Chapter 17 The Other Emma

Other Emma - POV

The mirrors don't just crack—they explode inward, glass shards dissolving into particles of light before they can draw blood. I watch my younger self stumble backward into her heirs' protective circle, and the sight tears something loose in my chest. I remember that trust. I remember believing their love could save me.

"You're really me." Her voice carries the tremor I used to have, back when fear meant I still had something to lose.

"I'm what you become when you discover the price of freedom." I step through the settling light particles, feeling the dimensional fabric strain under my presence. The thing wearing Kane's face snarls behind me, but I've learned to ignore its attempts at control. "Layer fifteen isn't the paradise it appeared to be in those mirrors. It's a tomb."

Through the psychic echoes that still connect me to other versions of myself, I show her flashes of my world. Empty corridors where students once laughed. Silent laboratories where brilliant minds once pushed the boundaries of human potential. Gardens where lovers once walked, now filled with ash that used to be people.

"What happened to them?" Emma asks, though her enhanced senses are already reading the grief that saturates my every cell.

"I killed them." The words come out steady because I've had three years to practice saying them. "Not with violence or betrayal. With freedom."

Cole moves closer to Emma, his protective instincts recognizing a threat he can't physically fight. Blake's mind works frantically to find the manipulation angle while Ryan's medical training tries to diagnose what kind of trauma could create this level of devastation. Kai's synesthesia must be painting my emotions in colors that hurt to perceive.

"The conduit system doesn't just harvest your power," I continue, letting the environment around us shift to show the truth. The space expands beyond the chapel walls, revealing floating fragments of dead worlds. Pieces of familiar buildings drift past us like grave markers. "It stabilizes the barriers between dimensions. When I severed my bonds and destroyed Kane's control in my layer..."

I gesture to the wreckage surrounding us. A piece of debris floats by—part of the medical wing where my Ryan died trying to treat dimensional sickness that ate through his nervous system like acid.

"The cascade failure started immediately. Every dimension connected to a conduit system began unraveling." My voice stays clinical because emotion is another luxury I can't afford. "My heirs didn't die in battle. They just... faded. Layer by layer, as reality lost cohesion."

Emma's face goes pale as she processes the implications. "How many layers?"

"All of them." I let that truth settle while the fake Kane circles us like a predator. "Every version of you that achieved a stable bond. Every reality where Blackwood found its conduit. The collapse spreads through the multiverse like infection."

"There has to be another way," Blake says, his charm cracking under genuine terror.

"There is." I meet Emma's eyes directly. "We switch places."

The silence stretches while cosmic debris continues its slow dance around us. In the distance, I can hear the dimensional barriers groaning under stress they were never designed to handle.

"My layer is dying, but the infrastructure still exists. If you take my place there, use your stabilized bond as an anchor, you might reverse the cascade." I take another step closer, ignoring the threatening energy radiating from her heirs. "Your reality survives. Billions of lives across thousands of dimensions continue."

"And you?" Cole's voice carries lethal promise.

"I stay here and accept the consequences of my choice." I don't flinch from his glare. "I die with the dimension I destroyed."

"No." Emma shakes her head violently. "There has to be—"

Reality convulses around us.

The dimensional barriers don't crack—they shatter like overstressed metal. Through the sudden rifts, other versions of Blackwood bleed through. I see universities made of bone and shadow, campuses where the students have no faces, realities where the sky weeps blood instead of rain.

"The barriers are failing," I say urgently as the space around us begins to warp. "Choose now, Emma. Your life for everyone else's, or—"

The fake Kane's laughter cuts through my words, but now it's different. Hungry. Triumphant.

"Did you really think I was just another failed experiment?" Her form shifts, revealing something vast and ancient beneath Kane's stolen face. "I've been orchestrating this cascade across every dimension. Every conduit who breaks free feeds the collapse. Every reality that dies makes me stronger."

Horror floods through me as understanding hits. The entity hasn't been trying to control conduits—it's been farming them. Using our desire for freedom to destroy the very barriers that keep it contained.

"You played us all," I breathe.

"And now the last barriers fall." The thing spreads its arms wide as dimensional rifts tear open like wounds in space itself. "Every reality collapses into singular chaos. Every conduit's power flows into me. Every—"

Emma's scream cuts through the entity's gloating. Not a cry of fear, but something primal and furious that makes the collapsing dimensions ring like struck bells. Power explodes out of her in waves that make my own abilities feel like candle flames.

But instead of fighting the entity, she's reaching for me.

"If switching places might work," she shouts over the multiversal chaos, "then we do it together. Anchor both dimensions. Share the load."

"That's not how dimensional physics—" I start to protest.

"I don't care about physics!" Her heirs are being pulled apart by conflicting gravitational forces from overlapping realities, but Emma's power keeps them tethered. "I care about stopping this thing and saving everyone!"

The entity's laughter turns to rage as it realizes what she's attempting. "Impossible. The mathematics require sacrifice. Someone must—"

Emma's power slams into both me and the entity simultaneously, and suddenly I'm being pulled into a psychic link I haven't felt in years. Through the connection, I feel her determination, her refusal to accept that mathematics of sacrifice, her absolute certainty that there has to be another way.

The last thing I see before reality turns inside out is the entity's form beginning to unravel as Emma attempts something that should be impossible—binding two dying dimensions together instead of choosing between them.