If anyone had bothered to ask Dorian what his greatest flaw was, he would answer them honestly. His greatest undoing, the thing that cursed him every time it reared his head, was his sheer brilliance.

He imagined the asker gaping at that, open-mouthed. Then, he imagined patting them on the shoulder and telling them that it was alright, they could gawp at his genius all they wanted. If he was going to be cursed with a high pedestal, he might as well let the simpletons of the world look upon him and clamor to climb the mountain that separated him from them.

See, he had vision like nobody else in the world had. From his earliest memory, he saw a perfectly clear line that led him to his goals in life. The muck and distractions around him had no hold on him; he was a man on a mission.

Sometimes, his vision was a curse. People tended to dislike him for his pursuit of it. They had their precious little feelings hurt, or they would say ‘Don’t do that, that’s unethical/impossible!’.

The joke was on them. He’d climb a mountain of hurt feelings, he’d build a monument out of the scruples, and when every person who ever asked him why he was ‘like this’ or ‘could he please just be nice for once in his life?’ was dead, he would sit on a throne of all reality and laugh.

He could see the path forward so clearly. All Emma had to do was fall for one last ruse, take one more pratfall, and everything would be golden.

She just had to pull one single lever. One slight switcheroo and he would be free and she would spend an eternity isolated inside a big shitty soap bubble in the clouded bathwater of reality.

Emma was looking at his machine, his creature, his creation. Dead metal, under his hands, became a living body. It had loved him too much; loved him so much it ate him up and refused to spit him out. Emma Raymond, his old college fling, the unluckiest bitch in the world, would be suitable food in his stead.

“Alright. First step is to pull that lever,” he said.

Come on, Emma. She had fallen for his every trick without fail. Was now really the time to hesitate and linger?

“No, hang on. I just want to clarify a few things,” she said.

Fuck.

***

 

The tower stood as a stark shape against a snowy backdrop; a lighthouse in a storm; a skyscraper against silver clouds.

Henry had come to think of it as a sort of second home, in the months of dropping by. He’d found any excuse to go over there, any reason at all to bask in Bailey’s presence. That positive association still lingered, even as the place itself had been emptied of Bailey.

No, she was there, next to him, frowning. The place was looking even worse than usual; the strange dual contradictions of it were only getting more contradictory. It was ancient! It was new! The stone was freshly quarried! It was so weathered it was hard to tell where the stone began and the rot of ages ended!

Whenever Henry blinked snow out of his eyes, or even just looked away for a second, it switched. The light from the third floor was a harsh glare above all gathered.

“Here we go,” Bailey said, “ready?”

“Always,” Henry replied.

“As I’ll ever be!” Hannah said.

“Yes,” Lillian put in.

Neither Belladonna nor Yulia spoke up. They both gazed up at the tower’s crowning light in fear, or awe, or neither.

“Bella! Yulia,” Henry said, “are you ready to go?”

They were, but not so ready that they said so. Belladonna turned her full attention to the group and the path ahead; Yulia kept on glancing back at the unnatural glare above them all.

“Cards on the table here: I hate this!” Yulia said.

The door was slightly ajar; Bailey opened it all the way. Henry poked his head in and looked around the foyer. There was no evidence of Emma there, nor any sign of what was going on upstairs. It was just the same old spiral staircase’s stairwell.

There was, however, a distant noise of mechanical stress coming from above. It was a metallic grinding sort of sound. It was the sound of gears grinding into one another, of a squeaky wheel, of something tearing itself apart, second by second.

“I’ll agree with Yulia, here. I also hate this shit,” Bailey said.

With that, she went up the stairs. Henry followed behind. Halfway up the steps, Hannah called to them.

“Hold on! Lillian’s going a little less dragon so she can come in!”

They both stopped their ascent. After a few moments of waiting, a more human Lillian emerged through the door…

She was in the rough shape of a human being, in that she was built for bipedalism (at the moment). Beyond the bipedal movement and smaller size, though, she was still all dragon. Feathers covered her from the back of her ears to where the scutes of her legs began. Her face was a scaled snout and a sharp-toothed smile, and a pair of horns were growing out the back of her head.

