"I don't know," he sighs. Petaal flutters her wings again.

Kas and Petaal are at the same table; Petaal is viscacha-shaped on top of the pile of cards, and Kas has his arms around her and his face buried in her fur.

She could always ask him. He hasn't gone anywhere. He's just over there snuggling his daemon.

"The Joker was killing people. He likes this masked vigilante type and that was how he was getting her attention, was terrorizing their city. And there wasn't - I could have laid down all the ground rules of Mars on that world, and as long as I wasn't sticking around to babysit him and patch holes, he would have found something else to do that would've been distinctly not-benign. I have my own world to babysit, but I found someone from his who let me in to - sequester him. The asylum wasn't going to hold him; he told me as much himself. I did not have another way to keep people around him safe. But I did make sure that he could still visit Milliways in his dreams, from the asteroid, before I left." She shrugs. "You've got a Bell. You don't have to kill anyone to get her attention. She's got enough projects to keep her fascinating for an eternity. And if you go some manner of glitchy and become dangerous anyway, she can take care of it, I don't have to. No one on the Joker's world was going to be able to do anything of the kind. No magic there."

"At the time? I was pissed off. But that wasn't why. I told him well before I got to the point of being pissed off that this was the plan, if I found a way to his world. It's sad, when I think about it now. He could've been like my Alice if things had been different."

"...And that's what's sad?" says Kas. "It's sad that he's not a different person?"

"It's sad that things turned out that way, that he's not safe to have in a population center, that the masked vigilante he had his eye on never even slightly got what he was about, that he's unhappy about the asteroid, that all the relevant people and events fell together this way and not some in happier configuration," says Stella. "Maybe that adds up to it being sad that he's not a different person. The multiverse doesn't have to be fair. Quite possibly some people are just net sad, net incompatible with others being happy, net doomed to leave their environments less pleasant than they were. The people the Joker killed don't get to be anyone anymore because they are dead."

"He'd be just fine in a population center of other Jokers," says Kas. "He's a sweetheart to us."

"Yeah, well, the one time Alice tried to visit him he got trapped in his mindscape, I thought Alice was dead, and I ultimately had to mount a hazardous rescue mission," scowls Stella. "Maybe one day if enough Whistles collect here I'll force the door for you all and you can all have a party on the asteroid or something. But he was not born in a population center of people just like himself. He was terrorizing ordinary people whose only mistake was living in a city that attracts people who like to take it apart."

"Who're you pissed off at?" he asks quietly.

"Human psychology." She sighs.

He smiles crookedly. "What's that supposed to mean?"

She shrugs. "Can you think of a place to put the Joker where he'd be happier and not dangerous? I can force the door, I've done it before. I guess I could see if he wants to go Micaiah's route and follow the Edori, Alice said they sounded like an entire society of Whistles and then Angela would be around and she's got coins now, if that turned out to be a bad idea... I'm not out to punish him. That's just not what I'm about. I just don't prioritize his comfort over anyone else's life."

"There's nowhere better than dead you can put any of us where we won't be dangerous," he says. "Unless you mean something way different by 'dangerous' than I do."

"What do you mean by it?"

"Dangerous is something we just are," he says. "We don't have little rulebooks in our heads telling us what we're not allowed to do. We just do what we want, whatever that is. So if you want it to be a rule that we can't hurt anybody, you have to either put us where there's nobody to hurt, or kill us. And being where there's no other people is one of the worst things that could possibly happen to us."

"Whether it's a rule doesn't matter. What matters is that it doesn't happen."

"I'm gonna live forever," says Kas. "Of course I'm gonna hurt somebody someday. I won't even have to mean to. There's just too much of forever for it not to happen."

Stella triangles away a burgeoning headache. "The it that has to not happen is not all forms of hurting all people forever. It's hurting people who ought not to be hurt. I don't care that you blew up your parents or that Golden set the woman who mind-raped her daughter on fire or that Amariah assassinated the president of Panem. Those people were not innocent. Would I slightly prefer it if, say, Golden had had the ability to strand the relevant mind-rapist with her mate somewhere? Sure, but she didn't, so execution was reasonable."