SKIP_FINALE:TRUE

VP and BP Standings
Claire - 154 VP - 3100 BP - 3 Achievs
Sam - 139 VP - 5900 BP - 3 Achievs
Erin - 134 VP - 8100 BP - 3 Achievs
Emi - 125 VP - 9250 BP - 3 Achievs
Myra - 121 VP - 4000 BP - 3 Achievs
Chloe - 114 VP - 6250 BP - 2 Achievs
Marissa - 111 VP - 3000 BP - 3 Achievs
Emily - 106 VP - 7600 BP - 3 Achievs
Lies a- 104 VP - 4400 BP - 3 Achievs
Norah - 103 VP - 0 BP - 3 Achievs
Dawn - 102 VP - 9000 BP - 3 Achievs
Riley - 77 VP - 8800 BP - 3 Achievs
Laura - 0 BP - 2 Achievs

Andy woke to the white-gold slant of morning slicing through the smallest gap in the blackout curtains. He’d never understood why the Master’s Suite had those—no one could see inside from this far up the volcano, and the light that made it through the glass was never harsh, even on a clear day. Today it made a neat line across the foot of the bed, turning the tangled heap of comforter and limbs into something stage-lit and holy.

He lay there, perfectly still, taking an internal census: arms, chest, one leg, then the other. On his left, Chloe was curled around his bicep, her head tucked close enough that he could feel every slow exhale. Her hand, as if in sleep she’d lost any sense of boundary, had migrated up to his chest and splayed there, thumb grazing the space over his heart. On his right, Claire was asleep with her cheek pressed against his shoulder, her arms folded up in front of her in a pose so defensively compact it looked, at first, like she was bracing for impact. Her cat ears ticked and pivoted through whatever dream she was having. The effect was somewhere between adorable and deeply vulnerable. He felt the impulse to stay still, to not break the balance for as long as he could.

He watched the light crawl up the foot of the bed. If he’d been able to freeze the morning right here, he would have. The peace of it, the sheer lack of urgency. No one needed him to fix anything, right this second. No one was crying or shivering or staring at the ceiling waiting for the world to restart.

Of course, the world did restart. Chloe was the first to stir. She woke the way the tide came in—first with a small repositioning of her feet, then a slow uncoiling of her arm from his chest. She blinked herself awake, her pupils going from pinpricks to wide and soft in a second, and then did what Andy had come to recognize as her first post-waking ritual: she checked his face, as if reading for signs of distress or pain, before she allowed herself to assess her own state.

He grinned. “I’m okay,” he said, before she could ask it. “You?”

She stretched, made a face, and said, “Sore in a way I’m not complaining about. Kind of like after a field day, if the field day was… you know. All of last night.”

He laughed, and it felt easy in his throat.

She rolled to her side, gathered the comforter to her chest, and said, “You really are okay, though?”

He nodded. “Are you?” he shot back, reflecting the question as he always did.

She snorted. “I’m fine. I’m better than fine. Just… a little overwhelmed, maybe. Not in a bad way.”

He reached across and squeezed her hand, the one still buried in the comforter. “You can take a day off from having to manage everybody else’s feelings, if you want.”

She considered that, like it was a possibility she’d never been offered before, then said, “That would be nice. But old habits die hard.”

Claire made a small, confused noise and rolled over, squinting into the daylight. She pulled her arms in tighter for a moment, then let them go, flexing her fingers and testing her wrists, which still bore faint red lines from last night. She took a deep breath, then seemed to do a full diagnostic: ankles, knees, shoulders, jaw. Finally, she looked up at Andy, eyes at half-mast, and made the gesture with her hand: two fingers to her temple, then outward—a question.

He nodded, kept his voice low. “Morning. You okay?”

She thought about it. Really, truly thought, as if cross-referencing half a dozen sources. Then she nodded, slowly, and wrote an invisible word with her finger on the comforter before miming a book closing.

He asked, “Was that what you wanted?”

Claire hesitated just a moment, then nodded again, more emphatic this time. She made a gesture that was halfway between a shrug and a hug, as if to say: it was more than she’d expected, in the best way.

Chloe watched this exchange, then said, “If you want the actual words, Andy, she’s probably going to need coffee.” She smiled, then turned to Claire. “You want to make a run to the kitchen, or do you want to stay here a minute?”

Claire considered, then shrugged in a way that meant: I could go either way.

Andy was content to stay. There was a soft, unhurried pleasure to the three of them lying there together, the air warm and still smelling a little of sweat, salt, and something else from the night before. He realized, with a kind of gentle surprise, that he didn’t want to move yet.

For a while, no one did. Chloe and Claire both shifted and settled in, using his arms as cushions. Chloe rested her cheek against his chest, her hair trailing down his ribs, while Claire lay with her head on his shoulder, absently tracing patterns on his bicep with the tip of her finger.

Andy watched the patterns, wondered what she was spelling, then decided it didn’t matter.

