Celia was lost in thought, but Ajax spent a lot of time studying the weird assemblage we had going on here.

I felt like the most normal person of the bunch, maybe even counting the two of them. AEGIS was just on my right, already made out as an AI by them at a glance. Lia, on my left, made me feel tired and pained just to look at, clad in her grey slipskin and leaning on her enormous fuck-you sniper rifle, taller than she was. Tobias looked like he'd been ripped out of an asian bootleg of a medieval feast hall, his head gleaming in the moonlight shining through the courtroom's collapsed ceiling. And Aesa was silent and stern, but not cold, as she methodically put the last touches on the device encasing the angle-gate.

Al was here too. He was normal also, I guess.

"Well it doesn't look a damn thing like the one we used on the other side," Ajax said. "But I guess that's probably all just casings and facades and junk, right?"

"On the contrary," Tobias said, his eyes alight. "From what you described, it seems the other device was grounded not in alzstraz-beta compression, but in endo-elastic, zero-point-energy kinetic transferral. Not the same at all."

"Wait, there's another way?" AEGIS asked. "Why the hell didn't we do that?"

"You never asked," he mused.

AEGIS' face looked like she was about to short out.

"Also, it wouldn't be possible," he clarified.

"Well, thank fucking God for that. If we spent all this time and took all these risks when there was another safer way…"

"A much more dangerous way," he smiled. "Fear not."

"Yeah, I don't do that stuff," Aesa said, banging on the machine with a wrench, seemingly just for effect. It was chilly in the night air, but she'd finally thawed out. To my annoyance. "You'd have to find a different Exhuman to build you one of those, zero-point energy isn't my thing."

"But you did this thing?" I asked. "Is it ready?"

"Ready as any death machine will ever be. Offer still stands, if the three of you want to live under my front porch like rats."

AEGIS and I exchanged a glance. "No, we'll do it," she said.

"The two of us will. Lia, I think you should stay with Aesa."

She was tired and sore, but still had plenty of strength to look up at me with the hatred of a thousand burning Justices. "Hell no."

"Come on. You'll be safe. This machine might kill us, I don't want you taking that risk."

"Will probably kill you," Aesa grinned. "Dimension-hopping is all about probabilities after all."

"And you think I want to live on in a busted-up, falling-apart world without you? Hell to the no. I'm coming with you. If you die, at least I don't have to outlive you."

"Lia, that's--"

"It's final. No more debate. We've got five minutes before Justice, don't waste them on me."

I took a few deep breaths as I studied her fierce, exhausted face. A big part of me wanted to attack her, to be honest. Just jump her now, tie her up somewhere she wouldn't get hurt, keep her safe, no matter what.

But it sounded so wrong, didn't it? Attack her. If I loved her, I couldn't spend my whole life controlling her. Worrying incessantly, sure...but thinking about her tied up and crying as AEGIS and I possibly plastered ourselves across probability-space?

I didn't know if it'd be better for her to be dead, but she thought so. I felt like I had no leg to stand on, given that I was going, despite AEGIS telling me not to. We were just a big, bumbling cascade of death-seeking insanity here.

Fuck me.

"Hit it, then," I said. "Let's do this thing."

"Okay. Last chance," Aesa warned us, as she began fiddling with controls, and I felt again the strange sensation of all the power in the grid being drawn to a single point.

It said a lot that Lia and AEGIS weren't trying to stop me. About how desperate we all were, that this insane plan should work. About how little I valued my life, and apparently theirs. About how little time we had for second-guessing, and how we just needed to move forward, no matter the cost, no matter the likelihood of failure, because we were big damn idiots who had to do something, even if it meant our deaths.

I looked at the faces of my sister and girlfriend. They were tired, but resolute. Determined, like I was, to do whatever we could or die trying.

If it weren't for them, either way was fine by me, to be honest. Somehow, despite everything, I was still here, still hating this fucking world, which had consistently shown itself to be cruel and selfish. There were terror attacks going on in the refugee camps, without sufficient police or military, rape and theft was skyrocketing, and the three armies were still killing each other instead of cooperating, even at the fucking end of everything.

People were trash. And if I saved them, great. But if I died, at least I tried my best.

Lia had a whole different set of problems, I knew. She wasn't as jaded as I was, though maybe even more cynical. I knew that under her soft exterior, she hurt every day inside, and she'd been suicidal more than once. Not out of some stupid passive-aggressive spiteful reason like I'd been, but to stop the pain of living. I'd failed at protecting her at every step, yet still she clung to me, wouldn't want to live in a world without me. She was broken, too.

And AEGIS, who did this out of a love that was more twisted than any hate. Even more than Lia, she'd based her whole being on mine. It didn't seem to matter to her that she could have a fully, incredible existence without me, finding a new calling, or hell, a better guy...there were plenty of them out there. Instead, she was all-in on me, down to this dice roll of whether this thing we'd assembled would see us through, or into our deaths.

