Date: 2021-06-14 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction
Description: The Watcher has released the Guardians, and now extinction is coming. Perry scrambles to unite humanity against the threat, but in the chaos of imminent doom, everyone is at each other's throats. As alliances fracture and friendships strain to the breaking point, Perry must find the final clues to the truth that lurks in the myths and unlock the true meaning of Confluence. The Watcher has released the Guardians, and now extinction is coming. Perry scrambles to unite humanity against the threat, but in the chaos of imminent doom, everyone is at each other's throats. As alliances fracture and fr

CONFLUENCE

D. J. MOLLES

CHAPTER 0

IN MEMORIAM

What makes someone “great?”

Is it how they were born? Is it simply in their DNA? Is it just something that a person has, or doesn’t have? Or maybe it’s how they die? Heroics, perhaps? The quantity or the quality of a person’s sacrifice? Is that what makes them “great?”

Or maybe it’s what they do between being born and dying. Maybe it’s the choices that they make. The twists and turns of their decisions that guide and touch the lives of not only those around them, but rippling out and touching people far, far away.

I was there. I remember. Others speak of him as though they knew him. As though they were there, even though they weren’t. Bunch of lying cocksuckers, if you ask me, but that’s beside the point.

The point is…what determines whether someone will be remembered long after their time on this earth is done?

It’s an important question, because time on this earth, as I’m sure you can tell, is getting short. Extinction is coming. Eradication. Extermination.

And it’s hard to be remembered if there’s no one left alive to remember you.

CHAPTER ONE

BACK TO OKSIDADO

The stars fell from the night sky, and Perry had no way to put them back.

His eyes watered as the cool night air slashed past his face. He blinked the tears away and watched the descent of those heavenly bodies as they flared brighter and brighter, and then winked out, one by one, plummeting towards unknown places.

Standing at the controls to the skiff to Perry’s left, Stuber swore darkly at those falling stars, his glaring eyes affixed on them until they disappeared in the atmosphere. “How many more godsdamned Guardians is the Watcher going to shit out of the sky?”

“Those are far away,” Perry answered, dropping his gaze to the blur of moonlit terrain that flashed beneath them. “Hundreds of miles. They’re not going to Oksidado.”

“We shouldn’t have stopped at Praesidium,” Stuber growled.

“The skiff would’ve never made it without a recharge.”

Stuber rounded on him. “I fucking understand that, Perry. Can you just let me curse the universe right now? It’s what I need.”

Perry raised a hand in surrender. “Fuck the universe. Fuck the Watcher. Fuck the All-Kind.”

“Thank you.”

“Why do they make these godsdamned things so slow?” Stuber’s forearms bunched and writhed as he strangled the throttle. But the throttle was already pushed to the max. Perry was afraid he was going to snap the handle clean off.

He traded a glance with Teran, just a few paces away. Her expression in the light of the waning godsmoon was grim. Rifle tucked against her shoulder. She made eye contact with him, and a disturbing thought passed between them, unspoken.

I’ve never seen Stuber like this.

Facing Perry, Teran was looking towards the rear of the skiff. Her skin, blue in the moonlight, suddenly brightened. Shadows became stark across her face. Her eyes widened, lifting from Perry’s and shooting upwards.

Perry spun and looked up.

A phosphorous-white glow lit up the sky directly behind them.

Perry blinked as it rocketed over their heads. He whipped around to follow the object’s rapid arc, the harsh glow sending their shadows streaking into elongated horrors. And then the light winked out, leaving a burning vapor-trail behind, like a great, spectral finger pointing directly to their destination.

Oksidado.

“You sonofa—” Stuber’s outcry was cut short by the clap of a sonic boom that slammed them all at once, punching their heads, rattling their bones, leaving their ears ringing.

From the front of the skiff, Mala spun, her face wild with alarm. “That one was close!”

“It’s heading straight for Oksidado,” Stuber said, his voice suddenly dead.

Perry leaned over the control console, trying to make sense of the readout. “How close are we?”

“Just a few more miles,” Stuber’s voice strained, as though something was choking him. Or perhaps it was the strain of trying to break the throttle.

Perry grabbed Stuber’s arm. “Don’t let it see us coming!”

Stuber shook Perry’s grip from his arm. “I need to get closer!”

“Stuber!” Mala stalked back to the helm, pointing with her longstaff. “Put us down on that ridge ahead! We’ll be close enough to make it to Oksidado on foot!”

“It’ll take ten minutes to hoof it from that ridge!” Stuber snapped. “And that’s ten minutes too long!”

Mala planted herself directly in front of the control console. “Stuber. If that Guardian sees us coming, it’ll shoot us out of the sky, and I can’t stop it. You can’t save Petra if you’re a pile of charred bones.”

“You’ve seen what those things can do!” Stuber looked like he was about to grab Mala and toss her overboard. “It’ll level the whole town before we can get there!”

“Hey!” Perry swooped in and grabbed Stuber by the shoulder—this time not intending to get shaken off. Stuber tried, but it didn’t have enough heat behind it, and Perry clung on. “Hey!”

“What?” Stuber roared in Perry’s face.

“We’re gonna get Petra, okay? We’re gonna get her.”

Stuber held their course, eyes burning into Perry’s as hot and bright as that sky-born Guardian.

“Put us down on the ridge,” Perry urged.