“Hey, ‘Ian,” Henry said, “looking good.”

“Thank you. I feel completely naked like this, but I will surely adjust.”

Any further discussion re: Lillian’s tall (taller than Bailey!) new anthropomorphic dragon form was tabled. The machinery noise from above was only getting more foreboding, and time was growing shorter and shorter.

They all arrived at the common room on the second floor, and were met with an unfortunate reality. The place was a total mess, and not in a ‘lived-in’ way. It was a mess in the way an abandoned house was a mess. It was a mess in that special way the aftermath of something terrible could be a mess.

“Emma!” Bailey called.

No answer.

“Emma, whatever it is you’re doing, you can stop! It’s not too late!”

The gathered people fanned out around the room. Lillian investigated the dining area, where one of the chairs was broken (thrown?) on the floor. Hannah checked out the washroom, and Bailey went upstairs. The couch was Yulia’s point of interest. Belladonna looked out the window.

This left the kitchen unit for Henry. He poked around, opening a few cabinets here and there. But something on the wall of the tower caught his eye.

Or rather, an absence of something caught his eye. The gristle and grout that was supposed to hold the stone brick in place was just gone. The brick was there, sitting loose, without anything to hold it in place.

“Huh…”

He went to touch the brick. It popped out of existence before he could touch it. Or… not popped, note quite. It was like some great mouth of the cosmos had come and just swallowed it up.

Bailey called, “I need a hand up here!” from upstairs.

Henry turned away from the gap where a brick had once been and bolted up to the workshop floor, with Lillian and Hannah hot on his heels.

Two things were notable about the scene upstairs. First was the horrible machine, screeching and scratching away as its mechanical anatomy pumped and exhaled in violent metal sounds. Light poured out of it like water out of a leaking bucket, like blood from a wound. Its wooden door at the center of it was wide open, and a glaring grey-blue shine assaulted all corneas that gazed upon it.

Second was that Alice collapsed on the floor with eyes closed, motionless, with Bailey beside her.

“She’s breathing, but she’s not responding to anything,” Bailey said.

She looked at the machine, with its horrible workings, and then to her partners.

“Let’s get her downstairs.”

Lillian, with her tall frame and buff dragon arms, picked Alice up all by herself and nodded.

“I have her. Let us see what we can do.”

They all went back downstairs, in something of a rush. Plates clattered to the ground and broke as Henry and Hannah cleared off the dining table to serve as a makeshift medical bed. It was just long enough to hold Alice from head to ankle.

It occurred to Henry, after Alice was already on the table, that there was a perfectly serviceable couch not ten feet from all of them.

“Alice,” Bailey demanded, “Alice, if you don’t wake up, I will be so fucking pissed. I’ll go into your apartment and organize to my tastes, Alice. I’ll alphabetize all your papers. I’ll--”

She rested her head against her sister’s stomach. Henry watched the minute motion of Bailey’s head and Alice’s torso as they both breathed, in, out, in, out.

“What’s wrong with her?” asked Yulia, whose mouth was a tight line.

“I -- I’m not a doctor. Or a healer. I don’t know,” Bailey said, “I don’t, I don’t! Fuck! What happened! I’m gonna kill him. And, if I have to, her too. For this…”

Bailey stood up straight, with her staff clutched in her hands.

“If my dad were here, he could at least help Alice. If my mom were here, she would know of something we could do to speed along her recovery, or…”

“But I’m not them, am I? I’m me. I can’t heal, I can’t mend… but I can cut. I can break.”

She inhaled and exhaled a few times. Each rise and fall of her lungs was a shift in her geography; mountains rising from a fault line, a glacier carving through a valley. Bailey Thistle was a cartography of a woman ready to let her anger out.

And then, with no shortage of tight rage in her voice, “Let’s go break Dorian.”

With heavy breaths, she made her way to the stairs --

And then Alice spoke up. Her voice was strained and wobbly, but even in its unstable motion, her trademark sharpness shone through.

