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The Rift had been growing for three days.
Everyone in Goiky knew it. You could not look at the sky without seeing it, that jagged, luminous tear splitting the atmosphere like a wound that refused to close. Glitched assets flickered in and out of existence around its edges, pieces of the world appearing and disappearing in stuttering loops. A chunk of the northern sky had simply gone dark two mornings ago, replaced by a void that pulsed faintly, like something breathing on the other side. The ground near the Wireless Recovery Center had developed hairline cracks that hummed with a faint violet light, and every few hours one of them would widen without warning, releasing a gust of hot, displaced air that smelled like burnt static.
Pen was used to a lot of things. He had watched friends get eliminated one by one, had seen the Grasslands turn grey and goop-covered, had seen the sky begin to blacken at the edges where the strange dark substance dripped from above. He had watched Two get torn apart by One’s power and still manage to smile through it, which was somehow the most unsettling thing he had ever witnessed. He had never been eliminated himself, which meant he had been present for all of it, a continuous witness to every stage of the deterioration, with no forced intermission in a void to break it up.
But nothing had prepared him for the moment the Rift cracked open directly above the Wireless Recovery Center and dropped Pencil onto the grass.
She did not fall gracefully. She hit the ground hard, bounced once, and lay still for a moment while the Rift above her sealed itself shut with a sound like a snapping rubber band stretched to its absolute limit. The glitch-light faded. The sky returned to its usual grim, goop-darkened state.
Pen was the first one to reach her.
“Pencil.” He dropped to one knee beside her. She was in her Early BFDI design, loosely drawn, her outlines slightly wobbly at the edges, as if she had not fully solidified back into the present. Her graphite tip was chipped. There was something in her left hand, a small device, cracked down the middle. One’s undo device. He recognized it from the descriptions Match had given before she left
Pencil opened her eyes.
They were the same eyes. Sharp, quick, always slightly calculating. But there was something underneath them now that Pen had never seen before, not in all the years he had known her. It looked like exhaustion so deep it had become structural, like a wall that had been holding something back for so long it had started to bow inward.
“Pen,” she said. Her voice was steady. That was the first thing he noticed. She was not panicking. She was not crying. She was already putting herself back together, already smoothing her expression into something manageable. He had seen her do it a hundred times. He had always admired it. Right now, for the first time, it made him feel a little sad.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s me. You’re back.”
She sat up slowly, looked at the cracked device in her hand, and then looked at the sky. She took in the Rift’s fading glow, the dark patches, the flickering at the horizon. Her jaw tightened.
“How long was I gone?” she asked.
“From our side? About three weeks since TPOT 13.”
She nodded. Processed. Moved on. Classic Pencil.
“Where’s Match?”
And that was the question Pen had been dreading.
---
The group that had gathered near the Wireless Recovery Center was not large, but it was complicated. X was there, sitting on a broken piece of recovery equipment and watching the sky with the focused anxiety of someone who understood exactly how bad the numbers looked. Golf Ball had arrived from the Underground Factory tunnel two hours ago with Tennis Ball in tow, both of them carrying armloads of notes and diagrams. Grassy was there because Grassy was always somewhere he was not expected. Marker was painting something on the side of the recovery center wall, which no one had asked him to do, but which everyone had silently agreed was fine because it gave him something to focus on. Winner was standing near the tree line, watching the Rift’s residual glow. Firey Jr. had fallen asleep on a pile of displaced grass. Liy was pacing. Price Tag was sitting very still and very quietly, which was somehow more unnerving than anything else.
Donut and Black Hole were nearby. Donut had been attempting to organize a supply inventory, which was a very Donut thing to do during an apocalypse. Black Hole was simply present, which was all Black Hole ever needed to be.
And then there was Bubble.
Bubble had returned from the search mission two days ago, alone, after the group had gotten separated in the terrain near the old Yoyle Mountain pass. She had not been able to find Match. She had not been able to find Ruby. She had come back because the Rift had started expanding rapidly and she had been afraid of getting pulled in.
She had not stopped looking guilty about it since.
So when Pencil emerged from the Rift and Pen helped her to her feet, the reaction from the assembled group was not a warm one. It was the kind of silence that has a shape to it, the kind that contains a lot of unsaid things pressing against the inside of clenched teeth.
Golf Ball spoke first. This was not surprising.
“You,” she said, walking forward with her expression doing the thing it did when she was about to deliver a verdict she had already decided on, “are the reason the timeline is destabilizing.”
Pencil straightened. The wobbly lines at her edges flickered slightly, a visual artifact of the time travel, and then steadied. She met Golf Ball’s gaze without flinching.
