I couldn't think, couldn't feel, couldn't understand. Flecks of blood were landing on my face, I was dimly aware of how they felt like they burned my skin.

AEGIS was screaming, grabbing her, wrestling the knife out of my sister's hands, but her movements were stilted, jarred, ineffective. She seemed to be conspiring to slip and to screw up, and every time she failed, Lia rammed the knife home again and again, her torso just a bloom of crimson beneath the papery hospital gown she was wrapped in.

Dumb, lost, I just stood there. I couldn't move, held as though by an all-powerful magnet. My mind couldn't take in what I was seeing, it was just...trapped, thinking of every horrible thing that had ever happened to Lia, from her fucked-up mental biology at birth, to the Exhumanity I'd just forced on her, and wondered what thing had finally pushed her over the edge.

It had to be me, I thought. If she just wanted to die, there was no reason to take the elevator and find us. This was her last, great act of passive-aggression against her abuser. She must have learned somehow that I had this Aphrodite muse, that I'd enslaved her against her will, like all the others. She wanted to show me just what she thought of me and my fucking powers, my decision to make her live as an Exhuman against her will.

She wanted to tell me just how much my selfish desires were worth: Nothing. My wants were without value. I should have been less of a hypocrite, should have been the person I always pretended like I was, acting in the interest of good, not just my own selfish perception of it. I should have--

Something tugged on my arm and I turned and found Lia's hazel eyes and shy grin plying me. She gave a little apologetic wiggle and guiltily offered me the knife back. I took it, without thinking, and returned it to my sheath, and she tutted at me and pulled it out again, wiping it down on her gown before re-slotting it.

I blinked at her, and then back at the girl still maiming herself, who was on the verge of collapse, giving her absolute all to her mutilation, and then back at the shy smile beside me.

Well given the two, I had no doubts which was my sister. Even if she was still sporting crimson blooms across her gown, I couldn't mistake that smile.

I barrelled into her, almost sending us falling with the force of my hug. Wordlessly, she squeezed me back, although there was a distance there, again, an apology it felt like. After long seconds I held her shoulders and pulled us apart.

"You scared the shit out of me," I told her. She shook her head and began to say something but I wasn't finished. "I'm so sorry. I should have never taken you here. I should have--"

I paused, my mental tirade against myself from a moment ago still fresh in my mind.

That was the first thing to come to mind, but it wasn't right, was it? That was me being selfish again. She was her own girl, her own woman now, and I didn't own the rights of where she got to go or didn't.

But all the same, she shouldn't have been here. She almost died, and the burn scars across her body would be there as proof of that, every day for the rest of her life. The muse now dwelling within her, the brand of being Exhuman…

Was that all because of her choices? Just because she'd been hurt, did that mean she somehow lost the right to choose? That didn't seem right.

At the same time, anything which led to her almost-death couldn't be right either. I didn't know. But that was significant, too; someone who didn't know shouldn't be mouthing off like I had.

"Sorry," I repeated. "I um, I hope...what I did...was okay by you. I know it's a lot...being Exhuman. And if you'd...rather have died...I respect that…"

"Athan, just what the hell is this?" AEGIS asked, turning towards us with teary eyes as she held Lia's corpse. "Why would she--"

Lia gave an embarrassed wave and grin. AEGIS blinked at her, and then took a deep, deep breath and sighed.

"Right," she said to herself. "Exhumans. Hi, Lia. Glad you're...better. Glad you're...not all...knifed up. What the hell was that about?"

Lia excitedly bounced forward and took AEGIS' hands, wrapping them around her own throat, and then nodded vigorously.

"You...want me to...crush your throat?" AEGIS asked, pulling her hands away, and then further as Lia grabbed at them again. "Dude, Lia, what the fuck?"

Lia turned to me and tried the same stunt, and got much the same reaction. Hell no was I putting my hands on her neck.

"Why aren't you talking?" I asked.

