best to pluck out any remaining splinters before stitching up the biggest nicks.

As I watched the thread seal my skin over the metal beneath, I couldn't help but wonder what had happened to Zi's pouches that he'd kept the glue for me in, and with it the NEVA he'd had to use to get back to Hyrule. He was going to have so much to explain whenever he would wake up.

And it was probably a good thing I wouldn't be able to talk back, because even with all of my qualms about his health, there was still part of me that was furious with him. Having to write down what I wanted to say about everything he'd put me through would keep me from screaming it in his face.

Returning to Kakariko Village was what finally made me feel like leaving wasn't a mistake. In the couple hours we'd been away, all of the potions and remedies Zi had been given continued to work on him, giving more life back to his appearance—and while he was still unconscious, he wasn't totally unresponsive anymore. He would twitch a little from pinches and jerk when his reflexes were tested. His improvement was reassuring.

But that assurance didn't last, because the rate of his recovery only slowed from there.

Each new sign of improvement seemed miniscule in the grand scheme of things, and days would pass between them. December 15th, the day we were supposed to graduate, came and went along with them. Then the 16th, then the 17th, the 18th, the 19th...

It was hard not to lose hope. Especially because it started to feel like I was the one on the verge of death.

I started to feel tired and sluggish all the time. Started zoning out and forgetting things. As hard as I tried to play things normally, Link saw right through me. It was on the night of the 25th—following me suddenly realizing it was Christmas, asking why nobody had celebrated, and having to be reminded that Christmas didn't exist in Hyrule—that he finally confronted me about it in my shack. He felt sure that the reason I wasn't doing well was the fact that I hadn't been sleeping; I hadn't slept at all since I'd fallen asleep in his arms after being returned to Hyrule, weeks ago now. I hadn't thought he would've realized that fact, much less that he would've noticed my decline.

"I know you might just tell me I don't really know what I'm talkin' about," he said, "but don't you think staying awake is making you run out of battery charge even faster?"

True as it was that he didn't really know what he was talking about when it came to anything technological ... he wasn't wrong. Probably, I wrote in response—that was as much as I was willing to admit.

"...So sleep," he said. Like it was that easy.

I can't.

"Why not? You know Zi's in good hands, and if anything happens with him, someone can come wake you up right away."

It's not because of Zi.

"Then ... why?" he asked. I didn't make a move to write a response. "...Do you not feel safe to go to sleep because of his dad?"

I started to shake my head at that, then stopped and shrugged. I guess deep down that's part of it, but that's not the main thing I've been worried about.

"...Think you'll have a nightmare?"

Another head shake. I'd still only had a single dream, which felt like a weird fluke—the possibility of having another hadn't crossed my mind at all.

It looked like Link had exhausted all of his ideas and was wracking his brains now, trying to come up with some other reason why I wouldn't want to go to sleep. I'd thought I was the one not in the right state of mind, and here he was, not being able to figure out something so obvious. I didn't really want to tell him—obvious as it was, it felt ... stupid—but I also wanted to just get the whole conversation over with already.

I'm scared I won't wake up.

His face fell after reading it, but he quickly grew resolute. "You will wake up. Zi's here, and he's getting better every day—even if your battery runs out of charge while you're asleep, he'll get you back awake as soon as he gets up himself, and you won't even realize you were gone. Everything's gonna be fine, Vanna."

I shrugged again. I knew that he was right ... but I'd scared myself about the idea so much that it was hard to listen.

"Just try," he said, voice gentle. "...Would it make you feel better if I laid down with you?"

I hadn't fully realized just how lethargic I'd been until those words smacked me in the face with lucidity. Even though we'd slept in the same bed before, it still made my heart race.

My heart raced even more after I agreed and we lay down on my bed together. He held me close, and as I lay my head on his chest, I could hear his heart beating in time with mine. I closed my eyes and counted each beat, wishing I'd still be alive to hear them in the morning.


I woke up strapped down to a cold metal table, with Mr. Rider standing over me.

"No!" I cried out. "How did you—?!"

"You've made it so easy to track you down," he said. "Going by your real name, associating yourself with important figures in that mistake of a world... It almost makes me disappointed in myself. I thought I'd made you smarter."

"How was she supposed to know that you'd do this to her?!" a muted voice yelled.

I turned my head to look at where the voice had come from and saw that it was exactly who I thought it was: my mom. She was standing behind a glass window, fists pressed against it, tear tracks on her face.

I couldn't believe it—he was going to make her watch him kill me.

