"I didn't know there was an Altgame with a billion users," Sakura said.
"There's exactly one," he said.
"Aftermath."
"You have a billion users?"
She actually gasped at that, in spite of herself.
"Yes, and I'm going to need serious funding to keep it stable under that kind of load.
I wasn't expecting a billion people this fast."
"You could crowdsource it," Sakura offered, without much hope.
"That's a weak move," he muttered, mostly to himself.
"No.
Absolutely not."
"There's the offer from the American consortium," she tried again.
"Sharing that much player data with a foreign intelligence contract in exchange for their money?"
Takehiro made a face like he'd bitten into something rotten.
"I'd rather run it into the ground myself."
"You could run advertisements.
Sponsorships.
Every company on earth would kill to put a billboard inside your world."
"Are you serious right now?
Please, take this conversation more seriously than that."
"Why don't you just call Shinji," Sakura said, quieter now.
"He's still your friend, whatever the board thinks of you this month."
"I would honestly rather die," Takehiro said.
"I will not hand my own child over to that snake just because the board likes his spreadsheets better than my vision."
Genesis Studios' board had removed Takehiro as chief executive three weeks earlier and replaced him with the company's co-founder and chairman, his childhood best friend, Shinji Nakamura, and Takehiro had spent every one of the three weeks since acting like it hadn't happened at all, which Sakura had slowly come to understand was its own kind of answer to a question she'd stopped asking him out loud.
"This game is going to be the greatest thing ever made in this industry," Takehiro said.
"The kind of thing that gets you invited to sit across from prime ministers.
I'll take you along to all of it, obviously."
"Why would you?"
"We're married."
"Not anymore," Sakura said.
"What do you mean by that?"
"I'm divorcing you, Take."
"Is this some kind of joke."
"No," she said, and for the first time all evening, she actually looked at him instead of past him.
"It's not."
"There's someone else."
He said it flatly, already certain.
"Isn't there.
It's Shinji, isn't it."
Sakura didn't answer that. She stood, smoothed down the front of her dress with both hands out of some old habit neither of them had ever discussed, and walked to the door. She turned back once, from the threshold, the way people in every story about endings always seem to.
"He begged me to tell you as gently as I could manage," she said.
"I don't think you've earned his gentleness, honestly, but I'm giving it to you anyway, because I don't have anything left to prove by being cruel about it.
I hope Aftermath makes you happy, Take.
Because I stopped being able to, a long time before tonight."
She left. Takehiro sat alone at a table set for two people, one plate mostly full, and after a long minute he picked his fork back up and kept eating, methodically, like a man determined to finish what he'd started even after every reason for starting it had walked out the front door.
◆ ◆ ◆
The house that used to be Alfred's mattered less, in the grey hour after the fires burned down to embers, than the house that was still standing, and Hans hadn't slept in three days by the time he finally sat still long enough for Abigail to look properly at the gash along his ribs.
"Hold still," she said, for what had to be the tenth time, dabbing at it with a cloth boiled clean over what fire they'd been able to save.
"You keep flinching like I'm the one who did this to you."
"You're pressing harder than the fellow with the sword did," Hans said, which was almost certainly a lie, and they both let it stand as one because a lie that small, said in that tone, was its own kind of comfort right now.
They were sitting in what used to be the tool shed at the edge of the farthest untouched field, one of the only structures left standing close enough to the crater's rim to still count as Hallowmere at all. Beyond the doorway, in the flat grey light of early morning, the crater itself stretched out where the heart of the town used to be: a vast, smooth, glassy wound in the earth, still faintly warm, still faintly smoking at its deepest point, ringed by the collapsed husks of houses that had stood since before either of their grandparents were born.
"He's alive," Abigail said, not quite a question, tying off the bandage a little tighter than she strictly needed to.
"I don't know that," Hans said.
"Nobody's found him yet."
"He's alive," she said again, harder this time, like saying it with enough force might make it load-bearing.
Hans let that sit a moment before he spoke again.
"You should let me look at your arm."
Abigail's left forearm was wrapped from wrist to elbow, the burn beneath it deep enough that the healers who'd come through at dawn had gone quiet in the specific way healers go quiet when they don't want to say the word scar out loud in front of the person who's going to be wearing one. She'd been close enough to the well when the light came that she still heard a high thin whine in her right ear that hadn't faded since, a sound like a held note nobody else could hear.
"It's fine," she said.
"It's not fine.
Let me see it."
"Hans."
She looked at him properly then, the exhaustion and grief and something rawer than either of those sitting plainly on her face for once, no scowl built up around it to hold it in place.
"I watched the sky come apart over my own home.
I watched it happen because the boy I love decided, in the space of about four seconds, that the only way to save any of us was to nearly kill all of us instead.
I am not fine, and my arm is the smallest part of why."