I sat on the ground, my head reeling from memories of a half-dozen lifetimes which weren't mine. Over my shoulder, Moon hovered, a look of concern almost visible on her purple copy of my face.

It took me...almost a minute to reorient and to figure out what had and hadn't happened. The others--happy as I was to see them somehow here with me and unharmed--kept piping up to offer me help or ask what was wrong and I had to shush them while I put my own thoughts in order.

When that didn't work, I turned to Moon. "Moon, what...what is all of this?"

She moved so she was sitting down on the floor in front of me, connected at the feet. Her eyes looked as heavy and haunted as I felt, and I thought, in that moment, there was nobody else in the world who could possibly understand what I'd just gone through.

"I...I don't honestly know," she said. "Can you ask the others...to leave? I apologize, they are...making me very nervous on top of everything else."

Tower was the first to stand up. I realized...sifting through Moon's memories in my head...that he was always the first to try to respect her privacy and insecurities.

"Let me know if you need anything," he said, giving a significant glance to each of us before he left through a hole in the wall.

I remembered why that hole was there. It was a solid concrete wall, nobody could have straight up melted that but Tem. But she'd been captured, hadn't she? Knocked out by the fortress armors blanketing the battlefield in gas...invisible, but still had to breathe.

Or...no, she'd been harried into a minefield by an Exhuman who could detect her even when hidden? But then she'd also stepped on a mine.

My head swam with the conflicting possibilities, and Moon placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder that passed right through me.

"This is what Soran showed you?" I asked, finding the point where all the varying realities diverged. In each of them, we'd made plans and went out, and in most of them, we lost horribly. But before that, we'd been brought here...the resistance HQ, and Soran had trapped us while he'd tried to take Moon's powers. That, and everything else I remembered before it was consistent.

So...Soran promised to show us something, and suddenly I have visions in my head. It helped a little knowing that this wasn't something that just happened, but I still didn't understand what or how or why.

"I think," Moon began slowly, and stopped. She usually liked to gather her thoughts before speaking a word, and was trying hard to force words out to reassure me. Again, something I only understood because the barrier between our minds was at an all-time minimum. "I...understand that I broke my rule in offering to share these visions with you, but please do not pry further in my mind. I am already quite upset and you are not helping."

She didn't really sound it, but behind her calm request, I felt a wave of anger and confusion and shame. Shame?

"I requested that you stop," she said.

"Sorry. I'm...not really used to blocking out thoughts in my own head."

"Understandable, but make an attempt, please."

"Right. Well, let's just focus on what's going on here to keep my mind honest."

"Good idea." She paused while she thought, and I tried my hardest not to listen in on it. "Could you not sing that tune mentally? It is very distracting."

"Sorry. I'm trying not to hear you think."

"It is appreciated. I suppose I will endure the song."

I waited a painful, still-confused minute while she sat blankly in front of me before she spoke again. "I have a hypothesis."

"Cool."

I waited.

"Uh, what is it?" I asked.

"Soran forcibly bonded with me, but the memories I have are not his, though I was able to glimpse his mind for a moment, and found it...blinding."

"Blinding?"

"Whatever the equivalent would be of peering into something too bright, mentally. I apologize, I do not know the appropriate term."

"I kind of doubt there is one."

"A shame. I detest imprecise speech. We will have to invent a term after this. But when I am shadowing an individual, I gain access not only to their memories but their powers as well, and that is where I believe these visions have come from."

"Soran has a power to hallucinate vividly?"

"Perhaps," she said, and her perception soured imperceptibly. "But also perhaps not. There is a wrinkle in this theory."

"Which is?" I said, my head spinning at the new information piling on the old.

"Both my and Soran's powers activate on touch, but are incompatible. When I touch him, I become his shadow, and my consciousness leaves mine and joins his body. But when he touches me, he removes both my consciousness and my powers, taking the powers for himself until I reawaken, at which point my powers are returned. Or I never reawaken, in which case he retains them."

"Is that how it all works?"

