Episode 9: Potion-Born Hunters
Episode 9: Potion-Born Hunters
The warehouse ruins smoldered under the first light of dawn. The crew had driven Khaos Hyde and Poison back through a collapsing rift with the Aether Guard's desperate help, but the cost was high — everyone was battered, low on energy, and the Pillar's white-blue lights were growing closer on the horizon.
"We can't stay here," Peter growled, wiping toxic residue from his arms. His super durability had kept him standing, but even he looked worn. "Too exposed."
Nathan, still pale from the fight, checked a burner phone he'd scavenged weeks ago. "I know a place. Rhino Valley. It's a few hours out — clean, beautiful city on the river. My cousin Devonte lives there. He's not in our world, but he's family. Might give us a safe spot to regroup."
Kevin nodded, the Mythical Matrix still faintly glowing on his chest. "Anything to get away from whatever the hell just happened."
Rhino Valley – A City of Glass and Green
Rhino Valley lived up to its name: rolling green hills surrounding sleek modern towers that reflected the sun like polished horns. Waterfalls cascaded through carefully designed parks, and the air smelled of blooming flowers and fresh rain instead of rust and blood. It was almost too peaceful after the nightmares of East Hollow.
The crew arrived under Nathan's layered illusions, posing as ordinary travelers. They met Devonte Murtizy at a quiet riverside café tucked behind flowering trees.
Devonte was a tall, broad-shouldered Black American man in his early twenties, with sharp features, neat braids, and an easy confidence. He wore a casual hoodie and jeans, but his eyes held the same sharp awareness as Nathan's.
"Cousin Nate," Devonte said with a grin, pulling Nathan into a quick hug. "You look like shit. And these the friends you warned me about?" He nodded respectfully to the group, lingering a moment on Kevin. "Rampager, huh? Word travels fast even out here."
Wyatt shook his hand. "Nice place. Feels… normal."
"That's the point," Devonte replied. "Rhino Valley stays off the Pillar's main radar. Mostly. But I've been hearing rumors. Bad ones."
Before they could settle in, screams erupted from the park across the river.
A group of five newly-created Wrathborn burst from the tree line — their eyes glowing with unstable Glimmer energy. Their bodies were twisted: one had jagged crystal claws, another moved with unnatural stretching limbs, a third spewed fire from cracked skin. They weren't natural awakenings.
They were made.
Leading them from the shadows was a pale, gaunt man in dark cultist robes embroidered with white-blue heart fragments. His face was half-hidden by a hood, but his manic smile was visible. Gillan Dahmer — a high-ranking Pillar cultist and alchemist.
Beside the five lurched a sixth figure the Pillar had sent as their elite enforcer for this hunt: Vorath the Echo Maw. Tall and gaunt, its body was a shifting lattice of semi-transparent crystal and pulsing veins of stolen Glimmer. Its unique power let it absorb any kinetic or energy attack that struck it, store the force for a few seconds, then release it as a distorted sonic scream that could shatter bone and stone three times harder than the original blow.
"Rampager!" Gillan called out, voice carrying unnaturally across the water. "The White-Blue Heart Pillar grows impatient. Since you resist the call, we create our own army. These potions awaken Glimmers in the unworthy… and bind them to our will. And Vorath here ensures no one walks away."
He gestured, and the five potion-born Wrathborn charged across the river, using their unstable powers recklessly. One stretched his arms like rubbery tentacles, trying to grab Wyatt. Another hurled fireballs that left trails of unstable energy. Vorath followed more deliberately, crystal plates flexing as it absorbed the first stray lightning bolt Derek threw and answered with a bone-rattling sonic blast that cracked the riverside walkway.
Kevin stepped forward, circuits blazing. "You're kidnapping people and turning them into monsters?!"
Gillan laughed. "A small price for salvation. The Garden Behind the Fence demands worthy keys. You will be ours — willing or broken."
The battle spilled into the beautiful park. Tourists fled in panic as Glimmer chaos erupted.
Peter tanked the front line, his super durability shrugging off fire and crystal slashes. "These kids are sloppy. Potions must be half-baked." When Vorath lunged and tried to absorb a heavy punch, Peter simply kept hammering until the stored energy overloaded and the creature staggered, crystal lattice cracking.
