Have you come to GLOAT?

As before, the words just seemed to hang in the air, unspoken but somehow still present. I opened my eyes—both of them, and I felt no pain—and looked around, but at first there was nothing to see. There was nothing but soft light, pale and colorless, and what looked like static in the distance.

“Where am I?” I asked. I looked down at my hands and my body.

The eye of the storm.

I recognized the cloth covering my arms, and it wasn’t what I’d been wearing when I went in. It was a green and black hoodie—my favorite hoodie, the one I’d been wearing when I Walked for the first time. I’d forgotten it at home—the home that was now gone—when I’d packed up some of my things and left the life I knew forever.

Yet here it was. I could feel the softness of the material, could smell the detergent my parents always used. I was wearing my most comfortable pair of jeans, and the ratty sneakers I’d worn into the ground. I felt no wounds anywhere on my body, which I knew was impossible.

I looked around again, trying to find the source of the voice I couldn’t hear. If I squinted, I could see that what I’d thought was static was actually lots of tiny numbers and letters. It was like what I’d seen back on my world. It was the swirling storm of FrostNight, and I was at the very center.

It was calm here, and quiet, though there was an underlying uneasiness boiling beneath the surface. A rage, something that felt like what you’d see in a wounded animal. Betrayal. Pain. Confusion.

“Joaquim,” I said, my own voice sounding strange to me. I sounded younger, my voice lacking the rough edge of the growth I’d already gone through. “Joaquim, this is you, isn’t it?”

That was the name we were given. The words came to me. I felt a faint rush of relief; my gamble had paid off. I’d been right about the “he” Lord Dogknife mentioned. Joaquim’s consciousness still existed within FrostNight, which meant I might be able to reason with him. I might be able to convince him to stop this.

Slowly, so slowly I thought I was imagining it at first, I became aware of little sparks of blue light. They winked in and out like stars in a cloudy sky, twinkling and seeming to move. There were more and more of them until they came together, forming a figure I recognized. He looked like me, as so many of us did.

“It is you,” I said. “You’re alive.”

I was never alive, he said, though the little blue stars that made up his mouth didn’t move.

I took a breath. Technically, he was right. Joaquim had been a clone, grown by Binary from our blood and powered by the souls of those killed by HEX. But … he’d had a personality, a consciousness. He’d had desires and goals, and in the end he’d wanted to live when he’d been told it was his destiny to die.

“Yes, you were. You were your own consciousness, different from the souls used to power you. You knew your identity. You considered HEX and Binary your parents, and you felt betrayed when they used you. You were alive, and you wanted to stay that way.”

He formed into something more substantial in front of me, into the person I remembered. His hair was dark, skin pale, eyes brown. I could still see the glimmering lights at certain points on his body, like he was an image superimposed over a field of stars, a constellation given form.

“You still consider yourself a child,” he said, and this time his lips moved and the voice that issued forth was the one I remembered.

“What?”

“You exist only as your consciousness here,” he explained. “As do I. You have a body because you are used to having one, and thus you give it the form you most identify with.”

“You mean, this is how I see myself?” I asked, glancing down. I wished I had a mirror, but I was pretty sure I knew what I’d see: a young, kind of goofy-looking kid who was in way over his head.

It wasn’t really surprising to learn that was how I still saw myself. It was pretty accurate.

He nodded. I looked him over, taking him in. His image was faint, like an echo, and I could see the souls used to power him far more clearly than I saw him. I wondered if this was how he saw himself as well.

“That was you I heard, wasn’t it? When I woke up?”

He hesitated. “I was not sure if you had heard me. Your consciousness brushed mine as you were extracted from your Earth.”

“What do you mean, ‘extracted’?”

“It was the Professor’s wish that you be saved for later use.”

I remembered the last few moments on my world, with all the figures swirling around me. Some of them had come toward me, covering me like a swarm of bees, and I’d felt myself fragmenting. I’d been broken down into my most basic chemistry, and re-formed elsewhere. It was basic teleportation, really.

“He wanted FrostNight to absorb me, to use my energy,” I said. Joaquim nodded. “Did you stop it?”

“It was not possible right then. The worlds that were destroyed were broken down and restarted clean so my parents can enforce their will upon them. Taking you at that time was not in my protocol.”

