33
Saturday Morning, January 29th, 2011
Brockton Bay
Hebert Residence
Alexandria turned her body and head far enough to see Contessa while keeping me and Dragon in her field of view.
"Contessa. What is it?" she asked quickly, her tone dropping some of the aggression it had a moment prior for surprise.
The world's most powerful thinker walked past Alexandria. "Just stop," she said, picking up Alexandria's tea cup and saucer before setting it down in front of the table's empty fourth chair and sitting.
The way she did it was mesmerizing. I had a martial artist's eye, and her every movement was like watching liquid grace. Flawlessly smooth, with perfect economy of motion.
It was all the more remarkable a display given the clear signs of physical exhaustion on her features. Her eyes were red and irritated, and below them was the classic periorbital hyperpigmentation of significant sleep deprivation. Her skin had a slightly grey, pallid cast, too. It was subtle, but I had the medical expertise to notice. Whatever path she was running had to be covering up the other physical signs of exhaustion that should have been present in her movement and expressions.
Alexandria's head followed her as she moved. "Where have you been?"
"Busy." Contessa smoothly downed the tea like a shot of liquor, set the cup down on the saucer without the slightest clink, and poured herself another.
"Busy," Alexandria echoed, voice flat. "What have you been pathing?"
Since it seemed like conflict was no longer imminent, I took my seat again. Dragon followed suit. I thought about speaking up, but it seemed like a golden opportunity to watch things play out.
"The answer to that is complicated," she said, setting the pot back down after she finished pouring.
"...Complicated how?" Alexandria asked.
Contessa paused to pick up her pilfered teacup and blew on it before turning to me.
She looked at me. Or through me. Her gaze shifted across my features, looking for something.
"Contessa, where have you been? What is going on?" Alexandria asked, a note of increasing concern in her voice.
"We need to cooperate with her," Contessa said, ignoring the questions.
"I am not going to let an untested girl give orders to us," Alexandria retorted.
Contessa's voice was level. "No. Not that far. What I am saying is that we must coordinate."
"Your long term paths aren't reliable, how do you know?" Alexandria asked.
"Reason. In addition to having unprecedented capabilities, she represents what might be an exploitable hole in the entity's ability to perceive and plan, just like she is for me."
Alexandria paused for a moment. "She's been interfering with you? Even so, there might be other ways," she said.
"Door to the bed of Dinah Alcott," Contessa replied.
A horizontal rectangle appeared in the air beside Contessa. She reached in and pulled, and a young girl in pajamas with dark brown hair tumbled out and onto the floor besides Contessa with a yelp as the portal closed.
It was so surprising I didn't know how to react.
"Chance the world survives the next twenty years if we don't cooperate with this girl," Contessa said, pointing at me.
"Less than zero point zero one percent," Dinah said, speaking automatically, and then she took in the room. "What-Alexandria?! What's going on?"
Then what she said seemed to dawn on her. "The world is going to end?!"
"Not if we have anything to say about it," Dragon said to Dinah, her voice soothing, before turning to Contessa and shifting her tone to anger. "Did you really just kidnap a child from her bed so you could use her power?"
"Chance the world survives if we cooperate with her?" Contessa asked, ignoring Dragon.
"I...higher? I can't see a number. Or there are two numbers? More than that. The numbers keep changing because there are different numbers in the future. Or numbers about the numbers in the future. I can't see them. It's all numbers about numbers about numbers." Her hands clutched her head and she closed her eyes. "My head, it hurts. That was...I think that was bad."
"Stop this," Dragon said to Contessa, standing once again, her voice firm.
"Door to Dinah Alcott's bedroom," Contessa said, and a vertical rectangle appeared.
Dinah opened her eyes, and looked between Contessa and the door.
"Go. No one will believe you," Contessa said.
Dinah paused only a second to look at me. "Thank you," she said, and bolted through the portal. It closed behind her.
"Who was that?" Alexandria asked.
