Unhappy, rattled, the feel of stringy black hair still on her fingers, Tam takes the spiral stairs two at a time, step after desperate step. The tower leading to the Theorist's sanctum is high enough that it'll leave her panting and exhausted by the end of her climb, but she needs answers more than she needs rest.

A glimpse out the window gives a peek at the Eradia far below. The ground at the base of the tower is a thicket of movement, a wide, expansive ants' nest of activity. Mage hunters prowl, eager to hunt down any magic user that dares tread there. It reminds her of the threat of this place, and she wonders which part of Jace's self-hatred chose to manifest in such a way.

She thinks of Vraska's guidance. Reassess what power you have. And if you have someone worth saving. Something about this resonates with Tam.

I have power, too.

I can do this.

I can face him.

She wonders how true this is, given the beatdown she knows just took place.

When she enters, she sees the Theorist cracking his neck, then pausing in surprise.

"It's you," he says. "How was Innistrad?"

Tam puts the journal of notes and dimensions on his workbench. "Unnerving."

"I told you it wasn't worth saving."

Tam scowls. He isn't remotely curious. She reminds herself where all his curiosity has gone.

She waits for him to say something next. He looks small in the cavernous sanctum, paces like a lecturer, orbiting the dead center of the room. The hum of the rings on all sides is particularly annoying today. He speaks as if she didn't start the conversation. "It's strange, Tamira. For years I wondered what it would be like to give myself permission to fight without holding myself back. It was … easy. I had hoped by the second or third time they fled the room they'd figure out a way to come back in without making it so simple for me to stop them. But they couldn't."

She knows how he fought his friends while she was gone. The teacher in front of her is divulging more than he should. Tam's resolve crystallizes.

"I want the versions of my friends in this Multiverse," she says, her assurance growing. "Where are they?"

Blinking, then sighing as if taxed from exertion, the Theorist answers, "They're not here. The process of creation is autonomous. Some things are likely to be skipped. Or removed. It's bound to happen."

"Some things," says Tam.

"Some things," affirms a fraction of a human being.

"So, what happens to them when the Multiverses combine?"

"Why are you asking this?" A flash of blue in his eyes.

Tam, unthinking, bats his intrusion away with a psychic swipe.

The Theorist retreats, surprised.

"Do not enter where you are not invited," Tam snaps. The Theorist only stares at her, rolling his shoulders back with cold acknowledgment. She's uncomfortable with him reading her mind, ignoring her worries about her friends. But uncomfortable isn't a big enough word. She knows the concept of furious and wonders if she has enough person in her to stoke such fire. She digs for the feeling, for that brilliant diamond certainty that it is righteous to care about those who might die.

But he saw enough. "You spoke to Emrakul."

"You aren't going to apologize for invading my mind?"

The Theorist ignores her. "How did you do it?"

How do you think? Tam projects.

"Did she recognize you?"

"No, she—Emrakul—asked me to show her I was a friend."

The Theorist smiles. "She remembered when we played chess at our first meeting."

The cold stone in Tam's chest can be ignored no longer. "So Emrakul will be overwritten, too?"

"The Eldrazi don't exist in this Multiverse. Nor does Bolas, the Phyrexians. She'll be eliminated, like all planar threats. Why are you worried about the life of a world-ender?"

"I'm worried about my friends!" Tam's words cascade like a landslide. She watches the Theorist flinch in response, realizing she pushed without intending to. She doesn't care. Let her truth rattle his bones and shape his mind for a change. "Why do they have to be overwritten? What about your friends? What about Loot? What about Vraska?"

Tam hits the ground, her vision turned black, the space between her ears on fire with a headache. Her head rings with psychic command.

"That's enough."

"No!" she shoves back, countering his command. Internally, she tries to repair her eyesight, soothe her splitting migraine. She pushes herself to her elbows and spits, "You fought your friends repeatedly for what? What are you trying to prove?"

He says nothing, so she screws her eyes shut and smothers the headache. Her vision heals, her mind quiets, but her rage persists. Tam stands and pulls a barrier around her mind.

