The train line from Canterlot to Ponyville had long since been replaced by a high-speed maglev train, which was certainly faster than it had been—though not instantaneous. Dr. Bloom and I sat together in a small compartment and watched the landscape rush past us.
“Can I ask you something?”
I glanced at her. “Sure.”
“What did you think of the other world?” Dr. Bloom asked.
What did I think?
I missed it. I missed the heat and the smoke and my squad. I missed having that kind of purpose, but that wasn’t exactly exclusive to being a wildfire fighter. I could still feel it now, albeit dimly—an ache to storm out into the woods and tangle with flame. If I was anything like Blaze (and I was), it probably wouldn’t ever go away. There would always be a part of me there.
“Didja hear what I said?” Dr. Bloom nudged me gently.
“Mm-hm.”
“Do you have an answer?”
“Yep.”
Dr. Bloom waited a moment. “Could I hear it?”
“No.” I folded my forelegs across my chest. “Why do you care, anyway?”
She shrugged. “You could say it’s my job,” she replied. “Since… it is.”
I rolled my eyes.
“But, um…” Dr. Bloom rolled her shoulders and cleared her throat. “I haven’t done it myself. So… I guess I’m mostly curious what it’s like.”
I shot her a sideways glance. “You haven’t done it?”
She shook her head. “No. What I’m doing’s important, y’know? I can’t mess around with other things right now. Equestria needs this,” she said softly. “Or we’re not gonna make it.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. But I said something anyway: “Oh. Right.”
Dr. Bloom nodded and returned to staring out the window. The train was flying across a river, now—the one that spilled from the top of Mt. Canterlot and wound its way to the South Luna Ocean.
“I have a question for you, actually,” I said.
Dr. Bloom gave me an expectant look. “Shoot.”
“I didn’t learn about tributaries in school. But the other me did,” I told her. “The wildfire one. In training. And I thought they were called that because they fed into a bigger river. Y’know. Tribute. Tributary.”
“Mm-hm. What’s your question?”
“My question is why are they called that?” I asked. “Because if destiny does what you say and it all branches off from this one big river, then ‘tributary’ isn’t the right word. Dis-tributary is.”
Dr. Bloom nodded. “Most ponies don’t catch that,” she said. “I call them that because I think that’s what they are. When you think of time linearly, the way we all do, it makes sense that destiny starts as one thing and turns into more. But I don’t think that’s right—I think they all converge somewhere down the line.”
“Converge… how?”
“We all have to change,” she said. Then she looked at me. “Even you, ma’am. And I think we have to spend our lives changing. Learning about all the things we could be.”
“Hm.”
The train passed over the river. In two minutes, we would be in Ponyville.
One little detail that had slipped my mind when I agreed to dinner was Applejack’s wife. Dr. Bloom had dropped her name as an aside, and a distant part of me had processed it, but that distant part had not managed to communicate it to the front part that did the actual thinking.
Lucky for me, Applejack was the one to answer the door. Her eyes lit up at the sight of her younger sister before turning stone cold at the sight of me.
“Well, well, well,” she drawled as she looked me up and down. “Rainbow will have a field day with you.”
“She ain’t here to cause trouble,” Apple Bloom defended, physically pushing her way between myself and her sister. “She’s in a tough spot right now and so I invited her to dinner. She’s just gonna be quiet and polite and sleep in the guest room. Ain’t that right, Spitfire?”
I swallowed my pride. “Yes, ma’am.”
Applejack arched a brow in my direction. “Tough spot, huh?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your fault, or someone else’s?”
Good question. Dr. Bloom shot me a look that told me the right answer. “Mine,” I admitted.
She looked at her sister, who offered a sheepish grin, then turned back to me. “Well. Points for honesty, I guess,” she grumbled. “You can come in. But I don't want to hear any nonsense about Last Gasp. You get me?”
“I get you,” I snapped back.
“No nonsense?”
“No nonsense.”
Applejack glared at me for another few uncomfortably long moments, then pulled away and waved us inside. I let Dr. Bloom lead the way and slunk in close behind. Applejack very nearly clipped my tail in the door as she closed it, which was absolutely on purpose.
The inside of the house was heavy with the scent of butter and cornmeal. I could already hear the sizzling from something frying on the stovetop, a pleasant hum underneath the sound of friendly chatter and laughter. There was a young voice in the mix—a little kid, maybe?—as well as the familiar rasp of my old teammate.
