"You'd have to define alive first," he quipped back, the threads of taunt nerves shifting around his eyes. She, at least, seemed not to have suffered for her fate. He wondered if he should put any stock in what that girl had said. Or if Yomi had just evolved past it in the day since.

He continued, "I don't hallucinate." You, the unsaid sentence ended. He wouldn't hallucinate her. "You were dead, though." That had been determined. Her waveform dulling to nothing. "You didn't come back from your own power? You came back from his?"

It meant something, that difference. Something he didn't want to consider at the moment.