My mind whirled. He had just told me two very important things, and I wasn’t sure which meant more. One filled me with hope that was immediately quashed; the other filled me with anger.

If my world had been restarted, that meant, in a sense, it wasn’t dead. If the planet was left alone, there was the smallest chance that maybe life would evolve as it had before. There was the smallest, tiniest chance that maybe my family would live again someday. I’d be long dead by the time that happened, but it was something, at least.

The other thing was his saying my protocol. This told me something very important.

“You’re not just within FrostNight,” I said. “You are FrostNight. You’re its consciousness.”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you stop it?” I screamed at him, the words ripping themselves from me. He didn’t even blink.

“Should I have?” he asked. I stared at him, aghast, and he continued. “Why? Why should I have stopped?”

“Because you just killed—” I had to pause, the number so high I couldn’t even fathom it. “Innocent people. Billions upon billions of innocents.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “That was a side effect of my ultimate purpose.”

I continued to just stare at him. Several other thoughts were making their way through my head; if he was FrostNight, if he was its heart, maybe killing him would stop it.

The problem was, I wasn’t even sure I could kill him. Not just physically, but morally. I felt for him. Even knowing he’d allowed the destruction of an indeterminate number of worlds, including mine, I felt for him. He hadn’t asked to be created for this, and he certainly hadn’t asked to have his consciousness shoved into a mash-up of science and sorcery made for the sole purpose of eradicating all life.

Still, his unfortunate circumstances didn’t entirely excuse his lack of personal responsibility, if you wanted to break it down to simple psychology.

Personal responsibility …

“But you said you were sorry,” I reminded him. “I heard you, remember? You said you were sorry you couldn’t stop it.”

His whole body flickered as though he might fade out, as though I’d shaken his very reality. “Yes,” he agreed hesitantly.

“If this is your purpose, and what you want to do, why be sorry?”

“It … is my purpose,” he said. “I did not say it is what I want to do.”

“Then change it!”

“I don’t know how.”

“You’re a self-aware ripple in time and space with the power to recalibrate entire worlds! The how is easy—stop doing it!”

“I can’t exist any other way,” he snapped. “This is what I was made for! You’re asking me to stop existing!”

The words hung in the silence, ringing true for both of us. I just looked at him, my sympathy growing with sudden certainty. “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I’m asking you to do.”

“Why should I?” he asked bitterly. “Why should I, when I could just take your power now and sustain myself forever?”

“Because what kind of existence would that be?” I asked, struggling to keep a lid on my temper. “Even if you fulfill your purpose and reshape the entire Multiverse for HEX and Binary, then what? Do you really think Lord Dogknife will wave his magic wand and make you into a real boy?”

He wavered again. “I …”

“Or that the Professor will grow you another body to live in? You’re made from us, Joaquim. You’re not a machine like Binary, they won’t want you. You don’t fit into their equation, their dream of a perfect, cold, and calculated existence. You’re not an entirely organic being like HEX, and you have no magic except what they gave you. And that magic,” I continued, desperate to drive the point home, “comes from us. From the things they hate.”

He stared at me, his expression saying more than his silence. He looked hurt and vulnerable, like a child. “You’re not one of them, Joaquim,” I pressed. “Of either of them.”

“And what am I, then?” he snapped, the little blue lights of his body pulsing with electric anger. “One of you?”

“Yes,” I said. “You are.”

He went still, surprised and wary. “You don’t mean that,” he said. “You are just trying to get me to stand down. Negotiation Tactics in High Stress Situations, Lesson One, Reasoning with Your Opponent by Identifying—”

“Joaquim, listen to yourself!” I interrupted. “Yes, I am identifying with you, because you’re just like me. I hate that you were made by my enemies, I hate that you betrayed us—but I hate that they betrayed you, too! You wanted to live, and you should have been given the chance. I wanted to save you,” I admitted, surprised by the words as they tumbled from my lips. “I tried to save you, at the end. I’m sorry I couldn’t.”

He continued to look at me, still wary and suspicious, but I could tell he was remembering. He was remembering all the lights and the fires and the wind, and the machines we’d both been hooked up to, and how he’d held his hand out to me and I’d taken it.

“So if I’m just like you,” he said finally, keeping his tone even and betraying nothing, “what would you do? If this was your only chance at existing, what would you do?”