At some point, Chloe whispered, “You’re thinking about the day already.”

He grinned. “Only a little.”

She poked him gently in the side, but there was no malice in it. “I’d like to pretend this could last forever,” she said. “Just a little longer.”

Andy squeezed her hand again. “Me too.”

Claire, not wanting to be left out, wrapped her arm over his chest, and Andy thought, for just a second, that he could feel the sum total of the last year of his life in the exact weight of these two women against him: every heartbreak, every recovery, every choice that had led to mornings like these, where nobody was performing anything and no one was expected to.

He lay like that, awake but not moving, until the sunline reached their feet and the room got too warm to ignore.

He said, “We should get up, eventually,” but made no move to do so.

Chloe groaned, “No, thank you. The world can wait a little longer.”

Claire agreed, with a little thumbs-up.

And so they did. They waited, just a little longer, letting the next day hold itself back at the door, and letting the last of the night settle into memory.

---

The breakfast table was already set when they shuffled out of the bedroom. It was early enough that the ocean was more suggestion than sound, and the only real noise in the Suite was the distant churn of the coffee grinder and the musical clatter of plates as they were set on the granite counter. Laura was there, both of her, each body doing something practical: one at the stove, near a cup of tea, stirring a pan of eggs, the other laying out fruit and bread. Her selves wore different outfits today—one in a hoodie and soft shorts, the other in a fitted blue t-shirt and faded jeans. She moved in step with them as they came through the doorway: the same tilt of Laura’s head when she spotted Andy, the same little smile tugging at her lips, the same narrowing of her eyes at Chloe’s grip on Andy’s arm—as if she’d never let him go.

Laura tracked the two of them for a heartbeat, took it all in, then turned to the stove and, in perfect stereo, said, “Didn’t expect to see you this early.” The words came out light, almost teasing.

She cracked an egg into the pan, then paused when Claire stepped in behind Chloe. For a full second, Laura just… recalibrated. There was no shock in her face, just that quiet, feline curiosity. Andy swallowed the questions rising in his throat. Laura let them linger in the air, then offered, “Morning, Claire.” No edge. Just the casual warmth you’d use for a friend who’d popped by for coffee.

Claire gave a shy wave, ducked her head, and edged around the counter. Chloe loosened her grip on Andy’s arm with an apologetic smile, grabbed a glass of orange juice, and slipped over to the window nook.

Andy, still in pajama pants and a T-shirt, made a beeline for the coffee pot. He filled three mugs—one for Chloe, one for Claire, one for himself—and set them out in a neat row. Only then did he glance back at Laura. She was already whisking eggs with calm precision. He could see how much she had improved over the last couple of weeks, and felt proud of her. She sensed it, of course. The bond was so strong now, that they could feel each other's feelings like he could do with Claire.

She turned towards him questioningly, and he said, “She came here thanks to the Chekhov’s Girl transformation.” He meant Claire, and Laura nodded. “It’s the one that drops her wherever her presence will matter most—and gives her the instinct for what to do once she arrives.”

Laura raised an eyebrow and let that sink in. Then she grinned—a slow, mischievous curve of her lips—and said, “So she just... appeared?” Her voice was amused, not accusatory.

Andy nodded. “She didn’t want to interrupt. But we told her it was fine.”

Laura laughed soft and low, flipped the eggs with a flourish, and quipped, “Well, I guess that explains last night’s… extracurriculars.” She caught Andy’s eye and winked. He blushed but smiled back, because Laura’s tone was warm, inclusive. She really wasn’t jealous—she’d felt every touch, every kiss, every moment of last night’s sex via her Bond of Marriage. And maybe that was why she sounded so pleased.

Laura nodded to Chloe and Claire, then turned off the burner. She slid three plates of steaming scrambled eggs onto the counter—one for each of them—and set them before the girls. As she wiped her hands on a dish towel, she called out, “Chloe, want the rest of those chives? Claire, orange juice top-off?” Her voice was gentle, welcoming.

Chloe’s eyes lit up. “Always,” she said, and Claire gave her signature little nod. Laura pulled out a chair at each end of the table, took her place, and picked up her cups. The morning sunlight warmed the kitchen, and for a moment, everything—Claire’s surprising arrival, last night’s thrills, the subtle bond that tied them together—felt simply right.

The breakfast was ordinary, which was its own kind of magic. There was no performative awkwardness, no edge. Chloe ate like she was making up for a month of missed meals. Claire, who’d ended up sitting next to Laura, ate with the precise, deliberate bites of a person who needed every sense engaged in order to process the food. Andy drank his coffee and watched the three of them, waiting for the balance to tip one way or the other.

It never did. At some point, Claire set her fork down, straightened, and made a polite, single finger in the air, the “I have a comment” gesture from high school debate. Then she pulled her notebook from the pocket of her robe and wrote, in her looping print:

I want to give a research update. Sorry if this is too early.