“I know,” she said.
“The Rift has been growing since your deal with One. The paradox caused by your presence in Season 1 has created cascading anomalies that Tennis Ball and I have been tracking for the past week. The probability of full timeline collapse increases by approximately eleven percent for every additional day the paradox remains unresolved.”
“I know,” Pencil said again.
“You made a deal with One,” Liy said, stepping forward. Her voice was not as controlled as Golf Ball’s. There was an edge to it. “You gave her Four’s power. You gave her Two’s power. Do you understand what Two looks like right now? Do you understand what One has been doing out there?”
“Liy,” Pen said.
“No, Pen, I’m sorry, but someone has to say it. We have been out here trying to survive while One tears the universe apart, and the reason One has enough power to do that is because of the deal she made.”
Pencil did not move. She absorbed it. That was what she did. She took the hit, and she stood there, and she absorbed it, and she did not give anyone the satisfaction of watching her break.
“You’re right,” she said quietly.
“That’s all you have to say?”
“What would you like me to say, Liy?”
“I’d like you to explain yourself!”
“I was trying to save Three,” Pencil said. Her voice did not rise. It was flat, and it was tired, and it was honest in a way that Pen had not heard from her in a very long time. “One told me she could save Three if I helped her. I made a choice. It was the wrong choice. I know that now.”
“Knowing it now doesn’t fix anything.”
“I know that too.”
The silence came back. Pen looked around the group. He could see it on their faces, the way they were calculating her, measuring the damage she had caused against whatever sympathy they might have otherwise extended. He had been in enough conversations like this to know where they were heading
He stepped forward.
“Okay,” he said. “I think that’s enough for right now.”
Liy looked at him. “Pen.”
“She just came back through a time rift. She’s been in the past for three weeks. She looks like she got hit by a reality glitch, which she did, and she’s standing here answering every question you’re throwing at her without complaining. Can we maybe give her five minutes before we put her on trial?”
“This isn’t a trial,” Golf Ball said.
“It’s looking pretty trial-shaped from where I’m standing.”
“We need answers,” Golf Ball said. “The timeline situation is critical. If she has information about One’s plans, about the device she was given, about what she saw in Season 1, we need it immediately.”
“And you’ll get it,” Pen said. “Give her five minutes.”
Golf Ball opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at Tennis Ball, who gave her a small, careful nod. She turned and walked back toward her notes, which was Golf Ball’s version of conceding.
Pen turned to Pencil.
She was looking at him with an expression he could not quite read. It was not gratitude, exactly. It was more like the look someone gives you when they weren't expecting to be defended and aren't sure what to do about it.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “Come on. There’s a spot behind the recovery center that’s mostly out of the wind. You can sit down for a minute.”
---
She told him everything.
Not because he asked her to, but because he sat down across from her and said nothing, and after about forty seconds of silence, Pencil apparently decided that the silence was more uncomfortable than the telling. She talked about the deal with One, about the Season 1 timeline, about the way One had constructed something that looked like the perfect version of the past, everyone happy, everything simple, the way it was before the EXIT and the iance and all the years of accumulated damage. She talked about the moment she realized it was not real. She talked about the undo device, how it had been left somewhere she would find it rather than being handed to her directly.
She talked about Match.
“She wasn’t there,” Pencil said. “In the version One showed me. It was the past, but it wasn’t right. Match was there, but she wasn’t… she wasn’t Match. She was like a copy of her from before everything. Before I made her into what she became. Before I started using her as a mirror to tell me I was right about everything.” She paused. “I did that to her, you know. The whole iance thing. That was me. I made her into someone who agreed with me all the time because I needed someone to agree with me all the time.”
“Match made her own choices,” Pen said.
“She was sixteen. We all were. And I was the one setting the direction.”
Pen considered this. “Okay,” he said. “That’s fair. But you were also sixteen.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
“It’s not an excuse, it’s context. There’s a difference.”
Pencil looked at him. “Since when are you a philosopher?”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think during the apocalypse.”
She almost smiled. It did not quite reach her face, but it got close.
“I don’t know where Match is,” she said. The almost-smile faded. “She left to find me. Bubble told me. She and Ruby went after me, and now they’re out there somewhere, and I don’t…” She stopped. “I don’t know if they’re okay.”
“We’ll find them,” Pen said.
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” he agreed. “But I know Match. She’s the most stubborn person in Goiky, and that includes you, and that is a significant bar to clear. She’s fine. She’s probably annoyed, but she’s fine.”
Pencil was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “She was more worried about me than I was about her. In TPOT 13. I was so focused on what One was offering that I didn’t even…” She stopped again. “I didn’t even look for her when One sent me back. I just went.”
