CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

THE NIGHT THE RIFT OPENED

They came through the ductwork.

The first sign was the Veil-thread, a shimmer in the air that Nathan felt before he saw, a wrongness in the ambient field that brought him upright and had his head turning before the first sound reached him. He was on his feet before the first creature emerged from the east vent.

It dropped to the concrete floor and the room got its first look at what Aldus had sent.

Volleyball-sized. Armored plating the color of old iron, segments overlapping at the joints, built to shed impact. Eight legs moving with the mechanical articulation of something engineered rather than evolved. Eyes like burning coals set in a wedge-shaped head. Fast, faster than something that size and that weight should have been able to move, closing distance in short explosive bursts that left no time to get clear. And a mouth that opened sideways, the mandibles spreading to reveal the apparatus of something that could bite through what it chose to bite through.

More coming through behind it. East vent. North vent. The ductwork producing them in a steady, deliberate stream.

They were not interested in the room. They were not interested in any of the thirty-odd people in the common area who were not wearing amulets. They were locked onto the five points of power, the white opal, the emerald, the garnet, the sapphire, the onyx, moving toward them with the fixed certainty of things built for a single purpose that could not be argued with or redirected. Aldus's creatures, sent for Aldus's targets.

But the Forum's common backstage area was a large and crowded space, and when you sent a wave of fast-moving armored creatures across it toward five specific people, everyone between the creatures and those people was going to get caught in it. The Skitter-Casts did not care. They went through. They webbed whatever was in the way. They misjudged occasionally, the same way the Wrought misjudged, the same confusion of proximity when a target was close and something else was closer, and the bite that was meant for an amulet-bearer landed on whoever was standing in the wrong spot at the wrong moment.

Across the room, Jace went still.

It happened before he could stop it, the arachnophobia was not a thought or a decision but a physical fact, the chest locking, the hands going cold, the terror that lived somewhere below reasoning and had been there since childhood and which Aldus had clearly studied and built into the design of these things. Eight-legged. Fast. Coming for him. The white opal blazed at his chest as his terror fed it wrong, power surging without direction.

His brothers were already moving.

Connor was between Jace and the nearest creature before Jace had fully processed the scene, not speaking, not explaining, just there, the emerald burning, a wall of telekinetic force pushing the creature back three feet. Ricky shifted in the same moment, the onyx flaring, cutting off the vent in the south wall before the next creature could fully emerge. Erik's hand was on Durandach's hilt. Nathan was burning Veil-thread from the east wall with a focused column of garnet fire, his other hand working at the entry points.

The Veil-thread anchoring the space went active, Aldus's design, the filaments glowing across the floor and walls and ceiling like a net of cold fire, and the effect was immediate. Ricky's portal attempt failed. He tried again. Nothing.

"Portals are down," Ricky said. Flat. Informational.

"I see it," Nathan said. He did not stop burning.

Vince Neil moved.

He was not a fighter and had never claimed to be, but he was a man who read rooms faster than almost anyone alive and he read this one in two seconds flat: the creatures were going for the amulets, not for the people near the kitchen corridor. He grabbed Mick Mars by the arm, turned to Nikki Sixx, and said "Kitchen, now" in the voice he used when there was no time to discuss it. He was already moving, already pulling people with him, the Go-Gos, the Bangles, the fans from the charity raffle, two road crew members who were close enough to grab. Moving fast, not running, because running created panic and panic slowed people down.

He got them through the kitchen door.

Nikki got the door shut. Locked it.

In the kitchen: Vince, Mick, Nikki, Belinda Carlisle, Jane Wiedlin and the rest of the Go-Gos, Susanna Hoffs and the rest of the Bangles, the fans, the road crew. Safe distance from armored creatures that were not coming for any of them.

Nikki counted heads.

Tommy Lee was not in the kitchen.

Tommy Lee was not in the kitchen because a Skitter-Cast had cut across him on its trajectory toward Jace and Tommy had done what Tommy Lee did when something came at him, which was deal with it. He had a chair in his hands before the creature had finished its first pass. It had webbed his forearm on the way through, a strand of it, adhesive and strong, which Tommy tore free with the annoyance of someone who did not have time for this, and then the creature had corrected its course toward the opal and Tommy had followed it because it had just webbed him and that was not acceptable.

On the other side of the common area, Bryan Hitt had a Skitter-Cast cut across his legs on its way to Connor, a creature that did not want Bryan but was not going to let him stand in the way either, its momentum knocking into him hard enough to stagger him. Bryan caught his balance, looked at the thing as it scrabbled to reorient toward the emerald, picked up a folding chair, and hit it. Because that was the reasonable response.

"Kitchen!" Kevin Cronin said to Bruce Hall, who was already looking at the door.

"Tommy's still in there," Bruce said.

They looked at the room. Tommy was in the room with a chair. Bryan was in the room with a chair. Michael Hutchence was in the room picking up anything he could find. All five members of Battle Cry were in the room doing things with their amulets that Kevin had seen twice before and which still, every time, rearranged his understanding of the world.

Kevin picked up the steel bar.

It was approximately three feet of structural support that had been leaning against the east wall, provenance unclear, irrelevant. Kevin tested its weight, turned to find the nearest creature that was not currently being handled by someone with an amulet, and used it. A Skitter-Cast that had swung wide of Connor and was reorienting came within range and Kevin batted it toward Ricky. Ricky dispatched it in midair without breaking stride and looked at Kevin.

Bruce Hall had a road case lid. Neal Doughty had a road case lid. Dave Amato had found a length of cable and was using it as a flail with the adaptability of a man who understood that the skill was receiving the situation and responding to it. Bryan borrowed the steel bar from Kevin after Kevin's second use and wielded it with the precision that three decades of understanding impact had built into him, not the dramatic swing but the targeted one, finding the joins in the plating, the gaps between the armored sections, the spots where construction became vulnerability. He sent two creatures toward Ricky by the third use with the aim of someone who had spent his life knowing where force needed to land.

Ricky killed both and looked at him. "Good aim," he said.

Bryan filed it away.

INXS was in it fully because they were spread across the common area and the Skitter-Casts were moving across the common area and the intersection was unavoidable. Michael Hutchence had started with a chair and upgraded to a length of monitor cable wrapped around his forearm, moving through the fight with the forward-leaning commitment that was simply how he moved through everything. Andrew Farriss had a chair. Tim Farriss had a chair. Garry Gary Beers had found something heavier. Kirk Pengilly was moving around the outside of it, clearing creatures off people's backs when they webbed onto someone and couldn't shake it loose. Jon Farriss, drummer, had a folding table leg and used it alongside Tommy and Bryan with the understanding of impact mechanics that all three of them carried in their bodies by virtue of what they were.

Three drummers in a brawl was, as it turned out, a formidable thing. Tommy had broken his first chair into component parts within the opening ninety seconds and was working through the fight with a chair leg in each hand, spinning the right one between strikes in the unconscious way of a man whose hands had been moving like this since age seven, not showing off, just what happened when you put a drummer in a situation that required impact and rhythm simultaneously. Jon Farriss was doing the same with his table leg, the grip shifting and resettling between swings with the fluid economy of someone who had spent twenty years knowing exactly where his hands were. Bryan was the controlled one, both hands on the steel bar, no spinning, finding the joints and the gaps with the methodical precision of a man who understood that accuracy beat theatrics every time, but his footwork was a drummer's footwork, weight shifting, anticipating the creature's movement, already where he needed to be before the creature decided to be there.

The three of them moved through the fight without speaking, reading each other the way musicians read each other, filling gaps, covering angles, the kind of wordless coordination that only happened between people who had spent their lives keeping time together, even though these three had never played together, had never been in the same room before tonight.

Two male fans who had been near the stage entrance when it started had not gone to the kitchen. They had looked at the kitchen door and looked at the room and made the calculation that a room with Battle Cry in it was probably the safer room to be in, and they were now using chair legs and making this calculation look correct.

Roland Orzabal picked up a chair leg. Not a deliberation. A creature had skittered close enough to clip his ankle on its way to Nathan, a misjudgment, proximity confusion, the Skitter-Cast not fully distinguishing Roland from the garnet, and Roland responded by picking up the nearest heavy object and using it with the Bath working-class directness that had always lived underneath the music and was, as it turned out, entirely applicable to armored spider creatures in a Los Angeles arena backstage. Curt Smith had a second chair leg and stayed alongside him.

The broom came from the catering area along the south wall. Nobody saw who found it first, it was simply there one moment, and then someone had snapped the handle clean across their knee and was moving through the fight with the pointed end forward, driving it through the gap between a Skitter-Cast's head and thorax plates with the satisfaction of someone who had found exactly the right tool for the job. The broken end went to someone else. The fight was resourceful in this way.

In the kitchen, Belinda Carlisle had found the windows.

There were two of them, large panes set into the kitchen wall, looking out into the common area. The kitchen was slightly elevated from the common area floor, which meant if you stood at the window you could see most of the room. Belinda had found the first window thirty seconds after the door closed and was watching with both hands pressed against the glass and her breath fogging it at the edges.

Jane Wiedlin appeared at the window beside her. Then Charlotte Caffey. Kathy Valentine on tiptoe behind them. Susanna Hoffs and two Bangles pressed to the second window. Nikki Sixx was at that window too, ostensibly managing the room, practically watching Tommy through the glass with the expression of a man composing extremely strong opinions for later delivery. Mick Mars had his forehead against the pane, the contained expression of a man who had seen a great many things in his life and was adding this to the list at speed. The fans pressed in wherever there was glass to press against.