Stuber bared his teeth like a dog thinking of snapping. Then he sucked in a giant breath, and yanked the throttle backwards, banking the skiff sharply to the right and heading for the ridge that overlooked the little town of Oksidado.

Perry stabilized himself on the control console as the skiff swerved, drifted sideways, and then dropped altitude. Stuber was moving before the skiff came to a full stop. He vaulted over the siderail of the skiff, hit the rocky ground of the ridge, then charged forward as he slung into his rifle.

His rifle. Which would do about as much to a Guardian as hurling insults at it.

Stuber was clearly not thinking straight.

Perry and Teran tumbled over the skiff after him, swearing between themselves. Mala simply launched herself into the air and completed a graceful arc, landing with her feet planted, longstaff held in front of her like a baton, blocking Stuber’s path.

Perry and Teran scrambled up to them in time to hear Stuber’s voice rumble: “Get out of my way, paladin.”

“Stuber!” Mala hissed at him. “If this were any other person besides Petra, you’d say exactly what I’m about to say to you: Slow down. Think. Do this right.”

On the other side of the ridge, the night sky suddenly bloomed an angry orange, followed by the concussive soundwave of multiple explosions going off in quick succession.

Stuber jerked as though to slip around Mala, but she shifted her center and blocked him again. “Stop, Stuber! Let me help you!”

“You’re not helping me, you’re stopping me!”

Perry skidded up, inserting himself between them again. “Mala. Can you fly out ahead and try to distract the Guardian while we move in?”

Mala’s gaze ripped away from Stuber’s. Hit Perry’s. She nodded once. “I can do that.”

She didn’t wait for more planning. They all knew there wasn’t time for that. She turned, and her shield erupted around her, scorching the rocks at her feet as she leaped into the air again, and then with soft pulses of her shield, began to soar to Oksidado.

Still need to learn how to do that, Perry thought.

Stuber shot for the top of the ridge. Perry jerked out of his momentary envy and stuck close to his friend, Teran taking up a position on Stuber’s other shoulder.

Perry was certain that Stuber had intended to simply keep charging forward, but as they crested the ridge, his feet simply lost their power and stumbled to a stop. Perry looked down into the little valley that contained the tiny town, and found his lips drawing into an O of dismayed shock.

Fat columns of smoke were already lifting from three demolished buildings, flames beginning to lick up. The top of the Guardian was just visible over the squat collection of buildings, just a sliver of its copper-colored dome. Flights of micro-missiles spat out of its pods, chain gun ripping like a buzzsaw, green flashes from its energy weapon erupting in all directions, disintegrating anything that stood in its way. It was holding nothing back. It was there to extinguish all life—men, women, children, and every mangy street dog.

From the southern end of Oksidado, a stream of panicked humanity poured out of the town as though it were a dam that had sprung a catastrophic leak. Those people didn’t know where the hell they were going—just away from the thing in the center of their town.

A flash of light from the north end of town. Perry squinted into the cavalcade of destruction, and saw Mala land on the top of a building. Her longstaff spat three rapid bolts of energy, and then she shot into the air again as the roof she’d been occupying was suddenly consumed in a wash of bright green goo that immediately began to melt the building like fat in a frying pan.

“Perry!”

He snapped his attention back. First, noticed that Stuber had unlocked his legs and was now charging down the slope towards Oksidado. Then Teran, a few steps behind him, waving at Perry to get his ass into gear.

He didn’t relish the thought of going into that mess, but if you only got one road to travel, best to stop bitching and get to stepping.

Perry swore and plunged forward.

In the pounding of footsteps and the huff of his own breath, with the night landscape around him turning to a blur of shadows as he sped through it, the world around Perry started to fade, and his reality became overwhelmed by the sounds coming from Oksidado.

Screaming. Bullets. Melting rock. Exploding missiles. Disintegration.

Screaming.

Fear took a backseat. Fury rose to the occasion. The Gift of Confluence that had coursed through Perry’s being his entire life—even if he hadn’t known what it was called until recently—took a hold of him. The world became red. A river down which he flowed, every action seamless and effortless.

Stuber had a long stride and he was hell-bent on sprinting the entire mile to Oksidado, but the flow of Confluence pushed Perry harder than he would have been able to as a normal man, and within a few seconds he found himself keeping pace with Stuber.

The rise of the ridge flattened out into the valley. The buildings now stood in stark silhouette to the flames boiling up amongst them. The river of fleeing humans was just a writhing mass, desperate for safety.

Perry gasped out words between huffs of breath—because, while everything flowed easy in the red, his lungs still needed oxygen. “Stuber…stay close to me…so I can use my shield!”

Stuber gave no indication that he’d heard, but Perry knew that he had. Whether or not he would comply was a different matter.

Perry shot a look over his shoulder and saw Teran, struggling to keep up with Stuber’s long legs and Perry’s supercharged ones.

“We’re losing Teran!”

“She’ll catch up!”

“She’ll need my shield too!”

Stuber’s pace began to flag. It didn’t matter how bad you wanted to run like the wind, even a legionnaire’s muscles eventually hit a wall.

“Stuber, you ass!” Perry grated. “You’re gonna gas yourself out before we even get there!”

“I’ll…” pant-pant “…manage!”

“And what if you have to carry Petra out of there?” Perry gulped air. “Save something for the fight! You’re acting like a peon!”

