"LUVVVVVVVVV!"

  The scream tore out of Jay before his conscious mind caught up. It scraped raw from the bottom of him and hit the impossible tiers of the gallery like a stone shattering still water.

  The gallery, which had been murmuring in the particular way that cosmic entities murmur when something interesting is happening, went quiet. The sound was loud, yes, but that wasn't why several beings who had watched civilisations rise and fall did something they hadn't done in eons: they flinched.

  Then from the terrified boy standing alone in the center of the court came the voice Jay had been screaming for.

  "Dad!"

  Luv's face broke. The word came out halfway to a sob. He scrambled up from where he'd been kneeling next to Bonk, the small dinosaur lying too still against the floor, scales gone pale, each breath rattling wrong in his chest. Luv's legs started moving before he finished standing.

  "Dad, Bonk is hurt! Please, you have to help him!"

  Jay was already running.

  He'd covered half the distance when the chains erupted from nowhere.

  Golden and thick as his forearm. They came from everywhere at once, floor and air and the spaces between things, snapping around his wrists and ankles and torso and finally his throat, yanking him to a stop so hard his teeth cracked together. He knew these chains. The same ones that had held Lady Death in the Amalgam Verse. The restraints the Three Judges of Three Worlds had used when they found her guilty. He'd watched those chains hold The Death Entity and sworn nothing short of that would ever need them again.

  Jay looked up at The Living Tribunal, floating above the dais with all four of his faces carrying the same expression. He'd never been in a hurry. Why would he be? Consequences eventually arrived.

  "Outsider Jay," The Living Tribunal said. "You have been summoned as a witness in the trial for this being known as Luv, trial concerning his right to existence. As such, you shall not be allowed to interfere."

  Jay didn't think. He just moved.

  He burned every channel open at the same time. Tachyon Field, Elemental Force, and even his raw reality warping he usually kept reserved for the harshest of battles. He actually bit into the chains with his teeth, which did nothing but made his point clear. He pushed raw universal energy into the golden links until they started softening at the edges, started dripping, and whispers moved through the gallery like wind through grass. No one had ever used their powers through the Tribunal's suppression field. Not once. Not ever.

  Jay didn't notice. He was already losing ground. For every half link he dissolved, two more snapped into place, then three, then more until breathing took active effort.

  Luv had stopped a few feet away. Close enough that Jay could see the dried tear tracks on his face, the careful stillness of someone who has been very frightened for a long time and has learned that stillness is safer than showing it. Bonk lay behind him, scales matted, chest moving wrong. Too shallow, too careful, like every breath cost him.

  Jay looked at the dinosaur. Looked at his son. Then back at the Tribunal.

  "He's five," Jay said. His voice came out flat, emptied of everything except the fact itself. "He is five years old and his dog is dying and you put a line around him."

  "The child's age is noted," Equity said.

  "The child's distress is observed," Necessity said.

  "Jay," Vengeance said, patient as always, "it would be wise to follow the court's decorum."

  Jay had four of the vilest words loaded and ready, words that Domino had specifically taught him for situations that deserved them.

  The pressure arrived before he could use them.

  Gravity got personal. It pressed down through his shoulders and chest and into the floor. His knees hit the ground before he understood it was happening.

  "I always find it amusing," said a voice behind him, rough and deliberate, like someone who had rehearsed this. "How these outsiders come to our world and make themselves at home in our affairs. They meddle with our abstracts, steal from our dead, breed with our inhabitants. And when their transgressions are brought to light, instead of having the decency to acknowledge their errors and accept the appropriate consequence, they raise their voices at us. At the rightful residents of this multiverse." A pause, timed perfectly. "As though their entitlement has no ceiling. As though they built something here. As though they belong."

  Jay turned his head.

  Oblivion stood at the edge of the gallery directly opposing The Living Tribunal, wrapped in shadow that moved wrong, less like darkness and more like the space before light existed. He was the guardian of the multiverse's outer edges, the force that stood between existence and the void beyond it. Jay had understood the weight of that once. Had respected it.

  Now he watched Oblivion survey the court, survey Luv standing small and frightened next to Bonk's unmoving body, and whatever respect remained died quietly.

  Jay was quiet for one beat.

  "You know what's funny?" he said. "The accent always stays the same. 'You don't belong here. You're disrupting the natural order. You should be grateful for the correction.' Doesn't matter if it's a pub landlord in Surrey or the literal primordial void having a tantrum because someone touched his sister's things. The speech is always the same. Same self-righteous bollocks dressed up in cosmic language. Same small-minded bigotry wearing a bigger hat. You're a racist, Oblivion. A garden-variety xenophobic cunt who's mad that the help fucked someone outside the approved list."

  Oblivion's head turned toward him, slow and deliberate.

  "Watch your tongue, outsider."