What they saw:

The five amulets blazing, opal and emerald and garnet and sapphire and onyx throwing overlapping light across the backstage in colors that had no business being in a fluorescent-lit concrete room in Los Angeles. The light was not decorative. It moved with intention, each color doing something specific, and the women at the windows had all watched the Barbara Walters special and had some framework for what they were seeing, but the framework and the reality were different things and the reality was considerably more than the framework had prepared them for.

Connor's telekinesis was the most immediately visible, creatures picked up bodily and flung, or pinned to the floor on their backs, legs scrabbling at nothing, the Visionary's focus so clean that you could see the exact radius of the force field and what fell outside it. He was moving while he worked, not standing still, circling to keep Jace behind him, the emerald burning low and steady at his chest with the quality of something that did not need to blaze because it was not running at limit.

"He's holding three of them," Jane said. Her voice was slightly higher than her normal voice.

"Four," Belinda said.

Nathan's fire was a different color from ordinary fire, garnet-red, deep, going through the armored plating of the Skitter-Casts in a way that suggested it was not interested in the surface and had opinions about the interior. He was burning entry points in the east wall simultaneously, the multi-channel work of a man who could hold more than one thing at a time and did not find this remarkable. The garnet light made his face look different, older, or something more, the intelligence in it more visible because the firelight was his firelight and it was responding to him.

A Skitter-Cast hit the kitchen window.

Not a full-speed impact, one that had ricocheted off something in the room and caught the glass at an angle, clinging there with all eight legs spread against the pane, the burning coal eyes level with Susanna Hoffs's face from approximately eight inches away.

Susanna yelped. Debbi Peterson grabbed her arm.

Belinda hit the window with her palm. Flat, hard, the slap of it loud enough to startle the room behind her. The creature skittered sideways off the glass. In the common area, Ricky appeared from nowhere at a speed that was genuinely not trackable, there one moment, there in a different place the next, the onyx blazing, and dispatched it before it had finished reorienting.

"RICKY," Jane Wiedlin shouted at the window, which did not carry.

"He can't hear you," Charlotte said.

"I know," Jane said, and shouted it again anyway.

The kitchen had opinions. The kitchen had considerable opinions and was expressing them continuously, yelps when something hit the glass or came close to someone they recognized, commentary on what the amulets were doing, the running commentary of people watching something extraordinary from inside a glass box who could not stop watching. Nikki's hand went to the window when Tommy went down briefly, tripped, not hit, up again in half a second, and Mick put a steadying hand on his shoulder without looking away from the glass.

Erik drew Durandach.

The sapphire blazed. The blade blazed. He held the sword in his right hand with the two-handed grip that the Warrior used when the Warrior ring was running at full capacity, and when the lightning hit the concrete floor it hit it once and went in three directions simultaneously, three creatures going into the east wall with the force of something that had not asked permission and did not negotiate. The sound of it was a crack that everyone in the kitchen felt in their back teeth.

"Oh," Kathy Valentine said, very quietly.

"Yeah," Susanna said.

"Does he... does he always..."

"I think yes," Susanna said. "I think that's just what he does."

Jace.

The Guardian was the one the creatures kept finding, kept reorienting toward, the white opal the brightest point in the room and the thing Aldus had built all of this to reach. He was fighting through visible terror, anyone who had watched the Barbara Walters special and paid attention to the moment when Jace described his arachnophobia understood what they were watching, understood that what was in his face right now was not performance. The chest was tight. The hands were too cold. The terror was real and he was inside it and he was working anyway, the Echo-Sticks blazing opaline white, the power surging with the quality of fury feeding something that terror had fed wrong, converting it, using it, the Guardian doing what the Guardian did.

The kitchen saw it.

"He's scared," Jane said.

"He's still fighting," Belinda said.

"I know. That's what I mean."

The kitchen was quiet, watching him fight through it. Then Susanna said, low: "Look at the ones near him."

They looked.

Michael Hutchence was not where he had been when the fight started. He had been near the center of the room when the first creature came through the vent, and he had taken a chair and dealt with what was near him, and then he had moved. Not toward the safest angle, not toward the clearest path. Toward Jace. He was operating on Jace's left now, moving with him, not alongside in the way of someone who happened to be there but alongside in the way of someone who had looked at the room and made a decision about where he needed to be. He had a quality of barely-controlled revulsion when the creatures came close, his jaw set, his shoulders tight, the physiological response of someone who did not love this and was doing it anyway, but he was doing it. Between Jace and the things that were coming for Jace.

Tommy Lee had been on Jace's right from the start, and had not left it. The grin was real, Tommy Lee in motion was Tommy Lee at home, but underneath the grin was something else, something that was not quite grin-shaped, the face of a man who had clocked what was in Jace's face and had made the same decision Michael had made, which was: not from a distance. Here. Right here.

Roland Orzabal had gotten into the fight because a creature clipped his ankle and his instincts were what they were. But once he was in it he had drifted, not randomly, not toward the exits, toward the cluster of activity around Jace and the opal. He was not especially close. He was on the outer edge of it, working with Curt, but he was oriented in that direction and had been for most of the fight. Roland paid very close attention to what was underneath things. What was underneath Jace right now was legible to someone paying that kind of attention, and Roland Orzabal had been paying that kind of attention to human beings in extremity for his entire adult life.

The kitchen watched the three of them without fully understanding what they were watching. They understood it more than they could have articulated.

Then a creature made it past Connor's telekinetic perimeter and closed on Jace and Connor caught it three feet out with a focused burst that should not have been physically possible at that range and held it there, legs churning, suspended in the air between Jace and the thing trying to reach him, and Jace looked at Connor through the suspended creature and Connor looked back and something passed between them that the kitchen windows could not fully read but that registered, even from behind glass, as something significant.

"Tommy GO," Nikki said, to the window, at full volume.

Tommy went. He was already going, had read the angle, the gap in the creature's position as Connor held it, and was closing from the right with the chair leg raised, the grin on his face the grin of Tommy Lee when Tommy Lee was entirely in his element, which was apparently this, apparently also this. Michael came from the left in the same moment, not as fast as Tommy but committed, driving his chair into the creature's flank as Tommy hit it from the other side. It dropped between them.

The kitchen erupted.

"OH..."

"YES..."

"TOMMY LEE EVERYONE," Jane Wiedlin announced.

"He cannot hear you," Charlotte said again.

"I KNOW," Jane said, at the window.

"Michael too," Susanna said, quieter. "Did you see... he was already moving."

Nobody answered that. They had seen.

The fight found its rhythm after that, not easier, not quieter, but with the shape of something where everyone knew their position. The Brotherhood holding the center. The drummers working the flanks with the wordless coordination of people who kept time for a living. Kevin and Bruce and Neal and Dave using the room's resources with REO's practical competence. Michael Hutchence and the INXS contingent filling gaps as they opened. Roland and Curt working the south side with the systematic efficiency of two men who had decided what needed to happen and were making it happen. The two fans, who had made a good decision and were committed to it.

The kitchen watched all of it. They watched Bryan guide two creatures into Ricky's path with the steel bar and someone in the kitchen said "where did the REO drummer learn to do that" and nobody had an answer. They watched Jon Farriss go low under a Skitter-Cast's trajectory and come up inside its reach and use the table leg on its underside which turned out to be the vulnerable side, and Vince said "that is useful information" in a tone that implied he was not planning to personally use it but was glad someone had found it. They watched the broom-spear get passed from person to person as each user finished with it and moved to something else.

The Skitter-Cast that tried the window a second time did not survive it. Belinda was ready.

The Brotherhood held the center. Everyone else dealt with what came at them and cleared the flanks and kept the creatures occupied enough that the Brotherhood could work. It was not a plan. It was the aggregate of everyone in the room responding correctly to the same problem from their own position, which was, when it came together, enough.

It took eleven minutes.

When the last creature went down, Nathan's garnet fire finding the final join in the final creature's plating and going through, the creature dropping with the heavy finality of something that had been built to be difficult and had met something more difficult, the backstage went quiet.

Not silent. The monitors were still running somewhere in the building. The crowd outside was beginning to arrive. Eleven minutes had passed in the room and perhaps four hundred people's evening was proceeding normally twenty feet away through a set of fire doors.

Inside the room, everyone was breathing hard.

The creatures were down. The Veil-thread Nathan had been burning had dissolved with them, the filaments fading, the space returning to its ordinary quality. Ricky tried a portal. It opened clean.

"We're good," Ricky said.

The kitchen door opened.

Vince Neil came back through first, assessed the room in one sweep, and said: "Everyone okay?"

"Everyone okay," Connor said.

The room began to decompress, the emotional release of people who had been through something impossible and had survived it, the adrenaline starting to metabolize into something that felt, improbably, like warmth. The Go-Gos and the Bangles came back through the door. Belinda Carlisle looked at the room, at the scorch marks and the cracked plating of the downed creatures and the broken chairs, and said nothing and then said: "I'm adding security briefings to our pre-show routine."

Someone laughed. Then several people laughed. Then the room was doing what rooms did after impossible things, which was finding its way back toward ordinary.

Bryan was being clapped on the back by Kevin. He accepted this with the expression of a man who had done something practical and found the congratulations slightly more than the situation required, then looked at the downed creatures on the floor and said: "I want it on record that I have played stranger venues." Kevin looked at him. "I'm not saying this wasn't strange," Bryan said. "I'm saying I've played stranger." Kevin started laughing. Bryan did not smile, which somehow made it funnier. Tommy was showing someone, Dave Amato, who had the expression of a man recalibrating his understanding of the world in real time, the stub of the chair leg he had used to finish his third creature. Michael Hutchence was saying something to Connor with the direct warmth of a man who had just been through something with someone and considered that sufficient basis for honesty.

