Sophie and I stood in darkness on the edge of a cliff, the wind whipping through our hair and cutting into our skin with ferocity.

I turned to her and realised she was looking at me with fear in her eyes, hurt, betrayal. I tried to hold onto her but she ripped herself away and retreated from me.

I cried out. The wind only began to roar, and I felt it vibrate through me. I looked down at my hands, and realised it was coming from me.

Sophie broke into a run, and as she got further and further away the rest of the world around us came into focus, piercing my eyes.

Utter devastation, and I knew, somehow, that it was all my fault.

As the world warped and dissolved around me, I realised that I was dreaming. But that didn't bring me any solace.

I dreamt what Lexie had been dreaming for months - the vision of Jayken, tortured and screaming, writhing on the ground. Except even this wasn't truly a dream, it was a memory now. I'd seen it through her eyes, and my own. And that had been my fault too.

I dreamt that I emerged from the Machine to find the room still, body after body scattered and deprived of life. I picked through the room, trying to find a way out and saw Jayken, Lexie, Sophie. I felt a hollow ache and knew I needed to get away, to escape. All the technology was dead too, there was no way of contacting anyone. I managed to coax a Staarus ship to life and launched myself across an empty star system, returned to Flauraan. Here, too, corpses littered the streets. With my house empty, I headed to the fields and found my mother, collapsed and beginning to decompose. I shook off my feelings and headed to my hill, certain that that would fix things somehow but as I reached the crest I saw a bright star in the sky, plummeting towards me. A fresh start, perhaps? A chance to try again? I ran frantically down the hill and plunged through the forest, with nothing to halt my progress, and emerged to find only wreckage. I dug through the debris and found my father's body, broken and burned. And with this it finally hit me; I killed all these people, the whole world, the entire Staarus System.

When I finally awoke I wasn't sure how to tell whether this was dream or reality. There was someone sitting besides my bed leant forward, sleeping with their head near my legs. There was something familiar about this, though that feeling only enhanced the dreamlike state of it all.

One detail after another emerged from the haze. Metallic walls, a sparse, enclosed space. Thin tubes of cool fluid and sensors attached to me. A telltale hum at the edges of my senses. I was in space. I was on a medical transport. I... supposed that made sense, with what I could remember.

I wished I wasn't here to remember it. That had been the plan. The moment I realised what I'd done... I knew it would take everything in me to stop it, and if I couldn't stop the hell we'd unleashed I didn't want to live to see it. Evidently I'd failed. I felt a deep, creeping darkness encroaching on me.

I'd figured it all out too late - the moment we'd sprung the trap, in fact - why Ray had let us go, why he hadn't killed Jayken in his experimentation. He knew that in our efforts to destroy the source of their scheme that we would trigger it. I thought of the Protector scanning Jayken's brain on the plains of Aandrigo, and telling us that he didn't have the same alterations of the other Weraynians, that the rift he'd gone through had removed it somehow. They didn't just test their signals on Jayken's brain in that prison, they reimplanted the force field damage so he would be susceptible to it again. And then they'd let us take him, save him, given us a glimmer of hope. In my desperation to hold onto that hope I'd doomed them all. I thought of Lexie, horrifying vision blossoming before her eyes, of the multi-layered vision I'd had inside the gel matrix. Feeling the connection to her, to Jayken, go taut and suddenly snap as she crumpled until it was just me in the matrix trying to salvage the mess we'd made while Sophie ran around doing the same on the outside. I'd never be able to rid myself of that feeling of loss, like the sudden hush after a storm.

I started to shake. The dim lights flickered. I glanced upwards in surprise, and flinched as something else stirred. I'd forgotten I wasn't alone, here, now. The person attending to me lifted their head, eyes bleary - Sophie, of course it was Sophie. I couldn't deal with this right now, I couldn't face the look in her eyes. If I was losing my grip on reality, my sense of self, I couldn't even imagine what was going on inside her head. I wanted to fade from existence, refuse to face the future that I'd wrought on us all. But there she was. I would have to confront it.

The first thing I noticed was her arm was gone. I mean, her prosthetic arm. It was only a stump now, again. I couldn't help myself from mining her expression for information, and the first thing I gleaned was that more time had passed than I'd thought. There was guilt there too, and worry, but not the same depth of brokenness I'd expected. Was it possible...

There were tears in her eyes, scaring me again. Time passed in a slurry as she reached out for my hand. "Abi..." she said simply, and the tears started to fall.