She held the notebook up, waited for acknowledgment. Andy nodded. Laura nodded. Chloe, mouth full of melon, nodded.

Claire wrote again:

I stayed up late reading last night. There are dozens of different references to the same idea but none of them agree on how it’s actually done. I think the majority of the threads are dead ends. But a few are not. For example, I keep coming back to the way Arabella made the elixir that last watered the blue rose.

She turned the notebook to face Laura.

The water for the resurrection. I can’t find a match for it anywhere. The closest examples in the Archive all include blood, but not water. I think the water was from Willow Run, where Laura died. I think that’s why the ritual worked, but I think I'm missing something. And I think the fact that we made the elixir together matters. It’s not in the reference texts. But it’s the only variable I can’t account for.

She let the notebook rest on the table, then waited. Laura, both faces thoughtful, watched Claire, then looked at Andy.

Andy shrugged. Claire nodded, then wrote:

The way it was done worked, but this ritual was only ever successful once before. I don’t know if they used the equivalent of the Edict there. I thought there might be a way to separate the substance of the Edict from whatever was done. But if there is, I haven’t found it yet.

Laura said, “It’s fine. We’ll just keep looking.”

There was a small pause. Andy thought Claire would leave it there, but she wrote again, a new page:

The other thing is, I kept wondering where Andy’s power is coming from. Power like that doesn't come from nothing. In the other cases, the jump to godhood is fueled by a Wish. Like Anna and Ereshkigal. But you don’t have a Wish behind you, Andy. Just a chain of flares, like the engine is running on a looped current. I think you’re drawing directly from Arabella.

She capped the pen, set it beside the notebook, and folded her hands over the page. She looked at Andy with a calm, level gaze, but her entire posture was poised for impact—like she expected the floor under this table to drop away at any moment.

Andy read the lines once, then again, and felt the words land with a chill that had nothing to do with the morning air. “From Arabella, like… her power?” he said, unable to keep a small edge of incredulity from his voice.

Claire nodded, lips pressed in a thin line. She wrote again, slower now, as though spelling it out for both herself and him:

I think you’re running on her power. I can’t see any other source.

She slid the notebook so Laura could see. Laura took in the words, then met Andy’s eyes, and there was a flicker of something like awe, but also caution.

“What does that mean for him?” Laura asked, voice hushed and careful, both her bodies unconsciously leaning closer.

Claire uncapped the pen once more, then hesitated, as if trying to distill a tangle of competing thoughts into something parsable. Finally, she wrote:

If I’m right, when you cross the threshold, you won’t be a minor god. You’ll be at Arabella’s level of power. The combined power of all her siblings, too, perhaps.

Even Chloe, who had been watching the interaction with the lazy, affectionate bemusement of someone content merely to be present, straightened at that.

“Wait, like… at the top of the food chain?” she said, wiping melon juice from her lip.

Claire thumbed the edge of the page and nodded, then added:

Not just a Master. Not even Host-level. You’d be whatever runs the show. Arabella is at least at the level of a Producer, but she’s limited by rules she can’t break. You would’t be. You’d be a rule-setter. The system.

Andy felt the implications cascade through him, rattling the scaffolding of what little sense he’d made of his life these past few months. He tried to assemble a mental image of what Claire was describing, to imagine himself at the level of Arabella, wielding the raw, reality-shaping authority that ran the whole Hotel. It felt like wearing someone else’s suit, only the sleeves reached infinitely in every direction and the fabric was heavier than the sun.

And still, the thing that came to him first—before the power, before the awe—was a deep, cold fear of what he might do with that kind of authority. He thought of every moment he’d already let someone down, every time he’d failed to protect the people he loved with the little power he did have.

He looked at Claire, hoping she’d offer some reassurance, or at least some metric for what this meant. “How bad is it?” he said, forced to keep his voice even so it didn’t crack.

Claire glanced at Laura, then back to Andy. She wrote:

I don’t know yet. But it means the stakes are higher than you think. And if something goes wrong, it could go very wrong.

She underlined “very” three times, then turned the page so Andy could see it from across the table.

Chloe, who had been quiet for nearly a minute—a rare and uncanny feat—set her fork down and said, “So, if you cross over, you could just… rewrite all of this? Undo the whole system?”

Claire shrugged, then wrote:

Probably not. There are many Producers. We just don’t know how to compare these levels of authority, but I doubt anyone, even that powerful, could undo Harem Hotel. The bigger risk is that the power would rewrite you. “Absolute power” is a trope for a reason.

Chloe considered that, then said, “What’s the worst-case? Like, Hotel implodes, or Andy goes evil overlord?”

Laura cut in, “He wouldn’t.” There was no hesitation. Both faces, both voices: pure conviction.

Claire nodded, but wrote:

I agree. But nobody plans to be corrupted. Sometimes the power shapes the person, not the other way around.