  "I have been watching it for months," Jay said, "and it keeps saying things that apparently need saying, so I've given up managing it. Here's what it's saying now: you're a xenophobic piece of shit hiding behind cosmic procedure, and every being in this gallery knows it. You don't give a single fuck about balance or order or protecting the multiverse. You want your sister back so you can go back to being her favorite Big Brother, and you're willing to murder a five-year-old to make it happen. That's what this is. That's all this has ever been."

  The gallery went so quiet Jay could hear his own heartbeat.

  The Living Tribunal's gavel handle touched the floor.

  The sound wasn't loud but it didn't need to be. It reached every corner, silenced every voice.

  Now we begin.

  "We are gathered here," The Living Tribunal said, "to adjudicate the case of the being known as Luv." He gestured toward the boy, toward Jay's son, five years old and trying with shaking hands to work the golden chains off his father's wrists. "It has been brought to this court's attention that this child is an anomaly, born from the combined genetic material of the Harbinger of the Ninth Cosmos and the Mutant Shaman. He exists outside the parameters of established cosmic law due to an outsider's influence."

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  "Don't mince your words, Tribunal."

  Oblivion's voice cut across the proceedings. His throne floated forward, and the shadow came with him.

  "This child," he said, and the word came out sharp enough to cut, "is an abomination. Formed from the stolen essence of the most exceptional humans this multiverse will ever produce. That alone would be crime enough." He let it sit a moment. "But compounding this, the creature was being raised by the Outsider. And worse still, raised alongside the woman who willingly debased herself by accepting an outsider into her bed as if the boundaries of our multiverse were an inconvenience."

  The veins in Jay's neck stood out like cables.

  "You motherfucker!"

  He stopped trying to melt the chains and pushed everything outward at once. The sphere of golden restraints groaned. New chains erupted to replace what he was destroying. The whole construction tightened around him until drawing a full breath required concentration. He didn't stop pushing.

  Jay's voice came out strangled. "You're really going to stand there… You absolute fucking coward… and slander a woman who has more courage in her little finger than you've shown in your entire parasitic existence, while simultaneously condemning a child for the crime of being born? That's your argument? That's the hill you're dying on?"

  Luv went still.

  He stood with his hands at his sides, the reaching forgotten. He didn't understand all of the words but he understood the tone. He'd understood that tone since before he had language for it. His face went very still, very careful, the way it did when he was trying not to cry.

  The gallery had gone absolutely silent. Jay could see beings in those infinite tiers. Some watching with satisfaction, some with an indifference somehow worse, and a handful staring at the floor like guilt looked when it couldn't find its voice.

  Oblivion kept going.

  "I propose we dispense with the theatre over this mutt of a crossbreed that should never have drawn breath. An existential erasure, for the abomination, for his outsider father who infected this multiverse like a plague, and for the thief who calls herself his mother, would resolve this efficiently and spare everyone further embarrassment. Let us clean the board and correct the anomaly."

  The sound Jay made wasn't words.

  "I'm going to fucking kill you."

  He said it quietly. He said it clearly. "I don't care if it takes me a thousand years. I don't care if I have to burn through every power I have and die doing it. When I get free, I'm going to kill you, you bigoted sack of sentient excrement. I'm going to unmake you. I'm going to erase you so thoroughly that the void you came from won't remember you existed. That's not a threat. That's a fucking promise."

  Blood vessels burst in his eyes. Iron flooded his mouth.

  He reached for the Tether. Reached for the Space Stone threaded through it, tried to punch a fold in space just big enough to send Luv home and get him out of this Kangaroo Court. The suppression field crushed the attempt before it formed.

  He hit the chains with everything he had, every power in his arsenal converging on the same point, and for a moment (a moment the assembled cosmic entities would discuss later in lowered voices) the chains actually began to give. Not much. Not enough. But they gave, hairline fractures spreading through links that were not supposed to fracture.

  More chains came.

  He was still trying when the voice came from across the court.

  "Stop this nonsense."

  The voice was cultured and tired of watching the same tragedy on repeat.

  The Queen of Nevers stood from her seat in the gallery's upper tiers, her eyes on Oblivion.

  "Oblivion." She left his name in the air a moment. "Don't imagine we're blind to the actual objective here. We all see the Death Stone. We all understand what restoring your sister's authority would mean for the balance you claim to be protecting. Return to the arrangement that suited you before a mortal and an outsider between them disrupted it." She tilted her head. "You're not subtle."

  Whispers spread through the gallery.

  "I am pursuing cosmic law," Oblivion said.

  "You are pursuing your agenda while wearing cosmic law as a coat," the Queen said. "There's a difference."

  Infinity's voice moved through the court like a tide.

  "Those who stand with Oblivion's position will speak their reasoning plainly. This court deserves that much."

  A beat of silence. Then the Powers That Be rose from their seat, adjusting the layered robes that seemed to exist in several dimensions simultaneously.