“If you alphabetize my papers, you will live to regret it, you brat.”

“Alice!”

This prompted, to understate things a little, a shift in Bailey’s affect. She sprinted over to her older sister and grabbed her in such a squeeze that even the jaws of a powerful animal would say, ‘Well, damn! I need to step up my game!’

Alice coughed when Bailey grabbed her in a huge hug. When she talked, her voice came out like liquid sugar dripping out the holes of a flute.

“Easy, easy!”

The elder Thistle sister inhaled.

“What happened? How did--”

“Dorian,” Alice spat, “got me with a paralysis spell, or something. Every muscle responsible for my motor function was forcibly relaxed. It takes a meticulous bastard to do that -- a more clumsy mage would have stopped my heart.”

Bailey’s hug only became more of a death clamp, apparently, because Alice’s breath was squeezed out and painful.

“Hey, easy there.”

“I don’t know what I would have done if you were dead,” Bailey said.

“I don’t know what I would have done, either. Mostly laid around and smelled bad, I figure.”

As inappropriate a time to joke like that as it was, Henry still laughed. No one else did. This led to him shuffling his feet and mumbling apologies. Bailey was too busy to smile at him for this clearly adorable gesture, so Hannah did it instead.

“You know, I feel pretty good, all told. I feel like I just got out of a steam bath,” Alice said, “I’ve been really tense lately. I wonder why?”

I wonder why was spoken with a bitterness that would have made Emma’s tea of choice take up a new career.

“I’m so happy you’re okay.”

“Me too, Bailey, me too. Now please let go.”

Bailey obliged.

“Thanks. Now--”

With a slow pace, Alice swung her legs to the edge of the dining table. She flinched a little as she did so, like it hurt. When her legs fully hung over the table, she let out a groan and pushed herself to stand up.

“Woah.” She shook a little, and her footing was unsure. “This is the worst pins-and-needles feeling. Ahh -- urgh. Remember when I said I felt pretty good? Yeah, never mind that.”

She took a few steps, and shook her arms out.

Out of curiosity, Henry looked over to the kitchen unit again. Alice seemed to have it under control and--

Huh.

“Hey everyone,” he said, “I think the building is disappearing.”

Everyone’s eyes were on Henry, which wasn’t helpful. They ought to have been looking at the growing hole in the tower. The brick wasn’t knocked loose, or destroyed, it was simply nonexistent. It had somehow never been.

They all saw, after a moment of looking.

“We need to stop Emma and Dorian quickly,” Alice said. “Let’s go.”

“Alice--”

“Bailey.” The elder Thistle put her hand on Bailey’s shoulder. “If you think I’m letting Dorian get the last word in on me, you’re sorely mistaken. I’m going to kick his ass until he’s got no ass left to kick.”

“Alright, then.”

Bailey looked at everyone.

“Let’s go.”

They all went upstairs, in clumps of three and four. Alice exchanged a few “Hi, what the hell are you doing here?”s with Yulia and Belladonna, along with the requisite “Why are you both wearing maid uniforms?”

All that ceased when everyone was gathered in the workshop. There were several holes in the wall; the nonexistence problem was worse near its origin point. Yulia took one look at the machine, and said just how little she liked this situation.

“I’m not going in there.”

“Yeah, we can stand guard, or something,” Belladonna said.

Alice rolled her eyes.

“Fine. I’m going, though. Bailey? You up for it?”

“Yeah, duh. Henry, Han, ‘Ian?” Bailey said.

Henry’s mind was already made up. He was going into whatever trap Bailey felt like walking into; he would walk right off a cliff if that’s where she was going. If it came to the cliff, though, he would try and argue a different path forward… but push come to shove, he would follow her if that’s what it would take.

“I go where you go,” Lillian said.

“Like hell I’m letting you do a caper by yourself,” Hannah put in.

“Great! Let’s go.”

The two Thistle sisters went up to the threshold, where regular old reality met with the shining blue light of some other place entirely. Yulia shook her head at this.

“You’re all going to get disintegrated.”