Andy let that hang in the air. He tried to picture himself corrupted, tried to imagine what the worst version of himself might do if given the ability to bend reality with a word. The image that floated up was less “evil genius” and more quietly, inexorably lonely—a king in a castle of ghosts, everyone he loved gone or changed beyond recognition.

He closed his eyes, breathed slow, and asked them, “Do you think I should stop? If I knew how, I mean?”

Chloe considered it longer than the shrug in her shoulders suggested. “Ideally? Sure. If this was just you and some scary hypothetical power trip, I'd say stop yesterday.” She shook her head slowly. “But it's not just that, is it? If you stop, whatever this is stops protecting Laura, too. So no—I don't actually think you should stop, even if you could. I just think you're allowed to be scared of it anyway. Those aren't opposites.”

Andy managed a small, tired laugh at that, but the fear underneath it didn't move. “It's not even the power that scares me most,” he admitted, surprised at how easily the words came once he let the first one out. “It's the lonely part. Being at the top of something, with nobody else up there. Outliving the shape of everyone I love, even if you're all still here.” He looked down at his own hands, like they might have already changed. “I keep picturing it, and all I see is an empty room, and everyone I know either gone or too far below me to reach.”

Nobody laughed. Laura reached for his hand, under the table, and caught it with both of hers at once. The sensation was uncanny—like being held in surround sound. “You're not going to be alone in it,” she said, both voices low and sure. “Whatever you become, we're becoming it with you. That was always the deal.”

Chloe was quiet a moment, turning her mug in her hands the way she did when she was choosing her words instead of reaching for the first ones. “I've been up half the night thinking about versions of tomorrow I don't get to have,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes. “So I'm not going to sit here and tell you it won’t be hard. I already know it will be.” She looked up at him then, steadier than her voice had sounded a second ago. “But you're not there yet. And I'd rather be someone who walked through that door next to you than someone who stayed safe on this side without you. I trust you. I don't know if that fixes anything. But it's true.”

Claire had gone very still, watching him. Then she picked her pen back up and wrote something short, turning the notebook so only he could read it at first: I'm not scared of you. I've never been scared of you. Not once. A beat, then underneath, smaller: And I don't plan on starting now. I love you.

Andy felt something in his chest give way, quieter than tears but in the same family as them. “Thank you,” he said, and meant it for all three of them.

Claire nodded, capped her pen, and gave him the double thumbs-up, though it landed softer than her usual delivery—more promise than punctuation.

Andy squeezed Laura's hands back, and for the first time since Claire had set the notebook down, he let himself breathe all the way out.

The rest of breakfast was quieter, but it wasn't heavy anymore. The threat of apocalypse—or apotheosis—sat at the far end of the table, acknowledged now instead of avoided, and somehow that made it easier to let it sit there. Chloe cleared her own plate, then went to refill her coffee, and Laura, after a moment, stood and refilled her cup with more tea, both bodies moving as one.

Andy looked at Claire. “You did good,” he said. “Thank you for saying it out loud.”

Claire nodded, then picked up her mug and took a long, slow drink.

When the plates were cleared and the light outside had gone full mid-morning, Laura reappeared at the table, arms folded.

“I want to do the Dream Date soon,” she said. “Today or tomorrow, if possible. I’ll wait until everyone’s ready, but I’d like to do it before anything else changes.”

Andy nodded. “We’ll do it. Just say the word.”

Laura smiled, a small one. “I will.”

Claire looked at Chloe, then at Andy, then at Laura, and gave a thumbs-up.

---

After breakfast, the Suite gradually emptied out, the way a party does when morning reveals the scattered evidence of everything that happened the night before. Chloe took her coffee and went back to her room to shower, then left for whatever she did in the mornings. Laura excused herself to visit her mother in the Hollow Garden. She did it every day, as a kind of promise. Claire, after gathering her notes, slipped out toward the Archive, her robe trailing just above the polished floor.

That left Andy alone in the Suite.

The peace of the morning did not last long. Instead, the old restlessness surfaced almost at once—a low, persistent hum in his chest that he’d learned to recognize as the need for a plan. He thought of Sam, how she always caught him when he was spinning like this. “You never sit still unless you’re alone,” she’d said. “It kills you not to have a plan.” He smiled, but the smile didn’t stick.

There was the anxiety spawned from Claire’s analysis. And more importantly, there were only three days left until the wedding.

He needed more information, and he needed it fast. Claire's research moved in days, not hours, and Arabella had already told him as much as she was willing to.

That left exactly one shortcut he knew of, one that didn't run through anyone else's help or permission—the kind he'd been trying not to think too hard about since the last time he'd used it. He remembered the visions he'd had on his birthday: Arabella dying, the two identical pregnant women (Laura?), and all the rest—scenes too vivid to be dismissed as dreams or random firing of the unconscious. The only way he'd seen them was through the code phrases Mark's girlfriend Ellen had given him as a gift, a tiny breach in the Hotel's rules, a way to see just past the edge of what was allowed.

