[Stephen moves closer, crouches down in front of him like a man seeking understanding with a wounded animal. Takeshi's expression doesn't change. Voice dry and hard and steady. His turn to tell a story.]

They had me on ice for two hundred and fifty years. Spun me back up to solve a murder. This meth, Bancroft, with an Envoy obsession. [As powerful as to consider himself a god, when all he'd been was another pawn.] It was all my sister, pulling strings. She'd destroyed everything, everyone I'd ever loved. Become everything we'd fought against.

[The sickness of the revelation is there again. Time hadn't diminished it. The betrayal, the despair, the guilt of not having seen it sooner. Of how far she'd gone. Of not being able to save her.]

I cornered her in her snuff palace for the rich and powerful. I had her, but I knew, I could see it. She wouldn't stop. She'd never stop.

[She'd tear apart the universe to get to him again. To bring him to her side. It would never matter to her how many people she hurt, how many lives she destroyed. His gaze on Stephen's doesn't waver, but there's a long span of seconds, time and weight and memory grinding against his resolve. But there was no eroding this.]

So I blew out her stack. [Simple, blunt, final.] Stayed with her, held her while the whole place fell out of the sky.

[Waited to die.]

And then I woke up here.