“Pencil.”
“I’m not asking for absolution, I’m just saying what happened.”
“I know. I’m not offering absolution. I’m saying that you’re doing the thing where you list every bad thing you’ve ever done as if compiling the list is the same as fixing it.”
She looked at him sharply. “What?”
“You do this. You take all the worst versions of your choices, you line them up, you stare at them, and you call it being honest with yourself, but it’s not; it’s just punishment. And punishment doesn’t actually help anyone. It just makes you feel like you’re doing something when you’re not.”
The sharp look softened slightly. “That’s a very specific observation.”
“I’ve known you for a long time,” Pen said.
“We were never that close.”
“We were in the same friend group for years. You don’t have to be someone’s best friend to pay attention to them.”
She looked away. The Rift’s residual glow had faded, but the sky was still dark at the edges, still dripping its slow black contamination onto the horizon. The ground hummed faintly beneath them.
“I have to go back out there,” she said. “I have to help fix what I caused.”
“Yeah,” Pen said. “You do. But you don’t have to do it while hating yourself the entire time. That just makes you worse at it.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “You’re different from what I remember.”
“Watching everything fall apart changes a lot of people,” he said. “Even the ones it didn’t happen to directly.”
She nodded slowly. “Yeah. It did.”
---
The meeting happened an hour later, in the main room of the Wireless Recovery Center, which had enough space for everyone if Grassy agreed to sit on someone’s shoulders, which he did, choosing Marker, who did not seem to mind.
X had set up a rough map of the current Goiky situation on the wall, drawn in marker, with the Rift’s location marked in red and the known positions of the major players marked in various colors. One’s last known position was marked in black, which felt appropriate. The Yoyle City Hotel, where Puffball and Two were reportedly located, was marked in blue. The waterfall area, where Leafy was camped with Boombox and Bracelety, was marked in green.
Pencil stood at the front of the room. She had not asked to. Pen had gently suggested it on the grounds that if she was going to be questioned anyway, she might as well control the format. She had looked at him for a moment and then said, “Fine,” which was about as much agreement as Pencil ever gave.
She laid out everything she knew. One’s plan, the power she had harvested, the structure of the deal. The undo device. The Season 1 simulation. The way One had used the promise of saving Three as leverage. She was methodical and clear and she did not editorialize. She just gave them the information.
When she finished, the room was quiet for a moment.
Then Donut said, “The device. The cracked one. Can it still be used?”
“I don’t know,” Pencil said. “It’s broken. But it activated once, which is how I got back. There might be residual functionality.”
“I can look at it,” X said, raising their hand slightly. “I’m not as good with algebralien technology as Four would be, but I know some of the basic principles.”
“Four is in the moon,” Tennis Ball said, which was still a sentence that felt surreal to say out loud.
“Yes,” X said, in a tone that suggested they were actively not thinking about that too hard.
“The priority,” Golf Ball said, “is the Rift. The timeline paradox has to be resolved before anything else. If the Rift reaches critical expansion, none of the other problems matter because there won’t be a universe left to have problems in.”
“Agreed,” Pencil said.
“Resolving the paradox requires either stabilizing your temporal signature, which I believe can be done using a sufficient concentration of Yoylite, or finding a way to close the loop that your time travel created. The loop being: you traveled to the past, altered events, and returned to a present that now contains the consequences of those alterations without a clean causal chain.”
“In simpler terms,” Tennis Ball said, looking at the room’s more glazed expressions, “the timeline is confused about whether Pencil’s trip happened or not. We need to make it stop being confused.”
“How do we get Yoylite?” Liy asked.
“Match was tracking Pencil’s temporal ripple,” Bubble said quietly, from the corner. She had been quiet through the whole meeting. “She had a shard. Ruby had one too. If they’re still out there…”
“Then finding Match and Ruby also solves the Yoylite problem,” Winner said.
“Potentially,” Golf Ball said. “It’s not guaranteed, but it’s the most efficient convergence of objectives we currently have.”
Pen had been listening to all of this and tracking the room’s temperature simultaneously, which was something he had gotten good at. He could see the way some of them were still looking at Pencil. Not all of them. X was not doing it. Bubble was not doing it. Winner was not doing it. But Liy was still doing it, and Donut had a particular expression that was not hostile but was very carefully neutral, and Price Tag was doing the thing where they looked at the wall instead of the person in question, which was its own kind of verdict.
He did not say anything yet. He was waiting.
The moment came when Liy said, “I want to be clear about something. Whatever plan we come up with, Pencil’s role in it should be supervised. She has already made one deal with One that went badly. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that she shouldn’t be making unilateral decisions going forward.”