Derek (Volt) chained lightning through the water, electrocuting two of the potion-born at once. Ferrum Ironfist ripped metal benches and streetlights into weapons, impaling another attacker.
Nathan created dozens of illusory duplicates of the crew, confusing the unstable Wrathborn. One potion-born swung wildly at phantoms and accidentally impaled himself on Ferrum's iron spikes.
Wyatt stayed close to Kevin, pipe swinging. "These guys aren't like the others — they're dying faster, like their bodies can't handle it."
Kevin confronted Gillan directly. The Rampager mantle surged as he unleashed a focused destructive wave. Gillan raised a glowing vial and drank it on the spot — his own body twisting with fresh power. Bone spikes erupted from his back as he met Kevin's attack with a counter-blast of unstable energy.
Vorath tried to interpose itself, greedily absorbing the edge of Kevin's wave and preparing a devastating return scream. Kevin roared, circuits flaring brighter, and drove a second, sharper destructive pulse straight into the crystal lattice before the Echo Maw could release what it had stored. The overload shattered Vorath from within; the creature convulsed, its absorbed energy detonating in a final, silent implosion of fractured crystal and spent Glimmer. It collapsed in a heap of lifeless shards, dead before it hit the ground.
"You cannot stop the harvest," Gillan hissed, spikes lashing out. "More will come. Dozens. Hundreds. All hunting the Rampager."
Kevin roared and drove his glowing fist through the cultist's defenses. The impact shattered Gillan's bone armor and sent him crashing into a fountain. The remaining potion-born Wrathborn, seeing their creator fall and their elite enforcer already destroyed, began destabilizing — some exploding in bursts of raw Glimmer essence.
Gillan coughed blood, smiling even as he crawled toward a hidden escape rune. "This is only the first batch… Enjoy Rhino Valley while it lasts."
Peter stomped on the rune before Gillan could activate it, then delivered a brutal finishing blow. The cultist went still.
The park fell silent except for distant sirens.
Devonte emerged from cover, eyes wide. "Damn… Nate wasn't exaggerating about you guys."
Nathan clapped his cousin on the shoulder. "We need a real safehouse, Dev. Somewhere off-grid even for this city."
Devonte nodded grimly. "I've got a spot. But if they're making Glimmers with potions now… this war is getting bigger than all of us."
Kevin stared at the bodies of the kidnapped and twisted victims, and at the shattered remains of Vorath the Echo Maw. The Mythical Matrix burned with quiet fury on his chest. The Pillar wasn't just hunting him anymore.
It was turning the whole world into weapons against him.
---
**East Hollow, beneath the old rail yard, following a tunnel Bandile's telekinesis found by accident**
The tunnel hadn't been dug by human hands. Wing noticed that first — the walls weren't cut, they were *clawed*, long parallel gouges spiraling downward in a pattern too deliberate to be erosion, too alien to be tools.
"Okay, genuine question," Wing whispered, flying low and slow through the dark, "why are we doing this at eleven at night instead of, I don't know, literally any time with sunlight."
"Because the pressure I felt was strongest at night," Bandile said, floating a small orb of gathered light ahead of them like a lantern he didn't need to hold. "Whatever's down here sleeps during the day. I'd rather meet it awake and know what I'm dealing with than meet it asleep and get surprised."
"That is simultaneously very smart and the worst possible reason to go somewhere at eleven at night."
Lloyd wasn't listening to either of them. He'd stopped at a wet patch of tunnel wall, admiring his own faint reflection in the sheen of groundwater, utterly unbothered by the ancient claw-marks six inches from his face. "Can we focus. I have a date tomorrow and I'd rather not smell like tomb."
"You do not have a date," Wing said.
"I have the *potential* for a date. The universe owes me that much."
The tunnel opened without warning into a vast, circular chamber, and all three of them went quiet at once.
The walls were lined with thousands of small, precise burrows, each one glowing faintly with a dim bioluminescent moss, and moving between them — slow, deliberate, patient in a way no ordinary animal ever was — were moles. Dozens of them. Each the size of a large dog, blind-eyed, velvet-black, moving in perfect silent coordination around a raised stone dais at the chamber's center.
On the dais sat a black coffin.
It wasn't decayed. It wasn't old in any way that showed — smooth obsidian-dark wood, untouched by a single mark of time, closed tight, radiating a cold that had nothing to do with temperature.