"Having been in his mind, I can say so with certainty."

"Well that's good to know."

"Focus, Chariot. Do you see the dilemma?"

"Uhh, no. He touches you...and you shadow him, and then he also has your powers?"

She shook her head. Man, I looked like I needed a haircut. "I do not believe powers can be cloned as you suggest. If so, why would Soran lose his stolen powers if the victim reawakens? It suggests there is only one true source of the power, and it can be with him or with the true host, but not both."

"So your power went off but his didn't, and you shadowed him. That's what we saw."

"But I, even in shadow, did not last long. I became an unconscious shadow, which I did not know could even occur, but that implied that his power did affect me."

"So...that, then. Your power went off, and you shadowed him, and then his knocked you out and stole your power."

"But if my power were gone, I would have not been a shadow. That is my power."

I held my head. How could Moon sound so calm, sitting there like this wasn't a world-spinning paradox?

"I have a theory," she said.

"Anything, just tell me."

"As I mentioned, I borrow the powers of my host. Yet Soran stole my powers successfully, but as you mentioned, only after I'd already become his shadow did I lose consciousness and give them to him."

"Okay."

"So, I was a shadow, I lost my powers, but because I was already attached to him, I now had his powers, one of which was my own power which he had just stolen. This kept me from my power simply ending and my consciousness returning to my body. Do you understand?"

"Okay...that's crazy, but I guess it makes sense. So I wasn't far off on my first guess...he didn't copy your power, he stole it, and then you being attached to him, you could still use it."

"Correct. But while this is relatively straightforward in the case of the one power, it has troubling implications for others."

"This was relatively straightford when?" I asked, wishing Lia were here.

"Let us take one of his powers, say, cryoism. Cryoism is control of ice."

I rolled my eyes at how she could still be a condescending pain even now. "Yeah. I understood."

"Your expression indicated otherwise. Now, attached to him, I would have access to this power. However, I then have that power, and he is leeching my powers to make his own. This gives him my cryoism atop of his. Which I then have access to, which he then drains. Do you understand?"

"Are you saying...that when you are bonded with Soran...each of you is like...I don't know, your powers are powered-up?"

"He is. I am unconscious. And 'powered-up' does not begin to describe it, it would be more akin to 'approaching infinite power'."

If I weren't sitting down before, I sure as shit would be now. An infinitely-powered Soran? I didn't even know what that meant, but the very sound of it about scared the piss out of me.

"No wonder he set this all up just to steal your powers, Moon. That's...that's…"

She shook her head. "It would not work if he stole my powers. For it to function, we need to be two entities passing power back and forth. It would not work with just one, or in the event he succeeded in taking my power, would not work with another vessel. He would just be taking the other's power in two different ways at that point, not both taking and giving."

"Then...what? He did this just for a short while so that...for the moments you guys were bonded, he had unlimited power and did what? Did he freeze every human in America or something?"

"No. While unlimited power is certainly quite a lot, I do not believe it would extend the natural range of the power at all. Merely expand the capability of the power in question in...some way."

Her words brought me way back to when I was still in Canada, when I last had a conversation like this about powers and their use which wrinkled my brain. It was with Lia, as we were brainstorming new applications of my lightning.

She'd told me that in theory, I had perfect dominion over all things electric within my range. If I was perfectly proficient, I could have a hundred billion lightning swords conjured instantly and effortless control over each of them. I could shoot lightnings as massive and insane as Tem's lasers, or stop the bioelectric impulses of anyone in my range, making them drop braindead instantly.

But of course, theory wasn't reality. Lia said that our minds shape how we perceive and use our powers. That was why I might use my lightning as swords, and might be able to dabble in other uses, but another electropath could be all about calling down bolts of lightning from the sky, or maybe successfully zap himself with super-speed.

It sounded like what Moon was talking about here was...all of that. Infinite meant no limits, meant whatever perceptions or mental hang-ups one had with their powers, didn't matter. Anything your powers could do -- within range -- they would do.