He went to his desk and pulled open the drawer where he’d hidden the folded piece of paper. It was old now, the creases worn soft, the ink faded but still legible: ELEVATE.SUDO.ALL, FEMME_FATALE.ON, SKIP_FINALE=TRUE. He turned it over in his hands a few times before opening it, like he was holding something radioactive and wanted to make absolutely sure he couldn’t hurt anyone else by touching it.

Last time, Tracy had run her own scripts to force the system open, and even then, the effects had nearly knocked him unconscious. But there was no Tracy now. No netbook, no friendly hacker to run interference or check the logs. Just him, and the smartwatch Arabella had given him, as part of the Console Gift. He knew—he was certain—that the codes would work. He also knew it was dangerous, and that the risks were real.

He set the watch on the desk, screen glowing, and took a long moment to steady himself. His finger hovered over the screen. Just as he was about to start typing, a memory flashed: the way Erin had looked at him yesterday, furious at being kept in the dark, at being treated like a tool rather than a partner. How much time he’d wasted, thinking he could spare the women he loved by carrying the danger alone.

He put the watch down. Stood. Paced. Thought about calling Sam, but knew she was on a hike with Liesa—she’d mentioned it, casual, just before lunch yesterday. He could wait. Or—

Or, he could do the thing he was always told not to do: just want it, and see if the world answered.

He wanted Erin there. Not because he needed someone to catch him if he fell (although that would be good), but because she deserved to know. He let himself feel the wanting, didn’t try to smother it, and as soon as he acknowledged it, the world obliged.

The air in the Suite twitched, and suddenly, Erin was there. Not standing by the door or lounging at the counter—she was mid-step, one foot off the floor, a trowel in her hand and dirt on her fingers, as if she’d been ripped straight out of whatever she’d been doing in the Verdant Arches. She landed, blinked, and looked around, instantly assessing the change of location.

She saw Andy and said, “Really?” A smile touched the corner of her mouth, but she didn’t set the trowel down.

Andy shrugged. “I didn’t want to do it alone.”

She snorted, checked to see if she was tracking dirt, and then—realizing her hands were clean—leaned the trowel against the counter and walked over to him.

“What’s so important it couldn’t wait?” she said. “Or is this an emotional emergency and not a literal one?”

He showed her the folded paper. “I’m going to try to use the codes again. The ones from the birthday. Those that gave me visions of what I assume is the future. I need to see what’s coming. I need more clues. If I get another vision, it might help.”

Erin considered this. “Is it going to knock you out again?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope not. But last time, I had backup. This time, it’s just me.”

She was quiet a moment, then said, “You sure you want to do it? If you’re out of commission for hours, it’s going to mess up the schedule for everything else.”

He nodded. “We’re running out of time. If I don’t get answers now, I’m not going to get them.”

Erin watched him, arms folded, her naked skin as unselfconscious as if she’d been fully clothed. “All right,” she said. “But if you’re going to do it, you’re going to tell me everything. What the codes are for, what happened last time, what you’re hoping to find. No hiding it.”

Andy took a breath, then laid it all out: the way the codes worked, the shell script Tracy wrote, how the visions came in bursts, like flipping through channels in someone else’s nightmare. The fact that he’d seen Arabella dying, and two versions of Laura (he supposed). Andy wandering a deserted island, no vegetation, under a bruised sky, and finding remnants of The HH. He didn’t try to sugarcoat it or make it sound less dramatic than it was.

Erin listened, not interrupting, not even flinching at the weirdest bits. When he was done, she said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

She set her trowel on the kitchen counter and took up position next to his chair. “If you fall, I’ll catch you. If you say anything out loud, I’ll write it down. If you don’t come back in five minutes, I’m calling in the cavalry.”

Andy grinned, felt some of the fear go out of him. “Thanks.”

She gave him a hard look. “Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t done it.”

He sat, entered the first code.

The screen flickered. Nothing happened—at least, nothing visible. He typed the second code, then the third.

As soon as he finished, the world tilted.

He didn’t lose consciousness, not exactly. But his body went slack, and all the light in the room shrank to a pinpoint before flaring back up, like someone rebooting a projector. Andy felt himself drift, then drop, then land somewhere else entirely.

Erin, beside him, watched as his eyes glazed over and his hand clamped around the edge of the desk. She reached out and steadied him, just in case.

She didn’t let go.

---

The drop into the visions this time was different—not a cascade, but a sudden gravity shift, as if the world had been tipped and Andy fell sideways into a parallel stream of moments, none of which waited for him to get his bearings.

The first one slammed into him almost before the afterimage of the Suite had faded.

Sam stood in the center of a sun-blasted plaza, the air shivering with heat. Broken arches circled the plaza, vaguely familiar although he did not quite recognize the place. She wore a sleeveless top, blue jeans streaked with dirt, grass, and something darker, and she held an oversized, massive sword taller than Sam herself, its pommel incongruously shaped like a dildo, its blade etched with script Andy couldn’t read but somehow understood meant “Thrustworthy.”