"How many times have you fought me and made me forget?" she demands, and with that she includes the image of a memory shared with her—Jace, young and soaked with rain, staring down his mentor on a roof and asking the sphinx the very same question.

The Theorist stills. She sees his lips part, his hands shake. Around the clear-water blue of his eyes is a ring of startled white. He doesn't move an inch, stays rooted to the spot. For a moment, Tam is certain he didn't hear her, then she realizes he heard her all too well.

"This experiment has gone too far," she announces. "I won't help you anymore!"

The Theorist's nose begins to bleed. Tam knows what this means. He doubles over.

"Another aberration," Tam marks. She's frustrated. She wants to keep telling him her mind—

A pulse hits the mental shield she left up. She screws her eyes shut as a blinding sapphire light knocks her back an inch.

A vision: cold and inelegant logic that confuses hopelessness for martyrdom, the writhing cables of a transformed and dying man, hands clutching the sylex, an attempt to talk his friends into a swan dive through the apocalypse. The Jace that doesn't care if he's despised.

The Nihilist.

A thud. Lungs drawing air. A second man lies on the floor.

Tam moves her hands from her eyes and gasps.

This aberration (she questions the word now; isn't she technically one, too?) is all sunken cheeks and grotesque limbs. Cables snake from under his cloak. One stares directly at her; others act as additional limbs, and they support the Nihilist as he rises. Tam always has the sense of being observed around the Theorist, but around this one she doesn't have to wonder if he's peering into her mind.

The Nihilist looks to Tam, then nods to the Theorist, his cables clearly tuning in to whatever the Theorist's original body is observing.

"You should watch, too," he says to her, and his voice scrapes like a fork on cast iron.

It takes Tam a moment to parse his suggestion, but when she sees the Theorist on the table, lost in a vision, she understands. Tentatively, she reaches out to the Theorist's mind, and worryingly, instinctively, she plunges in.

Tam sees the Echoverse and feels the vision from his perspective.

It is crumbling, fraying, full and empty at once. He tries to hold the fraying edges together, calculates the theorems necessary to bind idea to matter, but it all continues to float away. Worse, he feels himself continuing to fall apart, piecing out new aberrations from himself like seeds caught in wool. It feels like molting. It feels like shrinking, like an amputation. It feels like forgetting.

He tries holding it all together, but it spills through his fingers, pieces of him washing downstream like ice floes in a spring thaw, as if the more effort he puts in, the more breaks away. But he cannot stop its current. He must not stop here, not when his commitment is nearly complete, not when his goal is in sight.

The half-compleated Jace speaks aloud: "We were wrong to believe as the Theorist does, and we have doomed existence because of it."

Tam retreats to her own body, blinks back to her own consciousness. The Theorist is doubled over the table, a smear of blood on his upper lip, still lost to the world.

"His experiment is already tearing at the seams of the original Multiverse's reality," the Nihilist explains. "He thinks it will be painless, but that's not what the math says, and he knows it. It's hopeless." The nearly Phyrexian man looks down at the Theorist, half-conscious and slouched over the table. The Nihilist turns all his blue-eyed cables toward Tam. "There is no future when a rudder thinks he's the whole boat. Our death will mean nothing, just as our life meant nothing."

Tam nearly defends the rest of her teacher's selves but holds her tongue—probably not much she can say to cheer up the Nihilist. He reaches out with a gloved hand and rests it on Tam's shoulder. A small cable snakes up close. She feels oddly comforted by the contact.

"You can't win, kid," the Nihilist says.

"I can find a way," she hisses.

The Nihilist exhales quickly, and a cable twitches; it's as close to a laugh as he can get. "You know, there's one lesson we never learned," he adds. "Might solve this. Probably won't." The Nihilist sighs, his metal and cables sighing with him. "How to ask for help."

"Aberration!" snarls the Theorist, and a half-second later he flashes a portal into existence and kicks the Nihilist through it. The portal closes and vanishes.

Tam catches her breath.

The Theorist stands to full height, shaking his head clear like there's a bee buzzing past his ear.