"Dinah Alcott. It's early still, I wasn't sure if she'd triggered already," I said. "She recognized me. Maybe...she knows I took out Coil? He would have kidnapped her in April."
Alexandria turned her head towards me, her expression making it clear that I hadn't answered her question.
"She's the world's third most powerful precognitive, after Contessa and the Simurgh, although I'm not sure how those two rank relative to one another," I explained.
"Very fortunately for you, I can stop her as long as I'm awake," Contessa said.
My blood ran cold. "What do you mean by that?" I asked, tightly.
"You still haven't said where you've been. We haven't heard anything in weeks and Doormaker hasn't responded to requests for portals to you," Alexandria interjected.
"That would be because I ordered him not to. As I said, I was busy." She tossed back another cup of tea. "It started early in the month," she began.
Monday, January 3rd, 2011
Washington D.C.
Contessa paused on the marble stairway of a richly decorated and stately building, standing in a blind spot in the camera coverage without anyone else in the atrium for the moment. Precisely where her power directed.
Step 143. "Small door to Witchita, Kansas, Joel's Auto Shop, storage closet, third shelf from the bottom," she spoke. A window six inches square opened in the air to her right.
Step 144. She reached into the portal without looking, her power directing her movements, and withdrew a can of Greasy Joe's All-Purpose Spray Lubricant from a shelf. Just the right sweep of her arm with just the right amount of pressure put precisely the amount of lubricant needed in precisely the right place. Effortless, unfulfilling perfection, as always.
It didn't matter. Like every day, saving everyone everywhere was all that mattered. All that ever mattered. The path to save Humanity from Scion was just a means to that end.
Step 145. Her hand thrust the can back through the portal and set it down without her needing to look. When she was done she made a gesture with her offhand known to Doormaker and it closed.
Step 146, egress to the street and say 'Door to Glasgow, Scotland' in the third alley on the right.
Moving with her power, her feet took her down the steps towards the nearest exit to the building.
Five steps down, to her extreme surprise, her power cut out and she missed the next step.
She tumbled painfully down the remainder of the staircase, reflexively reaching for a path to stop without any result, a gut-wrenching feeling very much like the sudden shock of when her foot missed the next step and caught only air.
At the bottom she groaned before picking herself up. Nothing was broken, as far as she could tell. She was going to bruise, and it had been some time since she'd been physically injured. There were paths that called for minor injuries, on occasion, but for her feeling pain was a rare experience.
She tried her power again, this time asking her usual series of questions.
To her relief, it responded.
No power nullifiers present.
No masters present.
No strangers present.
No other parahumans present.
No tinkertech present.
No deception present.
No parahuman effects influencing her present.
No parahuman effects influencing an area present.
No near-term threats to her life or freedom to act.
No immediate threats, but also no explanation. What was going on?
It was a pathing delay due to a recalculation.
It wasn't uncommon for her power to need to recalculate paths when an action by one of her blind spots - Scion, Eidolon, or the Endbringers - diverged from the models she had built of their behavior. Endbringer fights in particular tended to involve considerable changes as a result of all the damage, parahuman deaths, and two of her blind spots coming into direct conflict with one another. It was one of the largest limitations she had on her ability to influence things over the long term; paths that went on too long inevitably ran afoul of a blind spot's unanticipated action and made bad predictions that needed correction.
In the long term, the shackles that the dead entity had put on Path to Victory meant she was working with some conglomeration of approximations, estimates, and guesses only, a fact she cursed regularly.
But the recalculations, even the most drastic, were always instantaneous. Her power had never cut out before.
Not ever.
Above her came the sounds of a group of suited men and women approaching the stairs, and she retained the presence of mind to begin walking towards the exit. She made it nearly out the door before an elderly man in the middle of the group stepped on the greased spot of stair. His leg went out from under him and he tumbled down the stairway, slumping bonelessly when he came to a rest at the bottom.