He remembered that sword. Sam had encountered it in the Museum of Pleasures Past.

She faced off against a bearded man with deep, cruel eyes, his stance both practiced and desperate. Sam didn’t hesitate—she laughed, wild, and swung the sword in a glittering arc, the momentum so vast it seemed to bend the sunlight around it. The man parried, barely, and staggered back. Their feet kicked up dust. Sam’s smile was feral; she was alive in a way Andy had never seen. The man was already on the defensive, and his expression made it clear he’d thought he’d be the predator in this fight. The vision shattered before Andy could see how it ended, but not before he felt Sam’s absolute certainty in every bone of his body.

The world snapped black, then spat him out in a cold, endless waste: sand the color of dried bones, a sky bruised with the colors of an old, healing wound. All around, the detritus of the Hotel lay scattered like the memory of a civilization—columns toppled and half-buried, a grand staircase leading up to nowhere, chandeliers hanging from invisible ceilings, all of it broken, half-digested by wind and time. In the far distance, a lone palm tree listed sideways, its leaves stripped but its trunk still standing, the last stubborn artifact. Andy was walking, alone, wearing black trousers, a dusty white button-down shirt, leather shoes, every step a search for something—someone. He understood, in that absolute logic of dreams, that he’d been walking for who knew how long, and that the thing he sought was not here but he had to look anyway. He called out, sometimes, but the wind always took the words before they reached the horizon. He kept moving towards a glint of blue.

The sky brightened and the ground changed beneath him; now Andy stood on the lawn of the Hollow Garden, the sun full overhead, the grass warm under his feet. There were women arrayed across the field, and while his eyes slid away from their faces whenever he tried to focus on them, they wore elegant dresses and he recognized some of the body shapes, toward the elevator at the edge of the clearing. They were in the Hollow Garden. There was no laughter, but also no sadness—just a collective, focused dread. The air was thick with expectation, as if everyone was waiting for news that would define their lives in one word or another. Andy scanned the group and realized, with a cold lurch, that Laura, Myra, and Riley were not there. The realization felt like a subtraction, like a tooth worked loose and missing from the familiar row. Before he could ask where they were, the vision flicked away.

He was in a room of old wood, the light green and filtered through thick panes of bottle-glass. The walls were lined with books and case files, none of which had names or titles. Across from him sat a woman in a dark, floor-length robe, her face entirely hidden by a black mesh veil. Her voice was already in motion when the world caught up:

“…you think harm given on someone else’s authority is less your debt, but the law does not agree,” she said, the words like stone laid on stone. “What you do for another, you still answer for. The hand raised answers to the law before it answers to the will that raised it.”

Andy tried to speak, but his own voice came out in a language he didn’t recognize. The woman went on, unbothered:

“The mistake is to think the ledger is a single column. A hand raised too far, on any authority, creates a new entry all its own.”

The world blurred for a moment.

“... there is a difference the law keeps, that you do not,” she said, and Andy felt this was another conversation entirely. “Between a debt paid, and a debt merely offered. A soul that gives itself to escape its own guilt has not paid the ledger. It has only tried to. Guilt is a coin that rings false no matter how sincerely it is spent. The door has never opened for it.”

The voice shifted, growing softer, almost kind. “Marriage,” she said, “is not just a binding of two. It is a web of debts. If you injure the wife, you owe the husband. If you injure the husband, you owe the wife. The network is fractal. Even those who have no interest in each other, when bound by this contract, create a shared ledger.”

Andy felt, more than understood, that she was talking about the harem, about the way all their choices wrapped together and compounded.

“And the ledger,” she went on, “was built to weigh what already has a name. Love has never been given one—not a debt, not a payment, nothing the ledger was built to enter in its columns. Thin and scattered, it changes nothing; the cosmos simply moves around it, the way water moves around a stone. But hold enough of it in one place, with no way out, and it stops being a small thing scattered wide. It becomes a single thing, and a large one—dense enough to matter on its own terms, whether the ledger has a column for it or not.”

He tried to ask who she was, but the words stuck in his throat. She seemed to sense the question anyway.

“I am only the one who keeps the door,” she said, her face changing shape behind the veil—sometimes young, sometimes so old it bordered on inhuman. “Even keepers have doors they did not choose to keep,” she added, almost as an aside, though nothing about her was ever truly aside. “Some of us would surrender the key gladly, if a hand ever reached for it instead of waiting to be refused. We rarely say this aloud. Saying it does not change whose hand holds the key.”

He wanted to ask if the door led to the end, or a way out. But the world blurred again, and he was falling.

For a moment, he glimpsed Erin’s hands on his arm, grounding him, but he could not move his own hands, could not even blink. The visions pressed on, harder, faster.