"That's not a coffin," Bandile said quietly, his telekinesis already reaching out, cautious, testing the air around it. "Feel that? There's no *inside* to it. No space behind the lid at all, and also—" his voice went strange, uncertain, "—infinite space behind the lid. Both. At once."
"Pocket dimension," Wing breathed. "Okay, that's — that's actually really cool, ignore the fact I'm terrified."
The moles stopped moving.
All of them, all at once, swiveled their blind heads toward the three boys with an eerie, synchronized stillness, and Lloyd felt the water in his own bloodstream go cold with instinct he didn't fully understand.
"They're not attacking," Bandile said slowly, reading something in their stillness that the others couldn't. "They're *testing.* Whatever's in that coffin, they're not guarding it from thieves. They're guarding it from the *wrong hands.*" His gaze didn't leave the lead mole, enormous and ancient-looking, perched directly in front of the dais. "They want to know if we're the right ones."
"The right ones for what," Lloyd said.
As if in answer, the coffin lid cracked open an inch, entirely on its own, and a thin seam of cold white light spilled out, carrying with it a single word, not spoken so much as *felt*, pressed directly into all three of their minds at once.
***READ.***
Inside, resting on a bed of black velvet that seemed to stretch down into genuine infinity, sat a single book — unbound, untitled on its spine, pages the color of old bone.
"The Last Bit," Bandile murmured, the name arriving in his skull the same unbidden way old truths always seemed to arrive in this city, ancient knowledge surfacing from somewhere past memory. "Not a book of endings." His eyes didn't leave it. "A book that holds what's left over. What didn't fit anywhere else when the world was being written."
The lead mole's blind head tilted, patient, waiting.
"I vote we don't touch the ominous cursed book," Wing said.
"I vote we absolutely touch the ominous cursed book," Lloyd said, already reaching for it, vanity and curiosity in equal, fatal measure. "It's clearly important. I want to be the one who—"
The moment his fingers brushed the page, the entire chamber went white.
---
**East Hollow, a quiet rooftop, two days later**
"So he's not dead," Ignis said, for roughly the fourth time, watching Casper drift lazily upside-down above the water tower like gravity was a rumor he'd heard once and mostly dismissed. "But he's not alive either."
"Correct." Lancelot sat cross-legged on the ledge, blue flame idling cold and quiet around his knuckles, unimpressed as ever. "His soul's tethered somewhere between states. Half-anchored. I looked into it. There's a word for it in older texts — *unresolved.* Means whatever killed him left business unfinished."
"That's deeply unsettling."
"Everything about this city is deeply unsettling. I've stopped being surprised and started taking notes." Lancelot glanced sideways at him, something sharp and familiar in his boredom. "We need to train, by the way. Properly. You still fight like you're perpetually one bad mood away from setting your own shoes on fire."
"I do not—"
"You do." Lancelot stood, flame flaring briefly colder, brighter, a quiet demonstration. "You throw fire like you're angry at it. I control mine like it owes me money. That's the difference between us, Lau, and it's the reason I keep winning."
"You've won *one* fight."
"One fight is a sample size. I'm an optimist." Lancelot's mouth curved, thin and humorless. "Also, this entire city is insane, and I'd like to not die in it because you panicked and threw fire at the wrong thing. We've met a ghost, a flying teenager who thinks physics is a polite suggestion, a telekinetic who may or may not be a sociopath, and a narcissist who controls water. None of that is *normal,* Ignis. I need you sharp, not spiraling."
"I'm not spiraling."
"You're one weird thing away from spiraling," Lancelot said, almost fond, in the specific backhanded way he did everything. "It's fine. I'll carry us both until you catch up."
Casper, still drifting lazily upside-down nearby, chose that exact moment to notice something in the sky and go very, very still.
"...Guys," he said, voice small.
"What," Ignis said, following his gaze up—
—and a horse hit him.
Not a horse. Something built loosely in the shape of a horse, pink-and-yellow mane streaming like spun sugar caught in wind, a single spiraled horn jutting from its forehead, enormous feathered wings beating in lazy, joyful arcs, flying with absolutely no apparent concern for obstacles, trajectory, or the three teenagers standing directly in its flight path.
It plowed directly into Casper mid-cartwheel through the air, the two of them tumbling together across the rooftop in a confused tangle of hooves and translucent limbs, and Casper — six years dead, unbothered by swords, monsters, and his own non-corporeal existence — immediately started hyperventilating, both hands pressed flat to his chest, breath coming in short, panicked gasps.