Tam turns her back on the sanctum, ignores the yells of the heartless man who made her, and makes for the door. If he calls out her name, she doesn't care, and the wall around her mind is strong enough that he can't force her to turn if he tries.

He's beyond reason.

Tam runs. Her objective is clear.

Her mentor must be stopped, and she must aid in his downfall.

Chandra listens to Vraska's news while grinding her teeth. They're packing up, preparing to leave Professor Opal's office to find Jadzi. The false Liliana has already left after tending to their wounds, mentioning something about "other errands"—she didn't seem to regard them as a threat any longer—and they were too tired to continue trying to kill her.

She lets out a long and frustrated breath. "So we figure out where Jadzi is, then go back for round four? We fight him until he gets bored and kills us? Then the world ends?" She joins Vraska by the window. There's nothing outside but dead leaves and copied cobblestones. "We have to fight him some other way."

All Vraska can do is shake her head. Chandra gets close.

"You know how I knew him? I knew him as a half-ass."

Vraska scoffs at the insult.

"I'm not done!" Chandra barks. "He was a half-ass because he was too scared to look himself in the mirror and own up to who looked back! He half-assed his way through Innistrad, half-assed his way through the Gatewatch, half-assed his way as the Guildpact." A strange emotion flares toward her throat. It catches in her chest, and she stifles a sob. "He beat us three times. Us! And he did it from across the room! He didn't even try! He was a coward and a snob, and I hate his guts, and he's my friend. He's a hundred times smarter than any of us, and he hates that he knows it, and I respect the hell out of him for that! That's the only kind of genius I want to be friends with, and I had him. That Jace is in here, somewhere. We can't fight the bastard upstairs without him. I want my friend back so I can kick his ass!"

Chandra can't help it anymore; she bursts into furious tears. She heaves frustrated sobs, feels Vraska's hand rest between her shoulder blades. It only makes her angry-cry harder.

"You're right. You can't defeat him," her own voice says from behind her. "I think you should go where all the other pieces go."

Strange … It sounds like Chandra. She notices a change in the windowpane; lattices of ice creep up the glass, unfurling like ferns. The skin on the back of her neck shivers—partly from cold, mostly from fear—and when she turns around, she sees her double.

Chandra, with a blue streak of hair, stares back.

The doppelgänger looks her over, studying her with a discerning eye. Unsatisfied with what she sees, the woman stands tall and holds her palm out in a distinctive gesture of attack.

"Dad says hi," says her double, and the air drops to a sudden chill as great jagged icicles suddenly appear all around them.

Icy Reception | Art by: Borja Pindado
0030_MTGFRA_MainUP: Icy Reception

Chandra leaps out the window, the only place not suddenly full of stabbing shards of ice, and falls. She lands in a courtyard, legs splayed, but with adrenaline and practice she swoops her feet beneath her and rises to a fighting stance. Her clothes are stiff with frost, and when she tries to step forward, she sees that her feet have frozen in place. The other Chandra hops down gracefully.

Chandra sees a device on the other Chandra's arm, familiar Avishkari filigree, sees the Consulate's symbol on its side. This version of her … Why is she different in the way she is?

The others are with her, sprawled in the snow and ice, looking up at the window they crashed out of. She shivers and groans, her leg frozen at an odd angle, stiff as if a child had contorted a doll into an unnatural pose. Everything she has learned about this stupid place surfaces at once. This Multiverse eliminates suffering. It builds on its own. The other Chandra is the result of a wrong righted. Where in her personal history did the split occur? Where else. Chandra is sputtering, confused, but with horrified clarity, she deduces Chandra the cryomancer's truth.

"It's me if Dad didn't die," she groans. "That's what this Multiverse decided was best for me. These losers don't seem full of peace and bliss and nonsuffering, Jace!" Chandra yells over the jet from her fingers as she tries to melt her foot free. "Ice-me is still pissed."

Tired, broken, frozen to the ground, Chandra watches helplessly as doubles of the rest of them approach from the main steps. They cross, and in the moonlight, she can see each of them as familiar and frightening as ghosts. They're framed on either side by immense stone statues, their gestures exaggerated, frozen in moonlight.

