The first time Tam opens her eyes, an exhausted man looks back at her with undiluted awe. He blinks too fast, his lips part, a sudden laugh escapes him.

"It worked." He smiles.

There are bags under his eyes (she knows this means he has not slept, though she has no history of sleep), and a vast array of chalkboards, scribbled from end to end with theorems, towers behind him (she can read the proofs, though she knows not how). She stares at the man, who stares back at her. He stammers, holding out a quivering, white-gloved hand for her to grasp.

She takes it, and he pulls her up to a seated position. The man leans close, his eyes alight with blue, and he inspects her up and down.

The woman who has just been made speaks. "Do you know me?" she asks.

There is softness in the man's eyes, and it catches in his expression as he nods. "I know you very well."

"Could you tell me who I am?"

He smiles even more broadly, if that's possible, a weary yet elated grin. "Your name is Tamira, but who you are is up to you."

He shows her to a room, brings her a meal, and sits close by as she eats her chicken and dumplings. The man tosses his cloak and the white glove to the floor, then runs his fingers through hair that hasn't been washed in days, closes eyes held open far too long.

He explains, "You're not my daughter. I'm not your god. We're not dating. Figure we should get all of those out of the way first. I'm a mage who made you for an incredibly special purpose, but first you'll need to learn everything I know, and more, I hope. There's something you'll need to do someday, but you don't need to worry about that right now. If I did this right, your body is real. You'll need to eat three times a day. You'll want to stay up all night and read, but seven hours of sleep is the minimum, otherwise we get moody. You're a telepath, too, just like me, so … I don't really need to talk aloud at all with you, but I haven't talked to anyone else in a while. I don't think I'm explaining this well."

Tam sets her bowl down. She has endless questions, but one feels most important. "Am I a person?"

The man who made her takes a moment … then nods. "In progress. Yeah. You're a person in progress."

Her name is Tam.

Hexhaven greets Tam with leaves on the edge of turning and a perfect autumn crispness. High above, the dean of Fatehold, Denzilore, spreads his wings in the morning light. He soars like a kite, his wings rippling like ribbons in the thermals. As Tam emerges from the prison, she knows she ought to feel welcome. Jadzi is locked below. Her task is complete. But this doesn't feel like a homecoming. What is this feeling? Why does it feel like hunger?

On paper, she returned from Strixhaven victorious, her mission complete, her captured oracle in hand. When Professor Opal met Tam at the portal and whisked their captive down to the cellar, Tam felt a bit empty. Why was the Theorist not there to greet her?

She excuses his absence. It was late. She could tell him the next day. It's best if she focuses on success rather than lingering on the memory of her friends. It's proving difficult to forget the look they gave her as she left.

Like the original Strixhaven, Hexhaven is old and young at once, a place where one becomes oneself on cobblestones tread by generations doing just the same. "But this university," says the Theorist, "is an improvement on the original." It's a singular and expansive tower, reaching and twisting high into the realm of the sphinxes who watch over it. Nothing here will hurt her, but nothing will fulfill her either, not so long as the Theorist watches from the walls and the birds and the borrowed eyes of other students. It's for her safety, of course, but she does wish the Theorist would have come out to greet her for a change.

As Tam passes quiet, pleasant cadets, she marvels at the Multiverse her creator has made. How her fellow cadets give her curt military nods to acknowledge her presence, independent of the Theorist's control. He calls it his "grand project." Tam thinks of it as the Echoverse, a sanitized reflection of the original, though she never says the word aloud. This manufactured Multiverse lives and breathes. It's a self-driving engine now, creating on its own with one command: become as your predecessor, built without suffering. So simple a charge and so complicated an array of praestigial theories layered as a haystack. Tam knows many of those theorems now and lacks the knowledge of so many more. The Theorist is a wonderful teacher. He'll be glad to know the kidnapping was successful.

It's a beautiful autumn day because campuses are meant to exist in autumn. Tam smells the crisp leaves and marvels that they never pile up. She carries a book bag but never needs to refill her ink. Her Theorix clothes fit perfectly, even if she hasn't worn them in months. She'll walk its campus soon, test theorems in the Parabox, try her best to befriend other cadets. (Are they capable of friendship? Tam is doubtful.) This campus is different from the true Strixhaven in many ways, but the most glaring is the absence of her … friends? Were they friends? Was she a friend?

