You can’t save everyone. Hypothetically, I could pass Cassie’s dad an implant, and maybe it could save his brain, but Spark had said that anyone passing through the fight with the Abominators while owning or using an implant could cause major deviations.

It wasn’t worth the risk.

Hypothetically, I could send Jaclyn back to grab Paladin, have him heal Giles from whatever damage the process of empowering him caused, but Vaughn might not even be born then.

On the other hand, it would be a world where Giles never turned evil, where Grandpa never sabotaged his attempt to gain even more power, killing him in the process. It might well be a world where the two of them had retired, remaining friends the whole time, and saving the whole team from pain and grief.

It might be a better world, but the price of making it was more than I was willing to pay.

Could I tell Grandma to stop smoking? That lung cancer would definitely kill her? Grandpa had told her so many times, but she hadn’t managed to quit. I even had Spark check on that one. The GCD returned with “minimal deviation.”

You could take that as meaning that it was too late already, or that she was old when she died anyway, so another year or two wouldn’t make much of a difference.

I needed to stop this. I couldn’t obsess further on how much of the past I could safely change.

I released Lee and Nataw from the GCD’s prison, a pocket universe that used a vast amount of energy. Through the GCD’s direct connection to the Artificer aspect of myself, I also sensed Lee and Nataw.

I’d sensed Artificers before, but only from a vast distance mediated by what I sometimes called the Artificer Superhighway. Sure, I’d seen physical forms of Govan, Lee, and Kee, but those were temporary forms taken for convenience.

Through the GCD, I sensed their full forms. I didn’t then, and still don’t have the words for it. Big is one word that fits, but immense carries more of the right feeling. Big could be a large pickup truck. Immense hits closer to beings that exist in an infinity of dimensions and whose form in this one exists mostly out of phase with what we can sense.

We could see human shapes, but those shapes were less the tip of the proverbial iceberg and more a grain of sand that had temporarily escaped its beach. Through the GCD’s view, I saw them as dark shapes that were larger than planets.

You’d think that as a proto-Artificer/Ghost mix, I’d have the insight to see them as people. I didn’t. I saw them as dark, massive, and impenetrable, and when I zeroed in on them, I felt myself wanting to look anywhere else.

The patterns on the miasma that might have been skin changed without stopping, absorbing what was there, and being absorbed in turn.

Isaac Lim may have been the person who told me about the psychics and sorcerers who’d gone mad trying to sense Lee, not to mention the Syndicate L telepath who’d gone catatonic when trying to scan my thoughts.

At the time, we’d all put it down to defenses Daniel had created in my mind, but he’d been inspired by what he’d sensed while being close to Lee.

In retrospect, that should have been a sign.

I opened up a portal from the prison about 50 feet away from the middle of the room where we all gathered to talk, allowing everyone to see Lee and Nataw before they reached us.

Lee appeared as he always had when we trained with him in Grand Lake, a man with light brown skin and shoulder-length, straight black hair. He wore a black T-shirt and blue jeans. A short sword hung on each hip.

As always, his grin as he surveyed the scene struck me as a little too wide.

The person walking next to him had to be Nataw, victim of the Abominators and unwilling contributor to humanity’s gene pool by way of reverse engineering.

He didn’t strike me as a victim. Thin and almost a foot taller than Lee, Nataw’s attention appeared to be on everything at once. In one moment, he appeared to be scanning the faces of the people in the room. In the next, he seemed to be staring up at the glowing pseudo-suns floating above us.

He wore a threadbare green suit that I could imagine on more than one of my college professors. A sprinkling of dandruff appeared on his shoulders underneath his curly hair.

If he was anything like Lee, the form he took was a composite of the viewers’ expectations. Of course, as a being billions of years old, he probably had some choice in the matter. On some level, this must be how he wanted to be perceived.

Soon, everyone was looking at them. Well, almost everyone. I was distracted. Through the GCD, I could see two more Artificers converging on the GCD from the outside. One of them had flown toward us from the orbit of Earth. The other appeared to be cruising in from deep space.