"Keep firing!" Snow roared, and the line of resistance fighters answered with a ragged volley that sent the soldiers ducking behind their barricades.
Then a blur of red rose petals crossed the bridge.
Ruby landed in the middle of the firefight, spun Crescent Rose in a wide arc, and swept three soldiers off their feet before they could aim. Jaune came after her at a run, shield raised. A volley hammered into it, and he didn't slow down.
"Stay behind the shield!" he shouted to the huddled prisoners. "Stay low, stay together, and don't run until I say!"
Snow stared at him. "Who the hell are you two?"
"Storm. That's Ruby." He shoved a soldier back with the shield's edge.
"Who's winning?"
"Right now? Them." Snow grinned through the pain.
"But that's changing."
Sazh arrived a moment later, dragging a wounded woman by the arm, his chocobo chick clinging to his afro for dear life. Lightning came last. She didn't look at any of them. Her eyes were fixed on the Pulse Vestige, the ancient ruin PSICOM had dragged to the Hanging Edge to destroy, looming black against the sky.
She had stopped listening to the gunfire.
"Serah," she whispered.
Snow followed her gaze up to the ruin, and the grin left his face. "She's in there."
"I know where she is." Lightning didn't look at him. "Stay out of my way."
"Not happening." Snow checked his weapon. Behind him, a silver-haired boy and a red-haired girl had edged out of the crowd, and Sazh let out a long breath. "Fine. We all go."
Jaune met Ruby's eyes. She nodded once.
"We're coming too," Jaune said.
An hour later, the gunfire on the bridge was only a distant rumble.
They left the firefight behind them and climbed through the ruins of the Hanging Edge, over fallen pillars and under broken arches, with the Vestige growing larger at every turn.
Lightning led. Snow kept pace a step behind her, and neither of them said a word.
Sazh walked in the middle with his chocobo chick perched on his head, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds. "Remind me why I agreed to this?"
"Because you can't leave a girl on her own," said the red-haired girl beside him, bright and breathless despite everything. "And because you're nice, even when you pretend you aren't."
"I'm not nice. I'm tired."
The silver-haired boy kept close to Snow, his eyes on the ground, gripping the strap of his bag with both hands. Snow dropped back long enough to ruffle his hair.
"Stay near me, kid. Nothing gets through us."
The boy nodded without looking up.
Jaune and Ruby brought up the rear. Ruby kept her voice low. "Do you think this is where the portal was taking us?"
"I don't know." Jaune watched Lightning's back, the set of her shoulders, the way she walked like a woman who had decided to break something.
"But whatever's in there, she needs help getting to it."
"Hey," the red-haired girl called, dropping back to walk beside them. "I never got your names!"
"Ruby," Ruby said. She started to add something, then caught Jaune's eye and stopped.
"Storm," Jaune said. It was the name he gave to people he had just met. It was easier than explaining.
"Storm." The girl tried it out and grinned. "I like it. It suits you."
After a long climb up broken stairways, the ruins thinned out, and the sky turned the color of ash.
A PSICOM patrol rounded the corner ahead, and the talking stopped. Lightning raised a fist. Jaune stepped up with his shield, Ruby unfolded Crescent Rose, and the soldiers were on the ground before the first of them could shout a warning.
Lightning looked at the unconscious soldiers, then at the two strangers, and said nothing. She turned and kept walking.
The Vestige loomed above them, vast and silent, its doors standing open like a mouth.
Hours later, deep inside the Vestige, the daylight was a memory.
She didn't remember the maze of black stone. She remembered the blade in her hand, the Cie'th falling in heaps, and Snow shouting her sister's name from somewhere behind her. Then the last doorway opened, and there she was.
Serah lay slumped on a dais of black stone, shaking. Her hair was the same pale pink as Lightning's, but longer, and her eyes were wide and unfocused.
"Serah!"
Her sister's head lifted. For one moment the confusion cleared.
"Claire," Serah said. It was the name nobody used anymore. "You came."
Lightning dropped to her knees and gripped her shoulders. "I told you I would. I told you..." She stopped. Something was wrong. Serah's skin was cold, and a faint glow was coming from beneath her collar, a mark like a brand.
"Serah, what did they do to you?"
"I saw it," Serah said softly. "Cocoon, Claire. The fire, and the sky breaking apart. I saw all of it."
Lightning's grip tightened. "What are you talking about?"
