"Are you able to..." I'm about to ask if Ty can fly, but then I remember he doesn't have a wingsuit on him. Even if I were willing to relieve Freddie of his - looting a corpse, how wrong - it was damaged in the crash, and the wings are broken and unusable.

"We gotta call for help." Gideon pats his pockets, searching for his phone. "Dammit, where'd it go? No, wait, here it is..." He finally finds his phone, pulls it out, and checks the screen. "No service. Of course."

I look over to Freddie. I think I might have to loot his corpse after all, but not for his wingsuit. I doubt any of us live Primers would get service here - we're literally a universe away from where our phones began. Connecting calls between Heaven and Hell is one thing, but between Prime and Second? Prime phones don't have that technology.

So I take his phone and toss it to Gideon. "Here, use this!" Then I return my attention to Ty. "How badly hurt are you?"

He grits his teeth as he sits up straight. "Nothing broken, I don't think. But my hand's really numb, so..."

"Which one?"

"Left." He holds it up, rotating his wrist. "Yeah, I don't think it's broken. Or maybe I'm just not feeling the pain yet...?"

I take his hand gently, feeling his wrist and watching his face for any negative reaction. I don't really remember freshman-year health class all that well, but I do remember a thing or two about how to determine whether or not you've got a broken bone. There'll probably be some kind of swelling as the bone forms a callus of some kind around the break.

But I feel nothing out of the ordinary on Ty's wrist. Or his hand, or even his arm.

"Huh," he says, blinking slowly. "Now it feels a little less numb."

Kelly catches my eye. "You wanted that Scott McCall tattoo...are you able to absorb other people's pain now too?"

"As far as I know, I can't."

Ty grins up at me. "Not that you wouldn't try, though, huh?"

I let go of his hand. "Why do you look like you wanna kiss me?"

"Uh..." Now he looks super-embarrassed, his cheeks flushing. It's hard to tell visually because his skin is so dark, but for a moment, the heat radiates off his face. "Yeah, I know, it's not gonna happen. But can you blame me?"

"You know I'm underage, right?" I cast my eyes around until I spot Gideon, who's about fifty feet away, closer to the road as he makes the call. "But you're enough of a badass that I wouldn't mind."

"Oh, stop it!" He laughs out loud, sounding more than a bit endorphin-high. I can't say how long that'll last, but I'd rather not stick around to see him come down.

"No, seriously. If Jesper Fahey were a driver and not a gunner-"

"Well, they're both played by Keiynan Lonsdale," Ty chuckles. "But you think I'm a badass? You two are the badasses!" He points to me and Kelly, one after the other.

"Yeah..." Kelly struggles to move her stiff arms. "I'm a badass who can't get out of her wingsuit armor."

"Why do you wanna take it off?" I ask. "Too hot for you? Or..." I force myself to push back the worried thoughts that flood my brain. "You're not hurt, are you?"

"If by 'hurt' you mean..." She moves her arms like she's doing the Robot. "No pain, no gain, am I right?"

Something else I heard in freshman-year health class comes to mind. "Pain means injury." I reach out and take her arms, feeling them gently. She grimaces, but only a bit. I can't actually feel her bones through the armor, though. "Can I take this off?"

She shakes her head, tossing her hair back to expose her ears. "Yeah, go ahead."

I pull my hands back. "Uh...mixed messages much?"

"Only you would think that's a mixed message, I bet." Gideon comes back and sits next to Ty. "Annie says she's on her way. Five minutes out, give or take."

"Here, come on..." Kelly walks a little further away from the guys until she's behind the remains of the car, out of their sight. Fully aware of how strange this must look to them, I follow her and kneel in front of her, taking hold of her arms again until I figure out where and how to undo the armor. She slowly slips out of it, revealing that her arms are practically locked into a ninety-degree angle. "Whoa. Who knew I could get so swole?"

"I can, uh, help loosen you up." I gently grip her wrists and coat her forearms with tendrils of ice.

She sighs softly, her whole body relaxing. "I don't think I've heard that before."

"Heard what?"

"That voice. That really low, growly voice. And I thought you just wanted to be my friend."