It was good that we'd gotten separated from Karu and Saga. They had more going on for themselves, weren't as messed up as we were, or at least, not in the same way.

"How painful will it be?" I asked Tobias. "If we miss?"

"That depends a lot," he said, his bemused smile fading for the first time. "If you have the misfortune of winding up somewhere mostly-hospitable...maybe a vacuum in a slow time field...you could asphyxiate over the course of months."

"I'll use this, then," Lia said, hefting her gun.

"At best, you'd just shatter on impact with something wholly incompatible with your being. You'd become molecular fragments in an instant. But most likely, something in-between."

That was...almost reassuring. And by almost, I meant, not at all.

"Okay, she's up," Aesa said. "Stand in front of the gate if you want to die. Everyone else, way back."

I stepped forward, as did the other two. As did Tobias, to my surprise.

"Wait, you're coming?" I asked.

He looked at me in surprise. "Of course."

"Why? I mean...what?"

"It's always been my deepest desire," he said. "My calling, to go in physicality where I'd only wandered in my dreams. I would not miss this opportunity for all the world."

"But--"

"Binding engaging!" Aesa called out from her controls. "Brace for compression in five...four…"

"But you might die," I said.

"...three...two…"

"If you give up on your dreams, are you not already dead?"

"...one--"

If she ever said zero, I never heard it. Tobias' cryptic remark echoed strangely in my ears...or maybe my ears grew to engulf his words. It felt like every part of me was being squashed and stretched and pulled, almost nothing like the stretch of when Soran had chucked us across dimensional boundaries, or the jerk and pull of Jack's short-range teleportation. And absolutely nothing like Rito's stealthy surrounding-swap.

I understood now why it was called alzstraz-beta compression. Because compression was absolutely the thing I was feeling most of all. I felt like a tube of toothpaste, all my guts being crushed and rolled up me, threatening to pop out of my mouth, except that my neck, my mouth, kept growing longer and longer, just as quickly as my guts rose up in me.

I couldn't see anything, just flashing lights that went by so quickly, I wasn't sure if I was flying or falling past them. Wasn't sure if they were the city lights, or entire galaxies whipping past. My body kept getting hotter and hotter, until I was sure that all of this twisting and torture would turn me into a lit matchstick, a mile long.

I wanted to throw up. I wanted to black out. I wanted to die. But none of these happened, instead I just tore across nothingness for an eternity.

And then, like Tobias had said, I slammed into something. It felt hard enough to shatter me into molecule fragments, alright. But my hands and knees were here, intact enough to hold me up as I voided the contents of my stomach onto the black glass beneath me.

AEGIS shrieked from beside me, and I couldn't stop retching long enough to look up. My body was so stiff, hunched over like a dog. But even, frozen in that pose, she picked me up with an arm around my waist and kicked both of us away, the ground streaking past in a blur, before dumping me into the dirt and disappearing.

I didn't understand any of that. All I'd figured out was that I was out of things to puke up, and my body was still trying its best. A moment later, AEGIS landed next to me again, and I heard diminutive coughing, the sounds of Lia being sick next to me. Another minute, and Tobias joined us, while AEGIS paced and swore.

She waved hair-probes at us and muttered numbers, her hands and eyes racing and roving as she prodded all three of us. As the minutes stretched on, I began to regain myself, to feel like I could move again, my body unlocking from the stiff paralysis, so that I could collapse into the dust.

Still she fussed over us. I wanted to tell her it was okay. I was getting better, we were okay. But I couldn't manage much more than taking deep breaths right now, and it seemed prudent to sit up as a first step maybe.

Sit up on the dirt of a new world. A new, very old one. Brown, as far as I could make out, with only patches of black scorch and a few hills to break up the view.

No, not scorch, I realized. Glass. Like the glasslands. There had been nukes dropped here, hundreds of them. The landscape stretched out beneath us forever, pocked with evidence of their blasts, arranged seemingly at random.

I heard wailing, pitiful, heart-breaking crying, and turned, wide-eyed to find the source. It was Lia, holding herself and shuddering, pitiful noises escaping her. And him, I realized, Tobias was wheezing and panting in pain as well.

The sound had somehow broken my ability to take in perception. It took too long for my eyes to focus, for my breath to fill my body and for me to be able to sit upright and see. When I did take it in, my heart stopped.

They were burned, both of them. Their skin was blistering and too red and too pale all at once, angry spots covered her head in a lattice, like someone had rolled her face across a hot waffle iron.

She was holding her body around the middle, apparently burned through her slipskin and all. I just...sat there, gaping, not understanding.

How? How had this happened to her? Why not me?

