Maki didn't remember coming to the lab. The malicious presence inside of her head was chanting. Her boots were slick with snow, and her hair was wet and matted to her face.

She took a sheath of papers from the desk. The other intelligence read over it, moving the papers impossibly fast, as if it knew the equations and physical moves by rote memory. Her hands found the device. A single green vial was held inside a lockbox. Pale fingers grasped the vial, swirled it and held it to her lips.

Maki started to cry. She didn't know what drinking the vial would do, she only knew everything would change if she did.

"This isn't what I want. I just want to be normal." Maki said.

Her other self showed her visions of her unhappy potential lives. Of Honoka, round with someone else's child, of herself, crying in a medical supply closet, of Nico shouting at her and breaking plates.

"I know. I know. But this is…" Drinking the green liquid would break her open into someone else entirely. She would cease to be Maki at all.

A shade rose from Maki, and she could see her other self as an illusion.

"There is no future with Maki. There is only the future with a god."

And then, the film before Maki's eyes sped up. Maki saw beyond the map of her life. She saw herself die, in a futuristic hospital bed. Her unhappy, unloved daughter grew up to be a therapist in an unrecognizable world. Concrete and rising water and space elevators. Her moderately loved grandaughter did a job Maki did not understand entirely, in a tiny space colony that she was lucky to live in. And on, and on, timelines of unhappy women in increasingly smaller, more hostile spaces. Children cried, in prison-like structures, their minds displayed on monitor for the teachers to see. Plants shrank smaller and less green. Shriveled leaves and sick trees.

"They stop playing music, in 2300. It becomes too painful for anyone to hear anymore. No one retains the ability to read sheet music in tiny space colonies, no one practices the flute when they're bored. On earth, the world is too volatile to create anything at all. What is the point in creating instruments, learning music, or teaching music when everything is on fire all of the time?"

Tears lapped at the edges of Maki's eyes. "And… the solution is to give ourselves over to this?" She said.

"Who else in the world possibly could? You know what we need to do. What we need to create. I'll let you drink the vial, Maki. I know you'll make the right choice."

Maki's hands shook as she uncapped the vial. She tilted her head back.

A stream of time, spreading into her bloodstream like the branches of a tree, opened inside of her.

###

When Maki came to, she was in the music room. Honoka stood against the blackboard, her face impassive. When had Honoka gotten here?

The sheet of papers was before her. Her equation. Her score. Her symphony.

Maki sat at the piano. She patted the seat and gestured for Honoka to come.

"It won't be the same, unless you do it with me. We always were meant to do it together."

Honoka sat down. Her eyes were so tired. She looked so different from the girl who'd Maki met freshman year of highschool, freshmen year of college. "This was always going to happen. I know that now. Everything I'd done, I'd done it all following the stream's guidance, hadn't I? Even if I wasn't aware of what was happening. My other self, just by talking to me, set me on this path."

"It would have been too much, to know at once. For any of us." Maki said. Her voice trembled with a thousand selves.

"It would have. Let's begin." Honoka said, in a whisper.

Maki's fingers caressed the keys, plying them with her geass to become shapes from energy. Notes rose in green and silver. Honoka's voice met hers. Shades of jade and viridian shot from their harmony. A garden of glass wildflowers spread out from them.

Gates appeared. Latticework of pearls and moonstone lined the tops of the stone walls, and metal of the Gate itself was a shining gold.

Maki stood up and nodded to Honoka. They joined hands.

"It's time." Maki said.

The Gates opened. Maki and Honoka walked through.