"I wouldn't have had to do this if it would've complied with its programming," Mr. Rider said. "It brought this on itself."

"She's not an it, she's a she, and all she's done is prove that she's her own person!"

"It's a machine, Daina. You only think it's a person because you want to keep playing pretend that you've got your daughter back. It was a mishap to ever indulge your delusions that your daughter is anything but dead—and I'm setting things straight, now."

At my mom's wordless scream, I turned my head back to see what Mr. Rider was doing, and I only caught a glimpse of the knife before it plunged into my chest.

I bolted upright gasping for breath, eyes welling with tears, heart racing and head reeling.

Grungy stone walls. Antiquated sconces. Rustic wardrobe. Cracked mirror. Shoddy wood boxes. The worn mattress I was on, along with a very startled-looking Chihuahua.

I wasn't in the basement of Ridertech. I was in my shack, in Kakariko Village, in Hyrule.

Ostensibly safe as I was, it still took me time to calm down, time to figure out what the hell had happened. It took me probably longer than it should have to realize that I'd been dreaming. Realizing that brought me back to a memory of the night before, of Link asking me if I thought I'd have a nightmare, and me not thinking I would because I'd only yet had a single dream.

So, I was on two dreams, now. And they both just had to be nightmares.

As I remembered more of the night before, I realized as well that the last wish I'd made before falling asleep hadn't fully come true: it was morning, and I was alive, but I didn't hear Link's heart beating. Just like the last time I'd fallen asleep with him, in Snowpeak, Link had left me before I'd even awoken. It was weird—and slightly disappointing—that he'd been the first to wake, considering how any other time I would've woken up long before him. It made me worry that something had happened.

Holding Rade along with my notebook and pencil, I slipped my borrowed shoes on and went straight for the inn, thinking that he had to be there. The kids, Ilia, and Renado were all in the lobby. Luda took notice of my entrance first, and flashed me a wide smile.

"Good morning, Vanna," she said. "Link is with Zi right now—he finally awoke in the middle of the night. He's been asking for you. You should go see him."

For the first time in a long while when it came to Zi, my stomach didn't twist and my emotions didn't clash—I felt nothing but sweet relief.

I started off toward the stairs right away, but Renado placed a hand on my shoulder to stop me.

"Vanna," he said. "I know things between Zi and yourself have been ... complicated. But I ask you to stay as gentle as possible with him, for now. He is still in a fragile state."

I agreed with a nod, although I thought that he hadn't needed to ask that of me. It wasn't like I could yell at Zi, even if I wanted to.

As I neared the top of the stairs, I began to hear Zi and Link talking to each other. Zi's voice was strained with weeks of disuse, and Link's voice was a shock—I'd never heard him sound so resentful. Wondering what they were saying, I walked quietly and stopped just outside of the doorway where they couldn't see me to listen.

"—she can't speak anymore, because of you and what you did to her," Link said.

"She's ... that traumatized from it?" Zi asked faintly. "She can't even speak?"

Link huffed. "It's not trauma that took her voice away, it was your dad turning her voice off. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was from trauma, seeing what you put her through. Being kidnapped, locked in a basement and restrained to a table, having your voice stolen so you can't even scream, being wide awake while someone starts flaying you...? Imagine if that was you."

The discomfort I felt at his words was nearly overwhelming. It was bad enough being reminded of what had happened in the first place, but there was something about Link being privy to all of the details that made it ten times worse.

The room was silent for a long moment before Zi let out a shaky breath. "I never... I never wanted any of this to happen to her."

"Then you should've acted like it and actually done something to stop your dad, not helped him."

"I tried to stop him. I really, really did. And then I thought ... if I helped him ... I could make it easier on her. It didn't even feel like a choice. 'Cause if it was somebody else, they would've been ... cruel. Letting someone who doesn't care about her at all get their hands on her seemed worse than just getting her myself. Even if that meant ... backstabbing her. ...Lesser of two evils."

"Lesser of two evils is still evil."

Zi just sighed, and I decided I couldn't hide anymore at that.

When I entered the room, Zi was sitting up in bed leaning against the wall and Link was sitting on the bed next to his with his arms crossed. Link noticed me first, the hostile expression on his face softening as he did. Zi's dark brown eyes then found mine, and for a second they held only warmth, before giving way to what I could only guess was shame. Cringing, he squeezed his eyes shut.

I slowly walked over to stand by Link. He stood up and took Rade from my arms, presumably so I'd be able to use the notebook to communicate with Zi, and then he excused himself from the room with a sigh, saying he'd let us have a moment. The room became uncomfortably silent once he was gone.