"You, without mercy," Chandra says to Ajani, motioning toward a hulking leonin wielding two axe heads on a chain to the far right of the group. One axe scrapes the side of a statue, its edge sharp enough to cleave off a stone finger without effort.

"Mine embraced the Chain Veil," Garruk growls, easing his weary, twitching muscles to grasp his axe as best he can. In the distance, his double emerges, an ogre's skull on his right pauldron and the violet glow of the Chain Veil across his features. He walks tall and confident, shadows of beasts curling at his feet.

One more rounds the corner, her hand rasping across the extended leg of a statue twisted in agony.

"Vraska," Chandra groans, "where is—"

A moment later, Vraska gasps. "Close your eyes!" she yells, and Chandra follows her command.

Chandra ignites her hands. "What do I do now?" she yells. She feels her way toward the gorgon, glancing down at her shoes before someone grasps her by the shoulders. Chandra can tell Vraska is listening for something she can't hear, sensing someone far away in the dark.

"It's my double! It takes a few seconds for petrification to charge. She'll be weak to your flames, but she's looking straight at you. She can hit from a distance!"

Chandra tries to stammer a question.

"Straight ahead!" Vraska yells, and Chandra unleashes a blast of flame.

Footsteps to her right. "Three o'clock!"

Searing heat, fire burning orange and white through her eyelids. Chandra grits her teeth and hears Garruk scuffling, grunting, the sound of metal on metal as two axes meet.

Smaller footsteps. "Ten o'clock!"

Chandra isn't certain she's hitting anything, but Vraska tightens her grip. "One more—wait. She's not petrifying."

Vraska's fingers are tense on Chandra's shoulders. She releases them and watches.

Her double is close enough now she can see her eyes … open, golden, and pleased as punch. The woman's hand comes to rest at a statue nearby, and she emerges into the moonlight.

Vraska's lip curls with rage. Her double is taller than her by an inch, her long white cloak elegant and begging for sunshine, crow's feet smoothed and neck long and inviting. She's a vision, resplendent without effort, no captain, but worse. As the other Vraska approaches without danger glowing in her eyes, Vraska realizes the most repugnant fact of all: This is a gorgon who cannot petrify.

She wants nothing more than to claw her apart.

Vraska charges her gaze and runs straight at her double. Absorbed with murderous focus, she doesn't hear Chandra cry behind her, "Can I open my eyes?"

Her double yells, a diadem catching the light from under her hood, "Don't worry, Captain! Your love remains all yours. I'm not his lover, I'm his architect."

All Vraska sees is fury. Her double smiles, and with a graze of one perfectly manicured nail, the statue at her side rises, and she along with it. It is Jace as the Theorist, twice as tall as the real one, charging toward Vraska and shaking the ground with each step. The other Vraska holds on to the side of his cloak with a careful grip, calling out, "How do you want them, sir?"

Subdued, says a voice that echoes through Vraska's mind. She snarls and lets her gaze carry as she runs, trying to catch the eyes of her double. The gap closes, and Vraska pulls out her knives, but the statue is too large, too fast. It grabs her around the middle and slams her to the ground. All the air whooshes from Vraska's lungs, and she's picked up again by the statue's unmoving grip.

"Care to know how I am an improvement? Unlike you, I never knew a cage," the other Vraska says, though her eyes remain carefully hidden by the statue's head.

Vraska thrashes, trying to escape the grip of the statue. "You're an impotent gorgon! Filthy turncoat," she groans, then grunts as the statue grabs hold of Chandra as well. Vraska watches as the stone hand holding the pyromancer turns orange with concentrated heat.

"Fight us fairly, Jace!" Chandra yells from under the searing-hot rock.

"Would you like me to crush that one?" says the Vraska-who-is-not-Vraska. She is referring to Chandra.

No, says Jace in all of their minds after a languid beat. She's a friend.

Chandra balks. "Am I?" There's hurt in her voice.

A noise, a figure approaching from behind the statue. Jace's voice whispers, Were you to me?

Chandra falls quiet, the orange hand gripping her goes cold, and Vraska grows angry once more.