But it was more than just her that was familiar. It was all of it—the clatter of dishes. The little orders called over each other in the kitchen rush. The murmur of customers.
Customers.
Customers?
“Customers waiting, Chef!”
I looked to my left. It should have been Dr. Bloom there, but it wasn’t—it was some unicorn, short and dressed up in a tux. A member of the waitstaff. What was her name?
“Chef?” she repeated. She was waiting expectantly, on the tips of her hooves, ready to dart away should I give the order.
“U-uh…” I stammered, staring down at her. “Velvet?”
“Who’s Velvet?” she asked—but it wasn’t Velvet anymore. It was Dr. Bloom.
I blinked hard. “I, uh…” The smells were changing, interweaving in my mind: some of it here, down home and southern, but some of it there, sharp and clean and sophisticated. “Sorry. Just a little… that destiny-hopping stuff doesn’t have any side effects, does it?”
Dr. Bloom furrowed her brow. “What’s going on?” she hissed back.
“Oh, horseapples…” My successor was sitting forward in an armchair playing with a collie when I stepped into the room. For a minute, I thought she was wearing a chef’s jacket—but it turned out to merely be an overwrought aviator’s jacket. Upon seeing me, she put her face in her hooves.
“Rainbow.”
“Spitfire,” she replied. “Been a while.”
I grunted.
Rainbow chuckled. “Real nice,” she spat. “How’s the hermit life treating you?”
“Great,” I lied. “I didn’t have to see any of you.”
Rainbow rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair. I noticed that, underneath that jacket, she was wearing a wing-belting vest. “The board managed to evict you, I guess?”
I remembered Applejack’s threats. “Uh-huh,” I said. “Your sister-in-law very generously invited me here for the night.”
Dr. Bloom offered a thin smile and a weak chuckle.
“How nice of her,” she said, refusing to look either of us in the eye. “Just try not to set off any magic bombs while you’re here. And it’s six falafel all day, chef.”
“Uh-huh,” I grunted. “Wait—what did you say?”
“I said, ‘six falafel all day,’ chef!” Griddle shouted, his focus from his task unbroken. “Two minutes!”
Two minutes wasn’t fast enough. Stir fry would be up in less than one.
“You feelin’ okay, ma’am?” Dr. Bloom asked. “You look a little… well, I dunno, exactly.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to chase away the visions. “I-I’m fine. I think I maybe just need to sit down.”
Dr. Bloom nodded and started to pull me towards a table.
“What’s with her?” Rainbow asked, just slightly too loud to go unnoticed.
“I’ve got no got-dang idea,” Applejack grumbled.
Dr. Bloom plopped me down into a chair at the dining table. While it was closer to the kitchen, there was a door between the dining room and the family room where everyone was chatting—the much-needed space was already helping me ground myself a bit more firmly in the here and now.
“What’s goin’ on?” Dr. Bloom asked in a conspiratorial whisper.
I shook my head, searching for the words. “I-I feel like I’m not all the way here,” I said. “It’s the kitchen. It’s making me… do you think there’s another world out there where I was a chef?”
Dr. Bloom cocked her head. “I guess it’s possible,” she said. “But you shouldn’t be going anywhere without the console prompting you. It’s a magical process—you need magic to move.”
I rubbed my temple. “Yeah, but isn’t there, like, excess magic everywhere?” I grunted. “Isn’t that sort of the whole deal?”
Dr. Bloom rolled her eyes. “Well, yeah, but no one else has ever—” She paused. “Oh, horseapples.”
“What?” I leaned forward to try to look into her eyes, but she was hiding behind her mane. “What?”
“Ah…” Dr. Bloom put a hoof on her forehead. “I’ve only ever done this sorta thing on campus.”
“So?”
“So the campus has almost no magical background radiation!” Dr. Bloom told me urgently. “I-I’ve never let a patient leave in the middle of the procedure—your current cutie mark isn’t stabilized yet! Shoot!” She pounded her hoof on the table and made the centerpiece rattle.
“What do you mean it isn’t stabilized?” I asked. “Why do you keep skipping parts of the explanation?!”
“Because you keep telling me you don’t care!” Dr. Bloom snapped back. “Plus, you were supposed to actually read the paperwork you signed at the front desk!”
“I-I did!” I lied.