Zi finally looked at me and spoke, voice weak and raspy. "I'm sorry, Vanna. I'm sorry. I know it's not enough... It'll never be enough... But I'm sorry. I... I understand—if you still hate me and never wanna see me again."

Even if I'd had my voice, I wouldn't have known how to respond to that. Since that day, when my last words to him were 'I hate you,' I'd had weeks to think over my feelings toward him, and yet they still remained a tangled mix of love and hate—just like they'd been for months ever since he'd admitted that he planned to hand me over to his dad, but even stronger now after everything that had happened.

"...I get it," he breathed out. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back. "I hate myself, too. I've been ... a real dickhead."

That was putting it lightly.

Blinking his eyes open, he wrenched his head back up and looked at me again, a serious set to his face. "Still... I had to come see you. We need to talk. If you don't ever wanna speak to me again after all this, that's fine, but..."

Sighing, I stepped over to his bed and sat down on the edge. His eyes opened wide at my nearness. I opened my notebook, which was starting to feel like a permanent part of my hand, and started to write to him on a blank page. Zi quietly asked me if I really couldn't talk. I shook my head, not looking away from what I was writing.

I know we need to talk, or write in my case. Who's starting?

Zi stared blankly at the page before peering at me and drawing his brows together. "Rade has better handwriting than that."

Confused—because I knew well that I'd always had perfect handwriting—I looked back down at the page, and it hit me a second later. I'd unthinkingly defaulted to writing in the Hylian alphabet, which he'd never learned. I may as well have shown him a page of scribbles.

Writing it again in the correct alphabet helped Zi read it. "Um... Whatever you want," he responded.

I cut right to it, then. What the hell happened to you?

Zi stared at the page for a few moments, forehead creased. "Uh... I came after you. Obviously. I went into the woods to try to find you, but ... there was this giant ass spider, and I chased it. And then those stupid puppets got mad at me and beat me up and stole my shit, and the spider got away, and I couldn't get out of the woods, and then ... I woke up here. I think that's it."

If I'd had my voice, I probably would've interjected with disbelief at him having willingly chased after a spider, what with all his hatred of creepy-crawlies, but I was able to make myself stay on track with my writing, asking the questions that'd been taking up my mind these last few weeks. Why did you stay behind in the first place? Why didn't you have Ooccoo warp you back here with us if you were just gonna come back after me anyway?

"...Figured you wouldn't want me around for a while..." he said in a low voice. "And I at least wanted to explain to my dad why I did what I did, so maybe he wouldn't be as mad... Didn't work. I ended up teleporting away before he could strangle me."

Did you take anything else with you besides a NEVA? I wrote.

Before I could write more, asking specifically if he'd brought a charger with him, he responded. "I actually brought two of the NEVAs. I would've grabbed the other so he couldn't use it, but ... I wasn't really thinking about that, I was just thinking about us using them... And I brought your pouch with all your stuff in it, and a charger for you."

Pent-up tension melted away with the breath that escaped me. The charger—my lifeline—might've been stolen by some weird marionettes, but it was here, in this world. We just had to get it back, and I would be okay.

Is that what you needed to talk to me about?

"That's ... some of it. There's something more important I needed to talk to you about. Something ... a lot more important."

I raised an eyebrow at him, beckoning him to go on.

"Before I tell you ... I wanna know something first," Zi said. "...Have you thought any about how to stop my dad?"

I wanted to write something along the lines of A sword will do—but I held back. Instead, I settled on writing my only other idea that didn't involve killing him. I've kinda been banking on finding a doppelganger of me living here somewhere and using her to convince your dad that I've turned human.

Zi seemed to ponder that for a moment. "...I don't know. I mean, he knows this world has doppelgangers... He might not fall for it."

That's pretty much all I've got. After thinking about it, I decided to just go ahead and write what I wanted to. Besides killing him.

"Yeah... I ... figured you were gonna say that." He pursed his lips. "So... You also think there's no other way to stop him...? No more talking, no trying to make him see that you're not a threat or a waste—nothing will work...?"

My first instinct was to tell him that his father had more than made it clear that there was no changing his mind.

But the last words he had spoken to me before he'd turned off my voice came ringing back in my head. Insisting that he still had a soft spot for me, that he didn't like seeing me scared and upset, that he'd seen me as his daughter... That he didn't want to kill me, but he had to, because he'd been warned about robots like me... Angry as they had made me in the moment, I didn't doubt now that his words were true. He'd had no reason to lie to me, then, no reason to pretend. For all he'd known, I truly was about to die.

