Winterwing found himself with a lot of time to think.

He should have ignored Emily and the sagging, spongy floor that had brought him to this place. She would still have been swallowed, sure. Someone would give him pills to forget it, and assure him that floors did not suddenly become permeable, and he could have put her behind him and moved on with his life.

This was fantasy, but the desperate desire to return to normal was unavoidable. It would have been so much simpler, for him, to have just ignored every sound from the other room, laid down, and dealt with the aftermath in the morning.

There was a stinging guilt in having that fantasy.

The second thought he had was he could have just left her on the side of the road, many many months before, and pretended to have never seen a body. No one would have ever known. He felt similar guilt for this thought, and yet could not stop having it.

He spent his time inventing all sorts of ways that he could have plausibly extracted himself from his current captivity. He was a mix of confused and angry and frustrated and, above all, sore, and he could not rid himself of the nagging idea that maybe, for all the times Emily had needed help, if he had just not stepped in once. Had just chosen not to. Had focused on anything else instead.

And every time his mind worked its way through what he could have done, it recoiled again when he realized how cruel that would have been.

They had put him somewhere out of the way. Winterwing did not have a better word than ‘they’. No one had bothered with an introduction, but he understood well enough that he was not exactly a guest. They had placed him in a small room, better lit than his last cell, and it smelled better too, and the ceiling was not sagging above him. They had followed through on the promise to stop the painful vice squeezing his torso every time he tried to breathe, though the bruises remained. They said they would help Emily, and the others rescued, and while he did not fully believe that they could, they seemed more likely to try than the last batch of hosts.

There was no furnishing in his little room, it was just a square box of blue steel walls and ceiling and floor. He had drifted off, and then woken up with the slight disappointment of finding himself still here, instead of in his own bed at home. Home had its own set of problems, but he understood most of them. It would have been better, to have discovered that the last day or two had all been dream. But, his muscles were still stiff from the hard floor, the rib still itched furiously under his bruised skin, as doctor-of-not-medicine had promised it would, and the air had a distinct staleness to it.

The hallways of this new prison had the benefit of being far less sharp-edged. Their layout seemed even worse, however, sprawling and maze-like, going on for miles instead of the tight coils of the previous citadel. It was smooth walls and floor and cold lighting in every direction, all of it open and empty. With his head pressed to the steel, he could hear an ever-present hum, something deep and artificial, as a great machine sleeping somewhere. He couldn’t imagine what could have made such a noise; he had never heard anything like it in his life.

There was little else to do, in his box, beyond sit and think, and it was all the more frustrating that he could not come to anything useful. Every piece of what he had seen only brought him to the conclusion that he did not want to be here, and near as he could tell, every decision he had made, every step he had taken had been, upon examination, correct, and had unavoidably led him here. He could not leave Emily to whatever her abductors had planned for her. He could not ignore a friend passed out on the floor. He could not ignore a body on a road.

He did not know how long he had been there, as there was nothing to mark the passage of time. His screen had been left behind, though he was not sure when he dropped it, and it was now probably being analyzed by someone trying to decipher why he wasn’t home. Best of luck to them.

He was sitting on the cold, hard floor, with his eyes shut, resting against the wall and that insipid hum rattling his skull, when the single door finally opened. It was a theatrical thing, motorized and resembling an airlock more than a door.

Winterwing did not stand up. It was the one tiny little rebellion that he could have. Three of them had arrived this time: The distressing image of himself, the small redhead made of threats and fists, and not-medicine. They regarded him with various levels of awkwardness and suspicion.

He had squandered his time time feeling sorry for himself. He rested his hands on his knees and was left with no snappy dialogue, no witty remarks, and no more information than when he had arrived.

“What now?” he asked, sighing.

It was the one they addressed as ‘Wildwing’ that chose to break the silence. “Who are you?”

This was the most absurd question Winterwing had ever heard, because it had taken perhaps twelve hours before anyone had bothered to ask it.

“I-you’re joking, right?” he half laughed from the floor.

They didn’t seem to be expecting that answer.

“You’ve accused me of all sorts of things today. We’ve tried spy, clone, shapeshifter—I am, by the way, entertained by robot. You didn’t come with a new one prepared?”

They did not quite have the sense to be apologetic, but it appeared that, indeed, they had run dry of theories.

Wildwing tried to regain control of the conversation. “Why do you think Dragaunus brought you here?”

“Who?”

They did not seem prepared for that response, either, and looked between themselves, confused.

“You saw the Saurians, right?” the redhead asked, irritably.

“I saw some things that were lizard-shaped,” Winterwing conceded.

“What do they want with you?” she demanded.

“They seem to be friends of yours. I’ve never seen them before. Maybe I should ask what you did to piss them off?”

