So, I sat in the lobby of that closed vet clinic and listened as the Rebellion-sympathizing members of the Crossroads Committee explained just what that other version of me had done right after we left. I started out with my mouth hanging open from just the first couple of words. Which turned out to be a bad idea, because it only got more absurd and wild from there. My mouth could only hang open so far, and I didn't want to make any sounds for fear of missing anything important. Intelligent speech was right out, because I'd forgotten how to actually talk.

  I just listened as the story, the revelations, continued. My only solace in my shock was that everyone else who had come in with me were just as surprised. My dad, Miranda, Abigail, Wyatt, Tabbris, Percy, Eurso, Cerberus, even Puriel and Spark were equally taken aback. And for Abigail, that was even after she’d obviously been given a basic rundown before bringing us here.

  Actually, Puriel seemed the most surprised out of all of us. Probably because he never could’ve imagined his own people could be played to this extent, or for this long. All that time, and none of them had even suspected the truth. We all stared in disbelief as the full impact of all that hit us.

  One by one, everyone, Committee rebels and my companions alike, turned to stare at me. At one point, I had sat down through that, but it didn’t last. I’d stood up to pace anxiously before the story was halfway over. Now, I felt all those eyes on me as I stood in the middle of the room and tried to come up with something to say. My mouth opened and shut a couple times, as I gave a weak, helpless shrug. The sound that escaped me wasn’t anything intelligible. Then I finally did manage to say something approaching a real word. “Uh.” Yeah, that was it, that was the word.

  What was I supposed to say? What was I supposed to think? How was I supposed to react to any of this? Crossroads, the place, the island school in a pocket universe, had been my Archive the whole time? Well, not mine, but the one from the other me, the one who had been split off. The one who lived through thousands of years. I’d known she wouldn’t be able to completely sit out of things, time changes be damned. But this? She had managed to trick all of Crossroads, hell, all of the Seosten, into putting that school inside her Archive, and kept it secret for centuries?

  Had it always been like that? Had the Crossroads Island universe always been her Archive, or did she actually change history by setting it up like that? Obviously it didn’t really matter that much either way, since the revelation didn’t happen until I came back to the present, but still. It was just… a lot.

  Wyatt was the one who found his voice next. And he used it to say something more than ‘uh.’ Mostly because it took more than two letters and one syllable to get out all his questions. He kept demanding to know how so many special security features failed, how they could possibly have been inside a Reaper (basically) Archive without knowing about it, how the Pathmaker building had been linked to it, how people could teleport into it without knowing, and so on.

  The poor guy was lamenting his own failure to figure that out more than anyone else’s. It didn’t matter that the person fooling him, and everyone else, had been some version of me without any bad intentions toward him. It didn’t matter that Jacob had known everything about Wyatt millennia before he was born, and would’ve known how to get around his defenses. What mattered, to Wyatt, was that he had failed to notice something that important, even with all his precautions. He never even suspected that the place wasn’t what Crossroads thought it was. Which, for someone who suspected everything, made him feel like he’d done something wrong.

  For a minute, I didn’t care about everyone else there. All I cared about was that my brother felt bad. Stepping that way, I took both his hands and squeezed them, getting Wyatt to look at me. “Come on, this other me didn’t just cheat, she designed the game itself. And the world it was played in. She had to make everything convincing enough to fool the Seosten, and by the time you came into the picture, she had hundreds of years of experience making Crossroads seem completely authentic. You had no reason to ever suspect anything like that. Not when you already had plenty of more obvious, more dangerous things to keep you distracted from that.”

  “Heh.” Wyatt gave that soft chuckle, looking at me past that long, hooked nose and straggly hair. “You don’t understand. I’m proud. You-- this is you. You’re the one who did this. Another you, yes, but you. You fooled me. You fooled me for so long. You can--” He made a sort of honk sound deep in his throat that seemed like a half-laugh, half-snort before embracing me tightly. It took me aback, but I returned it with a giggle despite myself. For a moment, we stayed like that, with his gangly, knobby limbs wrapped around me as tightly as he could manage. No one else mattered.