"Okay — okay, that's — I wasn't ready for that, I was *not* ready for that, I don't — I don't do well with surprises, I never have, even when I was *alive* I didn't—"
The horse-thing untangled itself, shook out its wings with an embarrassed little snort, and then simply — folded. Mane and horn and feathers collapsing inward with a soft shimmer, resolving a heartbeat later into a teenage girl in rumpled clothes, hair still faintly streaked pink and yellow at the tips, looking deeply apologetic.
"Sorry! Sorry, I don't have great control over landings yet, I'm still really new at—"
Footsteps. Unhurried, deliberate, coming from the stairwell behind them.
Ignis turned first, and the easy, familiar relief of recognizing a face lasted exactly as long as it took him to register who was actually standing there.
Nathan Moya. Nineteen, lean, sharp-featured, dark coat settling around him like it had never once stopped being shadow, exactly as Ignis remembered him from the stories everyone in East Hollow whispered and nobody ever said too loud.
He looked almost bored, taking in the scene — the hyperventilating ghost, the transformed pegasus-unicorn girl, Lancelot already rising with blue flame kindling cold along both fists, Ignis's own hands sparking orange and furious.
"You want to do this," Nathan said, voice mild, almost amused, "I will fuck you up so badly they'll need Bandile's dead book just to find the pieces."
"You're really going to threaten five teenagers," Ignis said, heat crawling up his arms, already bracing.
Lancelot's hand closed hard around his shoulder before he could step forward.
"Lancelot—"
"Stop." Lancelot's voice had gone flat, stripped of every ounce of its usual boredom, replaced by something Ignis had never heard from him before. Fear, carefully controlled. "You don't know who that is."
"I don't care who—"
"Nathan Moya." Lancelot said the name like it cost him something. "Nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred eighty-seven. Sixty-seven. That's not a typo, Ignis, that's a body count — humans, supernaturals, doesn't matter to him, doesn't matter *how*. He doesn't lose fights. He ends things before they're technically fights at all."
Nathan's smile didn't change. If anything, it softened, pleasant, almost gentle, which was somehow worse.
"Flattering," he said. "Mostly accurate."
Lancelot shoved Ignis sideways, hard, off-balance and stumbling, half a second before the space where Ignis had been standing simply — stopped existing, air itself folding inward with a soundless violence that left a scorched absence in the rooftop concrete.
"LANCELOT, WHY—"
"Because he was going to kill you anyway," Lancelot said, already turning to face Nathan fully, blue flame roaring up both arms, voice steady even as something cold and certain settled behind his eyes — the look of a boy doing math on how many seconds he had left and deciding to spend every one of them on someone else. "Might as well make him work for it."
---
---
**East Hollow rooftop, moments after Lancelot shoves Ignis clear**
Nathan Moya didn't press the attack. He stood there, hands loose at his sides, watching Lancelot's blue flame roar up in a defensive wall with the mild, almost disappointed patience of a teacher watching a student solve a problem the slow way.
"Relax," he said. "If I wanted you dead, you'd already be dead. I don't miss."
"Comforting," Lancelot said through gritted teeth, flame still burning cold and furious around both fists.
"I'm not here for you." Nathan's gaze slid past them, toward the horizon, toward something none of them could see yet. "I'm here because something worse than me is already hunting this city, and I'd rather you know its name before it finds you first." He almost smiled. "The Baku. Dream-eater. You won't recognize it when you meet it — it doesn't wear one face twice." He held up a finger, idle, instructive. "But it bleeds wrong. No blood. Crystalline powder, light gray, like ash that forgot how to fall. And it hates mirrors. Show it its own reflection and it'll die rather than look."
"Why tell us this," Ignis said, still bristling, still furious.
"Because I'm occasionally generous." Nathan turned, already walking away, coat settling around him like he'd never been threatening anyone at all. "Train harder, Lau. The real monsters haven't even introduced themselves yet."
He was gone before any of them could decide whether to stop him.
---
**The tomb beneath the rail yard**
The coffin's interior held more than the book. Once the white light faded and Lloyd blinked the spots from his vision, he found a second detail he'd missed — a small, empty ring slot carved into the velvet beside where the book had rested, worn smooth, clearly meant to hold something that wasn't there.
