The Redactor's voice was almost gentle as it delivered its final blow.
"You see possibilities," it said. "I see consequences."
Kael closed his eyes.
It would have been easy, in that moment, to keep searching for the perfect outcome, the branch where nothing was lost and no one had to pay for anything. Eclipse Horizon wanted to keep searching for exactly that — it always did, hungry for the cleanest possible future. But Kael made himself stop. He stopped looking for a future where everyone survived unscathed, because he understood, finally, that such a future wasn't the point, and had perhaps never been the point.
Instead, he searched for something smaller. Something the Redactor's endless procession of tragedies hadn't accounted for, because it wasn't built to look for it at all.
He searched for a future — just one, out of all the branching millions — where people still had the freedom to choose for themselves, even knowing what it might cost them.