"What are you talking about?" The ice creeps a little further up her arms. If it starts getting opaque, I'll have to stop. I can barely handle that level of cold myself, and even if being a land elemental toughens Kelly up - not that it doesn't - I can't imagine her tolerance would be much better than mine.

"You've probably used that voice with Fionna, I bet." She swallows. "And..." Now she's got the same sheepish "I wanna kiss you" look on her face that Ty just did. "You're gonna hate me for saying this-"

"Doubt that-"

"But I eavesdropped on you and your old girlfriend, and I heard you talking like that to her too." She looks me squarely in the eye. "Don't deny it, Alex. You like me, don't you?"

She's got me cornered. So what do I say?

After a long pause, I finally step off the fence I've spent the last week or so straddling. "Yeah. I do." I look up at the sky, wishing Annie could just get here and take us away so I can stop having to talk to Kelly. "I mean...Juliet and I, we've been falling apart really slowly 'cause I'm so bad at long-distance, and you've been a real help to me, and you're beautiful as f-"

She stops me with a short, but very tender, kiss. Then she pulls her arms away from me, at which point my ice melts off her skin and she reaches up to my neck, then to my skull. God, I need a haircut. The hair back there is getting really thick and shaggy again, and I say that as a guy who continuously grew his hair out during the ages of fifteen and sixteen.

"I don't exactly wanna be a homewrecker," she says.

I shake my head, feeling her hand move with my occipital bone. "Juliet and I were done anyway." It's like a switch has flipped in my head - and hell, now I think about it, I haven't even said her nickname of "Jules" for a while. Not since I talked to her last, at least. "I'll just have to tell her I've found someone else. Just like she found someone else."

Kelly nods solemnly. "Yeah, I...I kinda overheard that too."

I look over her shoulder and see, in the distance, an SUV emerging from the woods. "Sorry you did." I stand up, and she gets to her feet as well. "Well...maybe when we get back home, we'll meet up somewhere, huh? Just you and me. And...and maybe not coffee this time?"

She holds up her hand, which trembles just a bit in the air. "Three Guys. The greasier the better."

"Mmm...you read my mind." I rub my stomach, which of course takes this opportunity to growl expectantly. Sorry, Tummy Monster, I can't feed you at the moment. You'll have to wait.

The SUV's brakes squeal as it pulls up and turns around, pointing itself back towards Bearville. The door opens, and Annie runs around the hood while Paul emerges from the passenger seat. "Is it true?" he asks. "Is Freddie...?"

Oh God. I've practically pushed Freddie and his corpse out of my mind, but now the subject's been brought up, I feel myself growing a bit dizzy thinking about what's happened to him. Sure, his soul isn't dead, most likely - he's probably wound up in the fabled Third 'Verse, and he'll be continuing to deal with his unfinished business. But still, even though I didn't actually see the death happen - or feel it, for that matter, because I've physically felt two deaths too many in my life - and even though I didn't know Freddie all that well, it hurts.

Paul wipes a tear from his eye, then kneels in front of the wrecked car's passenger door and struggles to extricate Freddie. Gideon takes it upon himself to help him, and I approach Ty with Kelly and Annie. Then I see the Black Mirror sitting all by its lonesome, making a depression in the grass ten feet away from Ty. I walk past him and grab it, inspecting the whole thing - screen, buttons, casing and all - for damage. Nothing that I can see, but I think we'll have to take this to an electrical engineer or someone with genuine expertise in these matters. Get their opinion, because it must be more professional than mine.

I carry the Mirror to Annie and silently press it into her hands, then, together with Kelly, help Ty get to his feet. He takes his first, uncertain step, grits his teeth, then takes another. He's limping, but at least now we know he can walk. Shrugging out of my and Kelly's arms, he trudges up the embankment back to the road and stands next to the SUV, holding on to the door latch for a long moment before getting in.

"Hey, where are we gonna put Freddie?" Gideon turns to Annie from where he stands behind the SUV, holding Freddie by the ankles. Paul has him by the head.

"Um..." Annie rubs her neck. "Well, I mean, you told me he was dead, so...there's a tarp in the back. Lay him under that." She clicks a button on her key fob, opening the back hatch.

