She nods, after a second.

So they cross the entrance hallway briskly and they're out.

And only then does Marcy let out the breath she was holding. "Yeah! I fu—dging did it!" she says, changing the word around at the last moment after a glance towards Penny.

Denice wants to go home, so she can lie down. Path back to the actual city is still good, right?

Yeah, it is.

"So, why'd you do it?"

"She wanted to paint a word on the window. Exist, or something."

"No, man, it's not 'exist, or something,' it's Exist, with a period. It's a command, not a question or a word." She reaches for the black notebook in her backpack and then shows the original sketch:

She starts heading back. The path is too direct for there to be any real hope of slipping away, but maybe they'll be too distracted to follow immediately at least.

They walk along with her, because there's no reason to hang around the Undefined Edges.

"Yeah, I don't get it. And what's that little ghost?"

"Wait, you're ghostwriter? Man, I love your stuff! It's really deep."

"Yeah, see, she gets it, it's, I'm telling people to exist, you know? As opposed to—you know what, never mind."

"It's a defiant stance against the Echo Revelation, while acknowledging it as truth," Hollister says, scratching his chin, lost in thought. "Exist. Just do it, just exist. Only way forward is to exist. It's accepting the Echo Revelation but instead of caving in and giving up, it's saying you've got to prove you exist."

"...what."

That line of thinking did kinda save their butts today, she doesn't say. (Perhaps if she's quiet enough they'll forget she's there.) (Perhaps Hollister is some manner of decent human being after all.) (Not that she's risking her life on that supposition today, no thanks.)

"Yeah, you're right! That makes all sorts of sense, it's exactly the right message. The City can be all we want it to be, you gotta exist in it and with it and not let yourself get down by it!"

"Yeah. Man, I wish I'd thought of that... had the toughest week, but this word... I think I could've used that to help someone."

Walking. It's getting kind of hard now that the adrenaline is wearing off. She'll probably be okay, though, just wobbly.

"You know, we definitely need more people like you," she tells Marcy. "Spreading your words like that, making people—understand that life doesn't need to be bad, it can be everything we make it."

No one seems inclined to pick up conversation after that, though, so Penny decides to turn to Denice and say, "By the way, thank you. For, you know, um. Saving our lives and stuff."

"Glad I... was there."

"Yeah, that was real lucky. You did us a solid right there."

"And let this be a lesson to all of us," he says, looking at Marcy specifically, "that we shouldn't go exploring strange places on the city without proper knowledge and equipment."

"...fair, telescope not... basement."

"—yeah, of course the Picasso was in the basement, ugh, how did I not think of that."

"Well the whole building is actually part of the Sideways, you know," says the girl who has Bedlam's voice and looks like what Bedlam would look like if she had a consistent shape. "So it's not that surprising.—not that the Sideways are crawling with Picassos like that! We almost never run into them, they're much rarer than the Department of Safety says."

Denice nods at this.