Ellison looked…

I swallowed down the swell of emotion and tried to shake it off.

Kids are small. That’s obvious. But you don’t truly realize until you take responsibility for one, how slowly they grow. Maybe it wouldn’t feel so painstaking if they grew up protected in a vacuum. But they don’t. The world swirls around them, tearing at their unknowing hearts, shredding them with a debris of endless collateral they had nothing to do with. Hurting them for no goddamn reason, when they did nothing to deserve it. And you can’t help feeling that eventually, the storms and gusts will tire of toying with them and rip them from your arms entirely, carrying them away.

Because as much as we’d like them to be, kids aren’t protected by some common law of decency, or God, or trivial plot convenience. They get hungry and gaunt when there isn’t enough food to go around, fall victim to outside influences and grow cynical, and in the end, die like anything else.

So, as much as we’d like to wish the opposite, we are so often left wishing for something many would consider cruel.

Grow up and grow up quickly. Please. Before the world throws more hurt your way than I can protect you from.

Ellison’s physical characteristics had changed little. His arms were bigger, the clavicle at his neck more pronounced, his shoulders broader. He still held his trademark, all-knowing smirk that was his default expression when he wasn’t scowling.

But his eyes had aged a thousand years.

His metal armor reflected a warm blue, a fiery indigo bird etched into his chest piece, wreathed in blue flame.

Behind him, maybe twenty feet away from us, a man with long curly hair, wreathed in cloth bandages that flowed freely behind him despite the absence of wind in the cave stood. He was gazing at the Nosferatu in the crater, but seemed entirely too relaxed considering the strength of the enemy at hand.

Belatedly, I realized Ellison was talking. “… and now I’m waiting for you to pay attention again.”

I blinked.

“There it is.” Ellison said. “What I was saying—before you drifted off to poignant nostalgia land—was that there were… quite a few things I needed to grab to prepare for this. And I knew you could handle it. Nine times out of ten, you pull that victory out of your ass. That’s why I couldn’t help more during the transposition.” He trailed off, and his gaze grew distant. “Still. I know the toll it took on you. What it cost. And I’m sorry I couldn’t help more.”

I wanted to talk to him. There was nothing I wanted more. But the Crimson Nosferatu didn’t seem like the type of creature polite enough to let you pause for an aside.

I inclined my head towards it. “Is—”

“He’ll wait.” Ellison finished. “He’s ornery, but his perception of time is different. Hell, he’s older than most of the population of Texas combined. Also, he’s a pompous geriatric fuck who likes to let his prey come to him.”

“And Miles?”

“Stable. The collateral looks bad, but the amount of control that thing has is absurd. It knows I want to get Miles out, and there’s nothing more useless than a dead hostage.

Something ticked in my mind. An inconsistency. “The vampire. Did you mean he thinks he’s older?”

From my mostly guesswork understanding, monsters generated in the realms of Flauros were synthesized at the behest of something greater. Probably by the planners. Their previous life memories were fabrications, the only life they truly lived was whatever they carved out for themselves in the dungeons.

Ellison slowly shook his head. “Not… exactly. This really what you want to talk about?”

No. It wasn’t.

“Your ability. The future knowledge. How does it work?”

A dark shadow flitted across Ellison’s face. “Time loop.”

“Progressive or self-contained?”

“Self-contained.”

“Any carry over of abilities, items?”

“Not a damn thing except this.” Ellison pointed to his head and scowled. “And even then I don’t get the full package. My memories fade like anyone else’s. They’re more or less consistent, unless shit goes really bad early and post-traumatic stress gets out of control, then my memories from that loop are fucked.”

I slowly connected the dots. There was a problem with time loop fiction that always stuck out to me, in that the protagonists go through several life-times’ worth of trauma and mentally age dozens, if not hundreds of years. Realistically, any normal person who went through that would be reduced to a gibbering mess of insanity by the end, and the accumulated anxiety, depression, and angst that the constant futility would incur.

“They reset your fucking mental state.” I hissed, barely able to believe it.

“You always have such a visceral reaction to that.” Ellison mused. “But yes. Hell, half the time I wake up at the beginning, as soon as I think about the shit I’ve done in the previous loops it inevitably ends with me purging in the bathroom.”