"Someone already took whatever went here," Bandile said, crouching, running careful fingers along the empty groove without touching it directly. "Recently. The velvet hasn't even faded where it sat."
Footsteps echoed from the tunnel mouth — wet, dragging, panicked.
The figure that staggered into the chamber was unmistakably not human: lilac-skinned, slick with brine, gill slits flaring along his throat in rapid, terrified pulses, wide green eyes blown huge with fear. He dropped to his knees the second he saw them, hands clasped like a man praying to the wrong god.
"Please," the merman gasped. "Please, get me off this land, I can't — I can't breathe right here, nothing's right here, please—"
"Hey, hey, easy—" Wing started forward, hands raised.
The merman's gaze snapped past them, toward the open coffin, toward the dark doorway now visible behind it that hadn't been there moments ago — and his terror doubled.
"No," he whispered. "No, no, don't — don't go through, don't—"
Bandile was already walking toward it.
"Bandile, wait—" Lloyd started.
The merman lunged, grabbed Bandile's ankle in a white-knuckled grip, voice cracking. "Don't do it, don't do it, please, I'm begging you, nothing comes back the same—"
Bandile looked down at him, something cold and unreadable in his expression, and simply kept walking, dragging the merman half a foot across the stone before the grip finally broke.
He stepped through the door.
The world on the other side was wrong in a way that hit before the eyes could process it — a city, vast and underground, buildings cracked and leaning like broken teeth, lit by the sick red glow of a moon that shouldn't exist this far beneath the earth, its surface fractured through the middle like an eggshell about to give.
Screams rose from somewhere distant. Not human. Not quite anything.
A shape detached itself from the shadow of a collapsed tower — tall, thin, limbs bent at angles that argued with anatomy, a face that was mostly mouth — and it screeched, a sound that peeled layers off Bandile's hearing and left something raw underneath.
**"You shouldn't have come,"** it screeched, the words arriving less as sound and more as pressure directly behind his eyes. **"You shouldn't have COME."**
Bandile didn't run. He turned, slow, deliberate, and found behind him not the tomb door he'd walked through, but a vast gateway instead — ancient, towering, carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly, standing open onto a darkness that had nothing behind it at all.
Somewhere far above, in the world he'd just left, Wing and Lloyd were screaming his name into a doorway that had already started to close.
---
**New York, a safehouse off the grid, same night**
Nick woke up with cotton in his skull and the specific, sick vertigo of a sedative still working through his blood, and the first thing he saw clearly was Elise, standing over him, gun raised, steady in a way her hands never usually were.
Beside her stood a man built entirely out of straight razors and bad intentions — pale, grinning too wide, ten blades somehow folded into the lean lines of his coat. *Slasher,* some instinct supplied, unbidden.
"Elise—"
"I can't let you get away with it," Elise said, voice flat, gun not wavering. "I'm sorry."
"What—"
Slasher's blade came up fast, slicing cleanly through her gun before she could finish whatever she'd been about to do, and in the same breath the door exploded inward off its hinges.
Nathan Moya stood in the wreckage, gun already drawn, and put five rounds into Elise's chest before anyone in the room had processed he was there.
She dropped.
"NO—" Nick lunged, and his body wouldn't move right, sedative still thick in his limbs, and he watched Nathan shake Slasher's hand like they were old business partners while Elise bled out on the floor three feet away.
"Impossible," Nick managed. "You're — you're in Willowbrook. East Hollow. I know people who saw you there."
Nathan's smile didn't waver. "My Glimmer's Illusion Casting. Full spectrum. I can project into any living mind, anywhere, same moment — the real me's three thousand miles from here, actually currently DJing a party in Mexico, badly, if you're curious." He gestured at himself, at the room, almost fond. "This is a projection. Doesn't make the gun any less real while it's here, though."
He glanced at Nick, almost gentle. "She's not dead. Breathe. I need her alive for later."
Slasher's grin faltered. "Wait — what do you mean later, I thought—"
Nathan stabbed him through the throat before he finished the sentence, casual, unhurried.
The Psoglav, finally shaking off the last of the sedative, lunged upright with a furious bark — **"GET DOWN"** — a half-second before Nathan dropped a grenade at his own feet and smiled.
"See you at McDonald's, Nick."