Roland Orzabal set down the chair leg and looked at Nathan.

Nathan was setting the garnet back to its ordinary register, the fire dimming to the low glow it carried in rest state. He looked up and found Roland watching him.

"The fire comes from the amulet," Roland said.

"Yes," Nathan said.

"The amulet was... made."

"Forged. Over eight hundred years ago."

Roland processed this with the expression he had when a thing was landing as real rather than theoretical. "Shout is about something bigger than the individual having to fight against a system that doesn't want them to exist," he said. "I wrote it thinking about the psychological. I didn't mean it as... literal."

"Most true things are both," Nathan said.

Roland looked at him. Then he nodded once, slowly, the nod of a man who has just had something confirmed. "Yes," he said. "They are."

Jace was standing near the center of the room.

The arachnophobia was still in him, not fully metabolized, still present in the tension across his shoulders and the quality of his breathing, which was slightly too controlled, which was what happened when Jace was managing something. Tommy was just off his right. Bryan was just off his left, and Bryan had read the tension in Jace's stillness and was saying something easy and deliberate, horses, Nevada, the smell of a dry summer morning on the High Desert, and Jace was responding, his shoulders dropping by degrees, the managed quality of the breathing releasing toward something more natural.

Bryan was good at this. It was a skill, knowing how to talk someone back from somewhere without naming the somewhere, and it was a skill that had nothing to do with drumming and everything to do with who Bryan Hitt was when the kit was not in front of him.

The tension in Jace's shoulders dropped another degree. He said something about quarter horses. Bryan said: "Quarter horses are sensible. They don't have opinions about things that aren't their business." "Unlike some horses." Jace looked at him. "I'm not naming names," Bryan said, which was clearly a lie, and Jace almost smiled. Tommy added something about a horse he had briefly owned in 1986 that had strong opinions about tour buses, and Jace laughed, the real one, the one that came from somewhere honest, and Bryan looked at Tommy over Jace's shoulder and they exchanged the look of two men who had just accomplished something together without discussing it.

The concert was in twenty-five minutes.

The show would go on. All seven bands were present and intact and the thirty-odd people who had been in it for the last eleven minutes were all going to have a story to tell for the rest of their lives.

And then the air tore open.

It was not gradual. There was no shimmer, no warning of the kind Nathan had felt before the Skitter-Casts came through. One moment the air in the center of the room was ordinary backstage air, and the next moment it was not, and the explosion of the rift opening outward hit everyone in front of it like a physical force.

Tommy went backward off his feet to the right.

Bryan went backward off his feet to the left.

Everyone within eight feet of the point stumbled or went down.

Through the rift, which was ragged and torn at the edges, nothing like the clean aperture of Ricky's portals, nothing like anything the room had seen in the last eleven minutes, came a man.

Six feet eight. Pale as old bone, with the pallor of something that had not been in natural light for a very long time. Eyes that were dark, not quite the right color, not quite the right depth, something that you registered as wrong before you could have said why. Long dark coat. Large hands. The hands of a man who had been in actual battles, who had actually held a sword, who had wielded power for so long that the power was simply part of the shape of him.

He covered the distance between the rift and Jace before anyone could react.

His right hand closed around Jace's throat in a chokehold from behind, not a grab but a lock, the practiced grip of a thousand years of doing exactly this. His left arm wrapped around Jace's waist simultaneously, pulling him completely off his feet, already turning back toward the rift.

Jace knew who had him before he had fully turned. The power signature was unmistakable, not Veil architecture, not anything that belonged in the natural world, something older and darker and specific to one source. He had been training against this enemy for six years. He knew.

He drove his elbow back hard into Aldus's ribs. Once. Twice. His hands found the arm at his throat and pulled against it with everything he had, the Guardian's enhanced strength fully engaged, the white opal blazing at his chest, power surging into the grip. He got a thumb under the lock and forced it outward half an inch, enough to suck in a breath, and what came out on the breath was not a word exactly but carried the shape of one, a compressed, vicious sound through teeth, directed at the face behind him.

"Not... this... time."

The opal detonated outward in a burst that should have broken the grip. Aldus's arm held. The thousand-year-old body absorbed it. Jace twisted, got his feet under him for half a second, drove back against the larger body with his full weight, six foot four, two hundred and thirty pounds of Guardian at full fight, and felt the arm not give.

He was still fighting when the rift swallowed him. The room saw every second of it.

The door from the production corridor opened.

Gideon came through first, he had been outside, running a perimeter check with two of the Hartman detail, and what he had felt in the last thirty seconds was the wrongness that Veil-adjacent events produced in someone who had been around amulet work for eight years. He came through the door already moving, already reading the room, and what he saw was Aldus's back and Jace's feet off the floor and the opal blazing and he was across the room in an instant with the fury of a man who had been Jace's protection since 1983.

Sidney came through two steps behind him. Then Samantha.

Gideon hit the edge of the reachable space at the same moment as Connor's lunge, too far out, the wrong angle, his hand closing on nothing as Aldus pivoted toward the rift with Jace locked in the chokehold. He kept moving because that was what he had always done, right up to the moment the rift closed and took the air out of his next step.

Sidney had read the geometry faster and known it was wrong before he fully committed, six feet too far, the angle closing, Aldus already turning. He had run anyway. Of course he had run anyway.

Samantha had seen Jace off his feet and fighting and understood what was happening before she had fully cleared the doorway. She had read every file on Aldus that existed in the Castle of Elders. She knew exactly what this was.

Four people moved at the same instant.

Connor, bond screaming through him the moment Aldus's hand closed, lunging from six feet out, arm fully extended, fingers reaching for Jace's wrist.

Nathan, three steps further, already running, the garnet blazing, both hands reaching.

Tommy Lee, who had been standing right there, two feet off Jace's right, throwing himself into a full-body lunge toward Jace's arm, close enough that his fingertips grazed the sleeve of Jace's shirt.

Bryan Hitt, left side, same distance, the same desperate lunge forward...

None of them made it.

Aldus stepped back through the rift with Jace locked in the chokehold and the rift closed in the space between one breath and the next. The concussive force of it snapping shut knocked Connor and Nathan staggering backward. Tommy hit the floor on the right side of where the rift had been. Bryan hit the floor on the left.

The room erupted.

Not in one voice, in forty. The sound of people who have just watched something happen that they have no category for, all of them processing it at different speeds and expressing that processing in different ways simultaneously. Shouting. Someone screaming, a real scream, the involuntary kind, not performed. People who had been knocked down by the blast trying to get up. People who were still standing trying to understand what their eyes had just told them. Michael Hutchence saying something loud and sharp in the direction of where the rift had been, which was now just air. Vince Neil's voice, recognizable by its quality even through everything else, saying what the hell, what the hell, what the HELL. Kevin Cronin shouting Jace's name at the empty air as if the name might bring something back. Charlotte Caffey had her hands over her ears. Someone near the east wall was saying no, no, no, in the flat repetitive way of someone whose brain had gotten stuck on the simplest available word.

Gideon was standing at the closed point with both fists at his sides and the expression of a man who had just watched the person he was responsible for protecting taken through a tear in the air, and there was nothing in his experience or training that told him what to do with that.

Samantha had not made a sound. She was standing just inside the door where she had stopped when the rift closed, and she was not crying and she was not shaking and she was not moving. She was very still in the way that people went very still when the thing they were most afraid of had just happened and the body had not yet determined what to do next. Everyone in that room who had watched the Barbara Walters special, which was most of them, knew who she was. The drum tech. The fiancée. The woman Jace Elias had sung about in a song that had spent three weeks at number one. Aelin's future queen standing at the door in a Los Angeles backstage with her hands at her sides looking at the empty air where her person had been six seconds ago.

Nikki Sixx was on his feet and moving toward where the rift had been before he had fully decided to move, because Nikki Sixx's instinct when something impossible happened was always forward. He stopped two feet from the point because there was nothing to reach. He stood there with his hands out in front of him, touching the ordinary air.

None of them understood what they had seen. They had the pieces, the tear in the air, the figure that came through it, the chokehold, the opal blazing, Jace off his feet, the lunge of four people who did not make it, the snap of the closing, but the pieces did not assemble into anything they had language for. The fact of it was all. Six seconds. Their friend taken into nothing.

Jace was gone.

Tommy was on the floor and not moving. His arm was still extended toward the closed point, the arm he had thrown forward still reaching for something that was no longer there.

Bryan was on the floor on the other side. The same thing. The same reaching.

Connor was on his feet, the force had not put him down, only knocked him back, and the emerald amulet was at full intensity, green light washing across the whole room, his face the white of a man receiving information through the bond that he cannot act on. He could feel Jace. Diminishing. Moving behind a barrier that did not follow the Veil's rules and did not care what the Visionary needed.

Nathan was already at the closed point. Both hands extended toward the empty air. Working. His face showing everything at once, the calculation and the terror and the refusal, because right now they were all the same thing.

The shouting continued. The screaming had resolved into something more sustained, more confused, people asking each other what happened, where did he go, what was that, who was that, did you see, the questions that had no answers cycling through the room because the room needed to ask them even without answers available.

Then Sidney's voice, flat and absolute, cutting through everything: "Nobody leaves this room."

It landed the way Sidney's voice always landed when Sidney used that register, not loud, but with a quality that reached every corner regardless. The shouting dropped. Not to silence. To something lower, more controlled, still present but no longer running the room.

Sidney was already moving, positioning himself at the door.