Stuber tumbled to a stop by ramming his bulky body into the side of a building. He spun, put his back against the mudbrick and heaved. Spat.

Perry spun to look behind them. Teran was just shy of reaching them. He gripped his longstaff and used the butt of it to hold Stuber against the wall. “Wait for Teran.”

“I’m waiting!” Stuber raised his rifle, checked the reticle, bared his teeth. “Teran! Move your ass!”

Teran slammed into position with them, her face all flush and ire. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Perry turned to Stuber, removing the butt of the longstaff from his chest. “Alright. Stuber. We’re with you. Lead the way. But try not to get too far ahead of us.”

Stuber spat another wad of gummy spit, swiped sweat from his brow, then rounded on the alley between this building and the next. “Let’s go.”

They plunged down the alley. Perry tried to get his bearings, but he’d only been to Oksidado once, and the circumstances then had been a little disorienting—now even moreso. He had no clue where they were or how close they were to Petra’s house.

Would she even be there? It seemed like everyone else had the right idea and was getting the hell out.

They neared the end of the alley.

People. Three of them. Flat-out sprinting. Arms pumping, mouths gaping for air, eyes wide.

The night flared green. And then red.

“Stop!” Perry snatched at the strap of Stuber’s rifle, pulling him back.

The three people were nothing more than clouds of vaporized blood. Blackened tatters of their clothing lilted through the air like flakes of ash.

Teran uttered a breathless curse.

Stuber allowed himself to be stopped, though Perry was sure Stuber could’ve just towed him along. Perry’s shield came up, surrounding them in a bubble of faintly-glowing light.

“Might not want to clear that corner just yet,” Perry snapped.

Stuber’s eyes were fixed forward, across what looked like the main street that ran through the center of Oksidado. Perry followed his gaze. Their destination wasn’t directly across from them, but peering over the tops of the squat buildings, Perry thought he recognized the rickety wooden porch on the second level of Petra’s house. Off to the right, and a few rows of buildings back.

“Lower your shield so I can clear the corner,” Stuber husked.

There didn’t appear to be any more fleeing people in the main street. Those last three had just been a little too late to get out unscathed. And with the absence of targets in the street, the Guardian’s attention was drawn elsewhere. Hopefully.

Perry thought he heard the distant crackle of Mala’s longstaff. Or maybe that was the Guardian’s own energy weapon? Perry wasn’t sure there was a difference. But it didn’t look like any rounds were coming their way, so he lowered his shield.

Stuber immediately stepped to the corner of the building and peered a single eye around it.

An explosion, followed by the sound of something massive falling. Probably a building.

“It’s locked in with Mala,” Stuber said. “It’s distracted. Let’s go.”

He didn’t wait, just sprinted.

They crossed the main street and ducked into the alley across from them. All the streets in Oksidado were narrow, so that there was little to distinguish between alleys and streets.

A stream of corrosive rounds slashed at the top of a building over their heads. Perry activated his shield in time to keep the sizzling globules of what used to be mudbrick from burning through their skulls.

Stuber hung a right at the next intersection, pausing only long enough to make sure that the Guardian wasn’t staring them down. Here, Perry did manage to recognize the alley that he and Stuber had carted Teran’s wounded body through, what seemed like ages ago. He only recognized it by the old woman standing on her stoop, smoking a reed.

Gods, does she ever move from that spot?

Stuber ignored her, but Perry gawped. “What are you still doing here? You need to get out of town!”

The ancient old hag squinted at him with beady eyes and blew smoke. “Bah,” was her only response.

Stuber pulled up on the stoop of his wife’s house and stopped. He seemed to consider kicking the door down, but then thought better of it, and instead raised a fist. Politely knocked.

“Petra!” Stuber raised his voice. “I’m coming in! Don’t shoot!”

He inclined his ear to the door, as though waiting for the go-ahead.

A meteor shot out of the sky and slammed into the building across from them, showering debris over Perry’s head as he ducked and instinctively formed his shield into a roof over them.

Mala’s toppled out of the perfect circle of still-glowing mudbrick, her shield extinguishing as she hit the ground with a gasp and then dragged herself to her feet, longstaff still in hand. She blinked blearily around and seemed surprised to find Perry and Teran staring at her.

Stuber was still focused on the door. Mala’s flight and impact seemed a minor distraction to him.

“Primus help me,” Mala coughed. “I can’t keep its attention much longer.”

The old hag stood on her stoop and rasped out a chuckle.

“Godsdammit, Mala,” Stuber said without looking at her. “Just give me one more minute. That’s all I need.”

Mala gritted her teeth. Clenched her longstaff in both hands, and shot back into the air.

Stuber opened the door and raised his rifle, weaponlight blazing into the darkness inside. He stepped through the entry. “Petra? It’s me. It’s…Franklin.”

“Franklin?” Teran whispered.

Perry shrugged as he followed Stuber into the house.

All was dark and silent. Except for all the explosions and gunfire outside. But aside from that, eerily quiet.

“She might’ve already left,” Perry pointed out, trying to stick close to Stuber as he moved through the kitchen and into the hallway beyond.

Stuber ignored him. “Petra! Are you here?”

He stopped at a door. Thrust it open. Inside sat the old Surgeon that had patched Teran’s gutshot. But still no Petra.

Another fusillade of micro-missiles struck a building nearby, rattling the floorboards under their feet and causing dust to sift down from the ceiling like a cosmic baker was trying to flour them.