"Not much room," Paul says. "Not with the third-row seat up, and I don't think we're gonna want to fold it up." He lays Freddie's head on the bumper, and I rush in to grab hold of it while Paul roots around and pulls out the tarp. It's bright blue and, when Paul accidentally throws a bit of it in my face while attempting to unfold it, I pick up on how much it stinks like some kind of cross between chemical varnish and unwashed bum. But that smell will probably be no worse than the inevitable stench of decay I expect to start emanating from Freddie any time now. Hell, he already smells a bit like a bad barbecue because of the burns he sustained on his hands - maybe thermal, maybe electrical, maybe from his laptop. Which, now I think about it, is nowhere to be seen.

I think his laptop was destroyed. Gideon temporarily grips both of Freddie's ankles with one hand, his right, while stretching out his left arm. I found a few keys embedded in his hands. He wouldn't have felt it, though. I think his neck got compressed in the crash, and that's how he died.

Now I think about it, Freddie's neck does look shorter than I remember. I always thought he was such a gangly red giraffe of a guy. I can't imagine the pressure it must have taken to crunch his cervical vertebrae together like that, if that's really what happened to him. Although there's more damage that Gideon probably hasn't seen - small amounts of blood trickling onto my hands as I cradle Freddie's head. Blood that would almost be invisible under his hair. Almost.

Not to mention the nasty divots in the side of his wingsuit, some of which are also matted with blood.

All from that coilgun.

I look inside the SUV and see Ty looking back at me. Or, more accurately, at Freddie. He can't repay him for this, giving his life and shielding him from further harm as much as he could.

I say what Ty doesn't, not out loud. "You really took one for the team, man."

"Here, put him in..." Paul steps aside, having unfolded the tarp so that it covers the narrow strip of cargo space between the hatch and the third-row seat. He holds it up, waiting for me and Gideon to turn Freddie and lay him down nice and neat - although we still have to fold his legs up, because he's too tall to lie flat and completely lengthwise over the width of this space. It doesn't help that his head and feet press against the insides of the SUV's wheel wells.

"If rigor sets in," Gideon mutters as he lets go of Freddie's feet for good, "send out for some WD-40 to grease him out."

"We'll get him back long before that happens, I'm sure," Annie says from the driver's seat. "Ty, don't you wanna sit up front?"

"I'm good, thanks."

"You know we're still gonna have to get you checked out, right?" Annie starts the engine. "We'll make you our first priority, but the hospital's pretty swamped. We might have to take you into the Terminal."

"Whatever, just give me a clean bill of health and I'll be ready to go."

"Go where?" I ask as I get into the SUV and sit behind Ty. The third-row seat is cramped as hell for me, but I'll put up with the discomfort for a while. "I think you and Kelly should go home, right?"

Kelly moves over to let Gideon climb in next to me. "Sure, sure," she says. "If you and Gideon go home with us."

"What?"

"Alex, we're not gonna leave you to fight this alone," says Ty. "Come on, how many times do we gotta say it? We know what we signed up for."

"I wouldn't be alone-"

"No, you wouldn't." Kelly slides over to the passenger side and buckles her seatbelt. "You've got us now, so get used to it."

Steadfast allies, these two. "I know I can't stop you when you got your hearts set on it, but...I just don't wanna see either of you get hurt. And definitely not any more than you already-"

Ty turns around. Annie's started driving, so I really hope he's not one of those people who's prone to motion sickness when he's not facing forward. "We cool, Alex," he says firmly. "We got your back."

I raise my fist, and they take turns bumping it. "Thanks, guys."

It's a long, long drive back into the city, and an even longer drive around numerous roadblocks until Annie gets us to the hospital. There's nowhere near as much rioting going on, but I don't want to think about how many casualties there must have been to put a stop to it all. I'd ask Annie, but she's busy navigating us through the cleared streets at a "bat out of hell" kind of speed.

First, Paul and I pick up Freddie's body and carry him, wrapped clumsily in the tarp, around the front entrance to a basement door leading to the hospital's morgue. Then we return to the waiting room, which is crowded with a bunch of Second 'Verse denizens, most of which seem to be here less for physical injury and more for shell-shock. The whole way, I'm carrying the Mirror again, and its weight is more noticeable with each passing step.