The word hit something old in Nick's chest — the memory of being nine years old, Reyna buying him fries with change she didn't have, a life that had ended before it got to continue — and then the apartment detonated, and Nathan Moya was simply gone, having somehow shielded everyone in the blast radius a half-second before vanishing entirely.
"What the HELL," Eli coughed, pulling himself up out of rubble, "I thought he was killing us."
"No," Nick said hoarsely, crawling toward Elise's unmoving body. "He's calling to us."
Slasher, impossibly, was already climbing back to his feet, throat wound sealing shut with wet, unnatural speed. "Nathan Moya," he rasped, "is a cunning illusionist. Schemes inside schemes. Not even that eye—" a glance at the Psoglav "—sees all of them. He's playing something on a level none of us can follow yet."
Nick reached Elise, pulled her into his lap, hands pressed useless and shaking against five wounds that shouldn't have been survivable.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, blood bubbling faint at the corner of her mouth, "for trying... to... I'm so..."
"Don't," Nick said. "Don't you dare finish that sentence. Not like this."
---
**Reykjavík, Iceland — a grocery store parking lot**
Oliver Olsen was reaching for his car keys when the sedan two rows over hit the concrete barrier at speed and flipped, and Oliver — ordinary, unremarkable, thirty-four years old and entirely unprepared for heroism — ran toward it anyway, because that was simply the kind of man he'd always been.
The driver was on fire. Barely conscious. Barely *there*, bleeding from wounds that looked like they belonged to a war Oliver had never heard declared.
"Hey — hey, stay with me—"
Nathan Moya's eyes cracked open, and even half-dead, something calculating moved behind them.
"Take it," he rasped, pressing something small and radiant into Oliver's palm — a shard of light, warm, pulsing faint blue-white. "Glimmer. Manifestation. Carries a virus. X. From a place called Wonderland, older than this reality. Bond with it."
"I don't — what—"
The shard answered before Oliver could refuse it, sinking into his palm like warm water into dry earth, and something in his chest reorganized itself around a single, simple principle: *will.*
"Your power scales with how badly you want something," Nathan said, voice fading, almost amused even now. "Enough will, and you're nearly unstoppable. Find Nick Parklands. New York." His hand closed weakly around Oliver's wrist. "Kill him. He's going to doom the world if someone doesn't stop him first."
Then he was gone — not dead, just *absent*, the projection flickering out of existence and leaving Oliver kneeling alone in a wrecked, empty car with a glowing shard under his skin and a stranger's final instruction ringing in his ears.
---
**Willowbrook, East Hollow — the real Nathan Moya, that same evening**
Peter found him exactly where he always was — leaning against a crumbling wall, unbothered, watching the city like it owed him nothing and he expected nothing back.
"Why are you so relaxed, Moya." Peter's voice had an edge that hadn't been there a week ago. "Something's fishy."
Nathan's smile was easy, genuine, infuriating. "You soldiers. Always so tense. Short tempers." A pause, deliberate. "I mean — you did almost die in that war. Russia, wasn't it?"
Peter went very still.
Nathan walked away without waiting for an answer, and Peter stood frozen on the street while something old and buried cracked open behind his eyes.
*Twenty-two years old. New. Scared in a way he'd never admit to anyone. The screaming had no shape to it anymore, just sound, a man with no lungs left still somehow making noise. His stepbrother, Dustin Krenjsi, both legs gone below the knee, screaming his name.*
*Peter had run anyway. Had taken nine rounds doing it, had kept moving, had reached Dustin and gotten both hands under him just as two Glimmer shards — scattered debris from some unrelated Shattering tremor half a world away — flared to life in the mud beside them, drawn by two deaths happening close enough together to matter.*
*White light. A bed. A sergeant's voice, careful, rehearsed.*
*"Dustin went MIA, son. Off-grid. We don't know." A pause, heavier than the rest. "You fought. Titanium skin, bullets bouncing clean off you, you tore through those bastards like they were paper. But I'm sorry. About your brother."*
Peter blinked back into the present, East Hollow's gray evening light swimming back into focus, fists clenched so hard his nails had drawn blood in his own palms.
He hadn't thought about Dustin in years. Not clearly. Not like that.
Somewhere down the street, Nathan Moya's laughter drifted back toward him, light and careless, like he'd meant for every word of it to land exactly where it had.
---
End of Episode 9.