Nobody moved to leave. Nobody even looked at the door. The thirty-odd people in that backstage had watched Jace Elias fight with everything he had against something that would not give, and then watched him taken. There was nowhere else any of them wanted to be right now except in this room, watching what happened next.

What happened next was Nathan.

He was at the closed point with both hands extended, the garnet burning at a register the room had not seen it burn at during the Skitter-Cast fight, not the working heat of combat but something deeper, something that looked like it was costing him. His face was showing things that Nathan Dallenger's face did not usually show in public. The calculation was there, the focused intelligence running at full capacity, but underneath it was something that the room could see and could not name because they didn't have the word for what it looked like when a man was trying to tear open the fabric of something with nothing but amulet fire and will.

Connor was at his left shoulder, hand resting there, not speaking. Erik and Ricky flanked them. The four of them locked into position around the closed point like something that had been drilled, because it had been drilled, because this was what they were and what they had built, and the room could feel the quality of that even without knowing what it was.

The whispering that replaced the shouting was quieter but no less present. People asking each other in low voices what Nathan was doing, what the garnet was doing, whether it was working.

Belinda Carlisle had crossed to Samantha without deciding to, she had simply looked at the woman standing at the door and moved. She put her hand on Samantha's arm and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, and Samantha did not pull away. Susanna Hoffs came from the other side a moment later and stood with them, the three of them facing the closed point where Nathan was working, and the quality of that, two women who barely knew her, standing beside Aelin's future queen because she was a person who needed someone beside her, settled the room.

Samantha was watching Nathan. Her face was controlled, the chin up, the spine straight, the composure of a woman who had been prepared for the worst possible outcomes and had decided years ago how she would carry them. But her hands were not quite still. The hands gave it away, just slightly, to anyone paying close attention.

Roland Orzabal had not moved from where he was standing. He was watching Connor's face, which was doing things that Roland was filing away.

Tommy Lee had not gotten up from the floor. He was sitting with his back against the wall and the broken chair leg in his hands, watching Nathan work, and the grin was gone and was not coming back for a while.

Twelve minutes.

The room held.

ALDUS'S DIMENSION July 14, 1989

He came through the rift into the dark.

Consciousness arrived in pieces. First: cold. The cold of a place that had never been warm, that had not seen natural light since it was built, that was being driven colder by deliberate intention. Second: the enchanted metal of the shackles at his wrists, and the wall at his back, and the fact that he was upright because the shackles were holding him there and not because his legs were capable of it. Third: wet. He was soaking wet. He did not know why and the why stopped mattering quickly because the cold was the primary fact.

He opened his eyes.

Aldus's dimension was a castle lair that had been someone's home for nine hundred years, and it looked like it.

Dark stone, not Aelinian stone, not any stone Jace had seen in the natural world, but something heavier and colder and wrong-colored in a way he could not have specified. Vaulted ceilings above that were lost in shadow, how high they went was not determinable from this position. The light was torches, or something that functioned as torches, set in iron brackets along the walls, but the light they produced was off. Too yellow. Too still. Fire that did not move the way fire moved in natural spaces.

The scrying pool was to his left. Dark water, perfectly still, the surface not reflecting what was above it but showing something else, shapes moving in the depths, geography that was not the geography of this room, the world outside the dimension visible through the surface of the water the way the sky was visible through a window. This was how he had watched. For nine centuries. This dark still water and whatever it showed him.

Maps on the walls. Not modern maps. The kind of maps that predated the cartography Jace knew, showing coastlines that matched nothing in his current knowledge, kingdoms named in scripts he did not recognize, borders drawn in ink that had been there long enough to have become part of the parchment. Old worlds. Dead worlds. Places that had been real once and were now only on these walls.

Weapons. Functional weapons, racked without decorative intent, swords and axes and things that were not quite swords and not quite axes but were clearly designed for fighting and had clearly been used. The weapons of a man who had been in actual battles across ten centuries and had kept what worked. A throne along the far wall, not elaborate, not ceremonial, simply a chair with weight and age and the quality of something that had been occupied regularly for a very long time.

Artifacts on shelves. Objects accumulated over a millennium. Jace could not see them clearly enough to identify most of them. He did not need to. The nature of the room was clear.

The chains on the wall. Not decorative. Not a dungeon. This was where Aldus lived, and the chains were simply there because they had always been there, because Aldus had always had chains on the wall.

Aldus himself was standing in the center of the room.

He was larger in this space than he had seemed in the backstage. The room was built to his scale, the ceilings were high enough, the proportions were right for a man of six foot eight who had been the measure of this space for nine hundred years. He was looking at Jace with the eyes that were the wrong color and the wrong depth, and his expression was the expression of a man who had been waiting for this moment for a very long time and had arrived at it at significant personal cost, which he intended to recoup.

"Guardian," he said.

His voice was what you would expect from a voice that had been speaking for a thousand years and had rarely needed to project because power was its own volume. Low. Carrying. The quality of a voice that had given orders that were obeyed and curses that had taken and sentences that had been carried out, for a thousand years, in a space where no one was going to tell him no.

Jace said nothing. He was assessing the room, the chains, his own state. The white opal was dim, suppressed, he realized. The enchanted shackles. Whatever Aldus had put in the metal was working against the amulet's power, pressing it down the way a hand pressed down against a surge of water. He could feel the opal. He could not reach it.

"You are cold," Aldus said. "You will become colder. You are wet because the cold is more effective when the body is wet. These are not arbitrary choices." He moved to the throne and sat, with the quality of a man who had been sitting in that chair for centuries and whose body had long since learned its shape. "I have questions. I am not yet going to ask them, because questions require a baseline, and the baseline requires some preparation."

He filed everything, the room, the pool, the weapons, the chain attachment points in the wall, the distance to the rift point. The rift had closed. There was no rift. Ricky's portals would not work here, Aldus's dimension had its own rules, and those rules did not include doors that opened at a Sentinel's will.

"You are wondering about the chains," Aldus said. "They suppress the amulet's power. Not entirely, you will find that when you reach the threshold of genuine need, something will get through regardless. This is how Guardian power works and I have had eight hundred years to understand it. What the chains do is raise the threshold significantly. What comes through when you finally reach it will be less than you are capable of in ordinary circumstances." "This is relevant to what happens next."

"I have watched you," Aldus said. "For years, I have watched you through the pool. I watched you in 1984 at Benowen, when you were new to the opal and did not yet know what it would ask of you. I watched you in 1985 and 1986, and then the events of 1986, which were... instructive." He let the pause carry its weight. He was good at pauses. "I watched the television program. The one where you told the world what you are."

Jace met his eyes.

"You told the world what I am as well," Aldus said. "You understand this. You and your Visionary and your island and your amulets were presented to one hundred and fourteen million people, and what was presented was not only you. What was presented was everything that surrounds you. The history. The conflict. The enemy who has been trying to take Aelin for nine hundred years." His voice had something in it now that had not been there at the beginning, a controlled heat, the contained fury of a man who had been very careful for a very long time and found that care undone in forty-two minutes of television. "I have been patient. I have been thorough. I have done this work for nine centuries with a degree of care that you cannot comprehend, because nine centuries is outside your experience and it requires a quality of patience that human beings are not built for. I am not a human being. I was, once. I am not anymore."

He stood.

"For every minute of that program," Aldus said, "I intend to return something to you. One interval of pain for every minute that you told the world what it did not need to know. Forty-two minutes of broadcast content. Forty-two intervals." He looked at Jace. "You can end this at any point. The word is yield. Say it, and the intervals stop."

Jace looked at him.

"Do you understand," Aldus said.

"Yes," Jace said.

The first interval began.

What Aldus brought:

Cold first, deeper than the ambient chill, the temperature dropping to the point where breathing was a visible thing and the wet skin was conducting it directly into the body's core. Then the shock, conducted through the chains, the enchanted metal carrying the current in a way that made the muscles seize and the breath stop and the white opal blaze uselessly against the suppression.

Jace did not yield.

The interval ended. Aldus said: "Do you yield."

"No," Jace said.

The second interval. Psionic. The quality of a thousand-year-old mind pressing against the interior of another mind with the weight of everything it had accumulated, not Connor's empathic work, not anything Jace had encountered from a human source, but something older and heavier and more practiced. Finding the edges of Jace's interior architecture and pressing against them, looking for cracks, looking for the places that the 1986 kidnapping had made thinner.

Jace did not yield.

"Do you yield."

"No."

The third interval was physical. Aldus crossed to him and hit him three times with the force of a six-foot-eight man who had been fighting for a thousand years, who had the strength of something that had gone beyond human but remembered human combat, who had not lost anything in the centuries except mortality and softness and the capacity for pity. The third hit broke something in Jace's ribs. He felt it go, not the shattering of it but the clean crack, the structural failure of bone under impact.

He did not yield.

"Do you yield."

"No."

The intervals continued.

Cold. Shock. Psionic. Physical. Cold again, lower, the temperature now past the point where the body began making internal calculations about what it could afford to maintain and what it could not. The wet skin and the wet clothes and the chains conducting everything directly to the places where the body was most vulnerable to it.

Each time: "Do you yield."

Each time: "No."

At the twentieth interval, Aldus stopped. He looked at Jace with something that was not admiration, was farther from admiration than nearly anything, but had the quality of a man encountering a resistance that exceeded his model of what the resistance would be.

"You are more stubborn than Daeron was," Aldus said. "I held Daeron for six days. He never said yield either. But he had the quality of a man who was enduring. You have the quality of a man who is refusing." "There is a difference."

Jace said nothing.