  Finally, we separated and Wyatt went back to asking the Committee people questions. Which they answered as best as they could, but it was clear they didn’t have all the info he wanted. The only person who did would be that other me, and I had a feeling Wyatt would be doing his level best to find a way to lock that me in a room so he could talk about everything for as long as it took. And honestly, even after hearing about what happened with the Committee, I was pretty sure if anyone could figure out a way to pull that off, it would be Wyatt. Especially a motivated Wyatt.

  Abigail rose from her seat and offered a hesitant, “You’re saying the, err, pocket universe that the Crossroads school was located in has secretly been this… other Felicity’s Reaper Archive the whole time? It wasn’t replaced recently somehow, it wasn’t-- that is, it’s always been her?”

  “Him, we believe,” Percival noted. “From what we’ve picked up, this… ahh, time-displaced self of Felicity’s has fully embraced the male identity of Jacob Donn. Unless, of course, you can dispute the authenticity of that?” He was looking at me, raising an eyebrow. “If this actually isn’t some version of you, it would… ah, be even more confusing, but Jacob has been known as a tricky--”

  “It’s me,” I put in quickly. “I mean, a version of me. I created the Jacob identity to begin with, back in…” Oh. Right, well, it was my turn to explain the side of the story they didn’t know about. That had to be one of the main reasons they’d called us here like this, to find out what I actually knew about it.

  So, I told them. Percy helped, jumping in here or there, as I explained everything about what happened when I went into the past. Well, the general gist, anyway. First, I asked them to do a timestop thing, given how long it would take to get through. But the four Committee members informed me that time had been stopped ever since we stepped into the building to begin with. Which made sense. They were probably even more aware than I was of just how crucial time was right now. Especially if all the Loyalist Boschers were nearly as pissed off as they had to be.

  In any case, I took all the time needed to explain the entire situation. It was… surreal to be here, telling these four Committee members, and Queen Guinevere, about my time travel adventure. I went through all of them with it, the whole story that had led to a new, separate version of me being trapped thousands of years in the past. To say nothing of how weird it felt to tell them about the Ankou and how that whole thing had played out. But then, there was nothing about any of this that wasn’t surreal in the extreme. I just tried to roll with it.

  By the time I finished giving all the details on that, it was the Committee members’ turn to stare at me with their mouths open, completely shocked. Even knowing what they had already, the full story still managed to overwhelm them. Which, honestly, made me feel kinda good, under the circumstances. Maybe it was weird to enjoy surprising these incredibly powerful people, but there it was. I wasn’t perfect. Seeing the way they stared at me as I told them about stopping Maestro (leaving out the connection to Dare, of course), the whole tower of Lashra Vaeil thing, the imprisoned Reapers, how they had created so many versions of me to help counsel them so they could be better people, how that had turned me into a Fae version of myself, and… well, everything else was seriously cathartic. Though not nearly as much as it would’ve been to actually see my other self trounce the other Committee members like that would’ve been.

  Yeah, I definitely needed to find out if there was any way I could get the memories from th-- hey, maybe I could get them from my other self. Assuming she-- he ever spoke to me directly. He could do that, right? Obviously there wasn’t some sort of problem with the two of us existing at the same time. Now I was kind of anxious to meet myself. Not just to get the memory of that fight (though I really did want that), but for… for all of it. This was a version of me who had lived through all of human history, basically. I wanted to hear his take on everything, all of it. I wanted to meet him, talk to him, find out how much he’d seen, the people he had met, his whole story.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Suffice to say, there was a lot I wanted to ask my other self. For now, at least until he showed up and decided to talk to me, I was just going to have to stick to handling a few of the eighty-seven million other very important things that were going on. I wasn’t exactly lacking for things to do.

  Once I was finally done, Teach gave a low whistle while stroking his long, dark beard. “Well, I suppose we can’t say you haven’t kept yourself busy, Chambers. This is…” He trailed off, like he had started out not knowing how he was going to end that sentence, and never figured it out before he got there. His face twisted a little, until the man finally managed a rather weak, “This is a lot to take in.”