"SENATOR!" one of the man's aides called, and the group rushed to the bottom of the stairs.
"Someone call 911! I think his neck is broken!"
"Is he breathing?"
"I...I don't think so. Oh god. Oh god."
With the habituation of long, long practice, Contessa paid no attention to the drama, or the man she'd just murdered. By action or inaction she had the blood of many millions on her hands.
It was one of the prices she paid for the 2.7 billion lives she had saved as of the last time she'd asked her power for an estimate.
One quick death didn't register to her any more. She hadn't even bothered to ask her power why the man needed to die. It always had a good answer, and after a while it felt like there was little point in knowing.
Her steps took her out of the building, and she turned right. Without a path actively guiding her movements she walked with a slight limp from the pain of her fall.
Only one question mattered. Why had her power cut out?
She received no answer, just like when she asked for information about a blindspot.
Perhaps if she modeled her power instead of asking about it directly, like she modeled Eidolon and the others.
What could cause someone with a power like hers to suddenly have it cut out?
An encounter with an unknown source of predictive error.
...What the hell did that mean? What kind of unknown source?
Unknown.
In hindsight, she wasn't certain what else she'd been expecting. If the source was unknown, of course the power wouldn't have an answer as to what it was.
With an annoyed sigh she asked for her usual path to improving humanity's odds of survival against a being like Scion.
142,014 steps. Step 1, say 'Door to Miami, Florida' in the third alley on the right.
...That was a very long path. And the next step had shifted, so there had been a reconfiguration starting at the beginning.
When did it terminate?
27 years, 1 month, 7 days, 34 minutes, 27 seconds.
If she hadn't already been allowing the new path to guide her steps she would have stopped.
She had not had a path that long since December 13th, 1992. Behemoth's emergence.
Everything had accelerated since then.
She followed the new path with little attention, attempting to think of questions that could reveal the origin of the change without success.
Saturday Evening, January 8th, 2011
Cairo, Egypt
Basement
Contessa nearly missed the gas line with her hammer swing as the path vanished under a reconfiguration again, the step for severing the gas line suddenly missing. Her momentum took the fitting at a slightly different angle than the path had intended, causing it to clatter loudly as it struck the side of the water tank before falling to the floor, broken.
She heard muffled voices say something loudly upstairs in what was likely Arabic. Likely the bodyguards of the biotinker villain she was probably here to kill. Or had been. A gas main explosion and fire did seem like a good way of destroying the horrors the tinker was cooking up in the lab upstairs.
Her power activated.
Two steps. Step one, say 'door out of here'.
She hadn't asked for that path. That only happened when she wasn't running a path and her immediate survival was threatened. Ongoing paths simply took it into account, but her power seemed to always be running a process to keep her alive even if she hadn't asked it to do anything else.
She spoke the words and stepped through the door. It closed behind her as she heard feet pounding down the rickety basement stairs.
Her spartan bedroom in the Cauldron compound greeted her, but she wasn't interested in sleeping. She asked for her usual path once again.
2,221 steps. Step 1, say 'door to Oslo, Norway'.
Her heart nearly stopped. What the hell had happened?
Reconfiguration.
She sighed in frustration at the unhelpful response. How long was the current path?
117 days, 2 hours, 10 minutes, 1 second.
She'd just lost most of 27 years in time before the projected end of the world.
Path to staying calm.
One step. Step one, breathe.
The path guided her breaths in a steady cadence. It was reassuring; the regular breaths, in part, but also because she spent so much of her time on a path that not following one made her feel vulnerable. In danger, even. Like falling without a parachute.
Her mind worked through possible questions. What event did not go as expected?
An Empire 88 gangster in Brockton Bay turned left instead of right.
What was the next significant event in that causal chain?
The gangster missed an expected encounter with a local parahuman, one Shadow Stalker, a Ward.
And then?
Shadow Stalker's behavior changed due to increased frustration and anxiety.
And what would she do differently that was significant?