"I want to understand the training," Aldus said. "I can feel it through the pool, the signature of a formation transfer, the way the power moves between five men in alignment. I cannot determine whether you are close to the Sacrifice or whether you are still years away. I want to know."

Jace looked at him. "No," he said.

"That is not the question I am asking."

"I know what you're asking," Jace said. His voice was rough, the cold and the shock and the twenty intervals had done things to his voice. "The answer is no."

Aldus looked at him. Then the twenty-first interval began.

It continued.

At the thirty-fifth interval, Aldus asked again: "Do you yield."

Jace lifted his head, which required more effort than it should have required, and said: "No."

At the thirty-ninth, Aldus asked: "Tell me about the formation. Tell me where you are in the training. I will stop."

Jace looked at him through eyes that were not fully focusing. "No," he said.

At the fortieth, Aldus said: "I have eliminated Darrell Voss. I want you to know that. The man who broke his silence publicly. Who went to the press with what he knew and made himself a spectacle of it." He paused, not for drama, but with the control of a man covering complete information. "He was one of the men who helped subdue you in 1986. He held the whip on your Sentinel. He was very willing to do what was asked of him for the right compensation, and equally willing to sell that service when a better compensation presented itself. He was an easy and necessary life to remove from reality. I found him in March. He has been dealt with." He paused again, letting it carry weight. "I mention this not because I think it will break you but because I want you to understand that the consequences of the special reach further than you. They will continue to reach."

Jace was quiet. Aldus had named Ricky deliberately. He knew he had named Ricky deliberately. The calculation behind it was obvious and it had still landed.

"You should have started with Voss," he said. His voice was very rough now. "What happened was his doing. The man was a coward looking for a payday. Blame him."

"I have blamed him and addressed him," Aldus said. "You are the reckoning for the decision that was made after his betrayal."

The forty-first interval.

The forty-second.

When it ended, the room was quiet.

Jace was still upright because the chains were still holding him upright. His head was down. His breathing was wrong, the broken ribs making the mechanics of breathing more complicated than they should have been, the cold having done things to his core temperature that the Guardian's enhanced physiology was working to correct and was not fully succeeding at.

"Do you yield," Aldus said.

Jace lifted his head.

He did not look like a man who was about to yield. He did not look like a man who had just been through forty-two intervals of cold and shock and psionic assault and physical impact. He looked, with his eyes focusing, with the opal at his chest burning low and suppressed and still burning, like a man who had been through all of it and had arrived at something on the other side of it that was not broken.

It was fury.

Not hot fury. Not the performed variety. The cold specific fury of a man who had been pushed past the point where ordinary emotion applied and had found something underneath it that was older and cleaner and entirely ungovernable.

"Why," Aldus said, and there was a note in his voice that was not quite frustration and not quite respect but lived in the space between them. "Why won't you yield."

Jace looked at him.

"Because I will die a thousand times for Aelin," he said. His voice was rough and clear. "And you will die at my hands, Aldus." A breath. The opal blazing against the chains, the suppression cracking under something that was past the threshold Aldus had described, past it and still rising. "Former king of Cruxen." The chains were warming. The metal itself was warming. "Fallen Conqueror of destiny." The stone around the shackle anchors was beginning to crack.

Aldus moved.

He was not fast enough.

"I AM YOUR END."

The Guardian power released.

It was not a controlled attack. It was not aimed. It was not the precise, directed use of the white opal that six years of training had built toward. It was everything, the accumulated rage of forty-two intervals and the cold fury of the speech and the deep reserves of Guardian power that had been pressed down and suppressed for the entire duration of the captivity, releasing in a single catastrophic detonation of opaline light that had no target and no direction and hit everything.

The chains shattered. The stone around the anchor points shattered. The wall cracked from floor to vaulted ceiling. The artifacts on the nearest shelf went in all directions. The scrying pool's surface exploded upward and came down as dark rain.

And Aldus, who had not moved quite far enough away, who had moved fast, who had moved faster than a man his size should have been able to move, but not fast enough, felt the edge of the blast catch his left leg below the knee.

His scream filled the dimension.

Jace fell to the floor.

He hit the stone and lay there, face down, the shackles gone, the chains in pieces around him, the opal dim and spent. His ribs were wrong. Breathing was compromised. His hands were cut from the chain fragments. His face was cut. He was on the floor of Aldus's dimension after forty-two minutes and he was still breathing and the chains were off.

That was the complete list of things that were currently true.

Aldus's screaming had changed in character, the initial cry of impact fading into something ongoing, something that carried a quality Jace had never heard from a thousand-year-old sorcerer, which was the quality of someone processing a physical loss that was not going to be undone. The leg below the left knee.

Jace got to his hands and knees.

His elbows tried to give. He locked them.

He looked up.

There were red sparks in the air. Not many, a handful, scattered, hanging in the dim wrongly-lit atmosphere of the dimension like embers that had strayed from a fire. Red. Not the yellow of the torches. Not the opaline white of the amulet. Red, which was a red he knew, the color of one amulet, which in the fog of pain and cold and spent power registered as:

Nathan.

He started crawling toward the red sparks.

Aldus, behind him, was getting his bearings back. The cry had faded. The breathing was ragged, a man managing catastrophic injury with the capacity of something that had been alive for a thousand years and had developed, through that duration, a relationship with pain that was different from the relationship an ordinary person had with it. Not immunity. Familiarity. He was going to do something. It was going to take him a moment. Jace did not have many moments.

He crawled.

The kinetic blast caught him in the right side. The ribs that were already broken took it, not just cracked now but driven, and the lung was punctured, he could feel the wrongness of it with each breath, the sucking quality that meant the lung was compromised. He cried out. He kept crawling.

The red sparks were deepening. More of them now, coalescing, the scattered embers organizing into something with shape and direction, not random anymore but intentional, the quality of Nathan applying the garnet amulet to a problem with the full force of a genius-level intelligence and a capacity for Conjurer power that was, at this moment, everything.

Aldus leveled another blast. It missed, hit something structural to Jace's left that shattered and threw debris. Fragments cut his face and hands. He kept crawling.

"Nathan," he said. Or tried to say. What came out was a rough, broken version of the word, barely a word at all, more like the shape of it.

Through the forming tear, through the rift not yet wide enough to see through, still more suggestion than opening, he heard Nathan's voice.

Calling his name.

"Nathan." Clearer this time. The sound finding more of what it was supposed to be.

The rift widened. Movement on the other side. Shapes, light, the shapes of people. He reached the edge of where the rift was forming, reaching into the space where it was thinnest.

He put his hand through.

LOS ANGELES The Forum — Backstage July 14, 1989

Nathan had been working at the closed point for what felt like a very long time and was probably twelve minutes.

He had no precedent for this. Dimensional rifts were not Veil architecture, they followed different rules, rules that his knowledge of Veil structural principles did not map onto cleanly, rules that he was working out in real time with the garnet amulet and the full capacity of an IQ of one hundred ninety-eight and the motivation of a man whose brother was on the other side. The Brotherhood bond told him Jace was alive, the Threefold Bond carried the information clearly even through the dimensional barrier, the signature of Jace's presence present and diminished and present and diminished and present.

Alive. Diminishing.

Working faster.

Connor was at his left shoulder. Erik and Ricky were flanking them. Sidney was behind them, keeping everyone back, keeping the room clear of the people who were not going to be able to help and were going to need help to understand what they were watching.

The bond was carrying information that Connor was not sharing aloud but that his face was showing, the green eyes doing what they did when the empathy was receiving something that Connor was working hard not to project outward. He was feeling what Jace was feeling through the bond. Not all of it, the dimensional barrier was attenuating it, making it arrive in fragments and impressions rather than clean signal. But enough.

Connor put his hand on Nathan's shoulder. Not speaking. Just there. Grounding Nathan in the way that Connor had learned, over six years, that Nathan needed to be grounded when the work was at the edge of what was possible.

Nathan worked.

The garnet was burning at full intensity, not the contained working heat of ordinary use but something higher, something that was costing him, that he could feel as a drain in the way that high-intensity Conjurer work always felt as a drain. He was tearing at the dimensional fabric at the point where the rift had closed, finding the scar tissue of it, finding the lines along which it could be forced open again. Not wide. Wide enough.

He felt the moment when his work connected with something on the other side.

He pushed harder.

"Jace," he said. His voice going through the forming tear. "Jace."

And then something came through the tear from the other side.

A hand.

Connor moved first, grabbed it. Nathan grabbed it. Erik got his arm around the wrist. Ricky got both hands on the forearm.

Tommy Lee was already there. He had been on his feet and moving toward the tear the moment it started forming, twelve minutes on the floor watching Nathan work had not made him passive, only ready, and he got both hands around Jace's forearm above Ricky's grip, the drummer's hands knowing exactly how to hold something that needed to not be let go.

Bryan was alongside him, half a step behind, getting his grip on Jace's upper arm with the methodical certainty of a man who had spent his whole life knowing where force needed to land.

Gideon had been standing at the closed point since the moment the rift snapped shut. When the tear started forming he had not moved back. He got both hands under Jace's arm at the shoulder, the protection instinct that had been running on empty for twelve minutes finding something to do at last.

They pulled.

The pull was weight that the Brotherhood had not expected, dead weight, the weight of a man who was not pulling back, who was on his hands and knees on the other side and had used everything he had to get to this point and had nothing left for the return. Seven sets of hands pulling now, not four. They pulled harder.

Jace came through the rift.