I gritted my teeth. As far as the average person went, I’d done a decent job taking things in stride. But going through something like this once had been hard enough. Losing all the progress I’d made and despite that, knowing all the horrors in store? I couldn't imagine.

It was all I could do to stay calm, fists clenched at my side. “If you’d told me earlier, I…”

Ellison quirked an eyebrow. “You… what? Would you even have believed all this shit at the beginning? The guy who watched someone with powers out of a marvel movie get eighty-sixed in an alley and went to work at Dunkin’s the next day?”

He knew about that. The way he was talking, he’d been in the loop for a while. I had to assume he knew everything, keep deceit to an absolute minimum.

“Fair. But I’m not that person anymore. Let me help you now.” I argued. “Deal me in. I won’t undercut you, or muscle in, or try to steer things in a direction I want. You’re on point. So fucking delegate.”

“To be fair,” Ellison continued as if he hadn’t heard me, his expression softening. “You catch on pretty fast. Faster than most people. There were a few times, mostly earlier on, when I woke up and I just couldn’t handle it. What happened before. Couldn’t get out of bed. Couldn’t eat. And when I… broke… it was like you knew exactly what to do. You scheduled a shrink appointment we couldn’t afford—date always set after the dome came down, but it was the thought that counted—took off work, and let me cling to you like a stupid child. You even read to me. Though I’ll be honest, the book you usually chose was, uh. Not the greatest, considering.”

There was a lot to unpack there, and in the meantime, my mind seized on the last thing he said.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Please tell me it wasn’t Vonnegut.”

“Slaughterhouse 5, baby.” Ellison grinned, but the grin was hollow. “‘All moments past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.’ When you first read that passage I burst into tears—confused the hell out of you. The second time, though, it was actually kind of comforting. That time is static. Realized. Every decision we will or won’t make already etched in stone.”

Ellison had confirmed what I’d suspected. He’d been resetting to a scant few days before shit hit the fan. Given that, there was no way he hadn’t tried to leave. Either with us in tow or on his own.

“I take it the outside the dome isn’t much better?” I asked.

“Outside is different. Fewer monsters and powers, more supply issues, starvation, and garden variety people losing their minds in the face of the apocalypse. Sweeping everyone we give a shit about outside the dome is the same as prematurely breaking open a cocoon. It cripples us when it counts.”

“And?”

Ellison gave me an even look. “We die, Matt. Every one of us. So far that happens inside the dome too, but at least the system gives us a fighting chance.”

An icy chill went through me. I’d never been overly positive about our prospects, where things within the dome were going. Having it confirmed felt different.

“What happens after the citywide game?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“What’s the purpose of the Ordinator class?”

“Can’t tell you that either.”

“Why is Iris so important?”

Ellison feigned confusion. “Because she’s our sister?”

“In the greater scheme of things.”

“Oh. Definitely can’t tell you that.”

“Well. Why the fuck not?” I finally asked, barely filtering the hurt and hostility out of my voice. Addressed the elephant in the room that’d been present ever since I guessed his abilities. That up to a certain point, he knew everything that came to pass and made an informed choice to keep me out of it.

Ellison paused for the first time. Before, his responses were like mine every time Nick regurgitated the Wizard Quest story. More or less on auto-pilot. Now, he was thinking about them. Why? I’d almost certainly asked him this before. Was he considering giving me a different answer? Something real?

He flexed his jaw, seeming to decide. “I know what you’re thinking. Probably how many things you’d do differently, if you were in my shoes. It’s not that easy. Time, the order of events, it’s all so much more finicky than it is in the stories. There’s no set track, no predestination. The smallest changes end up altering things for no goddamn reason, and sometimes things change regardless of what you do. Ghosts in the machine.”

“The butterfly effect.”

“More or less. I tried warning everyone. Telling them what I know. Tried it more than once. Want to guess what happened?” Ellison asked.

I thought of how the Ordinator had cranked up the difficulty of the transposition in response to an abnormal amount of User advancement. “It changed everything too much. You weren’t able to make viable predictions anymore, and while maybe we cleared some of the initial hurdles with no issue, the eyes in the sky kept throwing curveballs and we eventually got blindsided.”