“What, jealous?” Hannah asked.

“Hell no. Don’t come crying to me if you all end up melted or something. We’ll cover your backs, if anyone comes this way, though.”

Henry looked to Yulia, and gave her a nod.

“Push comes to shove, you get out of here,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Henry went up next to Bailey, and took her hand.

“Have fun,” Hannah said, as her farewell to the pair staying behind, and then went to take Henry’s.

“Do not forget to write, Yulia, Belladonna. I expect a full debriefing on what happens while we’re away,” Lillian said.

For some reason, Belladonna winked at Lillian. Lillian looked winded at that, but in a good way. Winded at a nice surprise.

“I promise, if you promise to debrief me, too, Lillian Stone.”

Was Belladonna flirting with Lillian? Huh! Huh! Henry would have to poke Lillian about that later. And there would be a later. He knew, somewhere deep in his cerebellum, deep in his gut, buried in his bones, that this could work out.

“Ready?” Bailey asked.

“Yeah.”

Alice jumped through the blue light. It was like watching someone get dragged underneath a river; like seeing a boat get pulled to the bottom of a lake. Of course, with boats, or with a person, it was their own gravitational weight that made them sink. The water didn’t want things in it.

So, naturally, all at once, Henry and his three loves all stepped into it.

 

***

 

Emma had pulled up a chair and sat before the hungry hulk of a machine. Her stomach was still bothering her, her feet hurt from wearing party heels everywhere, and she was starting to get… doubts.

Okay. So.

She had always had doubts in Dorian. It was only natural. He was a slippery little beast, a man with a trick or seven up his sleeve. But seeing the strange air pocket in reality he was dwelling in multiplied her doubts tenfold.

It was like a great big soap bubble. At the far edges of the place, outside the tower’s windows, she could see a colorful membrane that separated this little pocket from the rest of the cosmos. Beyond the membrane, translucent and shining, was a constellation of distant lights.

They weren’t stars, not exactly. Apparently they were other air pockets, other spaces in the obtuse waters of reality.

Or, that’s how Dorian put it. It could all be a lie.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about our plan.”

“You weren’t before?”

She hated it when he got snippy and condescending. Which sucked, because he did it often.

“No! I’m being serious.”

“So was I.”

“Dorian!”

He was a portrait of impatience. His body took the shape of a runners’, inches before the finish line, forced into a time out. Dorian cleaned out the undersides of his fingernails and gave her mean looks through his eyelashes, which did not make Emma feel particularly welcome or happy with her choices in life.

“Look. I just need to know. We make this new timeline, right, we leave the old one to do its thing and rot Emma-less and unloved, but… in the new one…”

“Cut the foreplay, please. I’ve been ready for this whole thing to work for more years than I care to count; spare me your ‘ahs’ and ‘ums’ and get to the point.”

Gross.

“Fine. What do we do about the other Emma that’s going to be living in the new timeline?”

“Oh, that,” he said, with the same air as a man being reminded his unloved dog was scrabbling at the front door to get back inside.

He shrugged.

“I was thinking we just engineer her death. If you’re okay with murder, we murder her and maneuver you to take over her life. If you’re,” a note of disgust crept in, “squeamish, we can just make an accident happen or something. The Bailey and Alice there can mourn her, and then boom! You come in and make yourself known.”

“And omit the fact her death is my fault, directly or indirectly.”

His voice was rather pissy when he replied to her.

“Yes! Obviously!! You’re not going to walk up to them and say, ‘Hi, I killed and-or-engineered-the-death-of your sister, so I can be your new sister!’ Then we would have to start all over and make a new one where you hadn’t bungled things up royally.”

She said, “So, we just keep making new ones until we get the one that sticks?”

Dorian nodded, with some irritation in his motions.

“Yes. That’s how this works. Do you know how many different ones I had to make to--”

A funny thing happened. As he was about to say more, he caught himself and stopped, which was uncharacteristic of him. If there was a chance to brag, bluster, or hold something over someone’s head, he would take it. Something was not well in the state of Dorian if he was holding back.