The room shifted. Not dramatically, but Pen felt it.
Pencil’s jaw tightened. She said, very carefully, “That’s fair.”
“I don’t think it is, actually,” Pen said.
Liy turned to look at him. “Pen.”
“I know you’re going to say my name like that every time I disagree with you, and I want you to know I’m going to keep disagreeing anyway.” He looked around the room. “Pencil made a bad call. She knows it. She’s said it multiple times today. She’s also the person in this room with the most direct knowledge of One’s plans, One’s capabilities, and the specific mechanics of the deal that was made. Putting her under supervision like she’s a liability is going to waste the most valuable resource we have.”
“The most valuable resource we have is not getting betrayed again,” Liy said.
“Pencil didn’t betray anyone,” Pen said. “She made a deal with a hostile algebralien to try to save someone she cared about and it went wrong. That’s different from betrayal. Betrayal implies she was working against us. She was working for Three. The outcome was bad, but the intent wasn’t malicious.”
“The outcome being bad is the part that matters when the outcome is One having enough power to erase people.”
“I know. And I’m not saying there aren’t consequences. I’m saying that treating her like a suspect instead of an ally is going to make everything harder.”
“She gave One the power.”
“One would have taken it anyway,” Pencil said. Her voice was quiet. “I need you to understand that. One was going to get that power regardless. She had already been hunting numbers for it. The deal I made gave her a faster path, but it was not the only path. If I had refused, One would have taken it by force and I would have been erased along with it.”
The room was quiet.
“Is that true?” Donut asked. Not skeptically. Genuinely.
“Yes,” Pencil said. “I was not in a position to stop her. No one here was in a position to stop her at that point. The deal was the only option that gave any of us a chance of surviving long enough to find another way.”
Liy looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked at Pen. Then she sat down, which was not quite an apology but was the closest thing to one that the current situation was going to produce.
“Fine,” she said. “But if anything goes wrong…”
“Then you can say I told you so,” Pen said. “I’ll even let you do it twice.”
Marker, from the back of the room, said, “I think this is going really well,” and no one was sure whether he was being sincere or not, which was very on-brand for Marker.
---
They made a plan.
The plan had several moving parts. Golf Ball listed them out, then made a backup list, then made a backup for the backup, which was when Tennis Ball gently pointed out that three levels of backup plans was probably enough.
The core of it was this: Pen, Bubble, and Grassy would head toward the waterfall area to find Leafy and potentially use the garbage chute connection to establish a faster route between the two groups. X would work on the undo device with whatever tools were available. Golf Ball and Tennis Ball would continue monitoring the Rift’s expansion rate and refine the Yoylite stabilization theory. Winner, Marker, and Liy would maintain the recovery center as a base of operations and watch for any sign of Match or Ruby returning from the field.
Pencil’s role was the one that generated the most discussion.
Golf Ball’s initial suggestion was that Pencil stay at the recovery center, which was the supervised arrangement Liy had been advocating for. Pen had argued against it. His argument was that Pencil’s knowledge of One’s plans made her more valuable in the field, specifically in any situation that might involve direct contact with One or with the temporal anomalies that were still rippling through the Grasslands.
“She also has the most personal stake in finding Match,” Bubble said, which was the argument that actually settled it. No one could argue with that. Even Liy had gone quiet.
So Pencil was coming with the group heading toward the waterfall.
She did not thank anyone for the decision. She just nodded and started checking the condition of her graphite tip, which was still chipped from the landing. Pen watched her do it and thought about the way she had said “I know” three separate times when people were listing her failures at her, and thought about the way she had almost smiled behind the recovery center, and thought that Pencil was one of the most exhausting people he had ever met and also one of the most interesting, and that those two things were probably connected.
They left at first light, which in the current state of Goiky meant they left when the sky went from dark grey to slightly lighter dark grey. The goop on the ground had solidified enough overnight to create a crust that crunched underfoot, which was unpleasant but navigable. The Rift was visible overhead, its glow pulsing slowly, its edges flickering with glitched assets that appeared and vanished in stuttering loops.
Grassy kept trying to eat the goop. Pen kept redirecting him. This happened four times in the first ten minutes.
Bubble walked carefully, picking her way around the patches of goop with deliberate, cautious steps. She had no interest in testing whether it could pop her.
Pencil walked slightly ahead of the group. Not by a lot. Just enough to be technically alone without being actually alone. Pen recognized the configuration. He had seen her use it before, in the old days, when she wanted to think without appearing to want to think.
He walked up beside her.
“You don’t have to keep pace with me,” she said, without looking at him.