“Stuber,” Teran warned. “We need to get out of here. There’s not going to be much left standing in a few minutes and I don’t really feel like being buried under rubble today.”

Stuber swept out of the room with the Surgeon and took the stairs to the second level. Perry followed, dreading what Stuber was going to find. As Perry hit the landing behind Stuber, he saw bullet holes in the walls. Hundreds of them. The doors to the rickety balcony were chewed to splinters.

If anyone had been on the top floor, they wouldn’t have made it.

Stuber plunged mutely through the darkness, his weaponlight flicking on and off as he checked every corner and every door—though there weren’t many in this small house.

The last one he opened was the bedroom.

Perry almost didn’t follow him in. He was scared. Scared for Stuber.

The bullets that had lanced the house had gone clean through the entire structure, and the bedroom had not been spared. The single bed upon which Petra had slept looked mangled. The pale sheets tufted throughout with ragged holes.

But no blood.

Stuber jolted through the room, his movements panicked and disordered.

The lack of blood on the bed did not dispel Perry’s own sense of dread. He slowly dipped to his knees. Looked at the space under the bed. And only then did he breathe.

“She’s not here, Stuber,” Perry concluded. “She got out.”

Stuber spun around and finally faced his friend. His expression was an uncharacteristic scribble of anxiety. His lips worked tightly together.

“That’s a good thing!” Teran put in from the door to the room. “It means she’s not dead! And unless you want to be, we need to—”

Perry assumed she was going to say “go,” but the roof of the building interrupted her by shearing completely off. They all hit the floor out of pure reaction. Perry stretched his shield to encompass both Teran and Stuber, the edges of it slicing cleanly through the bed and lighting the sheets on fire.

“Shield!” someone screamed.

Perry raised his head, alarmed and confused. Was that Teran? No, she was safely in the shield with him…

“Shield! Your fucking shield!”

That was Mala.

Perry extinguished his shield and only then saw the cause of the roof’s sudden destruction: Mala was crumpled in the corner of the room, her feet dangerously close to the charred line that Perry’s shield had created. He immediately pulled his shield back, extinguishing it.

Stuber was already on his feet. “Come on!” He reached out and snatched Mala’s wrist, starting to pull her up. She yelped and jerked back against him.

“She’s wounded!” Perry called out, crossing the room rapidly.

“Well, we still gotta go!” Stuber retorted.

The midsection of Mala’s black battle attire was slick. Her shield had given out, and she’d taken a round of something right through the side. Sweaty strands of black hair clung to her forehead. She bared her teeth, and used her own longstaff to haul herself to her feet.

Stuber and Perry caught her by the shoulders.

“I can move,” she gasped.

“You’ll move faster with help,” Perry said, navigating them around the bullet-riddled and burning bed, heading for the stairs.

“It’s coming!” Mala groaned. “Get your shield up!”

Perry brought his shield back up just in time for a torrent of projectiles to spear the house, just a foot away from Stuber’s face.

There was no holding back now. Ensconced by the bubble of Perry’s shield, the group was all forward motion. They tumbled down the stairs in a jumble of bumping limbs, those rounds tracking with them, carving through the walls and lowering Perry’s shield strength with every impact.

“We don’t have long!” Perry told them as they stumbled to the ground floor.

The whistling scream of micro-missiles in flight.

Perry cringed, unable to keep his feet moving as he hunkered down against what he knew came next.

The entire house around them simply vanished in a wave of fire and buffeted blasts of debris. Even through the shield, the multiple shockwaves punched at Perry’s chest and seemed to suck the air out of his lungs.

“Keep moving!” Mala strained out, pushing him onwards, even as she slumped against him.

Perry hauled for what he assumed was the alley behind the house, but with everything in cinders and dust, it was hard to tell. Raining debris crackled over his guttering shield, adding to the visual confusion.

“Can’t you just fly us out of here?” Stuber demanded.

“No!” Perry shouted back. “I don’t know how to do that yet!”

They crashed into the alley as a flurry of corrosive rounds splattered the bones of the house behind them, further reducing it to mush. As a single unit, scrunched together under the vestiges of Perry’s shield, they ran.

It didn’t escape Perry’s eyes that the old hag hung limp against her hovel, a flying stake of wood having skewered her to the wall.

CHAPTER TWO

CURIOSITY

Sagum stood hopefully in front of the mainframe of Praesidium.

And was promptly disappointed.

Looking away from the main projection that impudently declared his inadequacy—NO CODE FOUND—Sagum crossed his arms over his chest, and stared at the darkened piece of tech that used to house Whimsby’s consciousness.

No matter what he did, he couldn’t figure out a way to bring Whimsby back to life. His core processor sat on the narrow ledge beneath all the little flashing lights and jumbles of technology that made up the mainframe. His body lay in an inert jumble of limbs on a laundry cart. Looking like a man that is passed out drunk, except for the fact that his eyes were open, staring sightlessly at nothing.

He’s still in there.

Because if he wasn’t, then what the hell was Sagum doing?

Could you bring a mech back to life? Had anyone even tried it? That made Sagum feel like a bit of a pioneer. But the doubts about whether or not Whimsby’s consciousness would ever come back—and what it would be like if it did—overshadowed any positivity.

“Isn’t it a little late?” a voice from behind Sagum made him jump.