“Make to what?”

“Doesn’t matter, Em-em. Do you have any more questions before we get started? Any other trivia games you’d like to play?”

He didn’t have to put it like that. Emma, as loath as she was to admit it, was starting to feel… bad. Insulted. Hurt, even. Hurt feelings were of course irrelevant, but her heart ran hot and her eyes stung.

She was not going to cry. Emma would not allow it. She could handle being berated. But… when Dorian did it, it hurt. This made her angry; the anger made her cry more tears. What a shitshow.

“Oh, what, are you--”

“Shut up. Let’s do this, Dorian. I can,” she sniffled, “I can handle this.”

“Alright. As long as you don’t get all hysterical on me.”

And then, they both turned their attention to the great machine.

Which was good, because the next thing that happened floored them.

 

***

Bailey remembered the Golden River like she remembered a vivid nightmare. She hadn’t even known she was cold, or wet, or that hypothermia was circling her like a carrion-bird while it was happening. It was only when she was back on the surface, being shouted at, that she knew how close to death she had swam.

The space behind the door was like that. A strange water surrounded her, and an alien current carried her. Which direction it took her was not clear; it might have been forward, but it might have been backward, up, down, or she might have been standing still.

And then, like being spat out of some horrible mouth, she landed on a cold floor. She didn’t even know that she felt terrified until she stopped screaming, and it was only when she opened her eyes that she realized they were closed. The ceiling hung over her menacingly. This was good to know! She gathered from this that she was flat on her back.

Her eyes saw another workshop, inside another tower.

It wasn’t such an alien place; but familiarity could signal hostility as easily as safety. There was another big reality-rendering machine, which actively hissed and clanked away. Tools were organized in perfect rectangular patterns around polished tables. On the whole, it was a neat place, neat out of sheer boredom.

“Are we disintegrated?” Hannah asked.

Bailey poked her. In less dire circumstances, Hannah would make her pay for that, but the poke was a sign that they were all still properly corporated… so payback would have to wait for another day.

She said, “Okay, not disintegrated. That’s a good start!”

“And we remain unmelted,” Lillian said, “which officially makes this an excellent start.”

“If it’s any help, I’m willing to bet a frost dragon like yourself has a much higher melting point.” Hannah grunted as she sat up. Evidently, her smart little comment didn’t help, because Lillian huffed and gave her a sharp look.

Heedless of that, Henry was pulling himself back onto his feet. He looked over to the machine, the twin to the one they had entered through. It was making no dangerous grinding noises… for the moment.

“How do we stop them, now that we’re here?” he asked.

“I was thinking of reasoning with Emma.”

“How is conversation going to help now?”

“It won’t. I was joking,” Alice said, “because I haven’t the faintest clue.”

And then, Dorian and Emma cleared their throats.

 

***

 

Emma Raymond was very good at goodbyes. She had had a lot of practice with them; it was only natural she’d figured them out. One didn’t lose so many people in their life without learning a thing or two.

So when Alice, the person she had said the perfect farewell to, went ahead and fell out the portal and landed face-first…

Well. ‘Mortified’ just about captured Emma’s emotional state. She had workshopped that hair insult, refined the jab at Alice’s ridiculous witchy look, and delivered it perfectly. To see all her hard work undone and made a mockery was horrible.

The horror didn’t end there. Bailey and her merry band of romantic partners came through and landed, too… and then started talking. They didn’t even have the decency to notice Emma was there! What a bunch of assholes!

She stayed quiet, to see if they would see her. Dorian made a move to get their attention a few times, but each time, she cut him off with a gesture. Let the intruders notice their mistake on their own!

The worst part was that had Bailey, Alice, and a gaggle of colorful dorks shown up at any other point in her life, she would be delighted! A younger Emma, the Emma that desperately tried to find but one single playmate to join her in romps around that castle, would appreciate this. Playing hide and seek would have been so much less fucking depressing if there had been but one other person who paid her any mind, even if the mind paid was adversarial.