Serah pressed her forehead against hers. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Then Serah's eyes went distant, and the glow beneath her collar flared.
Serah's eyes went white, and the visions came.
She saw a vast creature of black iron and flame tearing through the sky, a monstrous silhouette with wings spread above a burning city. She saw Cocoon cracking, its shell splitting open like an egg while people screamed in streets that had no ground left. She saw Snow on his knees in the ashes, and Sazh holding a limp little shape against his chest.
Then the vision broke, and the chamber rushed back around her.
Two strangers stood over her: a tall young man in worn armor with a shield on his arm, and a girl in a red hood with a scythe at her back.
She had never seen either of them before.
Serah's breath caught. They weren't in it. Not one moment of it.
She had walked through every frame of that burning future, and neither of them had been in it. Yet here they stood, small and defiant against the dark, as if some force she didn't understand had written them into the future.
Jaune turned his head. For a moment, impossibly, he looked straight at her.
Then her strength gave out, and the glow beneath her collar began to climb.
Lightning knelt on the cold stone with Serah in her arms, and the echoes of the Vestige rushed back into her ears as if she had surfaced from deep water. Serah felt lighter now, and her skin had gone translucent.
"Serah? Serah, look at me!"
Serah smiled, and it was the gentlest and most heartbreaking thing Lightning had ever seen. "Don't be angry. Whatever you have to do, don't stop being you."
Pale blue light spread outward from her chest, racing along her arms and hair. Her robe lifted around her as if it floated in water.
"No." Lightning's voice cracked. "No, no. I'm not letting go. Serah..."
A few paces away, Ruby stood with her hand over her mouth, and Jaune's shield had dropped to his side. He didn't say anything. He just moved to stand beside Lightning, close enough to be there and far enough not to intrude.
Over Lightning's shoulder, Serah's gaze found Jaune. Something stirred in her fading eyes, a glimmer of hope, as if he were the one thing her vision had missed, and the one thing that might change it. Jaune felt it settle on him like a weight he didn't understand. He held her gaze and nodded once.
The light brightened. Serah's last whisper brushed against Lightning's ear.
"Save Cocoon."
The crystal rose around her, faceted and glittering. It took her hair, her smile, and her outstretched hand until nothing was left of the girl but a shining statue of living light, and Lightning knelt in front of it with her sister's name caught in her throat.
The Brand
Further in, past the dais and the fallen Cie'th, the passage opened into the heart of the ruin.
Anima's chamber opened before them, and the fal'Cie rose from its throne. Snow begged it to give Serah back, offering himself in her place. Lightning and Sazh answered with gunfire, and the fal'Cie answered with light.
It climbed the air around the fal'Cie into a shape too large to see all at once, and for a heartbeat Lightning felt eyes on her from somewhere far above. Then pain lanced up her arm.
She gasped. Beside her, Snow doubled over, gripping his own arm. Sazh staggered back with a curse, and the little chocobo chick burst out of his hair with a startled chirp. Nearby, a silver-haired boy fell to his knees with a cry, and a red-haired girl who had stayed close to Sazh went down beside him.
The l'Cie brand burned itself into their skin, a glowing sigil that seared like hot iron, each one different and each one pulsing faintly in time with a heartbeat that wasn't theirs. Lightning stared at hers. The pulse felt like a clock she couldn't read, and something deep inside her knew it was counting down.
"What is this?" Sazh whispered. "What did it do to us?"
Nobody had an answer.
Then Ruby cried out, and Jaune's shield hit the ground.
The same light had found them. An l'Cie brand unfurled across Ruby's wrist and another across Jaune's forearm, the same pale blue-white as the others, pulsing with the same slow beat.
Ruby clutched her arm. "It hurts!" She shook her hand out and blinked.
"Wait. It stopped."
Jaune flexed his fingers. "Mine too. It's just... warm."
And it was. Their brands ticked on exactly like the others', counting down from the very same moment. But where the clock gnawed at Lightning's bones, Ruby and Jaune seemed to feel only warmth, as if the countdown were running on someone else's skin.
Lightning noticed. She looked from her own throbbing mark to theirs, and her eyes narrowed.
"Why aren't you..."
"Aren't we what?" Ruby asked, honestly confused.
Lightning didn't answer. Snow had gone pale, and the silver-haired boy was shaking. Sazh was staring at his arm as if it belonged to someone else. Whatever had marked them had started the same clock for every one of them, but somehow it didn't weigh on two strangers.