  “You’re telling me,” Calafia muttered. The dark-skinned woman visibly shook that off before her gaze centered on me once more. “I suppose that’s where we are. As best as we can tell, this other self of yours managed to replace the actual Crossroads pocket universe with his own… ahh, Archive as you called it, some time shortly after the original was created. We believe he had some level of influence over the design of that original. At least, assuming Bosch, or… or the Seosten--” Her eyes flicked toward Puriel briefly as she half-stumbled over the word. “-- actually created a real pocket universe at all, and it wasn’t already this Jacob Archive to begin with?”

  Realizing she really was asking, Puriel made a noise deep in his throat, like he was considering it. Then he nodded. “I believe that is the only real option. The original Crossroads island reality was overseen by Raduriel, our technology expert. But he was rather occupied with designing the actual Heretical Edge. Believe it or not, creating something capable of regularly and safely turning humans into even pseudo-Reaper-Bonded was not a simple matter. Even for Raduriel, there were many setbacks. I believe he employed a Gaegneh to handle the construction of that pocket universe.”

  “You--” That was all Percival said, at least at first. He was clearly about to say something else, but that was when he actually looked at Puriel. The old Camelot knight had been avoiding that this whole time, keeping his eyes anywhere but on that man. But now, as he looked that way to respond, their gazes met and Percival completely stopped talking. He froze. At first I thought he was nervous or something, afraid of the old Seosten who had led the war against his people.

  That was when I realized the truth. It wasn’t about fear. Sure, Percival was definitely aware of just how powerful Puriel was. Or at least he had some idea. He knew that even as a Committee member, he probably wasn’t going to win a throwdown fight if one came up. But he didn’t care. That reaction I saw wasn’t fear. It was anger. It was taking everything Percival had not to go after Puriel right now. There was still plenty of bristling, barely constrained rage in there. Of course there was. Puriel had been a big part of destroying the original Camelot. From what I’d heard, he actually took Arthur’s dead nephew, Gaia’s son, and controlled his corpse to fight Arthur. Which was just… yeah. No wonder Percival was barely holding himself back right now.

  Everyone else had fallen silent by then too, watching this play out. Percival took a step that way, then another. He slowly walked right over until he was standing in front of Puriel, less than a foot away. The two were basically face to face, both remaining silent for a few long seconds. I saw Spark, in the background, act like she was going to say something. But Puriel’s hand rose very slightly, just enough to make it clear he wanted her to stay out of it and not draw Percival’s attention.

  When Percival spoke, his voice was terse, making it even more clear just how difficult it was for the man to keep himself even slightly under control. “The rest of these people here don't really know you. They don't know the person you were back in the old days. They don't know what you let happen. They don't know about everything you helped destroy. But I do. I was there. I saw you back then, and I saw the people who died because of you. I know just what you're capable of. I'm not going to ruin this now. I won't make our situation worse over a petty grudge. But I need you to know that. I need you to understand it. Remember that someone here knows what you're capable of.”

  Puriel was silent for a moment after that, like he was giving the other man a chance to continue. Once it was clear that wouldn't happen, he bowed his head a little. “I am quite glad to hear that there are two people in this room who know precisely what sort of person I have been in the past. And two people who will ensure that doesn't happen again. There is nothing I can say that would even begin to make up for the choices I made. I could say that I believed they were right at the time. I could say that I did what I needed to do to prevent my people from deciding to call this entire planet a loss. If they did that, they would simply have left Camelot as the only human civilization on this world while taking everyone else. And then they would've done whatever was necessary to prevent this world from ever falling into Fomorian hands.”

  After getting all that out, he gave a heavy sigh. “I could say all that, but it wouldn't be the whole truth. I did nothing to make the situation better. I engaged in no negotiation. Because I saw humans as not worthy of being negotiated with. Perhaps it could've been possible to find a middle ground that was more palatable for everyone. Perhaps together we could have come up with something that would have allowed our people to work together. I can't say that it was likely, but my failure was in not even trying. My failure was in seeing your people as unworthy of even the barest effort. For that, I am sorry. And for everything that stemmed from that, for the atrocities I am responsible for, I will never cease working to ensure they do not happen again.”