She’d have settled for a nemesis. She’d have settled for anyone her age who didn’t look right past her like she was some dirty secret. Yes, her adoption was against Order regulations, no she was not a suitable male heir to continue the Frederick Raymond Lineage, but she was a person!

Seeing her two siblings (by blood, anyhow) in the room and not even noticing she was there boiled her blood. If they were going to have the audacity to intrude, they may as well have said ‘Hi, Emma, how’s it going?’ or something.

Dorian cleared his throat. Emma, in hopes of being in sync with him, copied him. He was the answer to her wishes as a kid for a friend… Right?

 He was the one who understood her, cared for her. Or if he didn’t, if this was all a ruse… she would take his fake smiles over no attention at all. In the past and future tenses of her life, there were worse boyfriends than him.

“Oh, well. Hi,” Alice said, leaning up against the machine like it was just another wall. “What’s up, you rancid bitches?”

Rancid? Dorian might have been a little bit rancid, but Emma was anything but rancid. If she was going to insult Emma, she ought to have done it properly.

“You’re in the way,” Dorian hissed.

“Yeah? You gonna pull another cheap spell on me?” Alice asked.

She really shouldn’t have done that. Asking Dorian if he was going to something cheap and underhanded was like asking a cat if they were going to be hungry later.

“No,” he said, because he was a liar.

Wait. Dorian was a liar, and Emma knew this. Wasn’t it a bad idea to trust him?

She dismissed this thought as unoriginal and not at all helpful. It had occurred to her in a million different ways while helping him with this whole plan, and there was no room to back out now. Emma would simply never live the shame down if she admitted she was wrong to her sisters.

She said to herself, in a quiet voice, “This is not what I’m seeing. These feelings are not what I’m feeling,” because it made her feel better. They were words that reminded her of the good times.

As it turned out, no one was actually prepared for them to be meeting in this scenario. Emma did the math and found that if the intruders pressed their five-against-two advantage, she and Dorian were done for. But…

“You said you were going to reason with me,” Emma said, of Alice. “How the hell were you going to do that?”

“Em-em--”

She hated that nickname. Why Dorian thought it was cute was beyond her reckoning. But he was saying it with some urgency, as in, hurry up and ignore these losers.

“Oh, I was mostly joking, like I said. But if you must know, I was going to say that when your friend Dorian here knocked me down, which I fully admit to being a chump for succumbing to--”

“You were a total chump,” Emma said, “never turn your back on the teleporting wizard.”

“That’s good advice. I should learn to listen to you, sometimes, if you’re going to say more things like that. Anyways, he said--”

It was at this moment that Dorian sprang to action. There was an unusual speed and desperate spring to his motion, like he was a man watching his winning streak at cards crumble, and his life savings would soon be transferred to someone else’s coin purse.

He moved like a rabid cat, or like a swooping bird of prey. His hands glowed with a fierce and predatory energy, and before anyone could react, he laid a hand on Alice.

And then Alice vanished.

A couple of things happened next, in no particular order.

Bailey, sporting a new staff made of twigs and weird flowery growths, swung at him with the staff. In a voice that was her own and yet intoned in a wholly unfamiliar way, she cried out, “You little--”

It was magic. Emma felt pride stir in her, even as spiny growths launched from the porous wood of Bailey’s staff and launched themselves at Dorian.

The rest of the intruding party got to quick work. Lillian, in her strange humanoid dragon shape, sprung at him like a cat. As she sailed towards Dorian, with the spines embedded in his face, her body took on a less humanoid form… by the time she landed on top of him, she was the size of a large pony, with wings and a four-legged gait.

Henry and Hannah, meanwhile, were watching Emma with sharp gazes, in case she intervened. Hannah had her hands in tight fists, and was set in a fighter’s stance, while Henry was just glaring at Emma from under his helmet. Or she assumed he was glaring. It was hard to tell what with the whole helmet deal going on.

“Where did Dorian put her?” Henry asked.

“Hell if I know. I wanted to hear what she was going to say, honestly.”