"Theorist," she says, calling this sliver of her partner by his chosen title.

The Theorist emerges, his face clearly pleased to be summoned appropriately.

Vraska whispers, the statue's grip still tight, "Did you choose this insult deliberately? Did you really wish I was harmless?"

The Theorist narrows his eyes. "I did not make them. This Multiverse creates on its own."

"And I am not harmless," her double says from atop the statue.

Vraska groans as its grip tightens further.

The Theorist kneels, leans close. "Give up, Vraska. Please. You are my dearest. No alternate, no matter the Multiverse, could replace you."

She spits in his face. "Give me back Beleren."

He opens his mouth to speak, visibly uncertain, but the other Vraska only laughs.

"You got shut in too many cages, girl," she sneers. "Too many closed windows and too many kicks in the side. You're a battered cat."

The statue pushes Vraska farther into the ground. She is squeezed, confined, enclosed in too tight a space, too dark a void, and her heart pounds in panic.

Vraska feels the cold-water clarity of Jace's magic and senses something being pulled into existence. A portal? And before she can open her eyes, Vraska feels herself being hoisted up then thrown through the portal into a vast and empty space.

Tam bolts down the stairs to her dormitory.

She passes by cadets as she runs, and through her fear and fury, she can see only blank faces, vacant eyes, programmed movements through the hallway. They're so obvious now, their emptiness as plain as hers.

But profound satisfaction buoys her spirits; she was able to counter the Theorist. She has power.

Her feet slide on stone, and she picks up the pace to her dormitory. From the corner of her eye, she sees young men in red, their faces featureless, and recognizes them as the henchmen repurposed from the Theorist's childhood tormentors. Tam hides her braids, runs faster.

After winding past a group of owlin cadets and dodging the silver-streaked professor ("Whoa, there, speed demon!" he laughs as she runs past in obvious distress), she finally barges into her room and slams the door behind her.

As she catches her breath, three thoughts crowd her mind.

First, the Theorist has tampered with her memory.

Second, he is beyond reason, his plan certain to doom existence.

Third, she can counter him.

The last thought shimmers in her memory. She countered him. Tam cradles the feeling, that notion of power all her own, and stows it safe within the lockbox of her mind.

She rises and walks to the window. His plan and all its red flags seem so obvious now. But what does it mean to take up arms against her maker? Against part of herself? She has felt his warmth and care. He is capable of empathy!

Tam sits on the edge of her bed and closes her eyes. She imagines herself somewhere quiet, somewhere she can think.

Tam imagines an alpine lake in front of her, the edges frayed with tufts of long grass, its water turquoise and tranquil. Moss clings to a half-sunken log, and a cirque of protective granite peaks embraces the water at its center. She imagines herself here, of here, warm in the high mountain sun, and asks a dangerous question.

What do I want?

The water answers. I want to resolve his logic, fix his proof. The embrace of the landscape answers. I want to protect my friends with my love, even if they hate me. The high, thin sky answers. I want to be filled, to know of the rest of myself.

Tam is frightened, and aware of her incompleteness, but her mind becomes clear.

I have to betray him, she thinks, and corrects the thought with haste. I have to betray the worst part of him in honor of the best parts.

Can she do that? The place in her mind answers easily. You are no stranger to betrayal.

True. She is not.

Tam opens her eyes and rises. She bears the blessing of creativity, lucky for her, and in an instant, she knows exactly what she needs.

She needs to visit the kitchen's icebox.

They fall—all of them, the others hurled through the portal as well—and Vraska doesn't scream. There's space now. Her heart calms. At least she isn't confined anymore.

It's clear they're somewhere in the tower, tumbling down and sideways, drawn by the strange gravity that runs as veins through the structure.

When they land, it's gentle, as if the building doesn't want them smeared on the stone. They're cushioned down slowly, all of them managing to get their feet under them just in time. And when they get their bearings, it's with ringing ears, for the room is silent as a mausoleum.

It's an infinite plane of marble, endless and bare, with what looks like a well at the center of it.