Tam has stopped in the center of the walkway. Her brow furrows. No, she wasn't. Not really. She tried to be because she was assigned to. But when she remembered how she and the others would conspire in the coziness of Sanar's dormitory, gorging on snacks snuck from the dining hall, laughing at one another and shushing themselves with hurried glee when a professor passed outside … it stirred a feeling in Tam. A burning ache that made her want to forget the look they gave her when she kidnapped the oracle. She does not have a name for this feeling. She will have to ask the Theorist what the sensation is called.

Tam does not feel that sensation here, but she does feel something else. Yearning. An absence. This hunger, but not for food. For what, then?

A vision—unprompted—appears before her in the walkway of the courtyard. She knows it's a vision instantly, sees how other cadets walk straight through it, but the illusion stops her all the same.

You left, signs Abigale. You lied, and you left.

The other students, the cadets of Hexhaven, pass by without care. They can't see the confrontation Tam imagines in her own mind.

If you're not real, then was any of our friendship real? Abigale signs, feathers raised in agitation, pinions stiff with guarded fury.

Tam looks down and walks through her. When she turns around to see if the vision is gone, she still sees her owlin friend, eyes wide with hurt, tail twitching in a silent accusation: You are a lie.

Tam turns back and keeps walking. She must speak with the Theorist. He'll know what's happening. A murmuration of birds flaps overhead, and she sees the suggestion of a familiar face nestled in their flock. He knows she's home, then.

Morning sun breaks through the clouds now, a crisp breeze at her cheek. The Theorist did such a magnificent job of replicating the Multiverse he came from while clipping away its cruelties. She walks across campus without slipping once on wet stone. The cadets pass without their voices ever growing too loud. It's real, here, as real as she is.

She climbs up the stairs to the administrative hall, her braids wet with morning dew.

The Theorist's office is more of a laboratory, an airy, light-drenched atrium down the hall from Professor Opal's office. It's quiet in the hallway leading to it; her heels tap on the flagstone, and motes of dust float through the late-autumn sunrise.

Tam feels empty, and oddly guilty because of it. Perhaps she ought to be feeling something firm or impassioned; after all, it takes a firm and impassioned person to deceive her friends in the name of progress. But she doesn't. She only feels awkward, quiet. She walks through the hall not proud and clever but inadequate and less than … and a voice that she knows has no sound interrupts the quiet.

"I know what you're missing."

She startles and looks for the source. It's Lluwen's sneer that catches her attention. The vision of him is perched on the ledge of a high window, bathed in a stained-glass wash of color.

"You're not you until you go out and find it."

"Find what?"

"You're just parts."

Tam hears a noise, a real one this time, from Professor Opal's office. She turns; the vision of Lluwen is gone. Her heart races. In a handful of steps, she makes it to the professor's office and sighs with relief once she's inside.

Opal's office always smells of heady lavender. Too many cushions smother the couch, and a painting of one of the campus's pegasi sprawls with pleading eyes over the fireplace. The lace curtains let in a gentle pattern of light, and just under the lavender is a base note of the sweets in the box on her desk.

"Tamira! I'm glad to see you, dear heart," Professor Opal says with typical warmth. "I was just about to feed the pegasi. Would you like to take a pot of moondew and join me?"

"No, thank you," Tam says. "I have to consult the Theorist before my daily tasks."

"Anything I can help you with?"

Tam stills. She doesn't want to tell Professor Opal about her vision. An instinct tells her it's not safe. She obscures the full truth. "Something is wrong with this Multiverse's structure."

"Oh, dear," she says. "I'll noodle on a solution."

"Professor—" Tam stops herself, finds the words. "What is friendship?"

The professor smiles gently, sets down the book in her hands. "The bonds we make with others should be unbreakable. We are contracted to those around us, and we honor those contracts with our actions. You are feeling torn because you delivered the oracle to the Theorist?"

Tam looks down guiltily. The professor puts a hand on her shoulder.

"Don't be," she says softly. "Your duty is to your maker. The Theorist isn't only your creator, he is …" Opal trails off, searching for the words. "You are very special, Tamira. And you are bound to him in ways I am not. Do not feel guilty for acts of service."