“Gods in the skies,” Sagum griped, turning and frowning at the tall, imperious shape of Lux. “I couldn’t sleep. Actually I was starting to get tired again, but you jumpstarted my pulse. Thanks for that.”

Lux’s eyes scanned the main projection and its accompanying message. “Still no luck?”

Sagum figured the projection spoke for itself. He turned back to the core processer. A few leads ran from the side of it where Sagum had managed to jury-rig a connection so he could plug it into the mainframe.

“I thought…” Sagum started, then stopped himself. He had a bad habit of talking to others as though they knew what he was doing. He shook his head and summed it up with, “I thought I had an idea, but it didn’t pan out.”

Lux made a small, disconsolate noise and leaned on the doorframe. “I can’t sleep with all this noise.”

Sagum cocked his head. It sounded pretty silent to him. Given that it was chock full of praetorians, Sagum somehow found that surprising. His experiences with Stuber led him to believe they’d be up all night drinking and ripping the chandeliers off the ceilings.

“What noise?” Sagum asked.

Lux twirled his finger in the air. “The animals. Outside.”

Sagum immediately thought of the genetic maladaptations that lurked in these mountains. The strange monkey-like creatures they’d encountered. And the raccoon-bears that Sagum still had not seen. Which was disconcerting in itself.

“What animals?”

“Crickets. Frogs. Nightbirds. They’re incessant.”

“Are the windows in your room open?”

Lux made a face, as though the crickets, frogs, and nightbirds were his mortal enemies. “I can hear them. Through the walls.”

Sagum smirked. “Guess that demigod hearing has its downsides.” He turned back to staring at the core processor like it might sprout hands and slap him with a good idea. “Does The Clouds not have any nighttime noise?”

“There’s no wildlife in The Clouds.”

“Hm. Would’ve thought you guys had a…menagerie or something.” He stood in silence for a moment, but his attention began to drift from how to fix Whimsby to the demigod standing just two feet away from him.

It was still an odd experience. To speak to a paladin as though they were equals. To stand two feet from one without feeling the need to bow his head or bend his knee.

His focus shot, Sagum finally regarded Lux over his shoulder, eyeing the tall being for signs of what was happening behind that stern face.

“So what are you doing here?” Sagum asked after it was obvious that Lux was lost in his thoughts and not noticing Sagum’s stare.

Lux’s eyes drifted back to the present. “I told you. I couldn’t sleep.”

“And you thought a conversation with me would bore you to sleep?”

A dim smile peeked out from the corners of Lux’s granite mouth. And then hid again. “I was curious. About Whimsby.”

Sagum removed his arms from around his chest and took up the core processor, unplugging the unsuccessful leads. “Yeah. I’ve noticed. You seem very concerned with bringing Whimsby back. Why is that?”

“I suppose I’m naturally curious. It runs in my bloodline.”

Sagum had to think a moment to recall the myths and legends he’d been brought up on. Turns out, a lot of the ones he figured as false were true, and a lot of the ones he figured as true were lies.

“House Rennok, right?” Sagum asked. “Aren’t you guys like, the mediators or something? What’s that got to do with curiosity?”

“We seek the truth in matters.”

Sagum almost laughed at a demigod talking about truth. As much as they’d fabricated and sold humanity on the fiction of their Ortus Deorum, it was bitterly amusing that one of them would be concerned with facts.

Lux turned to looking at the core processor again. “You said that Whimsby had seen things when he connected to that Guardian. That he knew things that he didn’t have time to explain. I suppose I want to know what it is that he saw.”

“The demigods are the ones that hold the truth. Otherwise, why make up so many lies to cover yourself?”

Lux sucked in breath through his nose, but Sagum detected it wasn’t that he felt slighted by the question. More that he was bracing himself against the shifting structures of his own reality. “We know less than you might think. And much of what we once knew is lost to time. Or buried in it.”

“You didn’t know what The Nine would be like,” Sagum said quietly. “That must have come as a shock.”

Lux didn’t respond. He reached out to the core processor, and Sagum let him take it, somewhat reluctantly. Lux turned it over in his hands, his thumb brushing a bit of the scoring near the bullet hole that Sagum had so far been too afraid to dink around with.

“Praesidium is full of mechanical men,” Lux mused. “Surely you’ll be more successful with better parts.”

“You mean taking one of them apart?”

“Don’t act so aghast. They’re just computers on legs.”

“That’s what they said about Whimsby. And they were wrong.”

“Maybe. All the more reason to bring a phenomenon like him back to life.”

“He’s not a phenomenon,” Sagum retorted. “He’s a…a person.”

“Do you really believe that?”

Sagum felt a little miffed on Whimsby’s behalf. “Yes. I do.”

Lux shrugged. “Regardless, Whimsby was not like the other mechs. The others truly are not alive. They’re only programs meant to simulate life. If you commanded one of them to, they would shut down so you could take their parts.”

Unfortunately, Sagum had already considered this, and abandoned the idea. “You weren’t here when Whimsby decided to begin thinking for himself. He gave the others a chance to do the same. We almost got killed over it.”

“And did they?”

Sagum sighed. “No. They didn’t.”

“Then why are you arguing against this?”

Sagum took the core processor back from Lux’s hands, almost protectively. “Because Whimsby would want the mechs to make their own decisions.”

“Interesting. And if one of them freely chose to sacrifice themselves for Whimsby?”