Two minutes of Annie talking to a nurse at the hospital's front desk gets her to shake her head and beckon us forward, deeper into the building. She finds a door near a vending machine and ushers us through it, holding on to everyone else besides me - because we're going into the Terminal. I take Ty's and Kelly's hands and pull them through, while she helps Paul and Gideon.

A few feet away, to the side, Gabe sits with Jay. He gets to his feet and waves to us with a crooked grin. "We gotta stop meeting like this, you cheeky bastard."

I hold the Mirror up. "Where's Fionna?"

"She'll be along soon, I hope," Harlan says. "She's keeping Kensi company - she got hurt, and they're fixing her up right now. But we got a more important issue to deal with."

"Dammit," groans a tall Indian-looking dude - college-age, I think, with heavy stubble and a stiff collar peeking out from under an argyle wool sweater. "Why couldn't my brother get here? If he'd been here, we would've been able to tell them by now!"

"Tell us what?" I ask.

Grace, who's busy pulling out a sheet of fresh cookies - mmm, they smell like walnuts, and they've got Hershey's Kisses embedded in them, like I'm not salivating enough - clears her throat and waits until the Indian dude closes his mouth. "You remember how there was that shiny force field thing in the oven earlier?" she says. "Thanks to Yash here, it's all gone now...but Ty, you touched the field?"

"I did. Why?"

"You need to get your hand disinfected right now." Yash runs over to a door marked with a red cross - it must be the Terminal's on-site hospital. "That field, it was made of old necrophages."

Everyone - except Gabe and Jay, who must have heard this already - gasps in horror, myself included. But none more so than Ty. "You mean to tell me...I got flesh-eating virus on my hands?"

"Uh, not exactly." Yash opens the door. "The name means 'death eater,' 'cause it's meant to eat dead or decaying tissue. But this is an early model. Defective. Has a bit too much of an appetite."

"They're nanites," Annie's quick to add, because Yash is letting his mouth run a little faster than his brain. "Not viruses, not bacteria. Not natural."

"Oh shit," Ty whispers. "That's why...that's why my hand was all pins and needles before? There were nanites eating me?"

Yash turns around, approaches Ty, and reaches out. "Give me your hand." He gives it a cursory inspection. "Not much necro damage I can see, but we can't take any chances. Hell, I'll have to disinfect myself now that I've touched you-"

"And me." I feel the blood draining from my face. "I touched his hand too."

"Then come on." Yash finally runs through the door, waving his arm wildly at me and Ty.

"Should we follow you?" asks Kelly. Gabe steps up behind her, ready to do the same.

"No, no, stay back," says Annie. "We'll be safe here. And the boys will be in and out in no time..."

I hear nothing further as I go through the door and it closes behind me.

Yash stops us outside one of many nearly-identical silver doors in the long corridor that leads away from the Terminal. He opens it, peers in, and starts yelling through the gap. "Aditya! Where the hell have you been?"

"What do you think I've been doing?" A younger boy, maybe thirteen, slides off a table and sticks the phone he's been playing with into his hoodie pocket.

"I've been trying to reach you for almost an hour!"

"Shit, calm down, brother!"

Yash rolls his eyes. "Move, slack-off. I gotta do some real urgent stuff here."

"Haha, are you really gonna go out of your way to not say 'shit' to me?"

"I'd pick you up and throw you out myself," Yash says, "but there's necrophages on my hands, so..." That's enough to send Aditya literally screaming out the door. "I love the kid," Yash groans under his breath, "but he's so undependable at the worst of times. Anyway...which one of you will do it first?"

"I will," Ty and I say in unison.

"No, dude, you go first," I say, angling my head at the door as Yash fires up the computer on the desk his brother was sitting on. "You had these on your hands longer than I did."

"But you might've picked up some of them from me." Ty shrugs. "I mean, I wasn't feeling as many pins and needles and shit after you held my hand-"

"Just get in and get clean." I lean against the wall opposite the door, crossing my arms until he goes in.

"Sweet guy," Yash says as the door closes.