They all went down, all of them, the Brotherhood and Tommy and Bryan and Gideon and Jace, a controlled fall that was not controlled, the tangle of bodies that had been pulling hard against resistance and had the resistance give all at once. They hit the floor of the Los Angeles backstage and Jace was at the bottom of it and the rift was still open and from the other side came an explosion, the sound of something large and furious being detonated in a confined space, and Aldus screaming.

Nathan stood up.

He turned to the rift.

He raised the Conjurer amulet and began to close it.

The rift did not want to close. Dimensional architecture sealed differently from how it opened, the tear wanted to persist, the edges pulling against the closure with the stubbornness of a wound that kept reopening. Nathan forced it. He pushed the garnet's fire against the edges, found the seam, pushed the two sides toward each other with the full strength of everything he had, which was, at this moment, not fully what he had in ordinary circumstances because he had been working for twelve minutes at the edge of his range.

He kept pushing.

The blast came through before the rift closed.

Not aimed. Not targeted. The desperation of a thousand-year-old sorcerer on the other side of a closing door who wanted the last word, power sent through the narrowing gap with the force of something that had nothing to lose in the sending.

It hit Nathan in the abdomen.

He did not stop closing the rift.

He found the last of what he had. He pressed the garnet fire against the remaining gap with the focused determination of a man who had spent his life being the smartest person in every room he had ever occupied, who had built a recording studio and a university and a structural ward around the island he lived on, who had designed a crossbow harness and the Veil maintenance protocols and the formula for Aelinium alloy, and who was now applying everything he was to a six-inch gap in dimensional fabric because his brother was on the floor behind him.

The rift closed.

Completely. The scar tissue sealed. The dimensional architecture finished.

Nathan dropped to the floor.

He was bleeding from his nose. Blood in his mouth, the sharp iron taste of it, he had bitten the inside of his cheek when the blast hit, hard enough to cut through. He was coughing. His abdomen was going to bruise impressively. He was not feeling what internal injury felt like, which was the relevant information.

He lay on the floor of the Los Angeles backstage and breathed and thought about the dimensional architecture of what he had just done, which was going to require documentation before he forgot the details, which meant he needed a notebook, which meant he needed to get off the floor.

He did not get off the floor. Not yet.

Three feet away, Samantha and Connor were at Jace's sides. Jace was telling Samantha he loved her, not directed at her, not a statement to her, just said, over and over, half-delirious from the pain and the shock and the aftermath of forty-two minutes of Aldus's calibrated revenge. Telling her because it was true and because he was not sure of enough other things right now to say anything else and the truth was always available.

Samantha was holding his hand and not crying and not saying anything and she was present in the way she was always present, which was completely.

"Jace," Connor said. Low. Direct. Jace's eyes found him. Connor held his gaze with the quality of the bond in operation, not words, not even clear impression, just presence, the Visionary saying through the thing they shared: I see you. You're here. You're back. "You're back," Connor said aloud, because sometimes the bond needed words to arrive fully.

"Yeah," Jace said. His voice was very rough. "Yeah. I'm back."

The women had come back from the kitchen twelve minutes ago. They had stood in this room and watched Nathan work at the closed point of the rift and had not left, had not moved to the exits, had not looked away. They had watched Jace come back through, the four Brotherhood members pulling together, the tangle of bodies hitting the floor, and then Jace at the bottom of it, and the first clear look at what forty-two minutes on the other side of that rift had done to him.

He had not looked like this when he walked into the room. The man who had stood in this backstage two hours ago, six foot four, warm, talking to Kathy Valentine about drums and the opal, did not look like the man on the floor. The wet clothes. The cuts across his face and hands, blood drying at the edges of them. The way he was holding his side where the ribs had gone. The color of him, the wrong pallor of someone whose body temperature had been taken somewhere it should not have been taken.

Belinda had both hands over her mouth. Charlotte Caffey had turned away briefly and then turned back. Debbi Peterson was very still.

Susanna Hoffs crossed to him.

She did not ask. She simply came, the way you came when someone was on the floor. She knelt beside Jace on the side that Samantha was not, the other side, the unguarded side, and took his hand. His hand was cut and cold and she held it carefully, the way you held something that had been hurt.

"Hey," she said. Quietly. Not performing comfort. Just there, talking to him the way you talked to someone when you needed them to know there was a person with them. "You're back. We've got you."

Jace's eyes found her. It took a moment, the focus coming back in pieces, the room assembling itself around him through the fog of pain and cold and aftermath. He looked at Susanna Hoffs kneeling beside him on the concrete floor of the Los Angeles backstage, holding his hand, and his face shifted. Not relief exactly. Recognition. Another person. Here.

"Yeah," he said. His voice was still very rough. "Thank you."

Susanna nodded. She did not let go of his hand.

Behind her, across the room, Jane Wiedlin had sat down on a road case. She was not crying but she was close. Kathy Valentine had her arm around Charlotte. The quality of women who had watched something done to a person and were processing the distance between what they had read in a newspaper and what it looked like when it was real and in front of them.

Tommy Lee was on the floor to the right of where the rift had been. He had not moved in the two or so minutes since Jace came through. He was sitting with his back against the wall and the broken chair leg in his hands and watching what was happening with the expression of a man whose understanding of the world had been fundamentally reorganized and who was still in the process of finding the new configuration.

Bryan Hitt was standing beside Kevin Cronin. He was watching Jace. He had the expression he had when he had processed a thing and was deciding what to do with it, not the processing expression, the decided one.

He turned to Kevin.

"Tell me," Bryan said.

Kevin looked at him.

"Everything," Bryan said. "Tell me everything."

Kevin held his gaze. Then he nodded. "Yes," he said. "Alright. Yes."

Sidney's voice cut across the room: "Medical personnel. Now. We have two injured."

Two, because Nathan was on the floor and Jace was on the floor, and Sidney was always going to be the person who counted accurately, even in this, even now.

The concert was cancelled. The show was not going on. Nobody in the room was surprised by this. Some of them were going to need a significant period of time before any show felt like it could go on again.

The Go-Gos and the Bangles and INXS and Tears for Fears and Motley Crue and REO Speedwagon were all standing in a Los Angeles backstage with the downed creatures of the first battle still on the floor and the scorch marks of Nathan's fire on the walls and the scars of a dimensional rift in the air and two men on the ground. Belinda Carlisle was sitting on a step with her head in her hands. Roland Orzabal was standing very still with the chair leg still in his hands, looking at the closed point of the rift. Michael Hutchence had found Ricky and was standing with him in the way of two people who have been through something and need the proximity of another person who was also through it.

Tommy Lee was still sitting with his back against the wall. He had not moved.

Vince Neil came across the room and sat down beside him on the floor.

They sat there together without saying anything.

It was enough.

LOS ANGELES The Forum — Backstage Later, July 14, 1989

The doctors who arrived were the Hartman security team's medical personnel, two EMTs who had been positioned outside the venue for the event, who came through the door at Sidney's summons and who, to their credit, handled the scene with the professional composure of people who had been briefed that working with Battle Cry involved an expanded definition of possible and had apparently taken the briefing seriously.

Nathan was assessed first, abdominal impact, no signs of internal injury, the bleeding from his nose and mouth was superficial, the cough was the aftereffect of the force of the blast rather than anything structural. He was going to need to rest. He was going to need monitoring. He was, as he had suspected, essentially alright.

Jace was not essentially alright.

The EMT assessment was rapid and thorough, the broken ribs, the compromised lung, the multiple lacerations, the core temperature that was lower than it should have been for a man in a July Los Angeles backstage, the evidence of sustained impact to multiple body areas that told a story of time and method. The EMT working on Jace was the kind of professional who did not ask questions during assessment, which was the right call, and who communicated his findings to Sidney with the efficient brevity of someone who understood that his role was not to understand what had happened but to address the results of it.

"He needs a hospital," the EMT said.

"He has one," Sidney said.

The portal to Aelin opened in the corner of the room, Ricky, the Sentinel's work clean and precise after the forced blockage of the last hour, the aperture steady. Sidney looked at it and then at the room, at the thirty-odd people who were watching.

Nobody moved to stop them. Nobody asked what was happening. They had all just watched what had happened, and the context for a portal to a cloaked island nation was abundantly available.

Kevin Cronin was standing with Bryan Hitt and Dave Amato, a man having a conversation he had been preparing to have for two months and was now having because circumstances had removed the option of a more controlled setting. He was not performing it. He was telling them. The way you told people things when the time for managed disclosure had passed.

Bryan was listening. His expression was the decided one, the one past processing, the one that had assessed the incoming information and was now filing it in the correct place. He would have questions. He was not asking them yet. He was letting Kevin finish.

Dave was listening with the adaptability of a man who had been in enough impossible rooms to know that the skill was receiving the information, not managing his response to it. He was receiving.

Sidney said: "We're taking Jace through the portal. Nathan as well."

Galena was already beside Nathan, she had come through the portal the moment it opened, the way she always came when there was something wrong with Nathan, which was immediately and without waiting to be asked. He had gotten himself to a sitting position and was resisting, with the quiet stubbornness of Nathan, the EMT's suggestion that he remain prone.

"Doctors," she said, not to Nathan.

"I'm alright," Nathan said.

"Doctors," Galena said again, with the finality of a woman who was going to win this argument and was not going to spend more than two words on winning it.

"I can walk," Nathan said.

"You can walk next to me," Galena said, which was not a concession.

"I'm going to walk through the portal and then I'm going to the Archive," Nathan said.

"You are going to the hospital wing and then, after the doctors have cleared you, you can go wherever you choose," Galena said, with the finality of a woman who governed an island nation and had been doing so for fifteen years and who had not once in those fifteen years lost an argument when it mattered.