Shadow Stalker would murder an unconscious girl in her bed in Brockton Bay General Hospital.
Why?
Shadow Stalker was responsible for the girl's condition, which was much worse than Shadow Stalker had intended. She feared the severity of her illness would draw serious investigation, which could reveal Shadow Stalker's involvement. Without the catharsis from beating the gangster, she would make the decision that the safest thing to do was to ensure the girl died in her bed of an apparent accident.
Any other reasons?
The girl was sicker than she should be. She hadn't triggered, as she should have.
When did that change?
The last reconfiguration, five days earlier.
Damn it, she swore internally. She clearly had not asked the right questions that day.
Why was the girl important? If her assassination caused the world to shorten so dramatically-
The girl was a source of incorrect predictions not connected with any of her blindspot models. Cause unknown. Apparently acausal.
Contessa growled in frustration. Why? Everything had a cause, and there was no reason her power shouldn't have an answer. The girl wasn't even a parahuman.
Perhaps she needed to approach the problem from the other end. What had caused the gangster to turn the wrong way?
The gangster was a former resident of Madison, Wisconsin. Her Simurgh blindspot model suggested probable interference via an unknown vector.
The assassination was a move by the Simurgh, then. It had been some time since she had stumbled across one of those. Why did the Simurgh want an unpowered, unconscious girl dead? Did it have something to do with how she was supposed to be a parahuman and wasn't? That seemed like the only change significant enough to matter.
Well, if the girl's life bought the world time, clearly there was only one thing to do. What was the girl's name?
Unknown.
What...the fuck?
What was the girl's name?
Unknown.
What was the girl's name?
Unknown.
How could her power not know a name? She couldn't be a blindspot, the questions she'd asked already wouldn't have led her to the girl. She would have had to build a model of her first for an approximation of results, which she would never have known to do without knowing she existed. And the girl wasn't a parahuman, so she couldn't have a power that was interfering. Unless giving her bad results, including as to whether she was a parahuman, was a function of her power. That...might be it. But, frustratingly, she couldn't just get the answer by asking her power because it would answer that she was not a parahuman regardless.
Fine. Whatever. She would find out what was going on later. Path to saving the girl who was going to be murdered by Shadow Stalker without being obvious about it.
Saturday Afternoon, January 8th, 2011
Brockton Bay General Hospital
Intensive Care Ward
"CODE BLUE! CRASH CART!" a woman's voice shouted over the wail of a flatline in an adjacent room.
One of the two occupants of the nurse's station ran for the aforementioned cart while the other stayed only long enough to use the paging system before following her.
Out of sight, Contessa casually tossed the emptied syringe of...something or other she'd used to induce the cardiac arrest into a sharps disposal bin, and took advantage of seven of the twenty six seconds the nursing station was unattended to replace the top sheet of the papers on a particular clipboard.
"That's odd," said the nurse, frowning as she looked over her clipboard. "Maybe someone new did this, they listed the cases counterclockwise around the ward today."
"It's fine," Panacea said dismissively, and set off in the opposite of her usual direction.
After her third healing she passed a room she wasn't scheduled for when the monitor inside began to wail a flatline alarm.
"What?" she said, looking inside and recognizing the figure within. "Didn't I just heal her yesterday?"
Angry at whoever had screwed up all her work - seriously, the girl had been so much of a mess of infection and organ failure fixing it had taken half an hour - she stalked inside and touched Taylor Hebert.
Standing in the room of an unconscious old man across the hall, only Contessa had seen Shadow Stalker escape in her shadow form through the window as soon as she'd heard Panacea.
"Door to hospital server room," she whispered, and stepped through to erase surveillance video.
Things had been faster back when she could just steal CCTV tapes.
Friday Afternoon, January 28th, 2011
International Waters North of Honduras
Unnamed Caribbean Atoll
Contessa rubbed her eyes as she reclined in her sinfully comfortable beach chair, the only artificial thing on the idyllic white sand of the tiny coral island.