“How many times do I gotta tell you: you suck at lying!” Dr. Bloom scolded. She paused a moment and drew in a deep breath, held it for a moment, then released it. “Okay. It’s fine. It’s no big deal. I’ll just skip dinner and we’ll head back to campus. Trains are still running, so it shouldn’t be—”
“Chef?”
“—more than ten minutes. Can you—”
“Chef!”
“—hang on for that long?”
“Chef!”
All the warm, home-y air was sucked out of the room in an instant, replaced by stark white walls and cold brushed steel. The entire room was hissing, sizzling, vibrating—something was beeping and grinding. A cash register printing receipts? No. No way. It wasn’t that kind of restaurant.
I looked down. In front of me, on a pedestal, was a mess of papers. Orders, guest list, and a million other notes scratched in margins. Notes in my hoofwriting. My notes.
I looked up. There, beside me, was Fleetfoot—my host, my front-of-house—looking at me with equal parts expectance, reverence, and unbridled anger.
I clicked my tongue. “Run that by me one more time?”
She growled in frustration. “Table two ordered stir fry but didn’t specify celery allergy.”
“We use celery in our stir-fry?”
“Chef, please!”
“Right!” I looked back down at the pedestal, bewildered by the absolutely alien language laid out before me. “Uh… table two, table two…”
“Oh, for goodness’s sake!” Fleetfoot leapt in front of me and reshuffled the papers. Her eyes darted across them for half a second before she shouted into the kitchen with total confidence: “Re-fire! Two stir fry, eighty-six celery! Reheat two focaccia! What’s the ETA on falafel?”
Griddle lifted the edge of a patty with his spatula. “Two minutes, chef.”
“It was two minutes three minutes ago!” Fleetfoot cried, stamping her hooves on the linoleum.
“I-I dunno, something’s wrong with the flat-top!”
“Then switch flat-tops!”
“I can’t! Falafel’s quarantined to this one—we’ve got a chickpea allergy dining tonight!”
Fleetfoot let loose what could only be described as a wordless war cry. “Oh, for goodness’s sake!”
“Get some drinks out,” I said sternly.
Fleetfoot looked up at me. “Drinks?!”
“Keep them distracted. Host, Fleets,” I reminded her, gripping her shoulder firmly. “That’s what you’re best at, right? That’s your thing?”
She stared at me with wide, vacant eyes. “I-I—”
“Say ‘that’s what I’m best at, chef,’” I ordered.
She bit her lip. “That’s what I’m best at, chef,” she murmured.
“Say ‘that’s my thing, chef.’”
“That’s my thing, chef,” she said, stronger.
I clapped her on the shoulder. “Good kid. Buy us some time. I’m gonna get this flat-top fixed.”
“But—”
“I know what I’m doing.”
I did. I knew exactly what I was doing. That was where I’d started, after all—selling restaurant supplies. Then repairing restaurant supplies. I was only in the business through a friend of a friend, otherwise I never would have made it. It took years, but now I was here: head chef. At my restaurant. Mine. But I still knew my way around a flat-top.
“Behind,” I muttered as I squeezed through the throng of chefs to get to Griddle. “We’re gonna pull this thing out from the wall. Then you’re gonna go find me the toolbox in the pantry. You got that?”
“Yes, chef.”
“Good. On three.”
Griddle grabbed the side of the flat-top and anchored himself on the floor, then nodded to me.
“One. Two. Three!”
The dining room table howled as I yanked it across the wood floor.
“Whoa!” Dr. Bloom shouted as she leapt away from it.
Everything hit me at once. The smell, mostly, but the sudden absence of noise almost made my ears pop. I stumbled one step, then fell back into the chair, missed, and fell all the way to the floor in a heap. I groaned softly and tried to push myself upwards, only to find that I’d fallen right at the hooves of my old friend.
“Spitfire?” Rainbow Dash murmured. Then she gasped. “Whoa! Your cutie mark!”
“Not again…” I lifted one wing and looked down the length of my barrel to find my new destiny: a frying pan with a curl of flame leaping out of it. I growled in annoyance. “Please tell me this one’s at least a little closer than the last one.”
Dr. Bloom stammered something nonsensical. “Without my equipment I’d have no way of—well, there’s really no way it could be anything but—er, then again—”
“Your old junk’s in the barn. Go on and get it,” Applejack said with the presence of an EMT. “Now!”
“Right!” Dr. Bloom’s eyes lit up. “Okay, yeah! I’ll be right back!”
She leapt up from the table and scampered out of the room. It was all too clear she was still the baby of the family, now that I was seeing her in context. I guess that’s something you just don’t grow out of.