She didn't answer, just looked at me forlornly, which was...sort of an answer. The extremely pained silence that followed should also have been expected, any time one asked that question.

"You...lost your voice to the radiation burns, I take it…" I asked, and she nodded. "I'm...sorry…"

She approached me seriously, with wide eyes, the whites of them stunning and beautiful against her now-mottled flesh. And with those same deliberate movements, she took my hands and placed them on her neck.

"I'm not going to kill you," I said, almost choking on my words, even as I pulled my hands away again. She rolled her eyes enormously, and with a deft movement, pulled my knife again. I tried to take it from her but found myself stunned, flat-footed, as she skirted away.

"Lia--" I pleaded. But she just pointed the knife at the body on the floor, and then her wounds across her chest, thrusting her head out like there was a logical conclusion here we weren't getting.

"She's saying…" AEGIS said "that...the knife didn't kill her?"

Lia nodded, and went back up to me, putting the knife away and my hands back at her throat.

"So...you strangling her won't kill her either?"

"I'm not strangling you!" I shouted, and she pouted away and went to AEGIS. I tried to separate them but again, couldn't, finding myself again overwhelmed by the enormity of my emotions and the scene.

"Um, I'd rather not strangle you either…" AEGIS commented. "Lia, can't you just...write it out or something, if you can't speak?"

She patted herself down like we were idiots. No mobile?

Before I got to ask, she seemed to have another idea, and was slinking around my legs now, my exoframe hissing as I backpedaled away from the maniac glint in her eyes. I found her hugging me, and I froze, off-balance, the auto-gyros keeping my legs rigidly locked against gravity.

She grinned and slunk under and behind me, crawling on all fours while I tried to figure out just what the hell was going on, and trying very hard to keep completely still so I couldn't tread on her.

When suddenly, from behind, she gave my leg a sharp yank. I flailed my arms, shouting, as the auto-gyros kicked in and my off-balance leg swung to catch me.

Stepping down hard. With a crunch. I turned away so I couldn't see Lia's face pulverized by the stomp of my frame. The sound of it made me sick, I felt bile rising in my throat, felt my breath getting shallow and my head getting light.

And then she patted me on the shoulder and gave me a thumbs-up.

"Fascinating," AEGIS commented. "Erm, may I?"

Lia nodded with vigor as AEGIS put her hands on my sister's neck. Before I could even shout out, there was a crack, and the head rolled on her shoulders in a way it shouldn't, her brown hair draping down her chest, the skin folding in unnatural creases.

That was enough for my stomach, and I vomited again, the second time today, and with nothing else left to get up. Lia's body collapsed into my puddle of sick, her head twisted impossibly as though trying to stare at me, to charge me with what I'd just done, what I'd just allowed to happen.

And then she was walking into view again, all smiles and waves.

"Her window!" AEGIS beamed. "She's trying to widen her window! The Ramanathan Window!"

That made a lot of sense, but it didn't keep me from fainting, stumbling over another one of my sister's corpses as I went down. I thought the exoframe might have caught me, or maybe AEGIS, or maybe Lia, but however it turned out, I was waking up on the floor to six perplexed and somewhat-worried eyes looking down at me.

Two were brown and green, a reflection of my own. Two were unnaturally yellow, like lightning caught in marble. And two were blue and luminous, one atop the other, in a bouncing, mechanical frame.

"Maybe we should do this somewhere away from him," AEGIS commented. Lia bit her lip and nodded. And with the weird unawake focus I had, I noticed that her hair didn't bob with her as she nodded, like it always had. With the sides shaved off, it behaved a little differently, she behaved a little differently.

This brilliant, mute, burned, death-seeker was still my sister, but at the same time, wasn't anything like her. She'd been an Exhuman for all of ten minutes, and already she was completely changed.

No, not completely, I realized. When she'd heard about the Ramanathan Window from me, the first thing she wanted to do was to kill me in a ton of creative ways. I guess it only made sense that she'd do the same to herself.