---

The next vision was the worst so far. Andy’s body in the real world jerked in Erin’s grip—his muscles tensed, jaw locked, a faint moan escaping his lips. Erin leaned closer, worried he might seize or bite his tongue, but then the noise settled to a low, ragged breathing and his face went slack, the muscles twitching only in the tiniest increments.

Inside the vision: sand, everywhere, not the cold waste from before but a bright, almost white surface under a bruised sky. At the center of the scene, four women were on their knees, arranged in a rough triangle, their hands behind their backs as if they’d been bound by something more absolute than rope. The air shimmered above them, like a mirage, and in that heat-haze Andy saw the truth. For one he could see two faces, and he wished he couldn't. At the apex, Laura, both bodies present but both stricken, faces twisted in the same excruciating pain. To Laura’s left and right, the other women were so blurred at the edges Andy couldn’t place them, but something in their posture made his heart jump; they were both familiar.

They were all hurt, all three, in a way that was not just physical. There were wounds—real ones, blood streaked over thighs, knees cut and swelling, faces streaked with tears—but what bound them was more fundamental. They were all reaching for each other across the impossible space between them, straining to touch but never quite making contact. Every time one of them got close, an invisible force yanked them back, so the effort became a cycle of hope and failure and hope again.

Moving among them, slow and methodical, was a bearded man. His face was out of focus—sometimes he looked like Laura's father, sometimes a face Andy dimly remembered from the Garden of Glass, or from a painting in Liesa’s atelier. A man, broad-shouldered, meanly built. He carried no weapon. Instead, he worked with his hands, prodding, pinching, sometimes pressing on old wounds to make them bleed anew. When a woman cried out, he would cock his head, as if analyzing the sound, then move on to the next. There was no triumph in him, but also no pleasure. The pain was not the point. He was looking for something else.

Andy realized, in the logic of the vision, that the man’s focus kept sliding toward the gap between the two Lauras—never satisfied with either, only interested in the tension between them, as if there was a seam to be opened. Every gesture, every touch, seemed aimed at widening that gap, prying it apart to see what would come out.

The vision lingered. Nothing was finished. No one had been truly taken or broken. All three women endured. And every time the pain crested, Andy’s body in the real world tensed harder.

---

The scene cut away, then—clean, clinical—and deposited Andy onto a stretch of empty beach at dusk. This time, all the harem were present, standing in a long, loose crescent. He saw Marissa, Dawn, Emi, Norah, and Liesa; Claire, Erin, Chloe; Sam, Myra, and Riley; Emily, and—at the center—Laura, both forms standing apart, arms folded.

At the water’s edge, Mildred waited. She looked out of place, like a chess queen parked in the middle of a bowling alley. Her posture was impeccable, her smile razor-sharp, she was licking her lips and her black eyes flicked from one woman to the next with a proprietary hunger. There was something strange about her, which Andy couldn't place. As the vision clarified, Andy saw Arabella standing off to the side, not quite in the group but not apart either. She was not alone—a woman stood beside her, tall and terrifyingly pale, with black hair that hung in straight sheets. Her eyes were solid black, her body built on the same lines as Anna but with all the grace boiled away, leaving only severity. This woman radiated power, but also violence, and Andy could not look directly at her face.

He understood, instantly, that a confrontation was coming. That this was the moment just before everything changed. He wanted to cry out to the women on the beach, to warn them or shield them, but in the logic of the vision he could only watch.

The scene winked out before anything could happen.

---

The next was a small, dim room—Sarah’s cottage, as Andy remembered it from his last visit. The air smelled of violets and wood polish, and the rocking chair by the window creaked under a slow, steady rhythm. Sarah sat in it, hands folded in her lap, gaze fixed out at the garden beyond. Andy was in the doorway, face worn and tired, the white button-down shirt and black pants dusty from a long walk. He held a folded piece of paper in his hand, and the way he gripped it told him everything: the news he carried was unwelcome, but he would deliver it anyway.

Sarah rocked on her chair, unaware of his presence. She didn’t speak, just waited.

---

The vision closed gently, fading to black, and then returned with a rush: this time, Andy stood on the footbridge from his childhood, but the boards were silvery, old, worn thin by time and weather. The river beneath was black as ever, but ran slower, thicker, like it had aged alongside the rest of the world. The trees on the bank were larger now, their roots gripping the soil like fists Andy looked down at his hands and saw they hadn’t changed at all; he was still himself, not a day older than when he first stepped onto the stage of The HH.

But everything else was older. The world had passed, seasons flickered by in a blur—leaves green, then fire-orange, then bare. He stayed there, at the midpoint of the bridge, for what felt like decades, waiting for Laura to return, or for the river to speak, or for someone to tell him what to do next. He waited so long that the idea of movement faded, until only the ache of missing Laura remained, undiminished by the years.