Applejack turned to the doorway. I hadn’t noticed until then that the rest of the Apple clan had gathered there, apparently waiting to see what had happened.
“Nothin’ to see here,” Applejack said. “She’ll be fine, Mac. Y’all just head back to the other room, now.”
The ponies exchanged looks, but didn’t move. They sure were a quiet bunch.
Applejack sighed. “C’mon. Out,” she ordered, rising to shoo the rest of them away.
That left me and Rainbow. She hesitated for a moment before settling into a chair beside me.
“So,” she said, “you are changing over.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “Guess I am.”
“I’m glad someone talked some sense into you,” she said. “You could really do some good. You’d be a great pilot for sure, or an engineer like the rest of the squad. And you were always a good leader.”
I looked at her. She offered me a genuine smile, and the kindness of it turned my stomach.
“Yeah, not that kind of change,” I grumbled. “I’m changing back.”
Rainbow’s brow furrowed. “Huh?”
“It’s really nice that you think I can ‘make a difference’ or whatever, but everyone seems to have already decided there’s no difference to be made,” I said. “So I’m changing back. To the old me. At least that way I can spend the rest of my days here, being myself, instead of some… some space nomad.”
Rainbow looked at me. Looked into me, more like. Her expression softened from the hard and discerning grimace into something almost sympathetic. “You’re upset.”
“Wow. How’d you guess?”
“Spitfire, having your destiny changed isn’t abandonment,” Rainbow said.
I flinched. “I never said it was.”
“Your friends feel like they’re losing you,” Rainbow pressed, “and they’re trying to save you.”
“No, they’re not!” I insisted. “They’re trying to handle me, because I’m a nuisance. Just like this planet.”
“You’re not a frickin’ planet, you’re a pony!” Rainbow pounded her hoof on the table. “Take a little responsibility! If you wanted to change, you could—Equus can’t. You’re telling me you really don’t see the difference?”
Before I could summon an answer, Dr. Bloom came back. She threw herself into the front door and stumbled over the threshold, then came running into the dining room.
“I’ve got ‘em!” she said. “My old stuff. I just knew it’d come in handy someday. Let’s getcha hooked up and stabilized.”
Dr. Bloom dumped a collection of clunky machinery on the dining room table. I wouldn’t exactly call it dirty, but I guess I was surprised that wasn’t the case—old crap in a barn is usually at least sort of musty. Dr. Bloom wiped a thin coating of dust from the top of something that looked like the console from her office, then clicked open a first aid kit and pulled out a hoofful of those little sticky pads.
“Can we do this someplace beside the dining room?” I muttered.
Dr. Bloom paused to scratch her head. “Uh…”
“No,” Rainbow answered for her. “Let’s just get this done. The others can eat at the kitchen table if they can’t wait.”
“Whew.” Dr. Bloom chuckled. “That’s good to hear. I was gonna ask Spitfire to climb up on the table.”
Rainbow winced. “Well, AJ won’t love that, but uh…” she trailed off, then shrugged and grabbed the centerpiece.
Dr. Bloom made a low sound of discomfort. “Are y’sure? What if somethin’ gets scratched?”
Rainbow Dash scoffed. “Oh, she’ll live.”
Dr. Bloom hesitated for another long moment, then gingerly removed the runner. I was starting to realize just how young the pony treating me was—still visiting the family homestead for dinner, still nervous about catching flak from her big sister. She was going to spend more of her life in space than here on Equus. And here I was trying to eke out a few more miserable years doing… what, exactly?
If you wanted to change, you could.
“Hop up!” Dr. Bloom directed.
I didn’t hop—I climbed. Once I was settled on the pilly fitted sheet, Dr. Bloom set about re-applying the sticky pads to my head and cutie mark. Part of me wanted to ask her to cover the frying pan, even though I knew it would be gone soon. I just didn’t want to look at it any longer.
If I thought the old console was hard to understand, this one was impenetrable. It featured a large keyboard where a majority of the old letters and numbers had been painted over with symbols I half-recognized from the squad’s late-night physics study jam. It had a readout, but it was far less visual—just rows of code that Dr. Bloom evidently found meaning in. She carefully punched in a line of commands and watched as the screen spat out a jumble of meaningless gibberish.
“Okay. You did manage to move one tributary closer, but—” She paused and smacked the side of the machine. When this didn’t give her what she wanted, she reached over and tore one of the sticky pads off my cutie mark, only to move it half an inch over. “Huh.”