“I’d give it up,” I said immediately. “I would stop it.”

“You would die.”

“Yes.”

“You would willingly die?”

“To save everything? Yes.”

He stared at me, then finally shuddered and looked away. “I don’t believe you,” he whispered. “It’s easy to say you’re willing to die, but to actually do it … to simply not exist … to miss out on everything …”

“I’ll prove it,” I said, holding out my hand. “Take me.”

He looked up. “What?”

“Take my power. Absorb me.”

He looked at my hand like it was a trap, hesitating.

Hue, I thought at the presence in the back of my mind. This is your chance to get out now, little buddy. Tell the others it’s okay, and I’ll miss them. Tell them Joeb’s in charge.

There was the general feeling of negation from somewhere inside my head. Hue, do you understand what I’m about to do?

Acceptance.

You’ll die, bud. I don’t want that. Go on.

Negation.

Hue, go on! You have to tell them for me!

Negation, sympathy, acceptance.

You’re one in a million, buddy.

Agreement. It struck me that Hue, despite being of a race many of us feared, had proven himself time and again to be a valuable teammate. I almost laughed out loud, and I wondered suddenly if Hue might actually be one of us, too. Joseph Harker, multidimensional life-form edition. Hell, it didn’t seem that unlikely.

“Absorb my power,” I said again to Joaquim, still holding out my hand. “I have Hue with me right now, I can see and understand a lot more than if I were by myself. Let me join with you, with FrostNight, and I’ll stop it. I’ll destroy it from the inside. You won’t have to do a thing.”

“I’ll still die,” he whispered.

“And so will I, and so will Hue. But everyone else will live, and that’s more important than anything.” He hesitated again, and I took a breath, grasping at straws.

“You have the memories of a hundred different Walkers, Joaquim—you said that once. Right?”

He nodded.

“You have the memories of their deaths, right?”

He hesitated again. “Some of them …”

“Can you honestly tell me that none of them went into this knowing and accepting that they might die?”

He flinched. Some of the lights within him grew dimmer, others brighter. “They were so afraid. …,” he whispered.

“Of course they were afraid. I’m afraid. I don’t want to die,” I admitted, feeling my stomach tighten into a knot with the truth of it. “But if it’s the only way to save everything, I will. You know I will. Come on. You and me, Joaquim. The saviors of the Multiverse.”

He snapped his head up, looking into my eyes, then at my hand. He moved, translucent and shimmering and glowing with the memories of a hundred lives. He took my hand.

“I, Joseph Harker,” I said. He looked at me.

“I … Joaquim …” Here he stopped, and I realized he didn’t have a last name.

“Harker,” I said. “You’re one of us.”

“I … Joaquim Harker,” he whispered, and I took his other hand.

“Understanding that there must be balance in all things …”

His voice joined mine, and we said the oath together, as the walls of FrostNight whipped and whirled around us. I could feel it constricting with me inside, felt it closing around the edges of my consciousness. I was afraid, but also calm. Peaceful. I could do this. I could save everyone. I could put Joaquim to rest, and all the souls that were part of him.

I hadn’t been able to save my family, but I could save everyone else’s.

Mom, Dad, Jenny, Kevin … I love you.

I felt my mind becoming one with FrostNight. It was chaotic and perfect, the answer on the edge of everything, the truth just out of reach. It was the precipice of all and nothing.

I felt my body break into pieces, my consciousness ceasing to need it as a vessel. FrostNight was my vessel now, and it was all I would ever be.

I was aware of everything outside myself, of the battle still raging. I found the threads of time connecting Avery and Acacia, and all the little stars that were my fellow Walkers. I gathered them all up like the strings of a hundred balloons, releasing them into the sky and sending them off toward InterWorld. Toward freedom.

I found the blight that was HEX, the virus that was Binary. They existed in the Multiverse like rot in wood, like decay on death. Necessary, in moderation. I had the power to destroy them. I did not.

I felt Joaquim react within my consciousness, and I felt him understand. I felt him join me as I began the process of deconstructing us, of pulling FrostNight apart piece by piece.

Then, like a ship with its tether cut, I felt a jarring sense of dislocation. I was floating, adrift, and then I knew no more.