So why does she? Why does her guilt take the form of her friends? Why would she manifest such reminders of her betrayal?

Professor Opal glides to an elaborate chair in front of her desk and sits. The morning sun outlines her shape as a shadow. The woman draws a pen and writes a small note in a nearby book. "Is our new guest comfortable?"

Tam knows she means Jadzi, the oracle. She walks to the side of the desk to see Opal better. "Will you be nicer to her than you are to the … other one?"

Professor Opal smiles politely, the corners of her eyes unmoving with the pleasantry. "I'm always nice."

Tam isn't so sure about that, but she hides it well. "Thank you, Professor." Eager to leave, she turns and offers an unceremonious, "Bye."

"Goodbye, Tam! I'll watch over the oracle!"

Tam shuts the wooden door behind her with a click.

Sometimes Tam has opinions without any memory of how she formed them. She likes Professor Opal, but part of her is always wary around her, like she knows she shouldn't show too much of her heart. Tam has no reason for this prejudice, but still she can't shake it.

She walks up the spiral stairs now, ascending to the Theorist's sanctum. Each step brings with it noise from above—a scuffle. Violent steps and sudden exasperations. It's a fight. Tam picks up her pace but stops at the entrance. Behind it, she can hear the Theorist in pain, the sound of him fighting someone off. She hears the clang of metal striking wood, two sets of feet jostling for position. Tam knows she can help. She bursts inside.

The Theorist's sanctum is an immense and open space, surrounded with mage-rings that encircle the atrium as chain mail. Each leads to any number of locations throughout the tower out into the world. They buzz with the energy of leylines. Normally, they're the first thing to catch her eye. Today, her attention is drawn downward. The dais below is smeared with chalk and blood.

Tam assesses the scene. The Theorist, eyes alight with blue, nose running a stream of blood, sleeves rolled up past his Phyrexian scars, white-hooded cloak discarded to the side. He grimaces, trying to find an opening, but his opponent is shorter, smaller, fast as all hell and fighting like a polecat. The child is young, maybe thirteen, with a knife in one hand and a mask on his face so she can't see his eyes. The boy slices at the Theorist's thigh, then slams the back of his hand against the wound with a flicker of magic. The Theorist howls in agony.

"Teacher!" Tam calls. She readies an equation of her own to negate whatever magic the boy transferred, but the Theorist calls out, "Tamira! Hold!"

With great effort and an openly bleeding arm, the Theorist summons a portal—a great round one, rimmed with metal—and hurls the boy into it.

Master and apprentice take a moment to breathe. Tam retrieves a clean cloth from a chalkboard nearby and hands it to the Theorist. He pants heavily, pinches his nose. His eyes close as if his skull is blooming with a headache, and he blinks back at her in silent admission.

"Another one?" she asks.

The Theorist nods.

"Is your nose all right?"

The Theorist shakes his head.

"Do you want to go to the Invasive Care Infirmary?"

"I'm fine. Thank you, Tamira."

The Theorist is the man who made her, but not all of him. Just a part. Like she is just a part. Tam understands him in that sense, but by nature he is more distant than the man she first knew. Straightforward, clinical, a believer in the authority of magical science and its refusal to reduce to opinion. The Theorist's approach is never about being right but about clarity. The man who made her, the one holding together his subtleties and emotion, is no longer here.

That's how he emerged from his first death, he explained early on. Beads on a necklace trying to imagine a string to keep them together.

Since then, he's fought so many aberrations. Tam wonders how many of them were there before, whether he even knew they were there in piecemeal. "When did you get your ears pierced?" she asks as a distraction. It's an honest question. She can't help but be curious. She can't help but be herself.

The Theorist blinks, looks up and away. "Not sure."

"I'd like to get my ears pierced," Tam muses, only partly to herself.

The Theorist doesn't say anything to that, but he does glance at her, blue eyes to gold. He would have had a dry retort several aberrations ago. Disappointing. He's gotten boring since they've been gone.

Does it hurt when they're carved out? It looks like it hurts.

She takes a seat on a nearby tabletop and looks at the praestigial equations smeared on the chalkboards around them. "Is it helping? Excision?"