“I know,” he said.
She glanced at him sideways. “You say that a lot.”
“It’s a useful phrase. It tells people you’re not doing something out of obligation.”
“What are you doing it out of?”
“Preference,” he said simply.
She looked away again. The Grasslands around them were grey and goop-covered, the familiar rolling hills now muted and strange, like a photograph of a place rather than the place itself. The sky above was wrong in the particular way it had been wrong for weeks, too dark, too still, with the Rift’s glow cutting across it like a scar.
“I keep thinking about what it looked like,” Pencil said. “The Season 1 version. The one One showed me. The Grasslands were green. The sky was blue. Everyone was just…” She paused. “Everyone was just doing the show. No EXIT, no iance drama, no One. Just the show.”
“Was it good?” Pen asked.
“It was peaceful,” she said. “Which is different.” She was quiet for a moment. “I knew it wasn’t real. Pretty quickly, actually. The colors were too bright. Like someone had turned the saturation up. And Match kept saying things that were almost right but not quite, like a version of her that had all her surface patterns but none of the actual Match underneath them.”
“That sounds lonely,” Pen said.
She looked at him again, and this time the look lasted a little longer. “Yeah,” she said. “It was.”
“Is that why you used the device? Not just because you figured out it was a trap, but because it was lonely?”
She was quiet for long enough that he thought she was not going to answer. Then she said, “I used the device because I realized that the thing I actually wanted was not a perfect past. It was the actual present. Even with all the…” she gestured at the goop-covered wasteland around them, “…all of this.”
“Even with all of this,” Pen said.
“Even with all of this.”
They walked in silence for a while. The ground sloped downward ahead of them, toward the area where the Grasslands began to transition into the rocky terrain above the waterfall caves. Grassy had found something interesting in a patch of goop and was investigating it with great enthusiasm. Bubble had drifted slightly to the left to avoid a cluster of glitched assets that were flickering in and out near a broken tree.
“Pen,” Pencil said.
“Yeah?”
“Why are you doing this? The defending me thing. We were never close.”
He thought about it. “You know how in the old days, before everything got complicated, you and Match and everyone had your group, and me and Blocky and Eraser had ours, and they overlapped sometimes but not always?”
“Yes.”
“I always thought you were kind of terrifying,” he said. “In a way I respected. You always knew exactly what you wanted and you went after it without apologizing. I didn’t always like how you went after it, but I respected the clarity.”
“That’s a very diplomatic way of saying I was mean.”
“Sometimes you were mean,” he agreed. “But you were also the person who organized the first FreeSmart mission and kept everyone alive through it. You were the person who went back for Bubble more than once. You were the person who, when things got genuinely bad, made decisions. They weren’t always the right decisions, but you made them. A lot of people can’t do that.”
“Making bad decisions quickly is not actually a virtue.”
“It’s not a virtue by itself,” he said. “But combined with the willingness to come back and try to fix them, it’s something. And you’re here. You came back through a time rift and you’re standing in a goop-covered wasteland trying to figure out how to fix things. That counts for something.”
She did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, quietly, “You’re going to make me feel things and I genuinely do not have the emotional bandwidth for that right now.”
Pen laughed. It was a real laugh, surprising him out of his wits. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll table it.”
“Table it,” she confirmed.
But she was almost smiling again. This time it made it a little further toward her face.
---
They found the entrance to the waterfall cave system about an hour into the walk, a narrow crack in the rock face at the base of the slope, wide enough to fit through single file. The sound of water was audible from the outside, a steady, echoing rush that bounced off the stone walls and filled the air with a cool, damp mist.
Grassy went in first, because Grassy had no sense of danger, which in this case was useful.
The cave opened up quickly, widening into a broad cavern with a high ceiling and a waterfall cascading down the far wall into a shallow pool. The light came from bioluminescent patches on the ceiling, a soft blue-green glow that made everything look slightly underwater. It was, objectively, beautiful, which felt like a strange thing to notice in the middle of an apocalypse.
The campsite was easy to find. Someone had set up a tent near the pool, with a small arrangement of supply containers nearby and a makeshift seating area made from flat rocks. A portable speaker was playing something soft and indistinct. Next to the speaker, sitting on one of the flat rocks with her knees pulled up and her expression somewhere between worried and resigned, was Leafy.
She looked up when they came in.
“Oh,” she said. And then, when she saw Pencil, she said it again, differently. “Oh.”
Boombox and Bracelety were nearby. Boombox had gone quiet when they entered, the music cutting off. Bracelety was looking at Pencil with an expression that was difficult to parse.
Leafy stood up. She looked at Pencil for a long moment.
“You’re back,” she said.