Still, I felt in a daze as AEGIS made apologies and reassurances to me as she trailed off with Lia to go find other things they could do to her. As the elevator door closed, and I saw Lia waving at me through the gap, I hardly recognized my sister, didn't want to hear AEGIS excitedly babbling about a chemical locker she'd seen, or going back up to soak up some more rads.

I felt defeated and deflated as I sat on the floor by the beacon, Cer humming to himself as he bobbed in some kind of eternal bliss I just couldn't understand.

She was so damn different. She didn't even look the same, more scar than girl now. And her throat all gone...who knew what other problems she'd have down the road? Was she like Saga, all her organs in various states of atrophy, only held together by the impossible powers of a muse? Would that kind of power stop cancer from claiming her? It had fixed up her radiation burns, but who knows what kind of solution the muse actually devised. It had fixed the burns, but left the scars...meaning...what, exactly?

I felt stupid and weak for throwing up. But there were still three corpses in the room with me, adding to the surreal feeling of lying here while Cer serenaded us with what may as well have been a dirge. Lia obviously had the situation in hand...but how the hell was I supposed to know that? I just saw my little sister cut open, crushed like a grape, and snapped like a toothpick. Wouldn't anyone freak out at that?

But I couldn't just be anyone. She was an Exhuman now, and she'd need my help more than ever. I was supposed to be the older one, I was certainly more experienced with the issues she'd face...so why was AEGIS the one helping her with her powers? Why was I lying on the floor with the other corpses?

I sat up, and in skirting around the pool of sick, noticed there wasn't any blood on the ground, not from any of them. Which was weird, I'd felt it splashing on me. I drew my knife and...it was clean, even though I'd jammed it in wet just a moment ago.

So they weren't real corpses. In fact, looking at them now, I didn't know why I thought they looked like Lia at all. They were featureless, nearly. Dummies, only resembling Lia in the most superficial ways, approximately her build, hair, and height and wearing her clothes, but little else. Like a waxy, fleshy mannequin.

I wondered if that was her power. Not just to create these fakes, but to utterly convince people that they were seeing her in them. But no, it must have been the window, her power was probably something else -- if she could make them voluntarily, she'd just be popping them out like crazy to test her powers. She still was Lia, after all.

And that thought came through and hit me like a ton of bricks. After all the lying around thinking about how much she'd changed, I was slammed with the enormity of how much she'd stayed the same. That grin, the excited bouncing, the gleam in her eyes that spoke of some plan coming to fruition, no scars or hair style in the world could obscure any of that.

The fact that she was out there, screwing around with her powers, an Exhuman for all of ten minutes, and she was already trying to play with it, to use every single second of her Ramanathan window to its fullest, that was Lia, my sister, without a doubt.

It was like that was the thought I needed to turn the key to get my brain running again. All the denial I'd been in over the last few hour seemed to wash over me, seep in, and not seem so bad or dangerous or overwhelming now that I knew the one simple, anchoring fact that Lia was, in fact, Lia.

It let me take a step back and just breathe. And then move away from the stink of my own puke and breathe again, slightly better this time.

There remained one nagging thought. Well, plenty of nagging thoughts, most of which revolved around the fact that we had no idea what Justice was doing right now, or to whom, or to what extent. But putting that aside, there was still one thing jarring me about this entire excursion to parallel-Earth.

Namely, it had been pointless. And that didn't sit well with me. Mage, or Aoede, or whatever we wanted to call her, she'd tugged at the strings to get us to come here, to land that insane cross-dimensional leap, and for what?

Was it all just so that Lia would get sick and we'd familiarize ourselves with the beacon to get her better? Was she the key to beating Justice, after everything that had transpired? This insane, convoluted web of lives hanging by threads, just to turn her Exhuman and unleash her on him?

I didn't think so. Although...the power we had selected for her was PEACE. I'd kinda hoped that meant peace for her...but bringing peace by killing him...could the concept apply in that way?