Tam's warning rings through Vraska's mind.

"I don't think this is real," says Vraska. "This is … some part of Jace's memories. Our doubles sent us into the tower's memory traps. Probably to keep us from reaching Jadzi."

Ajani approaches the well at the center. His tail flicks, and he lays a palm on the marble. "It's warm," he says. "Body temperature."

Vraska glances at Chandra, expecting a squirm or a snide comment, but the pyromancer only looks away.

"In," Garruk concludes for them all. He walks up to the eerie well, swings his legs over the side, and jumps down.

Ajani follows with a shrug.

"Chandra?" Vraska asks. The pyromancer has bags under her eyes, looks distant, sad.

"Would Jace have done all of this if I had been nicer to him?"

After a moment of thought, a beat of silence in the cavernous, uncanny space, Vraska answers. "You're not that special, Chandra." She's met with a mouth agape in offense, which she ignores. "We've got a friend to save. Get in the well."

She does, and Vraska climbs in after, expecting to fall down the shaft, but the well pops them out upright.

They arrive in a perfect reproduction of a Vrynian general's tent. The canvas smells as if it hasn't been aired, and all around them are family colors and propaganda papers. Spread out on the table is a map, markings, string, secrets.

They collect themselves and exit the tent into Jace's childhood bedroom. Vraska eyes the place where Pewter's horseshoe would have been and notes its place of prominence. She winces. The whole place feels a bit too personal.

"Where is the trap?" Ajani asks with a flick of his whiskers. He scents the air, on edge.

"Move," Garruk says, opening the bedroom door and exiting.

What they find on the other side is an immense lecture hall, wide skylights above, a podium surrounded by empty wooden seats with a single wheeled chalkboard at its side. The room is painted in long-weathered blues, motes of dust floating in the sun streaming through stained-glass windows. The room's design catches Vraska's memory. These are the same crystals and shapes she's heard Jace use to describe a mind. Their feet echo as they approach the front.

A number is written on the chalkboard: 9,724,815,509,002. A familiar voice scrapes through their minds like gravel. It is the number of people in the known Multiverse, the number he refuses to read.

All four of them brace for a fight: Ajani and Garruk flank Vraska on either side, Chandra falls to the back, all of them scanning the room for the Theorist's face.

Garruk inhales sharply. "Illusion!" he shouts, and as he does, the air next to the chalkboard ripples.

Jace steps through, but not the one from upstairs.

This one appears in a brown trench coat, his eyes haunted, a lantern in his hand. There's a shackle around his ankle, leading to the wall. He glances up from beneath his blue hood, eyes cold as a heavy autumn rain. Vraska runs forward but doesn't dare touch him. They regard each other.

"You're …"

"Me. Right before I met you."

"Jace?" Chandra says with a shaking breath. This is one she knew well.

Vraska feels dizzy. "The Theorist told me he split himself into parts. Which are you?"

The other Jace nods at his friend, clearly wanting to share the reveal. "Chandra, you tell her."

"He's the Detective. He solved the mystery of what was happening to Innistrad."

"I'm the one who sees how it all fits together," says the Detective. He gives Vraska a knowing look, and she catches his thread.

She approaches, uncertain. "Were you part of Jace's plan before he died?"

The Detective smiles. "Yes, and no. It's hard to piece apart a choice like that. Before anything else … I am sorry."

Vraska feels her stance grow tight, defensive.

"There is no forgiveness for what I set in motion when I was whole," he adds. "I was wrong. Most of me knew it. We tore ourselves apart to oppose it."

"How do we trust you?" Garruk growls.

"I don't deserve your trust," the Detective says. "I just want to prevent what I started."

He walks across the dais of the classroom, chain clinking behind him. This Jace speaks as a lecturer, as the intellectual who solves problems because of the humanity at his core. "I was split into parts when I died. We formed our new body when we were divided, so our connection is unstable. Thus, our Multiverse is unstable. The body is connected to the illusion. Holmberg's Paradox."

As if any of them are supposed to follow, Vraska thinks to herself.