I listen in through the door just in time to hear Ty say, "...I don't normally like someone I don't know, 'cause I'm demi and all, and I've only known him a few days. But I'm jealous as fuck of my sister. He wants to ask her out-"

"I already have!" I yell through the door, shaking my head and snorting with laughter. "Sorry, man, I don't date dudes!"

"Doesn't make you less of a sweetheart!"

Another door opens, closer to the Terminal, and out step Kensi and Fionna, the latter really brightening as I catch her eye. "Thought I heard your voice."

"Yeah, don't touch me, though," I say as she and Kensi both attempt to hug me hello. "In my ongoing duties as an artificially-engineered chosen one, I've been infected with an artificially-engineered flesh-eating nano-virus."

"No shit!" Kensi flexes her arm. "Nano-things just fixed my arm here. Maybe, uh, not the same kind, though...and I'll leave now." She steps back and walks away, blushing and trying to sound nonchalant as she whistles to herself.

"Nice choice of song," Fionna remarks as she watches Kensi leave us. Of course our eyes are both drawn to the same curvy sight. "She must think you're the new Messiah too, huh?"

"Hmm?"

"You didn't recognize the song? Dakoda Bigelow! I thought you were a fan!"

I sit on the floor, slumping my shoulders. "I'm a bad, bad fanboy. Happens when everything goes to shit all around you. They think I'm the Messiah? They think wrong."

I look up as Fionna stands next to me, then watch her slide down until she's level with me, though a good foot away like we're separated by a wall of Plexiglas. "I'm not much better," she mutters. "You saw what happened when I used the Black Mirror."

"You'll get another chance soon." I smile at her. "I brought the Mirror back with me."

She gasps, her hand on her heart. "Why can't I hug you right now?"

"Infected, remember?"

She pounds her head against the wall a couple of times. "Fucking fucknuggets."

"I don't regret it, though."

"What don't you regret?"

"I..." I stop and rub my neck as I think of how best to say this - and not accidentally paint it in the kind of light Ty's been bathing the situation in while talking to Yash. "I didn't know I'd be sharing the nanite load with Ty. But I'm glad I did it, 'cause I'd feel so much guiltier if I let him suffer that alone."

"Not like he's suffering now. Where is he, anyway? Getting the nanites off him?"

I look at the door again. I can't hear what's going on beyond the silver-painted metal, not at this distance, but I'm imagining that Ty's going fine. "Yeah, that's what he's doing. Like I said...no regrets. Not like what I really regret."

"Watching me die?" Fionna's voice breaks, very audibly. "Watching Gabe die?"

"Yeah, those. And also..." I shake my head, feeling my blood finally rush back to my face with a vengeance.

"Oh, you gotta tell me now!"

I don't want to, but she'll hear it in my thoughts anyway. "Not mutually swiping V-cards with you."

When Ty emerges from the door ten seconds later, he turns back in to ask Yash, "My joke wasn't that funny, was it?"

I get to my feet, wiping tears from my eyes and knowing Fionna's doing the same thing. Then I pass Ty and get ready for disinfection.

Yash picks up a series of sticky pads with wires connecting them to a small box next to the computer. Following his instructions, I take my hoodie off and pull my shirt's left sleeve up, making it look like it's half tee and half tank. "Don't worry," he adds as he spaces the pads out over the length of my arm, one every two inches or so. "Ty didn't get these same pads. Although I'm not sure I won't be able to avoid taking some hair off you when I unstick these."

"What are these?"

"They began as an electrostimulation device for physical therapy. Turns out the same pulses they fire into your muscles can kill nanites. Who knew?" He flips the switch, and the pads throb gently against my skin as they do their work.

I can almost smell the nanites cooking, and the fumes addle my brain enough to get me to crack a really stupid joke. "Electrostimulation, huh? And in the left arm...maybe now my arms will finally be equal in muscle tone."

He gets the punch line as fast as any of my best friends would. "Too much jacking off as a teenager?"

"I'm still a teenager, and yeah, 'fraid so. Fifth year of first-chair skinflute."

"When you start out in stand-up, send me tickets," he deadpans. "One for me, one for my brother."

"Consider it done."