"Control over the Multiverse's spell becomes more precise the more aberrations I excise."

"Teacher …" Tam trails off. "I fear even though you've gained more control, the instability problem remains."

He's moved the cloth from his nose now, tosses it into a waste bin he magics up from nothing. The Theorist is God here, and God needed a waste bin. "This is why you were sent on your mission, Tamira."

Why you sent me on the mission, she internally corrects.

"I did," he says aloud. Tam bashfully quiets her mind. "Drastic measures are needed."

"What kind of drastic measures?"

The Theorist smiles. "Deduce it."

Quandrix was not her first tutelage. The Theorist taught her praestigial theory, the impulse of telepathy, the art of illusions. His craft was hearing the unheard, showing the unseen, and so was hers. Below the chalkboards around them were Kaldheim battle drills, Ravnican spycraft missives, an entire volume of Eldraine fae illusion-riddles. Tam devoured them all as if they'd fill the hole in her heart.

"Holmberg's Paradox states that all illusions require a tether of reality, typically channeled through the physical body of the caster."

The Theorist nods. "And?"

"The new Multiverse's instability is innately connected to your body."

"And?"

It's innately connected to me, too, since you made me, Tam thinks.

"Correct, but I am the primary caster. The scope of the Multiverse was too great. Between my condition following my death and the inability to contain the entirety of the Multiverse's map, the tether was strained."

Tam winces. She knows that tether means his body.

"It was difficult to maintain the spell. I had to excise my aberrations to focus. Stability has been reestablished, and soon the spell can continue." He sighs.

"Is it better without the … aberrations?"

The Theorist pauses, then smiles to himself. "Yes. Now that I am wholly one thing, I know exactly who I am."

Tam watches his concentration drift for a moment before snapping back to attention.

"What else?" he prompts.

Tam's eyes are drawn to the orrery above, the model of the Echoverse that hangs over their heads. It's an illusion, marking in real time the stability and structure. It seems strangely thin, like a layer of film over a wire frame. Or dough stretched wide as a windowpane.

"This Multiverse needs a structure to support it. It needs to be laid over the top of the original."

"Correct. We need to overwrite the existing Multiverse to make this one stable." His eyes do not alight with magic but something more fiery. "No one has ever attempted this before."

Tam completely understands the reasoning but doesn't understand the leap. "What happens when the other is overwritten?"

The Theorist's grin starts to spread. "I think I know, but I'm not sure. Isn't that exciting?"

She feels uncertain suddenly. "What about your body? How do we get the original Multiverse to come over to this one?"

"Easy. Use my body as a tether between the two. That's what the oracle is for."

"What will you do with her, Teacher?"

With overly paternal practicality he nods. "She will provide the information I need to complete the overlay. Merge two Multiverses, eliminate suffering once and for all."

The Theorist points to a chalkboard on the far side. Tam slips off the table and goes to read the equations and the copied quote at their center. Her brow furrows, then rises.

"Is this true?"

"Sissoko's Law."

"'Telepathic communication follows consciousness.' But the oracles of Arcavios are unique. As we are bound to our illusions, so are they to their plane." Tam pieces it together, thrilled with the joy of feeling herself get the reasoning right.

"Specifically, to the origin of their home plane. The soul is projected to the source, through any planar and temporal barrier, where they become archaics."

Tam swallows. The praestigial theory is bold, but the method turns her stomach. "Does this mean that when an oracle dies, their consciousness returns to the beginning of time?"

"It's going to be a wild ride." The Theorist grins. "But I can't finish my task if I can't see how it was done."

"What?"

"The origin of a Multiverse. The fusion of two different planes into a single new one. That's how we make ours real."

Perfected Theory | Art by: Marta Nael
0034_MTGFRA_MainUP: Perfected Theory

Tam feels a tightness in her chest. Jadzi has to die so the Theorist can follow her consciousness back to the start. "Is it pertinent to the experiment for the oracle to be terminated?"

"Oh, yes. It's the only way for the phenomenon to be observed. I'll need you near to record results."

The morning sun is hot at her back. "Today?" Tam says tightly.

But the Theorist doesn't immediately reply. Instead, after a beat, he says, "No. But soon."