“Yep.” Ellison scoffed. “God, I hate how quick you are on the uptake. It took a lot of blood, tears, and wasted time before I even considered that. Point is, I’ve switched tactics. These days I help people that need to stay alive exactly when they need it, kill people who need killing, disappear, avoid explaining anything. Problem is, there’s still a laundry list of giant variables I don’t know how to control.”

I didn’t want to ask. But I had to. “Am I someone who needs to stay alive? Or…”

For a moment, Ellison looked shaken. “Doesn’t matter. I’m here for Miles, same as you.”

Then, a beat later he added. “Guessing you caught on to what happened at the apartments.”

“More or less,” I said, trying very hard not to think about how casual my brother was on the topic.

“Truth is, I don’t know what you are.” Ellison struggled, searching for a way to say whatever he was thinking. “Ever. You’re the biggest variable there is. Sometimes, you’re the best resource I have. Sometimes, you’re my worst fucking enemy. I’ve tried dealing you in, obliquely pointing you in the right direction, abandoning you entirely, and a bunch of other shit not worth repeating. No matter what I do or how many times I try it, the outcome is completely unpredictable.”

The cold arithmetic of it chilled me, as the events of the apartment snapped into context. When I looked at it abstractly, Ellison was being honest, insofar as me not falling into either camp he’d described. I wasn’t a threat or an ally. Instead, I was a variable.

And the best way to deal with a troublesome variable is to remove it entirely.

Ellison waved an arm. “That being said, this iteration of you is unique in a few ways that caught my eye. The uh, last breakfast we shared, I gave you a lot of shit for being a hypocrite—mainly as a vehicle for getting you to leave me the fuck alone.”

“I remember,” I said, only a little bitter.

“Well, it wasn’t bullshit. You are a hypocrite.”

“Thanks.”

“But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.”

“Really—”

The Nosferatu hissed loud enough to fill the dungeon, startling both of us. Ellison fell silent, his smirk fading to stoic neutrality. The significance of the fact that it still unsettled him, despite running into it multiple times before wasn’t lost on me.

Apparently the conversation was over.

Ellison cleared his throat. When he called across the crystal clearing to the Nosferatu, he almost sounded like a comic book hero. “I’ll meet you in combat, crimson one. But if you wish for a genuine test, you must give me time to make preparations.”

“Then make haste.” The Nosferatu hissed.

I processed what had happened, slowly. “That actually worked?”

“Uh-huh,” Ellison said. “The higher level monsters develop a lot of quirks. Some get nastier, more deviant, others gain certain preferences. It’s all about drawing out their values, figuring a way to use it against them. But you already know a thing or two about that. Can’t speak to where this motherfucker got the Dragon Ball Z fight logic from, but I will not complain.”

He took a knee and drew various metal pieces and cylinders out of his inventory. One by one, he assembled them with practiced ease; the pieces coming together to form a tripod. Slowly, the device took shape. Once I realized what it was, I couldn’t help but snort.

“A ballista.”

“I call it the anti-armor magic deterring cyber influenced magic implosion ballista. Or AAMDCIMIB.”

It was a terrible name with an equally terrible acronym, but somehow, knowing that despite everything my brother must have endured he still held on to some of his old quirks, was a minor comfort.

“You are a fool, small one. No mortal weapon can wound me.” The Nosferatu called over the clearing.

“Every time you mention my height is another five minutes you’ll suffer before I kill you.” Ellison muttered.

He pressed a tiny object, similar in size and shape to a roll of lipstick to the far end of the ballista’s bow. As he pulled it back, a luminescent blue beam of light emerged, tethered to the bow. He held the object far from his body and stepped over the miniature ballista’s body, attaching the beam to the other edge and stepped away, Ballista complete with the requisite string. Then he fiddled with the gear-like mechanisms of the ballista, pressing his head against its body before returning to the adjustments, dialing in the range.

“To answer the question you didn’t finish—the ‘really, being a hypocrite isn’t a bad thing,’ in an unnecessarily sarcastic voice.” Ellison said quietly, “I’m not talking about flip-flopping, or punching down on someone for doing something you do regularly. I’m talking about the big shit. How many wars do you think could have been averted if the drum beaters at the top were introspective enough to stop buying into their own propaganda?”