Dorian croaked, from underneath the dragon who was Lillian’s grasp, “I sent her to the garbage bin where I send the rest of the trash I don’t need.”

Something flared up in Emma. Was it… anger?

She was mad at him, yes. Why? She insulted Alice every time she saw her, and yet when he did it, it made her upset. It would be hypocritical of her to say ‘You have no right to insult her’… and yet part of her really felt that way.

“Look, Dorian. I wasn’t going to take what she said to heart,” Emma said, “but it sounded like she was going to say something novel, at least.”

Dorian sighed.

“You don’t get it. We’re so close. Every second we spend wasting our time with these distractions, the more we have to wait for our prizes.”

Prizes.

Yes. She and Dorian would both get paid what they were due; him his freedom, her her chance at a real family who could stand to breathe the same air as her.

All it would take was a trifle of… several dead Emmas. Ugh.

That was an unhelpful thought, all told. She imagined, against her will, explaining to another self of her s what she was doing. ‘Hi, sorry, but your life seems so much nicer than mine, so you’re going to die so I can have it. No take backsies!’.

If someone did that to her, Emma wouldn’t know what to say. It was an audacious move, but…

No. She was not seriously--

Ughhhhhhhhhh.

She would never live this down, as long as she lived. In all her years, what she was about to do would hang over her head like a sword. Someday, someone would say, ‘Yeah, that’s cool and all, but remember that time you admitted you were wrong and that Alice and Bailey were in fact right all along? Yeah, shut up, loser, everything you say is bunk. Goodbye!’

Whatever. She would have to deal with that deathblow of shame when it came. Yes, she was wrong, yes, it made her terrible in every way, and yes, she fully expected to live the rest of her life in shame for not being right. Such was life!

“Dorian… bring her back. And I don’t think I want to live in that new timeline.”

At this, he raged. He managed to teleport out of Lillian’s grasp and grab onto Emma’s shoulders with a death grip.

“After… everything. I was set to win, and now you -- how dare you!”

“I remembered that you sucked shit, you know?”

“I’ll kill you, Emma. I will make you into mincemeat, I will make chopped liver out of your entrails.”

His grip was drawing blood from Emma’s shoulders. To say it hurt would not suffice; his grip burned.

“All you had to do was pull one lever and I would be free, and you would be stuck here in hell! Is that so hard??? Is that so fucking difficult? You did all the hard technical stuff in fixing the machine, you sabotaged your own relationships beyond repair like I asked, but this one. Easy. Step? This was too much??? Huh?”

It was at this point that Bailey’s staff made contact with Dorian’s skull. It made a crack noise that could have been bone, or could have been wood snapping. It was a hard call to make.

The force of the blow sent Dorian reeling to the ground, and when he got back up he was clutching the left side of his skull like it was in pieces.

His gaze was wrathful, but his wrath was a leaky bucket compared to Bailey’s. A deep dark green light surrounded her. It was a force that seemed to distort gravity and space around her, a force that turned the will of one angry woman into a powerhouse beyond anyone’s reckoning.

“How do you like a skull fracture, douchebag?”

“Like this.”

He grabbed at her with one hand, said, “go away,” and then she popped away.

“And you, too. You make a good suckup, but your personality problems are mathematically chart-able, and you give truly atrocious head. Goodbye, Emma.”

Before she or anyone else could react, his hand gripped her shoulder, and she…

Where was she?

She was on the ground, underneath a blue and memorable sky. Her sisters were laid out nearby, on the stone-and-wildflowers hill with her. The three of them made an odd tableau, a triangle of women out of space and time.

 

***

 

“Now,” Dorian turned to face the remaining intruders, “the rest of the rabble. Let’s do this.”

“Yes,” Lillian said.

Her teeth were sharp, her talons knives, her stance a cat’s. And cats, like dragons, were the perfect killing machine.

Hannah’s stance was a fighter’s; feet spread out just so, fists raised.

And Henry? He was making a run for the machine. He could shut the fucker off in no time, either the right way, or the fun way.

Poised at this breaking point, all hell could do nothing but what it was always meant to: break loose.