Layton noticed it the moment Zero's success settled into the structure of the present.
There was no flash marking it, no thunderous declaration from the surrounding chaos, no boundary separating what she had been from what she had become. The present simply stopped resisting her. For an instant Layton watched her reflections flicker across the planes around them, appearing in worlds that had never coexisted, in histories that shouldn't have been able to touch. Then it steadied, and he understood the crest had passed, and understood, in the same instant, that his own waiting had just ended with it.
He reached into the fold of the present he'd kept apart from the rest of himself. Between two fingers a sphere took shape, dim except at its center, where a single coil of lightning sat trapped and patient, unchanged since the moment it was made.
A trace. What his killer had left behind.