I couldn't cope with this. "Sophie," I rasped, and was shocked to hear the sorry state of my voice.

I still couldn't make sense of anything, couldn't sift through everything that had happened. Couldn't read Sophie's eyes through all the tears between us.

I forced myself to focus on something hopefully neutral, even though I couldn't care less what happened to me now.

"What's happening? Where are we going?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

Sophie wiped her eyes with her sleeve. "Halapatov." she said and I frowned. "It's okay, everything's okay. The others are meeting us there. They wanted to stay with you but, well, it's complicated."

I fixed her with a troubled stare. What was she talking about? "The others?"

Now she was frowning. "Yeah, Lexie and Jayken. And-" She broke off as I started to tremble, panic in her eyes. She reached out and touched my face. "Abi? What's wrong?"

I was freaking out, hyperventilating. Making noises that were a mix between anguished and relieved, choking on them, body undulating. After a moment I could speak again, "They're alive?" I could barely make it through that sentence without sobbing, and there was a part of me that was sure this wasn't real, that she was lying to me, softening the blow.

Sophie took seconds to process and then grabbed my hand again and squeezed it. "Yes. Yes. They're alive. Why-" She shook her head. "They're fine, they're safe. I was just talking to Jayken an hour ago, they both wanted to check up on you." She pulled out her comms unit and showed it to me.

My eyes roved over the messages, and there was no doubting Jayken's voice in them, his concern and compassion. Warmth began to unfurl in my chest as I considered the possibility that I wasn't responsible for the deaths of people I loved.

I fixated on the device, I couldn't look at her. "I felt them die." I explained.

"They didn't." Sophie said softly. "That's not what happened. They're okay."

Not for the first time this war I found myself doubting my own perspective, my memory and perception. I forced myself to move my gaze from the messages to her face. "It was a trap." I laid the details out measuredly, as facts that needed confirmation. "We tried to sever the connection but we ended up triggering the signals. The whole room was affected." I paused, less sure of myself. "The whole world."

Sophie nodded somberly, crushing my hopes that perhaps I had remembered wrong, that the hell in that machine had been a dream as well. I swallowed.

"Lexie and I could see it, through the gel matrix and our powers, everyone writhing as the signals reached their brains. It was like I was keyed into their bodies, their heartbeats, like it was one big vascular system. We felt Jayken's heart stop, and then I lost the connection to Lexie as well, like she was affected by the shock. She was gone."

Sophie bit her lip. "Lexie did break the connection to the machine, and she fell, but that was it. Jayken's heart never stopped and neither did Lexie's. I was with them right away, they recovered fine once the signals were destroyed." She had a haunted look on her face I couldn't quite decipher. "Your heart was the one that stopped."

"So the plan worked?" I said in a small voice, hardly daring to believe it.

She nodded. "Even though their signals were unleashed. You had enough power to push them back. You saved so many people."

Something in her voice gave me pause. I studied her again. "But I didn't save everyone. I didn't stop it in time." She winced, and the panic rose in my chest again.

I held my head in my hands. "Oh god. How many people?"

"Abi..."

"How many?" I demanded, refusing to let her protect me from this knowledge.

She screwed up her face in pain. "I wish I could say zero. Everyone in our vicinity survived. Proximity to the Machine helped a lot. But there were areas at the edge of our reach, where a few hundred people died." She paused and then said, "I know you were the one in the Machine, but that doesn't make this your fault."

I knew that logically. I knew that we had been a team of people, including Weraynians, who had known the risk of what we were doing and acted accordingly. I simply happened to be the unlucky one with the ability to reach beyond my mind and manipulate matter. I hadn't killed my friends, and our mission had prevented a genocide, but there was still blood on my hands. I could feel it, a phantom sensation from my time in the gel matrix.

Sophie was clearly struggling with the weight of it too. She'd had longer to grapple with it, days maybe sitting at my bedside. I wondered what the aftermath had been like for her. I could see in her eyes she was trying to suppress emotions . She was trying so hard to be strong, for my sake.

After a thoughtful second she spoke, "We were the ones who helped discover their plot, and I built the Machine, and you manned it. We destroyed the signals but triggered them in the process. But they would have been able to figure it out without us. They were already investigating the force field signals. They would have figured it out eventually, and they would have done something similar. It would have been more gradual, but more people probably would have died. We sped up the process, but we stopped it sooner. That has to count for something."