Wildwing’s eyes narrowed “We didn’t do anything, they destroyed Puckworld.”

“Okay,” Winterwing coughed. “I feel like I would have noticed that, but, okay.”

Not-medicine spoke for the first time. “Did… you not?”

“I sat in an office and worked for ten hours tod-” he paused. “Yesterday?”

“How odd,” she said, thoughtfully.

“That’s your takeaway?” redhead spluttered.

“I would propose, from my earlier suggestion, that the main difference between our two versions of reality is in one the invasion happened, and in one it did not.”

“If he’s telling the truth.”

“You folks need more fresh air,” Winterwing said, putting his head back against the wall, “maybe see if a gas leak is causing your problems.”

“Who’s the girl?” Wildwing asked him.

“I don’t know,” Winterwing said, simply.

“You ran after her.”

“I did,” he agreed. “I’ve been thinking about it, a lot, and I have no idea who she is. I just thought I did, that’s all.” And when he realized the three of them were still waiting for a more complete answer, “I offered her a room, that’s it.”

The copy frowned at him in a way he found entirely uncomfortable, though he would not have been able to articulate why.

“Do you think she’s dangerous?” Wildwing asked.

“What? No,” Winterwing blinked.

“How would you know?” redhead asked.

“Someone hurt her. She was freezing and starved to death, when I found her.”

“You,” Wildwing said. “You found her.”

“On a road in the middle of no where. Beginning of last year.”

There was another silence as the copy considered, though redhead was now showing increasing impatience with the questioning. Wildwing shrugged to his companions and declared “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t understand what an impostor and an unknown contagion are doing in the possession of the maniac who wants to rule the solar system?” redhead asked.

“No,” he said. “If he lost someone on the wrong Puckworld, what the hell happened? It’s so convoluted.”

“We’re talking about the guy the mind controlled Phil into being more annoying so he could steal a rocket booster, right?”

“He said he found her early last year,” Wildwing nodded to Winterwing for confirmation.

“That’s right?” Winterwing asked.

“So, what? The others you brought back said they were sick at the same time,” the redhead insisted.

“Early last year I was in a work camp,” Wildwing said. “Dragaunus never knew who I was until we stormed the master tower in the spring.”

“So, he’s lying!”

“Possible.”

“I’d just like to point out that, for the record, no one’s made a compelling argument that any of you are very trustworthy either,” Winterwing said from the floor.

“Let’s say for the moment that everyone in the room is telling the truth,” Wildwing said. There noise of disapproval from his vocal companion, but she said nothing aloud. “We all have the same problems right now. The primary of which is that your friend-” he nodded to Winterwing again “-and the others from the cell block are ill. The secondary, more long term problem, is the Saurians the we are pissing off are interested in very little else beyond owning the planet you are sitting on.”

Winterwing found himself unmoved.

“You saw them for yourself,” the copy continued. “You don’t have to take my word for it. If they’re not Saurians and they’re not a threat, what were they doing in there?”

Winterwing looked away. He did not have an explanation that would have been satisfactory. He had seen for himself that, whatever it was he was now in the middle of, was certainly a matter of life and death. He had seen the death. He had seen that strange room, with the glowing runes written on the floor, too.

Winterwing exhaled, frustrated. “How about instead of bothering me, you look at the manual that we found with her? Seems like if you want to know what they were doing, you should be looking at the instructions.”

“Manual?” not-medicine asked.

Wildwing was quiet for a moment, before agreeing “We recovered a book. It’s huge, bound in leather. Wraith left it behind.”

“I had it put in the containment storage,” the redhead said.

“He’s not wrong, we should get a look at it. I’m not...I’m not sure it’s safe to handle, though.”

“Well, it can’t be worse than a parasitic infection that makes you explode now, can it?”

“I can make a deep imaging scan of it with minimal contact,” not-medicine suggested. “We can make a digital copy to look at.”

“Do you think that’s safer?” Wildwing asked.

“A-are you asking my scientific opinion of an evil magic book?”

Wildwing sighed. “Yes.”

“Mallory’s wording is… crude, but, probably? If it tells us how the organism works, even if it’s completely supernatural, we may be able to work up a solution.”

“Fine, let’s do it,” the copy looked to Winterwing again. “I’m going to let you out of here.”

“Wildwing-” the redhead interrupted.

“With supervision,” Wildwing amended. “He had a useful idea, so we can grant a bit of good will.”

“I don’t know if you have noticed, but you all appear to be heavily armed,” Winterwing observed. “Exactly what do you think I’m going to do?”

The copy did not answer immediately, giving him a long stare first, before finishing some internal evaluation and saying: “I admit I do not know. The last person that walked in here unarmed nearly drowned us. I will try my best to be fair, but I won’t be repeating that mistake.”