The Detective continues, "The body is unsteady, but if I'm united, we can fight. Once the body is incapacitated, it should pause the overlay of worlds. I don't need a body to stop the Theorist from the inside."

Something about the way he says this feels like her heart falling off a cliff. The words tumble with each heartbeat. I don't need a body to stop the Theorist … Why would he frame it in such a way?

"Why is the other part of you putting a trillion people in danger?" Chandra seethes.

The Detective doesn't budge. "Because the part that cares about people isn't home anymore. Same as the part that knows how to stop himself. Each of us is a collection of experiences, selves. Each of you, and myself. When I died, I divided and could not properly unite. But while I remain incomplete, the Theorist won't stop, and our grand project will persist."

She can't keep up. This … part. He wants to stop the Theorist from the inside. She knows without question what he means by stop. Surely there's another path? The body is connected to the illusion. The original body? That body has to survive for his new Multiverse to survive?

"He locked the rest of us away. Bastard. He knows he's failing, but he's too focused to grasp that you all can team up with us. He's trying to kill the oracle to complete the job, but it won't work, not without the Soldier. We'll need to find him. Then we'll have a chance to finish the task and eliminate the body."

Vraska's lips are shaking. "I'm going to throw up."

The Detective glances at her, and she knows he doesn't need to read her mind to deduce what she just realized. He turns to the others. "May we have a moment?"

It's a strange thing to ask in an empty lecture hall, but the three Planeswalkers dutifully walk to the opposite side of the hall to reconvene. Vraska's eyes are drawn back to this slightly younger Jace—not much younger, but she notes the differences. The lack of stubble, the way his hair curtains his forehead underneath his hood. There's a certainty to this one, a confidence that the Theorist lacks.

He motions for her to take a seat. As she does, she realizes that this corner of the lecture hall looks more like the stonework of a castle. Strange humanoid statues emerge from its walls, their faces contorted in silent screams, but the Detective doesn't seem to mind. He takes a seat in a ripped-up armchair, the chalkboard visible on the other side of the segmented room. Vraska sits and looks at him. It's painful. Even as a fraction of the whole, he is hers.

"What you said about eliminating the body—"

"We'll get there. I need to say something to you." The Detective's voice is stern. "I'm sorry for not standing up to the part of me that cares more about the experiment than the subject."

Vraska realizes this part is speaking for the whole. She can't help but take his hands as she understands. "You're the part that cares about the truth."

The Detective smiles tightly. "Yes. And I didn't stop myself sooner. You don't need to forgive me, just … know that I know this now."

"Is that the truth?"

"Part of it."

He leans forward ever so slightly, just a hair, but when he does, Vraska feels gravity pin her to the chair. "You thought I was a do-gooder, and you were wrong. I thought I was a monster, and I was right. You do not need to love me, but know that I loved all of you."

Vraska blinks, but he continues—hushed, quiet, not embarrassed, but aware.

He opens his mouth to speak, but she pulls him close for a tight and violent hug. He exhales with the impact, and she digs her nails into the oilcloth of his coat.

"You are no monster," she says with gritted teeth. "We are who we choose to be."

The echo of his own words leaves her lips as a hymn, a prayer, a veneration they both built their lives around. The part of Jace she trusts most, the part that leads as dowsing rods toward truth, grows still. At first, he does not move, does not flinch, then, moving at once, he pulls her tight toward him.

His shoulders tremble. She feels his lip quiver. This Jace sees with clear eyes and answers with unclouded objective. "I choose to be the man who kills his own ambition."

The wave of love and the wave of hurt collide inside Vraska's heart. "Then you are anything but monstrous, Jace."

Without hesitation, she leans forward and kisses him. It is deep, comforting. They both sink into it, and he whispers against her lips, "We'll need to put the rest of us inside your mind until you can bring us home. If we can get back to our body, we can stall the Theorist long enough."

"Long enough for what?"

His eyes are soft and stoic at once. "We can't stop the overlay, but the spell is held together by our body. If it's slowed, you may have time to find a solution."

"So in order for the spell to slow …"

He does not answer.

Vraska, lip trembling, finishes her conclusion. "You need to die."