The smile remained.
Small and quiet and terribly out of place, it lingered on the face of the child standing at the edge of the collapsing First Horizon — serene in the way that things are serene when they exist beyond the reach of consequence. It was not the smile of cruelty or threat. It was simply the smile of something that had never learned what smiles were supposed to mean, wearing one anyway, because it had seen the gesture somewhere in the vast and flickering catalogue of everything reality had ever produced.
Every world connected to the Equilibrium Network felt the cold of it regardless.