---

When the codes released him, it was mid-reach, his hand on the rail, about to step forward. Instead, Andy’s body folded up in the chair, all the muscles letting go at once. Erin, caught off guard, had to grab him under the arms to keep him from hitting the floor. He didn’t scream or convulse; he just went limp, the way people do when the power flickers and the system needs a second to reboot.

She cradled his head in her lap, one hand stroking his hair and the other feeling for a pulse—steady, strong, but fast. His face was slick with sweat, his lips parted, a thin whine escaping him with each breath. Erin waited, not sure if she should try to wake him or let the process finish.

In the space between visions, Andy found a blankness so absolute it bordered on peaceful. For a few seconds, there was nothing—no beach, no pain, no loss, no waiting. Just the sense that he had come through something, and that the only thing left was to tally up what remained.

He returned to himself slowly, the way you do after anesthesia—first aware of the light, then of the sound of someone breathing close, then of the heavy pressure of an arm draped over his chest. When he blinked, the first thing he saw was Erin’s face, upside down and anxious.

“You back?” she asked, voice sharp with concern.

He nodded, but his tongue was numb. He tried again, and the second time he managed a rough “Yeah.”

Erin exhaled, relief flooding her features. “You scared the shit out of me,” she said, but didn’t let him go. “What did you see?”

He closed his eyes, tried to hold onto the fragments before they slid away. “Sam. With a sword. She was fighting a man—I don't know who. A woman in a black veil talking about ledgers and marriages. There was a beach, the whole harem, Mildred, and…” He struggled for words. “There was a woman with Arabella. Like Anna, but… opposite? Harder, I don’t know. Ereshkigal. It felt important.”

Erin nodded, not writing it down but clearly memorizing every detail. “What else?”

“Footbridge,” he said. “Time sped up. I didn’t change, but everything else did.” He shuddered, the memory still cold in his bones. “I kept waiting for Laura. She never came.”

Erin squeezed his hand. “That’s not how it ends. You know that, right?”

He wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe it so badly his chest ached. “I know,” he said, and meant it, at least for the moment.

They sat together for a while, Erin holding him, both of them silent. When he finally felt strong enough to stand, she helped him up. They walked to the kitchen, and Andy drank a glass of water with both hands.

His hands shook the whole time, but only a little.

He was mostly back to normal by the time he finished the water. The adrenaline was still in him, shaking out his hands, but the hallucinations or whatever they were had faded to a set of dull, raw memories. He felt scraped out and light-headed, but not afraid.

Erin leaned on the kitchen island, still naked, her hair loose on her shoulders. She kept her eyes on him, just the same as she had through the whole event.

“That was almost ten minutes,” she said finally. “You didn’t move, you barely blinked. At one point, you said something. I almost missed it, but you did.”

Andy set the glass down. “What did I say?”

“Overreach.” Erin repeated it exactly, the voice flat, her usual affect gone. “I didn’t know if you heard yourself. It didn’t sound like you.”

He tried to recall the moment, but the word was a blank in his memory. He reached for it and found nothing. If it referred to any of the scenes he had seen, he didn't know which one it was. “I don’t remember saying it,” he admitted.

He explained the scenes, as much as he could: Sam with the sword, the broken hotel in the endless waste, the group of women on the grass in the Hollow Garden, the strange black-veiled woman in the green-lit room, Laura and two other women being tortured by a man that sometimes looked like the one Sam had been fighting. He tried to put the pieces in order, but it was more like a crossword than a narrative.

Erin was silent through most of it, just listening, only nodding or frowning at the names. She didn’t interrupt when he described the woman by Arabella, the one who looked like Anna but harder. She just said, “That feels important. Why do you think Arabella was not intervening?”

“I don’t know.” Andy rolled his glass between his palms. “But it felt like something momentous was about to happen.”

He moved on to the last visions: the cottage, Sarah waiting with a sad certainty, and the endless years on the footbridge. “It was so lonely,” he said. “Not scary, just... empty. Like nothing ever filled the missing in, even after decades. It wasn’t a threat. It was just what happened if I lost her.”

He didn’t realize how much that cost him to say until it was out. Erin, instead of trying to offer comfort or a fix, just moved to his side, wrapped an arm around his waist, and stood there as long as he needed.

After a while, she said, “I’m glad you didn’t do this alone.” She said it matter-of-factly, not as an accusation, but as a relief. “And I’m glad you told me everything. Even the parts that sucked.”

Andy smiled at that, the tension easing in his chest. “I’m glad you were here. Really.”

She squeezed him, then let go, retrieving her trowel from the counter with a little flourish. “Are you okay to walk?”

“Yeah. I think I’m good.”

He looked down at the table, where the watch and the codes lay side by side, and felt a new kind of clarity settle into him. Not certainty—he still didn’t know what the visions meant, or how to stop what was coming—but he was done with secrets. Whatever was about to happen, he would not face it alone.

“Let’s tell Claire,” he said.

Erin nodded. “Together?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Yeah.”

They walked to the elevator, side by side.