“I’m back,” Pencil said.
There was a pause. Pen watched both of them, ready to step in if the conversation went sideways. Leafy and Pencil had a complicated history, which was a significant understatement, but the specifics of it were less relevant right now than the fact that Leafy looked like she had been through something genuinely terrible recently and Pencil looked like she had also been through something genuinely terrible recently, and sometimes that kind of shared damage created a basis for conversation that nothing else could.
“I heard what happened,” Leafy said. “With One. With the deal.”
“Most people have,” Pencil said.
“I’m not going to yell at you about it,” Leafy said. “I know what it’s like to make a decision that everyone else decides defines you forever. I’ve been there.”
Something shifted in Pencil’s expression. It was subtle, but Pen caught it.
“I know you have,” Pencil said.
“It doesn’t get easier,” Leafy said. “People remember. But it does get… more manageable. Eventually.”
“How long did eventually take?”
Leafy considered. “A while,” she said honestly. “But it happened.”
Pencil nodded. She looked around the cave, at the waterfall, at the bioluminescent ceiling. “This is a good spot,” she said, which was not what Pen had expected her to say, but which seemed to be the right thing, because Leafy’s expression relaxed slightly.
“Boombox found it,” Leafy said. “He knows the cave systems pretty well.”
Boombox produced a sound that was probably acknowledgment.
“We need to talk about the Rift,” Pen said, because someone had to redirect the conversation and he was apparently the person doing that today. “And about Match and Ruby. Leafy, have you seen anything from down here? Any signs of temporal anomalies in the cave?”
“There was a shimmer yesterday,” Leafy said, pointing toward the far end of the cavern. “Near the garbage chute entrance. It lasted about thirty seconds and then disappeared. I didn’t know what it was.”
“That might have been a ripple from Match’s Yoylite,” Pencil said, turning to look at the indicated area. She was already moving toward it, the exhaustion in her posture replaced by something sharper and more focused. “If she’s been tracking my temporal signature, she might be close.”
“How close?” Pen asked.
“Close enough that the ripple reached here,” Pencil said. “Which means she’s within range. Which means…” She stopped at the far end of the cavern, looking at the dark mouth of the garbage chute. “Which means she might be able to hear us if we’re loud enough.”
“That is not how temporal physics works,” Pen said.
“I know,” Pencil said. “But it’s how Match works. She’s stubborn enough to close a temporal gap through sheer annoyance.” She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted up the chute, “MATCH! IF YOU CAN HEAR ME, FOLLOW THE SOUND!”
The echo bounced around the cave. Grassy covered his ears. Bubble flinched at the sudden noise.
There was silence.
Then, from somewhere far above and slightly to the left of the chute, muffled by layers of rock and distance but unmistakably, absolutely Match’s voice:
“PENCIL?!”
---
It took forty-five minutes to get Match and Ruby down to the cave, because the route they had found through the rocky terrain above was not the garbage chute but a series of narrow ledges that required careful navigation. Ruby fell twice and was fine both times. Match did not fall at all, which she mentioned several times.
When Match finally came through the cave entrance and saw Pencil standing there, she stopped.
She looked at her for a long moment. Pencil looked back.
Then Match walked forward and hugged her, which was not something Match did lightly or often, and which Pencil received with a stiffness that lasted about three seconds before she hugged back.
Pen looked at the ceiling. The bioluminescent patches pulsed gently. He thought about what Pencil had said about the Season 1 simulation, about Match being almost right but not quite, like a version of her with all the surface patterns but none of the actual Match underneath. He thought about the real Match standing in this cave, having tracked a temporal ripple through dangerous terrain for three weeks out of sheer stubborn loyalty, and he thought that the difference between the simulation and the reality was probably the most important thing Pencil had learned from the whole experience.
“You look terrible,” Match said, pulling back to look at Pencil. “Like, literally, your lines are all wobbly.”
“Time travel does that,” Pencil said.
“Does it fix?”
“I think so. Gradually.”
“Okay. Good.” Match looked at her for another moment. “We need to talk.”
“I know.”
“Like, a lot.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going to do it right now because we’re in a cave and there are more important things happening, but we are going to do it.”
“I know,” Pencil said, and this time the word carried something different in it, something that was not just acknowledgment but was closer to relief.
Ruby had found Grassy and was talking to him with great enthusiasm about the cacti they had encountered, which apparently had been sentient and also very rude. Boombox had started playing music again, something that felt appropriate for a reunion. Bracelety was looking at Match with an expression of intense admiration that Match had not noticed yet.