The Theorist rises and walks to the smeared chalkboards, uses one of the nearby cloths to clean it.

"On my own time."

She can't see his face, but something in his stance betrays what looks like discomfort. Anxiety tightens the Theorist's shoulders. He pauses. His head turns.

"Tell me about your visions."

Tam looks down, embarrassed. She leans back on a table, crosses her arms tight while the Theorist erases the board. "I saw two of my friends from Strixhaven. First when I was feeling something I didn't understand, then when I was feeling inadequate."

As she looks up, she realizes the Theorist has turned entirely and now faces her with an expression she can't read. The moment feels weighted with a meaning she can't decipher.

"What do you want from those who love you?" asks the Theorist.

"I want to know them, and be known in turn," says Tam. She watches him listen, sees recognition in his face.

The Theorist shifts his weight, visibly reaching some decision. "Come here," he says.

Tam does. She stands before him. He places his hands on either side of her face. "Close your eyes."

And she does. There's a powerful, cool sensation, like dipping her hands in an alpine lake. It feels familiar. It feels like her.

"You are more than adequate. You are incredible, Tamira."

She doesn't feel any different. Part of her wonders what he read in her mind just now.

"Nothing," he answers. "I was just checking something. Attend to your tasks. Your reading for the day is on the desk behind me."

Tam nods. She walks back toward the door and picks up a book off the desk.

Grant's Telepathic Methods of Warfare. A Vrynian textbook. Tam opens the stained front cover. JACE BELEREN is scrawled in a child's hand in the upper-left corner.

She leaves the sanctum and descends the stairs. Gravity shifts, and she follows the stairs onto the wall as the axis tilts underfoot. Tam frowns. The conversation unnerved her. She seals it within the bunker of her mind, far away from prying eyes. She feels uncertain. Frightened. What happens to a Multiverse when it is covered with the thin film of another?

"It's smothered," Tam whispers to herself.

The solution echoes through the stone hallway. Magelights cast a cold glow on her face, and no one is here to hear the truth she speaks. Not even the statues. Not even the birds. Tam shivers.

She needs to see the oracle she captured. Maybe that will quell the horrible feeling in her chest.

Tam descends and descends, walks fast, her breath counting her steps. Finally, at the base of the tower, at the end of the hall, she investigates the farthest cell, peers through the barred window.

Jadzi is slouched in the corner, head down, a blanket tight around her.

Tam starts to whisper an apology but stops when she hears Jadzi tease, "You'll get what you're looking for."

"I'm sorry," Tam says to the oracle who is here by her hand, who was brought here to die. "I'm sorry, Jadzi."

"It all comes back as a loop, doesn't it, sweetheart? A victim is hurt and becomes a perpetrator who hurts. You just can't escape your mentors."

Tam only half-understands what she's saying. "I'm sorry, Jadzi. I can't let you out. The experiment would fail. We need you in order to solidify the Multiverse. We have a path to end all suffering."

"A fool's errand, kid."

"You don't know that," Tam says, growing annoyed.

"I'm an oracle. What don't I know?"

"How to pick a lock," Tam counters, dry and barbed. "Goodbye, Jadzi."

Tam turns and walks away from the door. She hears Jadzi holler after her, "Come back! I'll tell you how to find it! The part you're looking for!"

But Tam doesn't turn. She keeps walking down the hallway, to the second prisoner.

Professor Vess is anything but slouched. She sits as tall as a queen in the solitary chair in the center of her cell, her violet dress spilling onto the platform around her. The magelight above carves her face into angles, her hair a long curtain framing it.

Her cell is far larger than Jadzi's, to accommodate the Konstrari construction at its center, a vast wood and stone sphere containing the chair and its platform. The floor around it is a crisscross of hexes Tam herself laid, alongside magic from the Theorist and Professor Opal. To one side stands an oversize stone bust of a man who looks vaguely familiar, though Tam can't remember ever seeing him.

She approaches the bars at the edge of the room, at the edge of the hexes. Even at this distance, her skin tingles, sensing unfamiliar magic dancing across it. Vess makes a curious noise. She knew the professor was a necromancer, but she never dreamed she'd feel her magic personally.