Even if that was right, I decided, I didn't like it. I didn't want Lia going in there alone, destiny or otherwise. I'd flat-out asked Aoede what were were supposed to do here, and she said she didn't know...and more importantly, the interpreter machine had given away that she hadn't been lying, either. This wasn't a situation where she was only saying what she needed to in order to trick us into doing what we had to; she genuinely didn't know herself, because her powers didn't work on reading futures created by other powers.

It was why we'd formed the P-Force in the first place, why I wasn't just dead the second Blackett got his hands on me, like I should have been. Exhuman powers cut through other Exhuman powers, cut through the Ramanathan Window, interfered with each other in a way guns and bombs just couldn't. To a muse, weapons were just predictable piles of matter, but it was only how other muses used them that remained a mystery.

The elevator ding'd, and I looked up to find just a few drones coming in, cleaning up my and Lia's messes, quickly and efficiently restoring the same sparkling metal spotlessness as everywhere else down here, before withdrawing with all the corpses in tow.

So...the only way to really counter Justice was...what we were already attempting to do. To bring all the Exhuman powers to the table to combat his. All the exotics made by technopaths, all the powers in New Eden, all those who were familiar with combating them...those were our shot. We were doing the right thing.

Just not the right magnitude. Justice was so many powers, wrapped up in one. I stood up and walked back over to the beacon, and flipped through the list of victims to find his face.

With a tap, I opened his profile and it exploded across the screen. There had to be a hundred muses here, everything I could conceive of was there in some way or another, it felt like. Every element in some aspect, every characteristic or trait, events, things, and so many words I didn't understand.

It almost put the rest of the list to shame, by itself. No wonder we were struggling, he might have more powers than the rest of Earth put together. The very thought of it made my mouth go dry.

Because I was very aware of the solution. I was touching the screen of the beacon right now, the cold glass of the holo's projector against my finger. I'd done it once, created an Exhuman to save a life. I could do it again. I could...make a hundred Exhumans or more, all at once, all ready to fight Justice on even footing.

I could.

But should I?

Instead of stopping to think of right and wrong, I tried to look at my own motivations for wanting to do it. Was this just to save the people I cared about personally? Or worse, myself? Or was this truly for the good of the world? Suddenly dumping a hundred or more Exhumans into what was already a volatile situation might not play out as I hoped -- people were, from my experience, shitty, and I already knew plenty were taking advantage of the situation to hurt others and help themselves. If one of them became Exhuman, that was actively hurting the fight.

But I also couldn't just hand-deliver powers to those I knew and trusted. For starters, most of them were already Exhuman. But also…

This was a selfish indulgence I knew. But also, I'd be taking away the lives of those I cared most about. I'd already irrevocably tainted Lia, and just because she was cool with it now didn't mean she'd stay that way, or even cope well, once the crisis and novelty had passed. In the moment she'd plunged that knife into her arm, I felt like I hadn't tried to stop her because I knew this was coming, knew that someone as hurt as Lia only needed one more push before she couldn't stand. Even thinking about it now made me want to cry and hold her and tell her it would be okay, even if for the moment, she was fine.

And Lia was a girl who liked Exhumans. I'd seen Whitney almost destroy herself when she was briefly empowered, working through the guilt of being something that had killed her own family. Karu had turned to cutting and rewriting her entire moral spectrum over what I now knew to be Aphrodite, I couldn't imagine what dropping another muse in her lap might do to shatter her world. And Cosette...well...I didn't know. She thought Exhumans were neat, and she was sharp and competent, but also kind of an irresponsible drunkard. It was hard to tell what she really thought, despite how straightforward she was.

That was kind of it. Who else would I hit up? Celia and Ajax? Tyler and Kiera? Darris and Sebastian? Al? Fucking...Subaru?

I really didn't know too many humans, I realized. Which kind of surprised and disappointed me. I thought I'd been open-minded and equal-opportunity, but I guess that was just a lie I'd told myself. I avoided them, because by-and-large, humans were crap. And that conclusion had nothing to do with my Exhumanity, and everything to do with my experiences with them.