“You’re not wrong, but I’m not seeing how that applies here.” I said.

Ellison shook the ballista, then banged his forearm against it. There was a click of something falling into place.

“Cold rationality and self-interest is an effective mix for survival. There’s a reason so many assholes make it to the end of the world. But there’s a limit to how much that can help you before it does the opposite. And from my observations, you, in particular, can reach far greater heights of power, the more people you’re trying to protect—almost out of pure necessity. Our family. The Adventurer’s Guild. Kinsley. Nick. Sae. Miles.” Ellison paused, as if deciding whether to mention something. “Jinny.”

“Is—”

“I can’t answer that. What I can say, is that excluding the last name, this is the first time they’ve all been alive simultaneously. Mostly because you helped them. Other things I can’t talk about are also going uncharacteristically well. Which is why… I did what I did.”

It stung, but I understood. “Tried to remove the variable before it skewed the results.”

“Exactly.” For just a second, Ellison looked ashamed. “I’ve obviously reconsidered, which is why we’re having this conversation. I can’t fully deal you in, but I don’t think this deviation from you is an act, and if I don’t take advantage of it now, I might never have another chance.”

“What do you need from me?” I asked.

“First and foremost, I need space to work. If you follow me, try to figure out what I’m doing, or use your vocation ability to spy on me, we’re done.”

“Got it.”

Ellison loaded the Ballista bolt. Or at least, that was what I assumed it was. It was forged from pure shadow, and despite the decently lit environment, it almost convinced my mind there was nothing there.

“Secondly. I need you to do what I ask, when I ask. For the immediate future, that’s grabbing Miles while I’m keeping Mister BBEG over there busy. Don’t back me up, don’t even take a parting shot.” Ellison scratched his nose with his third finger—the signal to ignore what he’d just said. With the timing, he wanted me to prioritize getting Miles out, but wouldn’t turn down any help I could give him on the exit. “Once you’re in the elevator, I need you to pass on a message to Miles, from you, in this exact wording. ‘For someone so concerned about the good of the people, you really ought to look into what Waller was doing in his free time.’”

“What—you can’t tell me that.” I finished, before he could speak.

“Now you’re getting it.” Ellison smiled. A genuine smile, not a smirk. It slowly faded. “I’ll let the fed fill you in after he’s not jammed up with a bounty and investigates. Waller needed killing. It seemed like a solid opportunity but now that we’re working together, it could make your life a lot more difficult. You need Miles off your back. Trust me. The guy is relentless.”

“Figured that one out,” I muttered.

“Once the ball is live, you need to hurry. If you take too long with Miles, you may miss something else. Something important.”

Nick? Or something else. It’s all so goddamn vague.

“Also, be careful with the Order of Parcae.” Ellison continued. “I’m guessing that you’ve figured out that we need them in some capacity, but their management leaves a lot to be desired. You’ve handled them well enough, and I think you’re heading in a good direction—dragging them out into the spotlight with this stunt, not shooting Aaron in the face the first time you saw him, keeping body count to a minimum before you know all the players. Just again, be careful. I’ve never seen this exact scenario, but as you know, they’re not fucking around. The Order turns nasty on a dime.”

“Hastur?” I asked.

Ellison shook his head and pressed his lips together.

“How long has it been?” I finally asked. “Since the first loop?”

Ellison’s voice was tired. “At one point I kept track. Wrote the number down on my journal as soon as I woke up and stared at it until I was confident I’d committed it to memory. But now? I can’t even remember the number I gave up on.”

The image of Ellison was trying to hold on to—my impression of him as a moody, clever kid who would hopefully brighten up after his teenage years—finally faded away, and I saw him for what he was. A soldier that had been at war for far too long.

I opened my mouth.

“Yes,” Ellison cut me off, and pulled a hand down his brow, contorting his face. “Assuming I survive this, I’ll come to dinner. Might even stay and watch a movie.”

“Great.” In that moment, that was all I wanted.

“Lastly. You’ve got a thirty-second window before this thing grows its head back.” In one smooth motion, Ellison reached down and fired the ballista.