Her power made her aware of another threat to the life of the girl who went by 'Taylor Hebert', according to all evidence except her power, which stubbornly insisted that her name was unknown for reasons she still couldn't pin down no matter what questions she'd asked. Which meant her power was defective, or she was missing something, both prospects she did not like at all.
"Doormaker, there is a meteorite ten meters across headed West across the Atlantic towards Brockton Bay, current coordinates 40.14, by -57.34. Open a door in front of it to an uninhabited Earth," she ordered, tiredly.
In the past, outside of attacks the Simurgh had always been less overt than using her telekinesis to throw large rocks at things. Her moves were always subtle plots set into motion at a distance. The uncaring gods knew that Contessa had seen and prevented enough subtle assassination attempts over the last weeks. Evidently subtle was no longer a requirement for the feathered abomination's plans, whatever they were. Besides the obvious. Apparently the Endbringer believed that the girl needed to die.
Her power kept reconfiguring seemingly randomly at least once every day, and all she could do was stay awake as much as possible to keep ahead in their ongoing thinker duel. Even drugging herself with modafinil there were limits to how long she could stay awake, however.
According to her power the girl should have died when she'd run into Victor during an escape attempt and Contessa had been asleep. But a reconfiguration had occurred, and the girl had not only survived but emerged victorious.
The girl had also had some unusual encounters that did not require intervention. Those seemed to be the product of actual circumstance and not the accursed porcelain birdbrain. At least as far as she could tell. Her power's blindspot models were never completely reliable, but from the Simurgh's perspective there didn't seem to be much to be gained by the fights with the Undersiders gang and the Nazi cape who went by Hookwolf.
In addition to a persistent Endbringer, the reconfigurations were a serious issue. They had to be something the girl was doing intentionally. Wherever she was getting her unaccountable skill and knowledge, it was connected to or the source of the continual march of acausal predictive errors around the girl. And it was not a parahuman power - the MRI proved that, and her power had consistently agreed. One or the other she might distrust, but not two independent sources.
She'd made a number of key discoveries over the weeks.
The answers to the obvious questions of why the Simurgh was trying so hard to kill the girl, and why her path to resisting her model of Scion was so insistent on keeping the girl alive, were one and the same.
Her power was certain that the acausal predictive errors that kept disrupting it would disrupt other predictive powers. The Simurgh model's, and the Scion model's.
Scion would not be guaranteed to anticipate and prevent whatever the girl did if they came into conflict.
And of course the Simurgh would want to destroy anything that impaired her precognitive abilities. It would be a necessary condition for her to get anything else done.
Another discovery was that the technology the girl displayed such comfort with was shockingly developed. Her power estimated that it came from a civilization older than the universe, a result so puzzling she checked it repeatedly.
The rest of her discoveries came not from asking herself questions, but from surveillance. In a conversation with the Ward Gallant, Dean Stansfield, the girl had displayed knowledge of the Ward's secret identity, of Cauldron, of their system of favors, of details about how the vials work, of the fact that Scion was the preeminent threat to humanity, and she'd declared her intent to kill it.
In a letter to Director Piggot, she'd spoken of possible future timelines. And she'd given specific warnings to the members of the heroic group New Wave and to Gallant.
Warnings her power predicted were plausible events, absent the girl's interference.
The girl's conversation with Panacea had been a clue that what was going on had a cause other than a parahuman power. Something technological, and new. The girl had also clearly been acting to prevent some sort of bad end that she could foresee. Evidence of a confident belief in her foreknowledge.
The girl had outright called herself a time traveler in that conversation.
The pieces fit, more or less. Some sort of temporal irregularity was the only clear explanation for how the girl had access to a technology base that showed the polish and development of a civilization older than the universe. It also explained why her power viewed the girl's actions as acausal. If the root causation was hidden in the future, inaccessible to her passenger and the sight of the Entities, it would look as though it came from nowhere.