Pen sat down on one of the flat rocks near the pool. The waterfall made its steady, peaceful sound. The bioluminescent ceiling pulsed. Outside, the world was a goop-covered wasteland with a cracked sky and a hostile algebralien harvesting power from the universe, but in this specific cave, at this specific moment, things were okay.
Pencil sat down on the rock next to him.
“She’s furious with me,” she said quietly.
“She came three weeks through dangerous terrain to find you,” Pen said. “Those two things are not contradictory.”
“I know.” She looked at the waterfall. “I have a lot of things to fix.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But you’re here. That’s the starting point.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I keep waiting for you to want something. People who are this helpful usually want something.”
“I want One to stop destroying the universe,” he said. “I want Match and Ruby to be safe, which they are. I want the Rift to close. I want the sky to stop dripping black goop. I want Grassy to stop trying to eat things he shouldn’t eat.” He paused. “None of those things require anything from you specifically.”
“Then why?”
He thought about it. “Because you were standing there taking it from everyone and you weren’t going to stop them and someone needed to. And because I think you’re useful and I think you’re not as bad as you’re currently deciding you are, and both of those things are relevant to whether we survive the next few weeks.” He paused again. “And because Match would never forgive me if I let her best friend get torn apart by a committee while she was busy navigating ledges.”
Pencil made a sound that was almost a laugh. “She would be very annoyed,” she agreed.
“Extremely.”
The almost-laugh settled into something quieter. “Thank you,” she said. It came out a little stiffly, like a word she did not use often in this particular context. “Genuinely.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Genuinely.”
---
They returned to the Wireless Recovery Center the next morning, the full group now, Leafy and Boombox and Bracelety added to their number, Match and Ruby restored to the fold. The route up from the cave was easier than the route down had been, partly because Boombox knew a wider passage that came out near the old recovery center access road.
The reunion at the center was complicated.
Liy’s reaction to Match and Ruby’s return was warm. Her reaction to Pencil being the reason they had been found was a visible internal struggle that she resolved by saying nothing and going to help Donut with the supply inventory, which Pen thought was probably the most diplomatic thing Liy had done in recent memory.
Golf Ball’s reaction to the Yoylite shards that Match and Ruby were carrying was immediate and scientific. She had them on the analysis table within four minutes of arrival, with Tennis Ball taking measurements and X cross-referencing with the notes on the undo device’s residual functionality.
“This is workable,” Golf Ball said, in the tone she used when she meant “this is actually quite good but I’m not going to say that directly.” “The combined resonance of both shards, calibrated to the frequency of Pencil’s temporal signature, should be sufficient to close the paradox loop. It won’t be instantaneous, but it should halt the Rift’s expansion within a few hours of application.”
“And then?” Pencil asked.
“And then the Rift closes over the course of a few days, assuming no new paradoxes are introduced.” Golf Ball looked at her over the top of her clipboard. “Which means no more time travel.”
“Agreed,” Pencil said.
“From anyone.”
“Also agreed.”
Golf Ball held her gaze for a moment. Then she made a small notation on her clipboard and turned back to the analysis table, which was, from Golf Ball, basically a handshake.
The calibration process took most of the day. X worked on it with the focus they always brought to problems involving algebralien technology, slow and methodical and occasionally making small sounds of discovery that no one else could interpret but which seemed positive. Match sat next to Pencil for most of the afternoon, not talking much, just present, which seemed to be what both of them needed.
Pen checked in periodically, helped move equipment when asked, kept an eye on the room’s temperature in the social sense. Winner was good at this too, he noticed. They had a way of moving through a group and smoothing things without drawing attention to the smoothing. He made a mental note to talk to them about it sometime, when the universe was less actively collapsing.
Late in the afternoon, when the calibration was nearly complete and the room had settled into the particular focused quiet of people doing important work, Liy came and stood next to Pen near the doorway.
She did not say anything for a moment.
Then she said, “I was too hard on her.”
“Yeah,” Pen said.
“She did cause a lot of the problems we’re dealing with.”
“She did,” he agreed. “And she knows it. And she came back anyway. And she’s been here all day helping fix it.”
Liy was quiet. “I don’t trust easily,” she said. “After everything with the time travel and the debuters and all of it. It’s been a lot.”
“I know,” he said. “But there’s a difference between not trusting easily and deciding someone’s verdict before they’ve had a chance to do anything.”
“Is there a difference? When the stakes are this high?”
“I think there has to be,” he said. “Otherwise we’re just running a different kind of elimination. And we’ve all had enough of that.”
Liy looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked across the room at Pencil, who was sitting with Match, her wobbly lines slightly more solid than they had been this morning, her posture slightly less braced against the next hit.