Which was just fucking insane, thinking about it. I'd sometimes wondered why Soran had been able to kill Mage using the water in her stomach, but couldn't just freeze the blood directly out of our veins, and the only answer I had was that, to Soran's mind and powers, he could freeze water explicitly, not blood or other liquids.

But for that moment when he had infinite cryoism, he could have ripped every cell of H2O out of us like a billion, billion microscopic bullets. He could have frozen and ruptured every cell in each of our bodies and turned us all into pulp.

The thought made me shiver and I pushed it from my mind before it could set in. I forced it out, forced other thoughts in. Because memories were coming back with it, unbidden.

But it wasn't budging. The thought of this room, an icy tomb, of Soran right there, able to kill us all with a thought. My body freezing. I already knew the pain of my cells freezing and dying, the sensation of flesh already dead but still attached--

Moon clapped her hands in front of me and I felt my mind go blank in shock.

"I apologize, I should not be peeking," she said, bowing on her hands and knees to me. "And even if I am, I should have the tact to pretend not to be. But it seemed to me you were about to be lost in your own memories, painfully, and I had to intervene."

"Yeah, sorry," I said, realizing I was breathing hard and sweating. "Sorry."

"I am the one apologizing. Twice today, I have violated my own rules, and will have to spend many hours reflecting on what that makes me."

"No, you just...look, let's get back to Soran."

She pulled herself back upright. "Agreed. It seems apparent he did not channel his infinite potential in any way we knew he possessed. No ice, no vivid illusions of fire, or otherwise. But then what did he do?"

"The visions," I said, putting two and two together.

"Correct. I know not what power he had before, but with infinite potential, he used it to witness visions. Regrettably, what he witnessed, I do not know. I was overcome with my own visions, which I shared with you, and I felt they were only a small fraction finished when he ripped me from them by returning me to my body."

"But why, then? He did it so that he could have visions? Do you think they showed the future? Is that it? He did all this to glimpse the future?"

"Though I think it a poor idea categorically, we may wish to consider his words. If he was truthful, he brought us here to show us something. And he did. If his word has any value, it is possible that it was not his vision which had significance, but mine."

"Would he even know what vision you'd have?"

"Such knowledge is beyond me. I apologize."

We lapsed into silence while the enormity of this conversation rivaled the half-dozen timelines in my brain. It did seem like the future. They were all lives which had branched off from this very moment, of us sitting and discussing in this room. Of spreading out and teaming up and of failure.

Lots of failure. Painful failure. AEGIS and Karu and I shot and torn and beaten down. Tower and Moon and Tem captured.

"Is...he supposed to be...helping?" I asked, not sure what else to make of it.

"Barring the number of ways I find your sentence irritatingly imprecise, I admit too much curiosity in wondering your meaning to joke over it."

"What?"

"Tell me what you mean."

"Is Soran helping us? I can't think of why else he'd do all this just to plant visions in us of the future. Of failures in the future. Like all the things we should be avoiding."

Moon sat silently for a minute. "On one hand, your theory is valid and explains the situation well. But on the other--as I mentioned before, Soran is an evil being, and the source of lies. Bad people cannot be trusted."

"Jeez, you are really binary when it comes to good and bad guys aren't you?"

"If you probe my mind now, I shall never ever forgive you," she said with actual malice in her voice. I didn't push it and let my mind wander elsewhere.

Right back to...here, actually. We were here for a reason. And whatever Soran was doing, our objective was still unchanged. Targa. Blackett. Exhumans, and Saga.

And the ball of hate inside me surged as the added fuel of all the deaths and defeats of us in my memories piled on top of it. It was so hot that just brushing the thought of Blackett in my mind made me stand up and move anxiously, dragging Moon along for the ride.

"Shall we make plans to bring down the bad guys?" Moon suggested, pretending she wasn't in my mind for all she was worth.

"Yes, let's," I said, cracking my knuckles and really really wanting to punch a wall or something. I'd be much better served by saving it for Blackett's stupid smug face.