The security guard shook his head.
“Never had a reason to go down there,” he said.
“Keeps getting better and better,” Eddie said.“Come on, Stace.You can do this.Stick through it.That’s my girl.Just keep breathing.Just keep breathing…”
The rest of it was a blur.I could feel the world blinking out into a dark tunnel—saw the whole of everything bleed away, like I was bleeding out, and then I felt Eddie picking me up, felt the whole world moving, and then.I was gone.
Next thing I knew, I sat up with a gasp, screaming.There was a pinging ricochet noise.
“Excellent, excellent,” I heard, from the far corner.“Perhaps you’ll believe me now.”
“Stacey,” Eddie said.He bent down over me, his face filled with concern.“Are you okay?”
He looked relieved.I felt.Well.Normal again.I touched my stomach.Brought my fingertips back up.The fresh wound was gone, with only old dried rust on my fingertips.
“I guess so,” I said.“Where are we?”
My surroundings looked familiar to me.Here there was a glass-front window.I could see the huge feet of the Bruiser outside.The smell of dark roasted beans and cappuccino greeted me like an old friend.And there, in the corner, a pile of rags moved forward, scrabbling at the tile, a hooded figure was pulling itself towards me.
“Is this the coffee shop?”I asked.
“Yes,” the hooded body said.Its hands—gnarled into claws like a monster’s—went up to its hood and pulled itself down.The person inside looked like a wizened mummy, dried and pruned from a long time gone.Little more than scab tissue composed around a skeleton.His face looked like a mummy’s, ugly, misshapen, and ashen, old flesh like dried beef jerky.
“Christ you’re ugly,” I said.
“Is that any way to greet your boyfriend?”the hooded thing asked.
“You are not my boyfriend,” I said.
“Not your only one,” William Corcoran’s corpse said.
“We workedout what had happened, the three of us, putting our heads together.We had verified it was actually Vic rustling around in Corcoran’s noggin,” I said.
“And how did you do that?”Judge Volkheim asked.
“Enquiring minds want to know,” Vic’s possessed head said.
“That’s not important,” I said.
“It’s a key part of the whole prosecution at this point,” Brynholf said.“It would behoove you to be as honest as possible.”
William Corcoran’s body sat up from where Brother Al had dragged him in.He looked much worse for wear.Being immolated and reconstituting himself from ash had seemed to do a number on his already-ancient looking bones.
“Stacey has a particular birthmark on her buttocks,” Vic’s now-hoarse voice said.“Corcoran would neither know its location nor care to know.Nor would he know the next boudoir secret I would wind up whispering to her.And Eddie.”
“Yeah, you don’t forget something like that,” Eddie said, shaking his head, his eyes wide.
I blushed.
“Can we get on with it?”I asked.“We found out something had happened during this last T-flop.Corcoran had cottoned on and he’d taken direct control of Vic’s body, swapping their consciousness during Vic’s last T-flop.Considering he himself was a Paradox, it would have been something relatively easy for him to do.This is just an assumption, but he’d planned on making things the worst they could be.We theorized all of his efforts were him trying to do what he could to alter things into the worst timeline possible.”
“And why did you not try and stop him before all of this?”Judge Volkheim asked.
“Culpability,” I said.“We wanted to prove in the court of law he was here and responsible for everything, even if he tried to dispose of his tracks and blame me for all of it.”
“Congratulations,” Vic’s possessed head said.“You’ve outsmarted me and outwitted me.Can we please get to the part where I’m executed?I’d rather not stick around any longer.If you all recall, Stacey herself admitted that were it not for her own actions I would no longer exist.So.Big round of applause to her for wreaking destruction on the city.”
“Your own actions have damned you,” Nagisa said.“Were it not for your plan of revenge, you could have lived, unmolested, as yourself.Perhaps even found another student and got another chance to pass on the torch.”