Nathan did not argue further.

Samantha was beside Jace. She had not moved from beside Jace since the moment he came back through the rift, and she was not going to move from beside Jace until he was somewhere that was not a Los Angeles backstage floor. She looked at the portal. She looked at Jace.

"Can you move," she said.

"Yes," Jace said. He was not sure this was entirely true. It was true enough.

With Connor on one side and Erik on the other and Samantha ahead of them watching his face the whole time, Jace walked through the portal.

Sidney went last. He turned at the portal threshold and looked at the room, at Kevin continuing to talk to Bryan and Dave, at Tommy still sitting against the wall with Vince beside him, at Roland Orzabal who had finally put down the chair leg and was sitting on a road case staring at the closed point of the rift, at Michael Hutchence and Ricky still standing together, at the rest of the room finding its way toward something that was not yet ordinary but was moving in that direction.

He made note of the configuration of people and the information they carried. He would need to address this, the number of witnesses, the expanded circle of knowledge, the question of what oaths or agreements or conversations would need to happen in the days ahead. That was tomorrow's problem. Tonight's problem was on the other side of the portal.

He went through.

The portal closed.

The Forum backstage was,, very quiet.

Then Belinda Carlisle lifted her head from her hands and looked at the room. Then Tommy Lee got up off the floor. Then Roland said something to Curt in a low voice, and Curt responded, and the two of them had the first of several conversations about this night that they would continue, privately, for many years.

The concert did not happen. The Forum made the announcement over the arena PA, medical emergency, show postponed, and seventeen thousand people filed out with the philosophical goodwill of people who had paid for tickets to a charity event and had therefore already given something before the show started. The charity did not lose the night's donation, because Nathan had structured it so that the donations were completed before the event rather than at it, because Nathan had thought about what happened if something went wrong and had structured accordingly.

He always structured accordingly.

Seven hundred and forty thousand dollars for forty-seven school music programs across eleven Los Angeles districts. The programs ran for the following academic year. Two of them, with the matching grant renewal, ran for three more years after that.

The boy from Draiocht County who sat in the third row of Connor's Tuesday seven-thirty music theory class was, by the time those programs ended, a working violinist in the Aelinian National Orchestra.

His name was Cillian, and none of that is in this chapter, but it happened.

AELIN Castle of Elders, Hospital Wing July 14 through July 22, 1989

The hospital wing of the Castle of Elders was on the east side of the castle, with windows that faced the Aelinian morning when it came. It had been built in Galena's first year as Prime Minister, upgraded twice since, staffed by three resident physicians and a rotating nursing team who understood the medical requirements of five men with amulets and enhanced physiologies and the occasional Guardian-specific complication.

Dr. Oksana was the senior physician and the one who had seen the most unusual presentations over the years. She assessed Jace on arrival with the combination of clinical thoroughness and personal warmth that was her professional register, not pretending the warmth wasn't there, not letting it interfere with the clinical work, holding both simultaneously. She had been doing this for fifteen years and she had learned, over those years, that the warmth was not an obstacle to good medicine but a component of it.

"Three ribs," she told Samantha, because Samantha was the one who would need to know the full picture and who would receive it most usefully. "The lung is compromised but not collapsed. We'll manage that. The core temperature is lower than I'd like but it's coming up. The lacerations are numerous and mostly superficial." She paused. "He's going to need eight days minimum."

Samantha nodded. "I'll be here," she said.

"I know," Dr. Oksana said. She did not argue with this. She had learned, over the years, not to argue with Samantha about proximity to Jace during recovery.

The first day was the hardest. The lung required management, not surgery, but active monitoring and the breathing exercises that Dr. Oksana specified and which Jace performed with the stubbornness of a man who understood that compliance was the fastest route to the other side of the medical situation. The ribs required time, which the Guardian's enhanced healing would shorten but could not skip. The core temperature came up steadily and was normal by end of day one. The lacerations were cleaned and closed.

By the end of day two, Jace was sitting up.

By the end of day three, he was arguing with Dr. Oksana about the specifics of the bed rest requirement, which Dr. Oksana was winning without apparent effort.

Samantha did not leave. She slept in the chair, not the small uncomfortable one, Dr. Oksana had arranged for the large chair from the visiting family area to be moved into the room on day one, and she woke when he woke and was awake before he was and was there when the nightmares came, which they did, which was expected and which she had prepared herself for.

The first night, he woke at three in the morning from something that left his hands locked around the edge of the mattress and his breathing wrong and the opal blazing in the dark. Samantha was there before he was fully awake, not touching him until he could locate himself, just there, visible, present, her voice quiet and clear: "You're here. You're in the hospital wing. I'm right here."

He found her face. His breathing began to slow.

"I'm here," she said again.

He let go of the mattress.

"I love you," he said. Still rough. Still the words from the floor of the backstage, still the thing he was most sure of.

"I know," she said. "I love you too. You can go back to sleep."

He went back to sleep.

She stayed awake for another hour, watching him breathe, counting the even rhythm of it against the night.

Nathan was in the hospital wing for three days. He spent the first day asleep, which was unusual enough for Nathan that Galena monitored it with the attention of someone who knew that Nathan sleeping without resistance meant Nathan was genuinely depleted. He woke on the morning of day two with the characteristic quality of a man who had been asleep and was now done being asleep and intended to get back to things. Galena was in the chair beside him.

"The Archive," Nathan said.

"After Dr. Oksana clears you," Galena said.

"I need to document the dimensional rift mechanics before the details fade."

"They will not fade. You remember everything."

"I remember everything accurately," Nathan said. "But the experiential quality of working at the edge of that kind of architecture, the felt sense of it, that has some decay rate. I need to document the phenomenology while it's current."

Galena looked at him with the expression she had when Nathan was making a completely valid argument for doing something she was not yet going to let him do. "After Dr. Oksana," she said.

Dr. Oksana cleared him at noon on day two.

Nathan was in the Archive by twelve-fifteen.

He documented the dimensional rift mechanics for four hours. The documentation ran to forty-seven pages of precise, dense notation that would later become the foundation of the first formal Aelinian study of non-Veil dimensional architecture. Galena brought him lunch at two o'clock, which he ate without fully returning from the documentation, and brought him tea at four, which he drank. He came out of the Archive at four-thirty and went to Jace's room in the hospital wing.

Jace was sitting up. Samantha was beside him with a book. The opal was at its ordinary low burn at Jace's chest.

"How long," Nathan said.

"Three ribs and the lung," Jace said. "Eight days."

Nathan looked at him with the assessment of a man who was not a physician but had a complete working knowledge of human physiology and the parameters of Guardian healing. "Six," he said. "Possibly five. The ribs will be seventy percent by day five at your healing rate. The lung will be functionally clear by day four."

"Dr. Oksana said eight," Jace said.

"Dr. Oksana is being appropriately conservative," Nathan said. "I am being accurate."

"I'm going to follow Dr. Oksana's recommendation," Jace said.

Nathan was quiet. He looked at Jace with the look he had when he was making a decision about whether to say the thing he was thinking or the thing that was appropriate to say in the situation.

"I'm glad you're here," Nathan said.

Not the thing he had been weighing. The thing underneath it. The unguarded thing, said with the quality that Nathan reserved for the moments when he let the precision of his ordinary mode drop away and just said what was true.

"I know," Jace said.

"The dimensional rift..." Nathan stopped. "I will explain the mechanics to you in full when you're out of here. What I did. What I found. What that kind of architecture is and how it can be worked. I want to document it completely while the phenomenology is current and then I want to give you the full account when you're upright."

"I know what I saw," Jace said. "On that side. The red sparks. I crawled toward them because..."

"Because red means Nathan," Connor said from the doorway.

They both looked at him. Connor came into the room with the ease of a man who had been walking into hospital rooms to sit with his brothers since 1983.

He sat in the chair on the other side of the bed from Samantha. He looked at Jace.

"I could feel you through the bond the whole time," Connor said. "I need you to know that. It was, attenuated. The dimensional barrier made it like receiving a signal through interference. I couldn't hear you clearly. But I could feel you. The whole time." "I want you to know that."

Jace looked at him. The bond was carrying something between them that did not require words and that was, in the privacy of the moment, allowed to just be what it was, two men who had been through everything together, one of them on a hospital bed and one of them in a chair, the bond between them loud and clear and undamaged.

"I know," Jace said.

The Brotherhood rotated through over the eight days with the rhythms of who they were.

Erik came on day one and sat for four hours without talking. He and Jace did not need to talk. Erik's presence was itself a statement, the solidity of the Warrior at rest, weight centered, hands loose, occupying the room with the permanence of something that was going to be there until it decided to leave. He left when Jace was asleep and came back the next day. He did this every day for eight days.

Ricky came on day two and talked continuously for most of it, which was also what Jace needed, the quality of Ricky talking, which moved through six different subjects without apparent transition and maintained a tone of cheerful forward momentum that was the antidote to lying in a hospital bed with broken ribs thinking about forty-two minutes in a dimension that smelled of old stone and cold metal. Ricky made him laugh three times. The third time hurt the ribs, which Ricky apologized for without any apparent sincerity.

"You did that on purpose," Jace said.

"I did not do that on purpose," Ricky said. "I did it because I'm funny. There is a distinction."

Nathan came every day and brought documentation. On day four he brought the forty-seven-page rift mechanics document and read selected sections aloud, which was, with Nathan, a form of intimacy.

Connor came every evening. He never stayed long. He came, sat with Jace for forty minutes or an hour, said what needed to be said or sat with what did not need to be said, and left. On day six he came in the evening and sat and after a while said: "The shard is quieter since you came back."