Maybe it all was still on the table. Maybe that soft spot, however buried, could have potential for me to tap into. If I could somehow prove to him that I was no danger, if I could somehow dispel any notions he had about rogue robots ... maybe he wouldn't try to kill me, and we wouldn't have to kill him.

...Then I remembered the knife lowering over my chest, and everything I'd just thought sounded like nothing more than wishful thinking.

I shifted uncomfortably. I don't think so.

"Me either." He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. "...That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to tell you ... I've made my mind up. I'm gonna help you stop my dad. Help you ... kill him."

My eyes widened, shooting back over to his face. He was being serious.

His words shocked me more than anything he'd ever said before. To hear him finally turn his back on his dad, in the most ultimate way, after so long of following him loyally ... it made me feel like I had to be dreaming, still.

Zi squeezed his eyes shut. "I don't want to. I don't want anyone to die. But... Seeing you cry on that table... Seeing him standing over you, like you were just ... some worthless piece of scrap metal... It broke me. I can't let him kill you. And if I need to kill him so he can't kill you, then so be it." He pried his watery eyes open and swallowed heavily. "I wanna make things right. Make up for ... everything."

As ever when it came to him, I felt at war within myself. Part of me wanted to thank him for being willing to stand up against his dad for me, to let everything go and accept him back into my life, while the other part wanted to tell him that nothing he could do now would make up for what he'd already done. I wasn't sure I had it in me to ever fully forgive him, whether I fully believed him that he'd genuinely felt like he'd had no other choice or not. The betrayal I felt at him handing me over to his dad cut deeper than any scalpel ever could.

I wish you would've decided this earlier.

"I'm sorry I didn't..." he said softly. "It's just... You gotta understand how hard it is ... to decide to kill your own dad, right?"

I shrugged. I supposed it would be hard to decide to kill your own dad ... if your dad was innocent. If your dad wasn't trying to murder your best friend. If your dad wasn't trying to commit murder, period.

"So... I guess that's about it," he said. "...You and Link should go to the grove, get your charger and everything back from those puppets. I'd go myself, but ... I think Mr. Jesus wouldn't want me getting out of bed yet. ...And I don't wanna see that spider ever again."

I didn't tell him, but I was glad that he wanted me and Link to go without inviting himself. There was still too much tension between us for me to want him around like that quite yet. All right. We can talk more about what exactly we're doing with your dad once I'm back with the NEVAs. Link and I might end up going through the temple while we're down there, so we might be gone for a while.

Zi nodded after he finished reading it, and I flipped the notebook shut and went to stand up from the bed. "Wait!" he said, his hand shooting out from under the blanket to stop me. "There's ... one more thing. Your voice."

I stared at him, wondering where he was going with it—wondering if he was going to say that he could do something to turn it back on. I reopened the notebook and wrote, What about it?

"You ... should be able to use it. You're not connected to my dad's computer anymore—it can't circumvent you."

For show, I tried and failed to speak. 'Well, clearly it can.'

"You can speak," he said, in spite of my display. "You just ... have to try harder. Really try. Change your code, like you did before."

I rolled my eyes. I wasn't even aware that I changed my code before. It just happened.

"But that proves it's possible, right?" he said. "I believe in you. You can do it—you can find your voice. So when you get back, we can talk for real."

We'll see, I wrote—but I doubted it.

The room went silent again. Neither of us moved.

"...I guess you can go now," Zi finally said. "Unless there was something else you needed to say before leaving...?"

I slowly tapped my pencil on my notebook before bringing its lead to the page. You know... I've spent these last few weeks thinking about whether I'd hug you or punch you when you'd wake up.

"Fair enough," he said. He then looked at me with big eyes. "But, uh... I'm hoping you're saying that 'cause you've decided against punching me, now...?"

I thought about it.

Tossing my pencil and notebook to the side, I quickly moved to snake my arms around Zi's waist and lay against his chest. He made a startled noise at my sudden movement, but once it sunk in that I was only trying to hug him, he let out a sigh and wrapped his arms around me in return.

Where he wouldn't know I was talking to him, I mouthed into his chest, 'I'm glad you're alive.'

We stayed like that for a minute before I pulled away. His lips were pulled into the smile that I'd missed seeing.

At least until I punched him in the stomach.


I know I say it every time I take forever to update, but seriously, big thanks to anyone who's still around. 💖 Next chapter, soon? -ish?