"You weren't born," the prisoner muses, like a chef identifying a meal's ingredients. "You were made. Your neurons are too new. Interesting. Do you come once a day to make sure the other me tortured me to your standards?"

"Professor Opal is doing her job."

"Well, your professor is going to kick you into a six-foot hole, then stand you back up and kick you in all over again."

Professor Vess is much ruder. Prettier, but ruder.

Tam jiggles the lock on the bars.

"You had friends, didn't you?" asks Professor Vess. "Those friendships were real. Everything that happened at Strixhaven was."

Tam pauses, peeks back in. Her old professor is leaning forward as if she has a secret. "You doubt it, don't you?"

Tam doesn't say anything.

Vess laughs, and it curls Tam's toes. "It's like looking through a window in time. Amazing." She stares at Tam as if she's assessing a sculpture. "Do you feel bad?"

Tam glances down, ashamed.

"Oh! You can feel bad." Vess leans forward in her chair. Tam finds herself leaning closer to the bars in response. "You should feel worse." She smiles. "I know how you feel, betraying your friends. I know you feel like dirt."

Tam backs away from the lock and flicks a small additional hex onto it, containing it in a geometric net of symmetric threads. Vess cries out in off-kilter joy.

"I know you, Beleren! I know where you put your shame!"

Tam bolts.

She runs down the dark stone hallway, her shoulders and hips brushing the wet stone of the wall as she runs.

Past the portal for the first aberration.

And the second.

And the third.

And the fourth.

And the fifth.

She runs and runs, and the heavy, sickly feeling in her heart follows as a shadow.

Tam doesn't feel like eating, or reading, or doing anything that makes it seem like she's passing as a person. She feels empty and confused.

As she returns home, she watches other cadets dueling in the courtyard outside. Unlike Strixhaven's academic-minded focus, Hexhaven's is martial, regimented, a school for battlemages in the mold of its maker. Tam wonders what the Theorist would have been like had he started at Strixhaven, as she had. She doesn't have much taste for battle magic, but she begrudgingly admits she has a talent for it.

The sun sets, but Tam has skipped the rest of her duties. They don't matter. They aren't real. She retreats to her dormitory and shuts the door. Even here, the Echoverse was careful to replicate everything. Her Quandrix banner hangs above her bed while her Theorix banner gathers dust bunnies in her trunk. Her desk is buried under layers of praestigial texts. Her necklaces sit ready by her favorite jewelry tray. She made her room comfortable, and this Multiverse followed suit.

Tam flops onto the pillows at the bay window and looks out over the campus. Night falls. No stars emerge.

Jadzi must die for the experiment to continue, for this Multiverse to become real. And this Multiverse must overwrite the other for that process to complete. This wasn't part of the original plan.

She remembers what the Theorist was like six aberrations ago.

She remembers finding him in his tower shortly after she was made. It was nighttime then, too, and he was on the floor surrounded by mage-rings, eyes alight, lost in vision or memory or telepathy or who knows what. Tam grazed his mind, saw flashes of blue and a wide plain of shrub-steppe, the grasslands filled with dozens of seizing bodies, a gloved hand reaching outward, an army of warriors using every weapon at hand to kill one another at Jace's command. She knows without doubt that this was Vryn under Phyrexian attack, though she does not know how.

She dove to the ground and embraced her teacher's shoulders. "It's evening of the new moon. Your body is yours. You're in Hexhaven, in the Multiverse you created. You're in your sanctum, and I'm here with you." But her grounding was left unheeded, as the man who was then Jace carved the first aberration out of his mind (he hunched over, fingers clawing at his chest, magic spilling from him as a river, until a second man lay on the floor). Tam took notes (mirageal manifestation, category four) as she watched her maker excise the part of himself that dared counter the plan.

It was only when the other man (a blue cloak, a face years younger) looked back at him that her maker froze in worry. Sweat shone on his forehead; the brown hood of his cloak jostled. He clutched at his heart.

"We were going to save existence without killing anyone," said the aberration, rage deeply carved into the lines of his younger face.

Her maker responded with unquestioning conviction. "Anything we could accomplish without sacrifice is a stopgap. Existence must be rewritten to be saved from suffering, and this is the only way."