Some form of time travel would also explain knowledge of Cauldron and other well-hidden secrets, and obviously knowledge of possible future events.
The girl certainly seemed convinced that her source of technology and evident skills, along with her knowledge of potential futures, would be sufficient to kill the Entity. Or at least that she had a realistic chance.
Normally that would be an absurd claim. Many tinkers had claimed to have weapons that could kill Endbringers over the years only to discover how outmatched they really were, and Scion was a greater threat by orders of magnitude.
But the hints of the girl's capabilities displayed so far were tantalizing, as was her power's prediction that the girl's accursed reconfigurations could trip up Scion.
As annoying as the reconfigurations and the duel with the Simurgh were, Contessa had been forced to come to a conclusion about what choice maximized humanity's odds of survival.
The girl had to be kept alive.
Perhaps it was time for her to think about making direct contact. Collaboration might make keeping her alive easier. But Contessa had been awake for days, and she needed sleep.
Hopefully nothing awful would happen while she was unconscious, but there was little choice but to take the risk.
Before Dawn, January 29th, 2011
Toronto, Canada
Contessa stepped through a Doormaker portal and strode out of a building alcove to view the place where her power had last been able to path the girl. It was a Toronto side street with a long furrow of torn up pavement, marked off with yellow and black 'Parahuman Response Team - Do Not Cross' tape and crawling with PRT personnel.
Something heavy and hard had carved its way down the street before coming to rest.
Something that had crashed.
"Please move along, ma'am," said an approaching trooper.
A ship. The girl's ship.
She hadn't been aware. There had been no paths to safely bugging the girl's home without being noticed, so she hadn't tried. Her power knew, but she hadn't known to ask.
What kind of ship?
A spaceship.
An FTL capable spaceship.
"This is a restricted area, ma'am, I need you to move along."
The girl was somewhere out of range, now. Which could be anywhere in the universe further than low Earth orbit.
So what the hell had happened?
There'd been a realignment late last night after Contessa had fallen asleep. Afterwards the girl had immediately moved to free Dragon from her creator's shackles. The girl succeeded, but there was a fight with the Dragonslayers as she exfiltrated. The girl had won, but not without the engagement becoming extremely public.
"Ma'am? Did you hear me?"
The girl had nearly died, in fact. She'd taken a serious risk to accomplish her goal as soon as possible.
Cauldron had discussed the possibility of freeing Dragon before. Legend had been in favor, arguing that the AI's history of benevolence made it an acceptable risk. The others had been neutral or against. Some believed that the risk of creating a new S class threat was too high, others thought it was too much of a loss of control, and that if the AI did stay benevolent it would impair future operations too much and possibly set off Scion early if the entity perceived the AI as a threat. Contessa hadn't gotten involved save for answering questions, as was her habit. Legend had been outvoted.
But the girl knew things. Had she known for sure that a free Dragon wouldn't turn on them? Contessa hadn't seen it in her paths, but they were far too unreliable in the indefinite future to make the gamble.
If the girl knew, and she didn't care about preserving the freedom to act immorally that Dragon would impair, then freeing Dragon could be an obvious choice.
But now there was a new and more immediate problem. Her paths couldn't take into account whatever the girl was doing out of her range. Her judgment of the girl's character suggested she would be back, and make more changes, but Contessa had no way of knowing when or what. Her paths went on as though the girl never returned. An incomplete model of the girl suggested she would certainly come back, but she had too little information for accurate predictions of when or what the girl would do. She needed more, and figuring out what was going on with the girl had been frustratingly slow.
Contessa would just have to wait and be ready. Her current anti-Scion path had reverted to something that didn't involve the girl at all, which was clearly wrong. Any large scale path she ran until the girl returned would likely be rather pointless.
"Ma'am, I need you to move away or I'm going to have to arrest you."
"She loves you, but she hasn't said anything," Contessa spoke.