“What? What is it?” I asked.
“It’s… something changed,” she said. “Between the campus and—how can that be?” She ran her hoof under a row of text, squinting hard.
“Share, AB!” Rainbow Dash ordered.
Dr. Bloom looked up at me. “Your old tributary,” she said.
I didn’t want to ask. I already knew. “Wh-what about it?”
“It’s gone.”
I closed my eyes.
There isn’t really a word for a river disappearing. Rivers dry up sometimes. Rivers change course. But they don’t vanish. This was, in my opinion, yet another oversight of the river analogy of destiny. I prefer the tree. Trees have trunks. The trunk feeds branches and is fed by roots. And most importantly, trees can be pruned.
“What happens now?” Rainbow asked softly.
Dr. Bloom stared at the readout. “I-I don’t know,” she stammered. “I… this has never happened before!”
“It can’t be.”
“Well. That’s politics, Madame Mayor.”
Something flashed. Light and sound. Sharp, but muffled. Distant. Then again. I flinched. Someone put a reassuring hoof on my shoulder.
“Madame Mayor?”
I opened my eyes.
I was in an office—impressively decorated, stately carpet, filled with well-dressed creatures in a semi-circle around a heavy, dark desk. A desk covered in an array of papers, ornate paperweights, and a single lamp spindly gold lamp. A desk I was seated behind.
“Mayor…?” I whispered to myself. This drew a few odd looks, but did not break the tension. If anything, it only seemed to make it worse.
The flash came again: cameras just outside the door.
“Y-you can’t leave her out there to fend for herself forever,” a young stallion murmured.
I squinted at him. “Who’s out there?”
He looked taken aback. “Councilmare Ivory.”
I closed my eyes again and gently shook my head to clear it. “Right. Right.”
“You need to be honest,” a tall dragon advised. “This was a mistake, and there’s no amount of clever lying that can get you out of it.”
An older stallion to my right scoffed. “Give her speech-writers twenty minutes, why don’t you?”
“You can-not be serious!” A unicorn mare behind him flicked her tail. “Honest or not, admitting to this completely undermines your authority! Think about the consequences!”
“The consequences are already here,” a changeling muttered darkly. “It doesn’t matter what she does—the election is less than a month away. It’s over.”
The hoof on my shoulder patted me gently. I already knew who it was before I looked: Fleetfoot. She offered me a thin smile.
In an instant, I remembered her with near-perfect clarity. She was my deputy now, but we had worked together for long before that. All the way back to our very first internships at the public works department. Even further than that—back to debate clubs in our youth. She could never beat me at the podium, but she had something I didn’t. She was… grounded.
“Fleetfoot?”
She seemed stunned. “Yes, ma’am?”
“What do you think I should do?” I asked.
That shut everyone up.
Fleetfoot blinked. “All due respect?” She withdrew her claw from my shoulder. “I think you underestimate the citizens of Manehattan.”
I arched my brows. “Do I?”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said firmly. “I know it feels like it in here sometimes, but it’s not you against them. Everyone’s just trying to make this city a better place. If we disagree on how—well, then that’s the time to have a conversation, isn’t it? Not to lie.”
I chuckled. “That’s not how politicians do things.”
She shrugged. “Maybe not. But it’s how they should do things,” he said. “You could be the first.”
I looked into his eyes for a long moment. Then, without thinking about it, I stood.
The crowd at my desk all lunged for me at once, half-formed thoughts spilling out of their mouths as they tried to block my path.
“That’s a very nice sentiment, but you can’t actually do that,” one of them managed to say. “J-just give us a few more minutes and—”
“She’s right,” I said flatly. “I’m not going to go out pretending to be someone I’m not. And I’m certainly not going to lay down and accept things the way they are. I’m going to try to fix this the way I believe it should be fixed. If I don’t do it, who will?”
No one knew what to say to that. I slipped through the crowd and up to the double doors leading out of my office. I could hear my deputy trying to speak over the sound of the cameras. She sounded… scared.
I opened the doors. And there she was: Fleetfoot.
But I wasn’t in the office anymore. I was back at Sweet Apple Acres, kitsch and all. And she was here.
I blinked.
“What did you say?” she whispered.
I blinked again. “Fleetfoot?”
“What did you say?” she repeated. “About… fixing things?”
“I-I didn’t,” I lied.