AEGIS was back again, apparently she'd left at some point, and this time she dropped a charred body near us. I barely took the stranger in, except for it to sink in...that blackened lump of flesh...that was the future for my sister. AEGIS' face was carved deep with worry, her eyes narrowed in focus and sympathetic pain.

"AEGIS, what's wrong with them? Did they...did they not make the jump?"

"Oh they made it," she said, her voice angry. "We just landed in a fucking nuclear crater. The rads are still fresh, even that amount of exposure was too much."

"Too...much?" I echoed.

"A lethal dose," she spat, and stomped her heel, as though she could crush the words into the dust.

That didn't make sense to me. That seemed impossible. We'd...we'd all just done something against all odds, we'd done the impossible. We were here, weren't we? On another Earth? We'd crossed the probability-space, we'd fucking thrown the ball to Paris. And now...this was what would kill us? Landing in radiation?

She'd carried us maybe a hundred fucking feet from the glossy black crater. We were a hundred fucking feet from safe landing? In a jump that should have killed us? That Aesa and Tobias had assured us was almost-certain death? Across dimensions, across entire fucking Earths, and it was a hundred feet that decided it?

It was bullshit. It wasn't right. I could not fucking believe it, how fucking stupidly awful our luck had to be for this bullshit. But I couldn't will away or deny the fact that Lia was sitting there, skin blistering off, crying in anguish as her body burned again, for the second time today. My heart breaking as she writhed.

"Do something!" I shouted at AEGIS. "Help her!"

"I...I can't! I don't have anti-rads or...blood packs. I can't treat her burns without taking off the slipskin, and all of her skin with it!"

Lia was mewling in pain, an inhuman noise I never wanted to hear, that nobody should ever have to hear. She was choking on her sobs, a pathetic gurgle punctuating her bleating.

"We have to do SOMETHING," I screamed. I was on my feet somehow, grabbing AEGIS by her rear, rummaging through the pack she kept on the small of her back.

Bandages, gauze, pills, stims, syringes. All of it seems tiny and pointless compared to the burns across Lia's entire body. Useless against her whimpering which broke my heart, even as I felt it pounding in my head.

A spray can of medical gel. That was all I found. I jumped over, stumbling as my exoframe malfunctioned from the rads, but forced myself there, muttering soothing words and empty promises as I emptied the entire can across her, pretending that the shiny gloss on her face was from the spray.

"You're gonna be okay, Lia. You're gonna be okay," repeated, over and over. "You're going to be okay. Just...just tough it out. You're so tough. You're the strongest person I know. You'll be okay."

AEGIS knelt opposite me, on the other side of Lia's body, silent and angry and sad. Tears streamed down the corners of her cheeks.

"How long do we have?" I asked. AEGIS shook her head, opened her mouth, but couldn't speak. "HOW LONG, AEGIS?"

She coughed, and wiped her eyes with her palm. "The...the burns...they're bad, but they...they won't be what gets to her. They'll...they'll inhibit body function, risk infection...pneumonia, cellulitis, UTIs, and respiratory failure. Anemia, rhabdomyolysis, blood clots--"

"HOW LONG?" I screamed.

Again she shook her head. "It's the...radiation poisoning. Nausea, vomiting, headaches, fever, leukopenia...shock and cognitive impairment. Seizures, ataxia, tremors."

She stared at me, her eyes cloudy as tears streaked down her cheeks. "...and death."

"HOW FUCKING LONG?" I slammed my fist into the dirt with a crack.

"At her dosage...maybe two days. Before her body shuts down. Maybe less, if the burns...depress her cardio system...if her pulmonary artery occlusion pressure drops, vascula resistance spikes..."

"Two days. Maybe less," I echoed.

I couldn't...just...couldn't anything. Just a minute ago, we'd been grimly determined to see this through, to do...whatever needed to be done, to die.

But it wasn't supposed to be her. It wasn't supposed to be like this. We all went, we were all supposed to go together. If we were all adrift with death hanging over us for two days, she had volunteered her rifle. It was supposed to be a success or a failure, not like this.

"Not like this," I found my lips moving. "Please, God, please."

"Without...treatment...there's a hundred-percent mortality rate. With care...ten percent chance of survival."

"We can get her back," I said, standing up. "We can follow the machines that Ajax and Celia used. We can get her back into our world, and get her into a regenerator. And she'll be fine."

AEGIS' tears continued to spill. "Radiation is mutagenic. If you put a pre-cancerous patient into a regenerator...what comes out...will be more cancer than human."

"Then we'll get whatever other treatment they use!" I shouted. "We're that ten percent. We just have to get her up, now. Come on, we can do this. We can save her!"

AEGIS said nothing, just slowly rose to her feet, and gently, gingerly, scooped up the girl with her. My heart was pounding so hard, and my breathing was so sharp that it hurt. And hearing Lia moan in pain as AEGIS lifted her up, seeing her arm dangle helplessly, like a corpse, I wanted to put her down and cry, to never touch her and have her survive. Somehow.

