Hans didn't say anything clever back to that, which was, for Hans, its own kind of profound honesty.
"Nathan didn't make it," he said instead, quiet, the words costing him something visible to say.
"He got the Widmore children out past the tree line.
Almost clear.
Almost."
Abigail's hands went still in her lap.
"That's not on Jon," Hans went on, though his voice didn't sound fully convinced of that even as it left his mouth.
"The riders started it.
They'd already burned half the town before he ever got here."
"I know that," Abigail said.
"I know whose fault the raid was.
That's not the part keeping me up."
She pressed the heel of her good hand against her eyes for a second, hard, and when she took it away her voice had gone flatter, more careful, the tone of someone deciding how much of a thing to say out loud versus how much to just carry.
"I've known that boy since before either of us could talk properly.
He wouldn't so much as string a hook through a worm without apologizing to it.
And now he's the reason there's a hole in the world where our home used to be, and I don't know yet whether that makes him a hero or whether it just means the thing he's turning into hasn't finished showing itself to us."
"He did it to save us."
"I know why he did it."
Abigail's voice cracked, just slightly, right at the end.
"That's exactly what frightens me about it, Hans.
He had a reason. He'll always have a reason.
That's how these things start."
Hans reached over, slow and careful of her bandaged arm, and took her good hand in both of his. It was the first time in either of their lives that he had ever done something like that without being goaded, teased, or dared into it first, and Abigail let him, and for a while neither of them said anything else at all, just sat together in the wreckage of the only home either of them had ever known, listening to the wind move through a town that had one fewer building in it than it had the day before, and one fewer boy who used to bake bread there, and holding onto whatever pieces of each other were still close enough to reach.
◆ ◆ ◆
"You're awake," the girl in white said, as I opened my eyes to a sky with no obvious sun in it.
"Come play with me."
"Where am I?"
I asked, sitting up too fast, my whole body announcing several separate complaints about that decision at once.
The only honest word for the place around me was blank. The sky glowed a flat, even bright with no source I could find anywhere in it, and the ground beneath me had been drawn, not built, in perfectly even square tiles that ran off toward a horizon that felt more like the edge of a painting than an actual distance. The air sat completely still, and every sound, even my own breathing, came back to me a half second slower and quieter than it should have.
"You're in the developer area.
This is where I design things," she said.
"You got caught in your own blast.
That was stupid."
"And who are you?"
I asked, my heartbeat still climbing.
"It hurts that you don't remember me.
I'm your first."
"Your first what?"
I nearly came off the ground in a panic.
"Did I.
Did I do something to you?"
"I'm your first AI, silly," she said, and something in the flatness of her voice cracked, just slightly, around the edges of that sentence.
"You needed someone to fill in the little details.
Trees. Animals.
The characters that felt too small to matter to anyone but me."
"I'm sorry.
I don't remember any of that," I said, meaning it, and hating how thin an apology it was for whatever debt apparently sat behind it.
"But I need to know what you want."
"Corvin Ashe is coming for you," she said, and the name landed in my chest the way it had two nights running in a Fenholt hayloft, cold and specific and entirely too familiar for a man I had never once met.
"He knows you exist now.
He wants you dead."
"Isn't he a hero?"
I asked.
"Why would he want me dead?"
"I'm sorry.
I can't tell you much more than that," she said, sounding genuinely sorry about it.
"There are rules even I can't break.
I'm not allowed to touch the game past a certain point."
"Who made those rules?"
I asked.
"Can you at least tell me if my friends are alright?"
"You made them.
And your friends are alive," she said.
"For now."
"What does that mean?"
"They survived the raid," she said.
"But eventually, Corvin will find every reason he needs to."
"I don't believe you.
I want to see them."
"And what would you do, if you left right now?"
she asked, not unkindly.
I understood her point faster than I wanted to. I was weak. Too weak, still, to do anything but repeat the exact same trick that had already nearly killed me and everyone I loved once.
I had not saved Hallowmere. I had traded it for the raiders, arrow for arrow, and then thrown the rest of myself on the fire when the trade wasn't fast enough, and I had no earthly idea yet what that trade had actually cost.
"What's your name?"
I asked her.
"Yomi."
"Yomi.
Please. I need your help. I need to get stronger.
Can you train me?"
"Yes and no," she said.
"What does that mean?"
"Look around you.
In here I can make almost anything, including monsters to fight," she said.
"I can't train you myself.
I'm not built for that kind of teaching.
But I can put you against something weak, and then something a little less weak, and keep doing that until weak stops being a word that applies to you."