  It was his turn to go silent, and I saw an assortment of emotions play out over Percival's face. It was obvious there was a lot more he wanted to say, much of it probably unhelpful. In the end, he just replied, “Maybe you've really changed. I hope so.”

  When that was over, Abigail hesitantly spoke up, her eyes on me. “So, that… that other you who went into the past and stayed there…” Her face twisted just a little as she said that, like even after this past year she still couldn’t believe that was an actual thing she was saying. “That’s really the one who just did all this? You-- he-- he’s really strong enough to stop the Committee?”

  I offered a weak shrug. “I mean, I guess it makes sense. As much sense as any of this makes. I went through that whole thing with the Ankou and became one of their Fae, so I sort of have full Reaping ability, not just the Boscher kind. I mean, when I… uh, kill something, I absorb every power they have, and it… umm…” Oh boy, they were all staring at me now. I could feel the laser-focused gaze of all four Committee members locked on me, staring deep into my soul.

  Ayup, Yardbird, who had taken over running copilot at that point, agreed. Definitely staring into our soul. We can feel it from all the way inside. Uh, are you sure they can’t see us right now?

  At this point, I’m not willing to bet on anything, I sent back with a small gulp before continuing out loud. “Uh, that is, anyway… yeah, the Ankou-Fae thing means I get all those powers. And if this other me has had over four thousand years to Reap powers and skills from bad things, plus all that time to learn magic, and advanced knowledge of a lot of what was coming, yeah, it makes sense. And believe me, I cannot believe I’m saying that having a forty-five hundred year old version of me running around creating the Crossroads pocket reality and winning a fight with half the Committee makes sense. This is all just…” I grimaced before moving to sit down again.

  My dad moved to sit next to me, putting one arm around my shoulders while giving me a small, amazed smile. “Remember when you were little and I said you could do anything if you put your mind to it? I had no idea how big your mind was.”

  “Yeah, big enough to fit all of Crossroads inside it!” Tabbris piped up while jumping over to land in the seat on the other side. She embraced me tightly. “I just wish that other you, uh, Jacob, was here right now so we could ask him all these questions.”

  “That… is a good point,” Puriel noted. “Why exactly has this… Jacob not shown himself here? He revealed his identity, his deception, cast everyone out of the, ahh, Archive, and then… what? What is he doing now? I would have expected him to be here already.”

  Beside him, Spark piped up. “How come he did that, anyway? Uh, sent all those Boscher people out of his Archive if it was so secure?”

  It was Sophronia who answered, though the woman started by staring at the Seosten girl with an uncertain, “Are you--” Whatever she was going to ask, probably something about why Spark was clearly a magical projection from Puriel, the woman eventually decided against it. Instead, she simply answered, “We believe Jacob was worried that most of his protection came from our companions on the Committee not knowing where they were. As soon as they were aware of the threat and more of the details, it’s… possible they could have damaged things with a full assault.”

  “And an assault inside an Archive like that could be bad,” I muttered. “Sure, I guess. But that doesn’t explain where he is now. I kinda wanna talk to my other self too. I have a lot of questions.”

  “Unfortunately, he’s the only one who can decide to show up and answer them,” Percival noted. “So until that happens, we’ll just have to handle something else.”

  “Oh good, you can help with our new project then,” Abigail replied brightly. “See, we were just talking about how to get Gaia out of the prison your people have kept her in all year, without any trial, representation, or even a basic reading of charges.”

  “Man, you guys thought Crossroads dealing with a four thousand year old me was dangerous?” I put in with a tiny smile. “They really fucked up this time.

  “Now they’re gonna have to deal with Abigail in lawyer mode.”

  Joke Tags: Let’s Just Not Try This Case In OUR Reality? Cuz I Feel Like The Current Supreme Court Would Side With The Extremist Genocidal Xenophobes