The trooper's head pivoted to one of the troopers closer to the crash site. "What-" he asked, but Contessa had already stepped back into the sheltered alcove and with a whispered word was gone.
Saturday Morning, January 29th, 2011
Brockton Bay
Hebert Residence
"So what," Contessa asked, finishing her story with her eyes boring into mine, "are you planning, and what happened away from Earth?"
I blinked, my gaze shifting to Dragon for a moment and then back to Contessa. "We spoke, and I'm making preparations. I'm not sure it's wise to tell you exactly what. The shards aren't entirely unconnected from one another."
Alexandria frowned. "Dragon called you a traveler. Why are you here? Why do you care?" she asked, and gestured at the kitchen with an offhand. "And how do you explain all this? You are difficult to read, but you don't act like a child. Did you insert yourself into this life somehow?"
"It's complicated," I answered. "I'm here because Taylor Hebert suffered irreversible brain damage. I was a failsafe, evidently."
"Evidently?" Alexandria asked.
Contessa tilted her head. "She's still piecing together what happened. She doesn't know everything herself. She had nothing to do with her arrival here."
Alexandria looked to Contessa, surprise in the set of her lips, then to me.
"That's true. I don't know everything," I said. "I know where my knowledge comes from, but it's not the same place I'm from, and I'm not sure where that is. Another world rather like Earth Aleph, but with no contact with other worlds or sign of the entities, just like the future civilization all the knowledge is from. They never encountered entities either."
"So you don't know how you're here. Do you know why?" she asked.
"For certain?" I shook my head. "No. I have clues. They were facing a seemingly insurmountable problem that looked like it was going to cause their extinction, despite all their technology. Maybe I'm a message in a bottle, a legacy. A way to live on and help others in desperate need.
"Whatever happened to bring me here with their knowledge, it was something they did intentionally. Something experimental, and last-ditch. I'm not sure if they knew about the contents of this timeline before or after they committed. I suspect after, given that they don't seem to have intended to hurt Taylor Hebert with their insertion into this universe. I have records of emergency measures activated in response, and that wouldn't have happened if all went according to plan. But she did get hurt, and I'm here now, plucked from my life somehow."
"That explains why you don't act like a child. You're an adult after all. Why come here? Now?" Alexandria gestured to me. "To the body of this girl you've taken over?"
"I wasn't consulted, but again, I can only guess. It was around the time Taylor would have triggered, and she's the one who defeated Scion in the original timeline."
Alexandria grit her teeth. "So your arrival effectively killed the girl who would have saved us. And prevented her from developing the power that would have been key to this plan, I presume?"
I nodded. "That's about the shape of it. We have no choice but to navigate a new path with what signposts we can take from the old, now."
"And you're not even sure how altruistic this civilization is, or what they want?" Alexandria demanded.
I shrugged my shoulders slightly. "I take reassurance from the thought that if they wanted to pick a time and a place to insert their knowledge to maximize the number of lives they could save, it would be hard to find something better than here, now, in the mind of Taylor Hebert, the girl destined to save a nearly uncountable number of Earths. If the civilization just wanted a safe beachhead to save themselves somehow, well, almost anywhere else would be preferable than a world about to be destroyed by the Entities."
"Perhaps," Dragon interjected, "there is something here they need to save themselves. Knowledge of how Entity dimensional travel is performed, for instance."
I inclined my head to Dragon, conceding the point. "If they knew ahead of time what was here, of course."
"Yes," Dragon agreed. "Although if they didn't, that raises the question of how they wound up at so critical a time and place as Taylor Hebert's brain when she would have triggered. From what we know the fate of all the Earths within the Entities' reach hinged on that moment. That cannot be a coincidence."
"No, it can't," I mused agreeably, and wondered about whether they could have wound up at such an important point unintentionally, but also not by accident. Might there be something significant I wasn't seeing, there?