The elevator came again, and this time I found AEGIS and Lia, the latter was pouting at me and gesticulating in some approximation of sign language, which neither of us spoke.

"I was catching her up. She's um, upset that we didn't tell her about Justice, sooner. She wanted to know how things were on Earth, and...I think kind of irritated that we've spent so long here without achieving much."

"I've thought it out," I told them. "I think...what Mage wanted us to get here...was you," I nodded at Lia. "All the tangled webs, all the lateral movements, all the cryptic hints, they all led to the beacon, and the beacon...was to be used on you."

"You think...Lia's power...is going to magically defeat Justice, by itself?" AEGIS crossed her arms at me.

"No. Well. Maybe. I think...that's what the prophecy is supposed to be. But I also think...Aoede herself doesn't have faith in the prophecy. I don't just want to thrust the situation into Lia's hands and pray. If things go wrong...I don't...don't want the very first thing going wrong...to be...her death."

Lia seemed very pale and started pacing, while I continued to flip through pages on the beacon. I'd almost ordered Cer to shut it down just minutes ago, and now it seemed like all we had left. It seemed appropriate that as ever, we had more Exhumanity on our hands than we could handle, and not enough humans to deal with it. Just, in a different context this time.

I was scrolling through the list of muses again and one jumped out which had caught my eye before. Immediately, I knew what we had to do to win this. And the best part is, nobody had to turn Exhuman, nobody had to be hurt.

"DISTANCE" I read. "Which speaks to me of like, an Exhuman power's range. We all know the one biggest limitation in Exhuman powers is their range. If only we could have a power which, by its concept, defied that limitation. Imagine being able to snipe Justice from the other side of the planet."

"Won't work. Just because you think of a concept somehow doesn't mean anyone you shove it into will. You could wind up with someone like Jack, who can cross distances, or hell, like Aoede, who could forsee events at great distance. Too many ways to interpret it to be promising."

"Snipe him from the other side of the planet...or multiverse." I nodded at her seriously.

I saw her brow furrow, and then she gasped. "Athan, no. I refuse. I will not let you--"

She took exactly one step towards me before freezing on the spot, her movement getting jerky and jittery, and the concern and anger written on her face replaced with confusion.

This was the third time this had happened now, and apparently three was how many times I had to see it before catching on. Without even looking at Lia, I understood: whether she was trying to or not, this was peace, of a sort. And I guess I was stupid for not realizing sooner, when I couldn't stop her before, but of course, when Lia thought of PEACE, she'd personalize it, she'd bring it down to her own experiences. The peace she understood wasn't global hold-hands and singing in harmony...it was the people she was with, not fighting. People like us, whom she loved, literally unable to argue.

This was the girl who'd made peace with Saga by telling her to mind-fuck her into being physically unable to argue or disagree. That was her idea of peace, and now she had the power to force it on all of us.

She nodded at me and pointed to the beacon, even as AEGIS stuttered and stammered towards me. I took the hint, and gave AEGIS a brief apology before turning to Cer.

"Cer, turn on the beacon again. Were you paying attention?"

"Cer, listens always! Already have muse and target selected, awaiting your orders, revered guest! Excited!"

"Bubble away, Cer. Let it go, Exhumanize me...for the third time."

It was a little anticlimactic when nothing happened, and AEGIS seemed completely bound in frustration, alternating with fury and confusion in equal measures, as Lia wordlessly tried to soothe her.

Then the elevator dinged, and a medical drone appeared. It was only after it offered me the same syringe of sedative as it had before that I remembered that a muse could only bond with a host while they were sleeping.

"Drug, potent, but short-term, will only take you out for a minute," Cer promised.

"Right," I agreed, jabbing myself and feeling the liquid burn hot under my skin. "Rooight."

I had intended to count to three, but by the time I tried to express that thought, the world was already slipping away down a dark corridor. And the last thing I saw at the end of it before all went black was AEGIS staring at me with contempt.