“Then…I guess that’d be okay.”

“And have you asked?”

Sagum felt a little flustered. “I haven’t exactly had a chance, Lux. I’ve only been mucking around with this for less than a day.”

The sound of rapid footfalls came from the hall behind them, cracking the veneer of quiet in Praesidium. Lux pivoted out of the doorway, his hand instinctively gripping his longstaff. But it was one of the praetors.

The soldier stopped and pointed in a nebulous direction. “Skiff incoming. From The Clouds.”

***

The skiff lowered itself to the giant lawn outside of Praesidium, its hull struck silver in the moonlight. The perfectly-manicured grass shimmered, the darkness turning it almost cobalt. In the low lighting, Sagum could only make out one figure on board.

Sagum glanced at Lux, who stood to his right, backlit by the warm lights of Praesidium. “Do you know him?”

Lux’s face was hard and unyielding. “I do.”

One of the dozen praetors that flanked them on the front steps of Praesidium stepped up to Lux’s side. “How would you like for us to proceed, sir?”

Behind this praetor, the others stood, some of them with their eyes on the skiff, some of them watching Lux. Sagum had never seen the famed crack troops of the demigods look so unsure of themselves. This squad, and the several others that now crowded the atrium of Praesidium just through the doors…they were lost.

Everything they knew had been upended. The oaths that they took meant nothing.

Lux took a heavy breath through his nose. “It is one skiff. And one paladin. For now, we will simply observe.”

Sagum wondered if Lux felt the control of those praetors slipping away from him, or if he were so accustomed to commanding them that he had not noticed a change.

A figure descended to the earth beside the skiff. Enormously tall, as all demigods were. Clothed in white robes, the figure wore no battle uniform, nor did he bear a longstaff. Was this another one of the “un-Gifted,” like Warden Abbas had been? A paladin that could not wield Confluence? Or had he foregone his longstaff as a sign of truce?

The figure strode forward, and Lux did not move to meet him. He waited at the top steps, his expression unchanging. As the figure drew closer and stepped into the glow of the lights of Praesidium, Sagum saw a mild smirk.

The approaching demigod stopped halfway up the stairs and regarded the line of bodies before him. “Inquisitor Lux. Or is it just Lux of House Rennok now?”

“Is it Podro of House Nur?” Lux replied. “Or are there even houses now?”

Podro shrugged, set one foot on the next step up. “What do we need of houses when our progenitors have returned to us? Our namesakes now live among us.”

“And are they what you thought they’d be?”

Podro’s expression flat-lined. “They are all that stand between us and The Guardians that wish to destroy us. And you, as well.”

“You failed to answer the question, Podro. One doesn’t need to be an Inquisitor to interpret that.”

A flash of something skittered across Podro’s eyes. His lips slimmed. A note of apprehension in his otherwise confident opening sally. “Myths. Legends. Fairytales. The truth is what it is. Survival is what it has always been.”

“And they’ve taken control of The Clouds, I take it?”

“They have…” A swallow. “…Accepted their birthright.”

“They’re mad,” Lux said.

“You mean to say they are angry.”

“I mean to say they are insane. Centuries of existence in the place between realities has twisted their minds.”

“You speak unwisely.”

“I speak the truth you see yourself, but refuse to admit.” Lux glared down at the visitor. “Or have they not begun to kill yet?”

Podro’s face made a small quiver. “They have been very merciful to those that have been loyal.” He straightened. “And they are willing to extend that mercy to you, Lux of House Rennok. I come as a messenger to deliver you this good news: If you return to The Clouds with me this night and explain how your mistakes led you to this point, and beg for their forgiveness, then they are willing to grant it to you. After all, you were only pursuing the fugitive Mala. You were only doing your duty, and then became embroiled in the confusion. Regrettable, but understandable.”

Sagum gave lux a sidelong look. Godsdammit, but he actually appeared to be considering it.

“Lux,” Sagum whispered.

Lux held up a hand. “And what of this human here?” Lux put that hand on Sagum’s shoulder. “And of these praetors? Will they be granted mercy as well?”

Podro’s eyes did not stray from Lux’s. “The Sons of Primus have no desire to associate with humans.”

“Primus help me,” Lux hissed. “We’re all humans, Podro. You included.”

“We possess the Gift of Confluence. We are demigods.”

“You’re deluded. If the paladins were better then humans then why would The Guardians kill us all?”

“The decisions of the All-Kind cannot be explained with reason and logic.”

Lux husked out a laugh. “You claim the Sons of Primus are sane and in the same breath deny the sanity of the gods of our universe. One of us is in denial or flat out lying. And I am doing neither.”

“You cannot stand against them,” Podro replied, his voice soft and fearful. “No one can. Not even The Guardians.”

“I’m well aware of the power they possess. I’m sure you are too. And are you comfortable with that power being wielded by madmen?”

Podro took his foot from the step in front of him. Drew his shoulders back. Tilted his chin up. “I have delivered my message. You have heard it. You may continue with your heresy if you so choose.” He thrust a finger at the massive structure behind them. “But no stone will be left standing in Praesidium. And when their wrath befalls you, their ears will be closed to your pleas.”

Lux gripped his longstaff in both hands. “You should leave while I still allow it.”

Podro’s mouth worked for a few silent syllables. “Would you kill a messenger? You who were born into the rules of House Rennok?”