Fleetfoot shook her head. “You’re a terrible liar, Spits. Always have been.”
My legs gave way beneath me, and Dr. Bloom was there to catch me before I hit the floor. Somehow, I realized, the console was still attached to me and dragging behind me like a metal parasite. Fleetfoot sat down beside me and peered into my face with pure concern.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
She sighed. “I realized it was… irresponsible at best to let you go storming off after what happened,” she said. “The receptionist at the health center told me where you’d gone.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just stayed quiet.
“So!” Fleetfoot tried to paint on a happy face. “Good for you on going to counseling.”
“It wasn’t for the reasons you wanted me to go,” I said.
“I know,” Fleetfoot replied. “I know you.”`
“That sucks,” I muttered.
Fleetfoot only chuckled.
My next question sat on the tip of my tongue for a long moment before I let it go. “What was I like?” I asked. “In your tributaries?”
“What makes you think you were in my tributaries?” she asked coyly.
“Because you were in all of mine,” I groaned. “Because we were friends before all the destiny stuff. Right, Dr. Bloom?”
Dr. Bloom clicked her tongue. “Aw! You were listening!”
Fleetfoot smirked. “Stubborn. Angry,” she said. “But generally for the right reasons. Unlike how you’ve been in the here and now.”
I rolled my eyes.
“What about me?”
“Annoying. Hovering,” I said. “But… mostly because you wanted to help.”
Fleetfoot’s smirk turned to a genuine smile. I couldn’t help but return it, even if I quickly hid it away.
Applejack cleared her throat. “I hate to break up the happy reunion, girls, but could we do this someplace other than my dining room?” she asked, drippingly sweet. “I’ve got hungry kids to feed, and they ain’t waitin’ any longer.”
“Oh, shoot. You’re right.” Dr. Bloom got to her hooves. “Rainbow? Fleetfoot? Let’s take her to the porch.”
Working together, the mares managed to clumsily guide me out of the house and sit me down in a rocking chair on the covered porch. The sun had long since gone down, and I felt a small pang of guilt for disrupting the evening so completely. Then again, if you really thought about it, this was mostly Dr. Bloom’s fault.
“So…” Dr. Bloom said carefully. “We still have the small issue of your, uh… your tributary vanishing.”
I sighed.
“We can definitely find you something stable with a little more mapping. Unfortunately, your current position is pretty shaky,” she explained. “But a bigger mapping job will also require newer equipment. Feel up for the train ride back?”
“H-hang on,” I said. “I… I don’t even know what I want anymore.”
Dr. Bloom blinked. “Uh. As much as I admire your progress on that front, ma’am, stopping now ain’t really an option.”
Rainbow chuckled. “What exactly did you want before?”
“I've told you all a million times: I wanted to stay here.”
“But not anymore?”
“No, I—well, yes, but—” I paused. “I don't know!”
Fleetfoot, Rainbow, and Dr. Bloom exchanged looks.
“Try to think about the tributaries you did visit,” Fleetfoot suggested. “Just… what felt right, I guess?”
Dr. Bloom gasped. “Right! The convergence!” She smacked her forehead with one hoof. “This is what I was telling you about: the point where all of your potential destinies tie back together again.”
“Okay…” I murmured. “Okay. I'll try.”
I thought about the fire—the heat. The sweat. The thudding of my heart in my chest. The terror of licking flames and smothering smoke. And the thing that felt right: planting myself on my hooves. Holding the end of the hose. Being the last member of the chain.
I thought about the kitchen—heat again, but different. The panic. The noise. The speed. The stress of communication. And the thing that felt right: owning it. Taking charge. Solving the crisis, but not through directives—through action.
I thought about the mayor's office. There was always heat. The flash of cameras. Sweat under a collar. The council surrounding me, advising and arguing and waiting. The knowledge that one word could make or break it all. And the thing that felt right: facing it.
“I…” I swallowed. “I need to stay.”
Dr. Bloom hung her head.
Fleetfoot kicked at the porch. “Oh, for the love of—”
“I need to stay and I need to fix it,” I said quickly. “It's not right to just… leave our used-up things behind. Destinies or planets. I want to stay. I want to face this problem head-on. I want to fix this planet.”
It hadn't been long since I last felt this particular change. It started as acceleration, then weightlessness… I was warm.
And then it was over.
I looked back at my flank. It was familiar, but also new: flame in the shape of a bird.
In other words? A phoenix.