Alexandria looked at Contessa. "I don't like the unknowns, here. Even she doesn't know what this other civilization is up to. This is a gamble."
"All our plans have been. Many with poor odds. And our ultimate gamble has the worst odds of all," Contessa replied, voice level, and gestured at me. "I believe she is the best wager we have at present. Quite possibly the best we are going to get in the time we have. At the very least, she buys us time."
Alexandria turned back towards me. I let her look, until she did something that caught me by surprise.
With a press of something recessed on each side of her helmet she pulled it off and set it down on the table to look me eye to eye. As when I'd confronted Tattletale, I could only guess at what she was thinking. Her mind ran on shard hardware instead of her stasis-frozen organic brain, and it gave her the ability to read tiny expressions and apprehend deep complexity in a moment.
How was she weighing me, in that augmented mind of hers? What could I say that would help her make the difficult decision to willingly extend a fraction of trust and give up a fraction of control?
To sway and influence someone, you must understand them.
What kind of a person was she? She'd had the best of intentions, once. She'd been a hero. Desperate circumstance and necessity had turned her into what she'd become, but an amoral monster wasn't who she wanted to be. It had just felt like the only option.
What Rebecca Costa-Brown needed most was another rational choice.
So I held her gaze and I spoke.
"Ever since you found out about the threat that Scion poses to the world you've been doing everything in your power to stop it. You've sacrificed your time, your personal life, and most of all your ideals, staining your conscience one desperate decision at a time, hoping against hope that you will find powers that can stop Scion before he destroys every Earth."
I held her gaze, willing my sincerity to come across in every syllable and expression.
"I am the answer to your prayer, Rebecca. I know how to stop Scion and the Endbringers. And I can do it without any more atrocities. If we work together."
"You really believe that," she said, her eyes narrow.
"I've seen what she's holding back. The plans she's considered. I believe she can do it, if anyone can," Dragon interjected. "There are tremendous hurdles to overcome, but combining our resources will maximize the odds."
Rebecca sighed, and closed her eyes. She hadn't blinked during our shared gaze.
I imagined she didn't need to.
She opened her eyes again. "Very well."
I nodded. "Thank you for being willing to extend trust. I will honor it. We should talk regularly from here on. Coordinate. And I'd prefer Danny be kept unaware that I'm not his daughter."
I thought about what I was going to say next. I wanted Contessa's insight into whether there was anything that could be done about the connection between Eidolon and the Endbringers. But I also didn't want Alexandria to hear the explanation from me. There was a risk she might reject the idea or immediately confront Eidolon with terrible results. Any solution might also require the issue being explained to her in just the right way to manage her reaction. Likely by Contessa.
"There are also...well, there's something I need to speak with Contessa about. Endbringer related. Information she needs, but it's sensitive," I said.
Alexandria arched an eyebrow and turned to Contessa.
"I don't know what she's going to say, but the request is significant for some reason," Contessa said.
Alexandria sighed and collected her helmet as she stood. "Fill me in after if you can. Door."
Another portal opened and she strode through. I waited until it closed behind her before turning to Contessa.
"Thank you," I said.
"Thank me by not relying on my power to mediate in the future," she said, a mild undercurrent of annoyance in her voice. "I don't like involving myself that way. There are reasons I've chosen not to take control."
I winced. She'd pegged me relying on her to intervene in this conversation if necessary. "Fair, although I may need to ask it of you once more. There's something you need to know about Eidolon and the Endbringers that's not in your models. I'm hoping you can use it to find a way to stop the attacks without having to kill him."
Contessa abruptly turned her complete attention to me. "Leave nothing out."
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "The thing to understand first about Eidolon's power is that it responds to his desires, even his subconscious ones. He was feeling unchallenged. Everything was too easy. He had no worthy opponents." I looked Contessa in the eyes. "So his power, ever faithful, reached out to find him some."
Contessa inhaled sharply, and I filled in the rest of what had happened to cause the Endbringers to awaken.