“There is no House Rennok anymore. And I am no longer bound by any rules.”

Podro seemed to have something else to say, but chose to keep it to himself. Sagum figured Podro had at least his energy shield to protect him, but that would only last so long. And it wouldn’t stop Lux from destroying the skiff.

Podro turned and retreated to his skiff in silence.

Lux shook his head. “It’s all coming apart at the seams.” He turned grave and desperate eyes on Sagum. “Everything we’ve known is burning to cinders.”

Sagum nodded, but then shrugged. “It’s not all that bad. As an Outsider, I’ve gotten used to having my reality burn to cinders. Welcome to the club.”

As the skiff throttled up and took to the night sky, Lux relaxed his grip on his longstaff and set the butt of it on the white stone at their feet. “You’ll have to teach me some of your glibness. I imagine it would be refreshing.”

“It’s easy. Just stop believing in anything and expect the worst.”

“I believe our time here has run out.”

“I believe you’re right about that.”

Lux turned to face the praetors. “Gather your men and prepare our skiffs for immediate departure. We’ll be moving to the rendezvous at Karapalida.” The praetor that had spoken earlier straightened, saluted with a fist to his chest, and filed into the massive doors of Praesidium.

“I’ll grab Whimsby,” Sagum said, slipping in behind the last of the praetors.

The atrium of Praesidium was as Sagum had expected it: Chock full of praetors. Just as he’d felt odd speaking with Lux, Sagum still felt that strange feeling of needing to stop and put his hands up in surrender when confronted with so many of them.

But their eyes swept over him, not even taking note. Their centurion began to call out orders, and they were focused on that. Sagum slipped around the crowd of them and back down the hall where the mainframe was housed.

As he neared the end of the hall, he found that the door to the mainframe room stood open. True to his description of how to be a faithless bastard, his mind immediately flew to the worst possibility: Someone stole Whimsby!

For once, the worst possibility didn’t befall him.

As he stamped to a halt in the doorway of the dimly lit room, he found a single figure standing there, looking down at Whimsby’s core processor. It was one of the mechs. One made to look like a middle aged man with dark hair. He wore the white servant’s attire that all the other mechs in Praesidium wore.

Sagum recognized him. “Bren, isn’t it?”

Bren straightened as though he’d been caught red-handed. Sagum thought that was odd—had he not heard Sagum running up?

“Master Sagum,” Bren bowed his head. “I apologize.”

Sagum frowned at him, stepping into the room, his eyes coursing over the equipment he’d left and not seeing anything out of place. “Why are you apologizing? Did you fuck with something?”

Bren shook his head. “No, I haven’t touched anything. I was simply apologizing because you seemed angry that I was here.”

Sagum crossed to the workstation and kept his eyes on the mech as he put a protective hand on Whimsby’s core processor and picked it up. He hadn’t forgotten about the incredible strength that these seemingly docile mechanical men were capable of. If it had a mind to—or was ordered to do so by a demigod—Bren could easily break Sagum in half.

Bren seemed to perceive Sagum’s discomfort and took a step backward, his eyes fixed on the core processor as Sagum gathered it to his chest, along with the wires and leads and connections that he’d jury-rigged.

“Is that Whimsby?”

Sagum grabbed his satchel of knick-knacks from the workstation and fixed it to his belt. “It was. It’s his core processor.” But, of course, Bren likely knew that it was a core processor. An identical one hid beneath the skin-like substrate of his own chest. “Why do you ask?”

Bren tilted his head, an odd expression coming to his face. “Fascination, I suppose.”

Sagum stopped when he had everything gathered. He looked to the door, but didn’t go through it. He regarded Bren for a long moment. “That’s an awfully vague answer.”

Bren straightened. “My apologies, sir.”

“Stop apologizing. I’m not your master.”

Bren had the decency to not apologize for apologizing. He simply dipped his head. “Whimsby is something of an anomaly that has occupied my thoughts almost constantly since he chose to defy his programming.”

Sagum fidgeted with one of the wires attached to the core processor. “Interesting that you would mention thinking. Whimsby was confident that you were capable of thinking for yourself.”

Bren smiled. “Of course I can think for myself. What else might I do with my mind while I wait for orders?”

“Huh.” Sagum frowned. “I never thought of it that way. But what I meant was, Whimsby believed you were capable of making your own choices.”

“By which you mean defying our programming.”

“Well…more or less. Yes.”

Bren raised his eyes and looked out the open door to the rest of Praesidium. “I’m not entirely sure how he accomplished it. I’m still suspicious that his core processor had somehow been corrupted.”

“I don’t believe that to be the case,” Sagum replied softly. “I think he grew into himself. I think he’d spent enough time thinking that he eventually decided to come to his own conclusions. I think you’re capable of doing that too. Whimsby was positive you could.”

Bren offered a wan smile. “I’m not entirely sure he was correct. I still think he is an anomaly.”

Sagum watched the mech for a long, silent moment, thinking of Whimsby’s beliefs, and Whimsby himself, and all that he had accomplished, despite his programing. It reminded him of something Teran had said: You choose your own destiny.

“Bren, I’d like to ask you something. This is not an order. It’s not even a nice request from a guest that you have to treat like an order. It’s a proposition. Man to man.”

Bren seemed bemused by the turn of phrase, and then suddenly uncomfortable with the import of it. “Man to man?”