Tam stood, worried for the young man on the floor, but her shouts were drowned out as the aberration answered his double in a full-throated yell—"Then death is all we're good at!"—before Tam's maker suddenly ripped open a portal and kicked him through with full force.

Tam shivers.

She hates that memory.

Now he's just the Theorist. He's easier for Tam to understand.

The dormitory is quiet. Only one set of footsteps treads outside, the other cadets asleep long ago.

The footsteps stop, and a knock at the door interrupts Tam's memory.

"Lights out!" comes a voice from the other side of the door.

"Thank you, Professor Zarek!" Tam calls, and with a snap of her fingers, the lamps in her dormitory vanish.

From here, on these pillows, she looks out the window and up the tower—a long-toothed star arch pierced by the height of it—and decides to practice. She sends a telepathic signal, the ring of a bell, for the Theorist to hear.

Yes?

Good night, Tam says.

She feels a sensation on the thread that connects them, a bloom of amusement. How are you doing that from a distance?

Yurchenko Principle, she cites, and the feeling along the thread is warm with pride.

Good job, says the Theorist. There's something else you want to say, he adds without question.

I feel like you used me to bring Jadzi to her death, she says, unafraid. You're my mentor. Why would you ask that of me?

The mind at the other end of the line is quiet. Tam watches a bat fly past her window. She sighs, and the window fogs.

The part of me that can be hurt by that accusation is gone, says the Theorist. Tam feels annoyed. You were given an assignment, and you completed it. I will never force you to stay here, Tamira.

Tam grimaces. I want to help. I know we're acting in service of the Multiverse. Our experiment will change existence.

It will. But it will not be easy. I need to know that you still understand the stakes.

He sends a wash of images—calculations and theorems and the flash of billions upon billions of lives and worlds, peoples and creatures, matter and time. Tam's breath shudders with the immensity of the projection.

I know, she says. The math is sound. The potential outweighs the present. She shifts in her seat. But I don't understand why you made me. What part am I meant to play in this? I'm incomplete, and I know it. Beyond your tutelage, what am I for?

The night is cool and quiet. She admires the star arch and the world beyond. Everything outside Tam's window is false, from the ivy on the tower, to the tiles, to the soil below. Her maker responds at last, and his answer plunges her into doubt.

I'm not sure. I carved the one that knew away.

There is nothing more to say. Good night, Jace.

Good night, Tamira.

She closes the connection and slams her defenses up as thick as a barricade. She crawls into bed and tucks herself in. Her gorgon eyes can see just fine in the dark, and she stares with wide awareness at her empty room. It has everything she needs, all the little bits that help her live her life. Look at her desk. Her banner. Her mirror and jewelry tray. There's nothing more she could want … and yet. Her real bed is back at Strixhaven. Her real jewelry sits on a real tray next to her real hair ties. Why are these potential things worth more than her real ones?

Why is she worth more than her real friends?

No. No. She can't be.

Maybe the part that is missing is the part that makes her matter. Tam scrunches her legs close and thinks as hard as she can. She feels wrong about what she did to her friends, about what she did to Jadzi—what she will watch happen to Jadzi.

The fake girl turns over in her fake bed in a fake world and fails to fall asleep. She turns and tangles her blanket before giving up.

Who cares if Professor Zarek spots her? She can't stay in this dormitory a second longer.

She sits upright and throws on a robe. Her feet pad on the cobblestone, down the hall, up the stairs, up more stairs, then up a ladder, and finally when she reaches the cold chill of a transverse roof does Tam feel a bit more like herself.

Tam's tendrilled braids twitch in the moonlight, responding to her thoughts, and she sighs. Her skin shivers in the cold. Her pupils widen in the dark. The world is a thin film in want of a mold to lay atop, but she is flesh, a body made of magic and maker and created before the Echoverse existed.

She checks her mental barricades and looks at the moon. It is a crescent, gleaming and waxing. Tam sits and watches.

She ponders the idea of a missing part and wonders what it is she's supposed to have but does not. It's not a heart. It's not really a soul. But she feels for half of herself, and her fingers grasp at air. Jadzi. The original Multiverse. Her friends. Her duty to a future without suffering demanded betrayal. So why does she still feel empty?

Tam hugs her knees and looks to the starless sky. I'm in progress, she reminds herself.

I'm in progress.