The rocket flew backward out of the fireball.
It was a precise, almost courteous reversal. The explosion contracted. The flames inhaled themselves. Fragments of car door returned to their original positions with the patient thoroughness of a craftsman undoing his own work. In the driver's seat, Theta's right arm reattached at the shoulder with a sensation she had no framework to describe and would not try to, ever, to anyone.
She gripped the steering wheel with both hands and concentrated on driving.
In the back seat, Tserriednich watched the palace gates approach in reverse, the convoy reassembling around them as scattered guards and vehicles walked backward into their original formation. The timeline rewound cleanly. No residue. No seam.
He had tested this problem before he ever needed to use it in the field: when a second reversal activated, which ten minutes would it reclaim? His own subjective ten minutes, counting from when his consciousness had last departed the material timeline? Or the ten minutes of the outside world, anchored to the moment he had first activated the ability?
The answer, he had confirmed, was his subjective ten minutes. The ability derived from his nature. It would not develop rules that worked against him. The RPG strike and its entire surrounding context were simply excised, a branch pruned from the tree of his afternoon, and the reversal picked up from the last time he had used it, at the palace gates, and ran backward from there.
This time, he had been at the car, not inside the palace.
The distinction mattered enormously.
When he had reversed time from inside the palace walls, the ten-minute radius had covered the palace grounds and a modest surrounding area. Now, reversing from a car at the palace gate, with ten minutes of movement calculated outward from a vehicle traveling at convoy speed through an urban capital, the radius was dramatically larger.
It covered a significant portion of Shengdeli.
In office towers throughout the business district, word processors rewound. Reports untyped themselves line by line. Calculations dissolved off spreadsheets with the soft efficiency of numbers that had never been committed to. In a prep school three blocks east of the convoy route, a history teacher watched a classroom full of students' understanding of the Kakin dynastic succession gradually vacate the backs of their eyes. The notes they had taken over the past ten minutes were still physically present. The comprehension was not.
On residential streets, conversations reversed. Arguments that had just been resolved reopened in the wrong direction. Children who had spent ten minutes acquiring happiness in a park found that happiness retreating from them by the second, like a tide going out faster than any tide had a right to.
The boredom, by general observation, did not noticeably change in either direction.
Outside the radius, private soldiers from the Second Prince's household stood on a rooftop with binoculars and watched Shengdeli's civilian population move backward through its afternoon. One of them watched a man on a bicycle pedal in reverse for a full thirty seconds without understanding what he was looking at. Then he understood what he was looking at, and it was worse.
"Can he just keep doing this?" the soldier said to no one.
In the safe house, Camilla had crossed to the window and then stopped herself and closed the curtain instead. She turned to face the room with the specific expression of someone who has been patient for a long time and is deciding whether to continue.
"Can he activate this continuously? This is completely unreasonable. Camilla will not accept it."
"If he could use it continuously without restriction," said Ellie's voice, from Ellie's chair, taking the last Purple Gold Gourd talisman from the table, "he would simply reverse one hour at a time and walk away from every threat forever. The restriction is obvious once you look for it."
A pause. Kurapika's voice came from the headset. "Standing by."
"Find the right distance," said Liam, through Ellie's mouth. "Force one more reversal. Leave everything after that to me." A beat. "Don't worry about the position. He can't run once I have the angle."
Camilla was already working through the logic.
Two distinct modes. Call them what they were: reversal, which reset a ten-minute radius of physical matter, and cut-off, which produced a disposable copy of his body to absorb whatever threat the preview showed him. He could not use the same mode consecutively. After a reversal, the next response available was cut-off. After a cut-off, the next available was reversal. The abilities alternated.
Which meant there was a gap.
A gap between the end of one reversal and the activation of the next cut-off. A moment, a fraction of a moment, when the transition was occurring and neither protection was active. Small. Structurally necessary. Exploitable.
She turned back to where Ellie had been sitting.
The chair was empty.
Camilla had not heard her leave. She had not heard a footstep, a breath, a door hinge, the compression of a floorboard. Ellie's aura had shifted to something that moved below the threshold of detection, cold wind in an empty corridor, present in the sense that the air was present and nothing more.
She was already gone.
On the street, Melina watched the convoy come back the wrong way.
She had been watching it with the patience her position required, maintaining the correct distance, following instructions she had been given through three separate intermediaries, using equipment she had been told was military surplus and had suspected was significantly more recent than that. The tactical glasses showed her an AR ghost of the Fourth Prince's route from ten minutes ago, an amber outline of where he had been, superimposed on where he was.
The convoy moved in reverse. The ghost moved in reverse along with it. The overlay updated.
She thought about what it would mean to own an ability like that. To be able to look at any moment of your life and say: this one. Start over from here. All the damage undone. All the choices unmade. The world returned to an earlier, less complicated version of itself.
She watched the car pass at a distance.
"You could have changed the world with that," she said, quietly, to no one who was listening. "Given something back to everyone who lost something they can't get back."
She lowered the binoculars.
It was a brief thought. She put it away.
Around her and across the city, at their respective positions, the three families had their weapons up.
Tserriednich's convoy emerged from the reversal boundary and the world snapped back to its current tense. His car moved forward again, pulling out from the palace on its modified route, and from every surrounding direction, the network opened fire.
The barrage was not modest. The families had been given military hardware by people who understood what they were being asked to help kill. Armor-piercing rounds, suppressive fire from multiple angles, overlapping fields of coverage. The street became very loud and very dangerous in a short amount of time.
Tserriednich sat in the back seat, calm, and activated the preview.
The hiss ran through his skull and the next ten seconds resolved.
He watched his fake body and Theta both absorb everything the street had to offer.
Ten seconds later, the real world caught up to the preview. The fake versions of both of them were rendered in a state that rendered the word "killed" technically accurate but inadequate as a description. Theta, armored with the aura she had spent a career building, took a sustained cross-fire that would have stopped an armored vehicle, and the aura held for some of it, and then not enough of it. She died in the driver's seat.
The reversal had erased her memory of his abilities. She had climbed back into the driver's seat not knowing what was coming, because she had forgotten, because ten minutes of her mind had been cleaned out and she had filled the gap with instinct and professional habit.
The fake body dissolved.
Tserriednich sat alone in a car that had been comprehensively destroyed around him and noted, with something that was not quite feeling sorry, that at least she would not have seen it coming.
Then the hands appeared.
They came through both windows simultaneously, left and right, symmetrical, erupting from the air outside the car doors. Skeletal. Enormous. Burning at their edges with a fire that had no specific color and left no smoke. They closed around the body of the car with the purposeful intention of something that had been sent to do exactly this and nothing else, fingers finding grip on chassis and frame, pressure building.
Tserriednich looked at them with the assessment of a man pricing a piece of furniture.
"Boring," he said.
He activated the reversal.