“She really didn’t have a choice with One?” Liy asked. “You believe that?”
“I believe she made the best choice she could see at the time,” Pen said. “And I believe that’s usually the most any of us can do.”
Liy nodded slowly. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
She walked across the room and sat down near Pencil and Match. She did not say anything dramatic. She just sat there. But Pencil looked up when she did, and Liy gave her a small, careful nod, and Pencil nodded back.
It was not forgiveness. Not yet. But it was a door left slightly open, and that was enough for now.
---
The calibration completed at sunset.
X had the two Yoylite shards mounted in a modified version of the undo device’s casing, the cracks sealed with a material that Golf Ball had sourced from the Underground Factory supply stores. The device hummed when activated, a low, resonant sound that seemed to vibrate in the back of the teeth, and emitted a soft light that was the specific blue-gold color of Yoylite at full resonance.
They all went outside to watch.
The process was not dramatic, which Pen thought was somehow more impressive than if it had been. The device simply… broadcast. A pulse of Yoylite-frequency energy that spread outward from the recovery center in a slow, expanding ring, visible as a shimmer in the air, like heat haze but cooler and more deliberate. When the pulse reached the Rift, the glitched assets at its edges stopped flickering. The jagged tear in the sky held still for the first time in days.
Then, slowly, the edges began to draw together.
It was like watching a wound close in slow motion. The Rift did not vanish immediately. Golf Ball had said it would take days, and she was right. But the growth stopped. The flickering stopped. The fragments of sky that had been breaking off held in place, and then, gradually, began to drift back toward the tear, reconnecting with the fabric of the sky in a process that looked almost like healing.
No one said anything for a while.
Then Grassy said, “Pretty,” and everyone agreed.
Pencil was standing slightly apart from the group, watching the Rift close. Her lines were more solid now than they had been this morning, the time-travel distortion fading as the paradox loop resolved. She still had the Early BFDI design, the loosely drawn outlines, the slightly different proportions. Pen did not know if that would stay or if it would gradually normalize. He thought, looking at it, that it suited her somehow. Like a record of where she had been.
He walked over and stood next to her.
“It’s working,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“How do you feel?”
She thought about it for a moment, which was not something Pencil usually did. She usually answered questions quickly and with certainty. The pause was new.
“Like I have a lot of work to do,” she said. “But like I’m actually here to do it. Which is different from how I felt this morning.”
“Different how?”
“This morning I felt like I was here because I had to be. Like I came back because the alternative was worse.” She looked at the slowly closing Rift. “Now I feel like I’m here because it’s where I want to be. Even with all…” she gestured at the goop, the dark sky, the distant sounds of the wasteland, “…this.”
“Even with all this,” Pen said.
“Even with all this.” She paused. “I said that already today.”
“It bears repeating,” he said.
She almost smiled. And this time it made it all the way.
It was not a big smile. It was small and a little crooked and it disappeared quickly, as if it was still learning whether it was allowed to be there. But it was real, which was more than Pen had expected when he had dropped to one knee beside her in the grass that morning and found her looking up at him with eyes full of a depth of exhaustion he had not known she carried.
Behind them, the group had begun to move back inside. Match was talking to Ruby about something, gesturing expressively. Leafy was showing Bracelety the map on the wall. Golf Ball was already making notes about the next phase of the plan. Donut was organizing something. Marker was painting something else on a different wall. Liy was talking to Winner in a low voice. X was carefully disassembling the modified device for storage, their movements precise and unhurried.ge.
The world was still broken. One was still out there. Four was still in the moon. The goop was still spreading. The Rift was closing but not closed. Three was still missing. There were a hundred problems left and maybe a dozen people to solve them.
But they were all here. And the Rift was closing. And Pencil was standing next to him with a small, crooked, real smile on her face.
“What’s the next step?” she asked.
“Golf Ball has a list,” he said.
“Of course she does.”
“It has sub-lists.”
“Of course it does.”
“And contingency lists.”
“How many levels?”
“Three, but Tennis Ball talked her down from five.”
Pencil made a sound that was a genuine laugh, short and surprised. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go look at the list.”
She turned and walked back toward the recovery center. Pen fell into step beside her. The Rift pulsed gently overhead, its edges drawing slowly, steadily together. The bioluminescent light from the cave below filtered up through the cracks in the ground, casting faint blue-green patches in the grey goop. Somewhere in the distance, a sound that might have been one of the mutated creatures or might have been the earth settling echoed across the wasteland.
Pencil held the door of the recovery center open for him, which was not something she would have done six hours ago, and which he suspected she did not fully register doing.
He registered it.
He went inside.
The door closed behind them, and the work continued.