We stared silently at each other. She was echoing what I said to her after Riowyn died, trying to comfort her and ease her guilt at the teleport watch causing the ghosts to mass on Halapatov. And I'd been telling the truth; our presence there had escalated the preexisting situation but it had also meant we had the tools to stop it, in spite of the deaths that happened because of us. Sophie had rebuffed me in the moment but I got the sense that she'd carried my words with her and repeated them to herself often, that she'd gotten used to running this dialogue in her head to keep herself going. I wondered if that would be my fate, working through the logic of the situation on repeat to stop myself giving in to despair. I knew now how Sophie felt back then, the words couldn't be a balm, didn't change what had happened, could barely even penetrate the truth that we had ushered forth death. I felt like I was back on the streets of Halapatov, Riowyn's death hanging over us, the world broken in a way that couldn't be fixed. I thought of Riowyn using her powers to save us, severing the connection of the ghosts to our universe and giving her life in the process.

"I know how Riowyn felt now." I said, even though it probably wasn't helpful. "Watching us being pulled into the ghost world. She was willing to do anything to stop it. I didn't understand it then, it just seemed like her death was an accident, a side effect. But she poured everything she was into it, knowing she wouldn't survive. I understand now."

Sophie's face was frozen. Perhaps I was just making things worse for both of us by dragging her down with me. I could see glimmers in her eyes of the ordeal she had endured, was enduring, the worry and pain. After a moment her expression softened and she said, "Me too."

What a horrible feeling to share with another person. We were broken in the same ways, over and over again in a cycle. I let the ghastly feelings turn over in my head a few times as we sat in silence. Then I forced myself to push through it, at least momentarily, for her sake and mine. I needed more information. I still had no idea what was happening, what had happened after the attack, how that led us to here... to Halapatov, apparently.

I leaned forward and touched her arm, gently. "So how long was I out? What's happening with the war now?"

She was crying openly now, and then I was crying, and suddenly it was as if the weight of everything over the past months was collapsing in on me at once.

They knew we were involved, obviously, it would have been impossible to suppress information about an event that sent a shockwave throughout the entire system, but we were just part of the team that was there on Werayne able to reverse it. There were no eyes on me as an individual. No one knew that I'd had my fingernails in the neurons of every Weraynian in the universe.

But never like this.

Having been dropped in the spaceport with all my possessions, including the plans and notes which the council had entrusted me with, a testament to a future of change, one that I had no choice but to have a hand in sowing, after everything, I took a transport to my hometown, watching the dying light through the window, and trying to hold down the emotions and images that threatened to engulf me, even now.

I walked the distance between the town and my home, unsure of what I would find. Surely my parents would be home and waiting for me, anxious as always, but in what state? How could our lives continue after the revelations of the war? How could I wake up and face each day with everything behind me? Between each breath, I saw flashes of the past months, Sophie shattered on the plains of Werayne, Beth in their hospital bed struggling to hold onto reality, Jayken's broken body in that Halapatovian prison, and worst of all everything I felt in the gel matrix, with Lexie and I battling to suppress the signals which almost killed us, almost killed all the Weraynians. Even some of what I'd witnessed in the aftermath, in the ceasefire, the broken spirit of people on all sides of the war, pervaded my senses and overwhelmed my memory with pain.

How could I live like that?

The answer was simple; repress it for I had so much more to deal with. For now, my father's pale expression filling with relief as he opened the door and flung his arms around me. Patting my mother on the back in comfort as she wept and then weeping too, standing in the hall for far too long, not even sure how long. Eventually sitting down to a cold dinner, mouth overflowing with food that, despite its temperature, tasted so good after so long away from home. Glancing up to see both their eyes piercing me, full of questions which they refused to ask both for my sake and theirs. Resolving to tell them the stories one day, not now, but when we could all handle it. So they could understand the role I'd played in the events they'd heard of, and the people I'd met who meant so much to me. So they could understand what I had learnt, and how I had changed. So they wouldn't have to step on eggshells around me, worried about the awful memories buried deep inside me. But for now, all that could wait.

Now was a time for change, for all of us, in our lives and the Staarus System as a whole. Soon Sophie would come back and we would do what we could to assist in the reparations and rebuilding. We would live each day with the weight of what was past, and push for something better. But that was okay, it'd be okay. And maybe one day, all the awful stuff could be a memory, a lesson, something that was so absurd that it would be unthinkable that such things could happen, with the world at rest.

For now,

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