Jace looked at him.

"I don't mean it's resolved," Connor said. "I mean, something about the bond being fully intact again after the barrier. The clarity of it coming back. It settled something." He was quiet. "I wanted you to know that. I don't know why. I just wanted you to know."

"Good," Jace said.

Connor nodded. "Good," he said.

They sat in the evening hospital wing quiet and let the Atlantic do what the Atlantic did outside the window, which was be enormous and present and entirely indifferent to the concerns of the people watching it, which was occasionally the most comforting thing available.

The Brotherhood's assessment happened on day seven, in Jace's hospital room with Jace in the bed and the other four distributed around the room and Galena present because Galena was always present when the Brotherhood assessed things and nobody had ever suggested otherwise.

Aldus had been angry. That was the primary conclusion, arrived at from multiple angles.

The kidnapping had been revenge, for the special, for the exposure, for Darrell Voss going public with what he knew, which had been the precipitating event even if Voss himself had been eliminated. Voss had been one of Aldus's people, had participated in the 1986 kidnapping, had helped subdue Jace, had held the whip on Ricky, and had decided at some point that his own interests were better served by talking than by staying quiet. What he said publicly had broken everything open. That Aldus had eliminated him was not a surprise. That Aldus had used it as a weapon in the fortieth interval, naming what Voss had done to two of the five men in this room, was the cruelty of someone who understood exactly which details would land and chose them with care. The torture had been calibrated to the special's runtime, which was deliberate, which was the mark of a man making a point rather than a man seeking information. He had asked about the Sacrifice training twice in the forty-two intervals. He had not asked about it the other forty times. The information he wanted was secondary to the punishment he wanted to deliver.

"He found out what he came to find out anyway," Connor said. "Even without you telling him anything. He found out by watching you not tell him."

"What did he find out," Jace said.

"That you can take forty-two intervals of his best work and still say no at the end of it," Connor said. "That the Guardian power, suppressed by enchanted chains and depleted by sustained torture, can still produce a blast that takes a leg below the knee." He paused. "He came to test whether you were as strong as the special suggested. He has his answer."

"Is that worse or better," Ricky said.

"It's real," Nathan said. "Whether it's better or worse is less useful than knowing it's accurate."

Erik said: "He'll be months recovering from the leg. Maybe longer. He's a thousand years old and has a relationship with pain that ordinary people don't have, but the structural loss, the mobility, that changes things regardless of age or tolerance."

"It changes what he can do," Jace said. "It doesn't change what he wants."

"No," Erik said. "It doesn't change what he wants."

The Sacrifice was what the assessment came to, because that was where it had always been coming to. The momentum had been building since January. Sidney's training log entries had been building toward it since December. The transfer duration had been building toward it since the eleven seconds on December thirtieth and the eighty-two seconds in March and the hundred and fourteen seconds in June.

"The Sacrifice is the answer," Connor said. "It has always been the answer. It is now urgent."

"I know," Jace said.

"He will come back," Connor said. "When he's recovered. He'll be more patient next time, and he'll be more motivated, and he will not make the same mistake twice."

"I know," Jace said. He looked at his brothers. At the five of them in the room, Nathan with his documentation, Erik with his soldier's steadiness, Ricky with the loose readiness he always carried, Connor with the emerald burning at his chest. At Galena in the chair by the window, running the island that had been running for eight hundred years. At Samantha in the chair on the other side of the bed, who had not left his side in seven days and was not going to leave in the one that remained. "I know," he said, for the third time, and it meant all of it.

The formation was going to resume when Dr. Oksana cleared him. Sidney had already begun adjusting the schedule. The Sacrifice was the objective and the timeline was now.

He held that thought and let it be what it was, not frightening, not distant, not abstract. Present. Real. The thing that was coming, that he was ready for, that was the reason for everything that had come before it.

Daeron's folio: I cannot tell you what it is to be that and also still yourself. I can tell you that both things are true simultaneously.

He understood now. He had understood since the transfers got long. He would keep understanding, more fully, until the day came.

BACK IN LOS ANGELES July 14, 1989 — Later

The aftermath happened in stages.

Kevin Cronin finished telling Bryan and Dave everything on the night of the concert, sitting in the Forum's empty backstage after everyone else had gone, the crew having cleared the creatures' remains. Kevin talked for two hours. Bryan listened. Dave listened. Neither of them interrupted.

When Kevin finished, Dave said: "How long have you known."

"Since 1984," Kevin said.

"Five years," Dave said.

"Yes."

Dave was quiet. "And the oath."

"Voluntary. No compulsion. Connor asked and we agreed."

Dave processed this. "I'd like to take it," he said.

Kevin looked at him.

"I was in this room tonight," Dave said. "I fought in this room. I watched what happened when, when the rift opened. I'm already in it." "I'd like to do it properly."

Kevin looked at Bryan.

Bryan said: "What he said." "I was in a room tonight with armored spider creatures and I hit them with a steel bar. At this point the oath seems like the least complicated thing I've been asked to do."

Two days later, Connor came to Los Angeles. The oath was taken in a hotel room in Silver Lake, which was not where these things were usually taken but which was where they were available to be taken, and which Connor had decided was sufficient. The hotel room did not diminish the oath. The oath was what it was regardless of the room.

Bryan shook Connor's hand afterward and said: "Tell Jace the horses thing stands. When he's recovered. Whenever he's ready." He looked at the hotel room, the standard lamp, the generic art, the entirely ordinary quality of a room where an eight-hundred-year-old oath had just been administered. "Also tell him I took the oath in a Holiday Inn. I feel like he should know that."

"It's a Marriott," Connor said.

"Even better," Bryan said.

Michael Hutchence called Connor's road number three days after the concert. They talked for an hour. Michael asked about the island, not the history, not the war, but the daily texture of it. What it was like to wake up there. What the people were like. Whether the music he made there sounded different because of where it was made.

Connor answered honestly, which was the only way he knew how to answer. Yes, he said. The music sounds different. Not better or worse. Different in the way that music sounds different when the room it's made in is a room that has been inhabited for eight hundred years by people who understood what music was for.

"I want to come sometime," Michael said. "If that's ever something that's..."

"Yes," Connor said. Before Michael finished the question. Because the answer was already yes and it did not require the question to be complete. "Yes. Come."

Michael came in September. That's not in this chapter either.

Tommy Lee called Jace's room in the hospital wing on day five. The call was patched through Kavanaugh to the castle's telephone system and arrived with the quality of something that had traveled a significant distance, which it had.

"Hey," Tommy said.

"Hey," Jace said.

There was a pause that was comfortable in the way of pauses between people who have established enough shared ground that the pauses don't need to be managed.

"Are you okay," Tommy said.

"Getting there," Jace said. "Five more sessions with Dr. Oksana and then I'm apparently free."

"I'm sorry I didn't..." Tommy stopped. "I was right there. I was right there and before I could even..."

"Tommy."

"I know. I know there was nothing anyone could have..."

"Tommy."

"Yeah."

"You were right there," Jace said. "That's what I know. You were right there."

"Yeah," Tommy said. Quietly. "Yeah. Okay."

They talked for forty minutes about nothing much, about drumming, about Nevada, about something Mick had said at rehearsal that week. At the end of the call Tommy said: "The new REO drummer. Bryan."

"Yeah."

"He's something. The way he moved in there."

"I know," Jace said. "He and I have some things to talk about."

"Rodeo things."

"Rodeo things and other things."

"I want to be part of the other things," Tommy said.

"You already are," Jace said.

AELIN Castle of Elders, Hospital Wing Day Six, July 19, 1989

A message arrived through Kavanaugh's office, forwarded to the castle: Bryan Hitt to Jace Elias, via Kevin Cronin.

It said, in full:

When you're ready, not recovered, not back to training, just ready, I'd like to come and see the island. Not as a visitor. Just as someone who was in that room and wants to understand what he was in the room with. No rush. Whenever it's right.

Jace read it twice. He was in the hospital bed with two broken ribs in the late stages of knitting and a lung that Dr. Oksana had declared functionally clear that morning, which meant he had two more days and then he was out. Samantha was in the chair beside him with a book. The window showed the Aelinian afternoon, the Atlantic bright, the island green, the castle solid on its peninsula.

He set down the message.

"Good news?" Samantha said, without looking up from her book.

"Bryan Hitt wants to come to the island."

She looked up. "The REO drummer."

"Yes."

She assessed this with the quality she brought to assessments, brief, thorough, complete. "Do you want him to come."

Jace looked out the window at the Atlantic. He thought about a night in a Los Angeles backstage when a man had stood to his left and talked about horses and Nevada until the tension in his shoulders came down. He thought about a steel bar and four Skitter-Casts and aim that Ricky had called good. He thought about the handshake that had felt like recognition.

"Yes," he said. "Tell him yes."

Samantha nodded and returned to her book.

Jace looked out the window a moment longer. Then he settled back against the pillow and let the afternoon light fall across the bed and let the island be what it was, settled, hidden, eight hundred years old, his.

Two more days and he was out of here.

The formation resumed when Dr. Oksana cleared him. The Sacrifice was the objective. The timeline was now.

He was ready.

Training Log — Sidney Greene July 24, 1989

Guardian cleared for return to formation training effective today.

The Guardian returned from Aldus's dimension under his own power. He returned across eleven minutes of Nathan Dallenger working at the edge of what is possible, and across four Brotherhood members who did not let go of his hand.

He spent eight days in the hospital wing. He is now standing in the lower courtyard.

Assess and proceed.

The Sacrifice is the objective.

Timeline is now.