My breathing shuddered in my chest. No! Come on! Come ON!

My feet wouldn't move. The exoframe was like a vice around my legs. I didn't know if it was still malfunctioning or if I was. We needed to go, needed to go now. Every second was fractions of percentages off my sister's life. Percentages she had so few of--

I meant to turn, to go. But instead my breathing broke. I shuddered as a sob racked through me.

"No," I wailed. "Come-fucking-on! COME ON. MOVE," I screamed.

But my body didn't move. I couldn't. I wasn't strong enough to turn from the spot where I was rooted. Lia's arm dangled, swinging carelessly in the dry air. Her fingers were red and pocked with burns, a red that faded to cloudy mist as my eyes teared up, as a comprehension I didn't want began to build inside me.

"No!" I sobbed. "No! I don't...not like this. I refuse to...accept it. No..."

AEGIS broke down at seeing my tears, and I cracked at seeing hers, and both of us stood and cried over my sister as she writhed in unconscious pain. The face that I knew so well, unrecognizable under red lines and blisters, her hair, cut short at the sides from her last burns, a tousled brown mop peeking out from her hood.

It was just wrong. She was so perfect, so strong and so sweet. It was just wrong for someone like her to be in this kind of pain. It was wrong for someone like her to die.

That was how I knew we were here. We were still on Earth after all. Everything beautiful must suffer, because that's what Earth was. Only by leaving, like Aesa had, could you get away from this pain. I thought I'd been ready for it, but even as I told myself I could endure the worst that Earth had to offer, it proved me wrong, always. It had pain as I could not imagine, which it handed out without restraint. With cold, uncaring dispassion.

We spent too long standing there and crying. Spilling tears onto this alien world which was too familiar. Longer than five minutes. Somewhere deep inside of me, I knew that Justice was there, now. That we'd failed, and Lia would die for nothing, as though her suffering hadn't been punishment enough. That her death was just one of millions to follow.

I wanted to throw up again. To black out. To die. I didn't want to live on in a world without her. If the jump hadn't worked, and we were all stardust now, that would have been better than this.

I eyed the rifle still draped across Lia's back. It'd be painless. I'd seen that gun in action, it vaporized half a body in a single shot. I could save Lia the suffering...and then AEGIS...and then me.

I heard a pained coughing and turned around. Tobias was there, I'd somehow forgotten...he looked even worse than Lia. His burns were black, deep holes, I could see far too deeply into his body. I could see his chest swelling with every heartbeat, the action of his lungs and veins. It was horrifying.

His eyes were red, and his pupils...messed-up. Not...not round anymore, like someone had broken the yolk of an egg. His breath was shallow and wheezing, too wet and too dry at the same time.

"Athan," he said, his words barely more than a breath. I felt my lips twitching and a fresh wave of tears threatening as I took his side. "Athan, are you there? I can't...I can't see, m'boy. Are you there?"

"I'm here, Tobias," I said. I wanted to hold his hand, wanted to...to reassure him somehow, but he was more burn than anything else at this point. If I touched him, it would only cause him pain. I turned my head so the tears would fall onto the dust.

"Oh, Athan," he said, his lips cracking as she muttered. "We did it. We did it. It's just like my dreams."

My voice cracked. "Your dreams must have been nightmares."

"It doesn't matter...doesn't...matter. We did it, Athan, we did it. Tell me...tell me...what you see? What does the world...the world look like?"

His next words made my heart break all over again, and tears streamed down my face.

"Is it beautiful?"

I couldn't speak. My lips were trembling as his breath rattled in his chest.

All that was here was death. Black craters and barren dust and AEGIS and these three corpses. The body she'd found, and my friend, and my sister.

He wheezed, and I saw his breathing stop for a second. He choked, and then gasped, as though forcing himself to keep on breathing, choking on air.

"Is...is it beautiful Athan? I can't...can't see."

"Yes, it's beautiful," I said, my voice breaking. "It's so beautiful. It's just like your dreams."

"Good...good…" he coughed again. "Just like my dreams. I can see it now. Another...entire world to...explore. So many...lives...memories to...be forged…"

I could see his heart laboring in his chest, under the black burns. It writhed with a strange movement, half of it collapsing at a time, more like it was being crushed than beating.

"So beautiful. It's...so...beautiful. I'm so...so happy, Athan. I'm so…"

His breathing stopped. He didn't choke back to life again. He was just still, and silent. The action in his chest ended, still as the rest of him.

As dead as this world he'd tried so hard to reach.

"Come on," I said to AEGIS. Or myself. Come on. Lia can't be next. She can't.

And this time, when I tried to take a step, my leg moved. One step at a time, we'd get her home, get her safe. She couldn't die here, not like this.

Not like him.

Not like this.

Not like this.

I prayed to God.