  "The child's potential already rivals the Harbinger's at baseline, not to mention the Mutant Shaman's powers are added in there," the Powers That Be said. "He has additionally begun drawing from magical disciplines that fall within domains that are mine to govern. He has been studying with the Sorcerer Supreme. The combination of those genetics and that training threatens my position as the singular authority on mystical force in this multiverse. He's an unchecked and unpredictable variable that should not exist."

  "How fitting," said a voice like algorithmic precision given sound. The Natural Order of Things, which manifested in this court as living geometry, turned a pattern of calculating light toward the Powers That Be. "That a power which defines itself as singular (more whimsical and logicless) should panic at the emergence of competition."

  "I don't panic," the Powers That Be said. "I act preventatively."

  "You act protectively," the Natural Order corrected. "The distinction matters, particularly when the thing you're protecting against is a sinless child."

  Several beings nearby shifted away from the Powers That Be.

  Master Order turned in his seat toward Lord Chaos, opposite him. He'd been carrying this difficult partnership longer than most forces had existed and the disapproval showed.

  "Explain yourself," Master Order said. "These are strangers. Outsiders even. Why would you align yourself against this court's natural interest. What is your interest in the child's survival?"

  Lord Chaos, who had been rearranging his own appearance for the last several minutes in deliberate mockery of the court's formality, grinned.

  "Because," she said, and the grin spread, "outsiders are my absolute favorite thing. You want to know the last time something genuinely interesting happened in this court?" He gestured broadly at Jay wrapped in his chains bleeding quietly on the floor. "This. This right here. He walks through and suddenly there are variables. Actual variables. Not the pretend ones we generate to keep things interesting, but genuine unknowns." She leaned back on her throne. "And now there's a child with those genetics who might one day do things none of us have calculated. I'm not letting you erase that."

  "You would preserve an abomination for entertainment," Master Order said.

  "Absafuckinglutely," Lord Chaos beamed.

  "You are impossible," Master Order said.

  "You're welcome," Lord Chaos replied.

  Chaos did what chaos does.

  It started with two voices, then four, then the entire gallery erupted. Ancient grudges that had been accumulating since before the concept of record keeping existed came boiling up through the proceedings. The Elders of the Universe, who had opinions about everything and the lifespan to have developed them thoroughly, began airing grievances from the second cosmos. The abstracts stopped speaking to each other and started speaking at each other, embodiments and primordial forces and gods and things that had no clean category all contributing to a noise that climbed and climbed.

  "The child is a resource misallocation at cosmic scale," Sire Hate said, louder now.

  "Oh, sit down, you party pooper," Mistress Love called from three tiers up.

  "The structural precedent alone..." Master Order began.

  "Is fascinating!" Lord Chaos finished, clapping once.

  "This entire proceeding is a transparent grab for the Death Stone and everyone here knows it," the Queen of Nevers said.

  "You would defend them," Oblivion said. "Your attachment to outsiders has always been a liability."

  "And your attachment to your sister's authority has always been the actual agenda behind every position you have ever taken in this court. Shall we keep going?"

  The In-Betweener said something that was simultaneously an argument for both sides and therefore satisfied no one.

  The King in Black said nothing. His silence was louder than most of what was being said.

  The Kings in Ivory drank their elixir, enjoying the show.

  Jay caught a glance at Luv during a lull. His son had stopped listening. Just standing there, enduring.

  Something in Jay broke quietly.

  The Living Tribunal rose to his full height.

  His gavel handle came down once.

  The sound swallowed everything. When it finished there was only silence.

  The gallery turned forward.

  "Let us begin the Formal Vote," The Living Tribunal said. "Those in opposition to the motion for erasure."

  Eternity raised his hand, galaxies spinning steadily in his chest. The Queen of Nevers followed. Infinity raised hers, her contained expanse contracting slightly. The Natural Order of Things indicated opposition through a shift in the angles of its patterns. Lord Chaos raised both hands and then one extra that materialised specifically for the occasion. Mistress Love glowed brighter. The Phoenix Force let a tongue of fire trace upward.

  Seven.

  Jay counted them and allowed himself one breath.

  "Those in support of the motion."

  Oblivion's hand rose first, unhurried. He'd counted these votes days ago.

  Sire Hate followed. Slow and deliberate.

  Master Order raised his with the expression of someone filing paperwork.

  The Powers That Be lifted theirs.

  Abraxas, from the far edge of the gallery where he'd been sitting silent as death, raised his without looking away from Luv. He'd been staring at the boy since the proceedings started.

  The Goblin Force didn't exactly raise a hand. It shifted, and the shift registered as a vote.

  The Griever at the End of All Things raised hers slowly.

  And then, last, the Ivory Kings raised their glasses.

  Jay counted them.

  More hands than the other side.

  By one.