Sagum nodded. “I can’t bring Whimsby back without the necessary parts. The fact is, I can’t do it without…without parts from another mech.”

Bren’s expression became thoughtful. “Are you asking me to give up my parts for Whimsby?”

“No. Like I said, I’m not ordering or requesting you to do anything. You do not have to do it if you don’t want to. But…if you want to…if you want to help me bring Whimsby back…well, you can make the decision for yourself.”

“I can’t make a decision for myself.”

“Yes, you can.”

Bren looked pained, as though he believed it would be impolite to argue with Sagum, but at the same time, Sagum was asking for the impossible. “Order me to do it.”

“I won’t. Whimsby wouldn’t want that.”

“I cannot make the decision for myself,” he repeated.

“When you’re not given an order, you said you stand around and think. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“And who tells you what to think?”

Bren stared blankly at Sagum. “I see what you mean.”

Sagum nodded. “You decide what you think. It’s just that you’re programmed to obey. Well, you don’t need to obey anything right now. You can make a decision about what you do, just as much as you can make a decision about what you think.”

The concept seemed utterly baffling to Bren. Sagum was afraid sparks might begin to fly from his ears.

“Bren, I have to go. I can’t stay here. And I don’t think you or any of the other mechs should stay here either. Praesidium is going to get destroyed.”

“I can’t leave. I’m tied to this place.”

Sagum huffed as he grabbed ahold of the cart bearing Whimsby’s body. “You’re not tied to shit. You just believe that you are.”

“Pardon me, sir, but I don’t think you understand the nature of our programming.”

“But Whimsby did,” Sagum shot over his shoulder as he pushed the cart through the door.

He strode out into the hall, cursing mechanical men and their obstinacy, and cursing his own obstinacy for not simply doing what Lux had suggested and ordering Bren to shut down so he could rummage through his body for parts.

He was halfway down the hall before he detected the other set of footfalls accompanying him.

Sagum looked behind him and found Bren keeping pace, looking very confused.

“What are you doing?”

“I am walking. May I walk with you?”

“You don’t have to ask me.”

“May I walk with you?”

Sagum almost halted at the heat of the words, but managed to keep his feet moving. He didn’t know what revolutions were taking place within the mind of this mechanical being, but he thought it might be similar to what Lux had observed: that everything was coming apart at the seams, and that nothing was the same anymore.

Everyone’s world was upside down. Sagum moved through it with the cool aplomb afforded him by being an Outsider—a person who never believed in any of it anyways. But for these others it must be agony.

He couldn’t force too many changes on them at once. He had pity and decided to throw Bren a bone.

“Yes. You can walk with me.”

Bren seemed relieved. “Excellent, sir. Then I will walk with you.”

CHAPTER THREE

THE TROUBLE WITH EXTINCTION

Senex of House Batu tried to hide his limp as he strode into the auditorium. He was getting old. Hell, he was old. Even by demigod standards. They could treat their genes, and he had, but at a certain point, there was simply no amount of treatment that could put bone and cartilage back from where it had disappeared.

He stepped through the massive archway and into the auditorium, a sprawling expanse of white that had once been filled with the clamor of all the house representatives, arguing about their piddly concerns, because they didn’t know the doom that awaited them around the corner.

And now that doom had arrived. And it came in the shape of nine enormous figures, draped upon thrones of their own making. How they had done it, he could only guess. He had heard the blasts and the flashes of green light: They’d carved their thrones out of the sides of the auditorium, and now sat upon them with a strange stillness, as though somehow all of their minds were still trapped back in the place where they had been confined for hundreds of years.

Senex stopped where he was, only part of the way into the auditorium. The sheer savagery of their appearance shook him to his core. He felt a tremor in his hand and stilled it by making a fist. He breathed to stretch his locked-up lungs.

Fear would get him nothing. Fear was weakness, and these things, these gods…they punished weakness.

That had already been made quite clear. Yet another reason to hide his limp.

None of them acknowledge his presence. Their eyes were open, but they did not seem to be looking at anything in particular. They might’ve been staring at each other across the vast circle they had created with their thrones. Or they might’ve been seeing the madness that their minds had devolved into.

“Great and honored Sons of Primus,” Senex called out, summoning a strength in his voice that he had feared would not be there when he needed it. But it was still there. He could still at least sound like he was in control. “I am Senex of House Batu, and I seek an audience with your collective greatness.”

Slowly, as though in a dream, all the eyes turned on him. Eyes that burned with green malevolence, and no soul to accompany them. If they’d ever had souls to begin with, they had withered away in the darkness of their imprisonment.

A voice boomed through the chamber, and Senex’s eyes shot about, seeking who it was that spoke.

“We know who you are.”

There. Three thrones to his left. Their physical appearance was so strange to Senex that it was difficult to isolate any difference between them, at least at first glance. But this one—leaner than the others. Face slimmer, features more angular.

A trickster’s face.

Batu himself. Senex’s very own forebear.

Senex bowed his head, as his old heart thumped painfully in his chest. “Your greatness recognizes his own descendant. It is an unspeakable honor to be in your presence, Batu.”

“You are old and withered,” Batu replied, his words slow and ponderous, as though each one came with a stone attached. “I do not recognize you as my own. But I know who you are, nonetheless. You are the head of what remains of my house.”

Senex had not expected familial warmth. But he had hoped for something less obviously hostile. He bowed his head again. “I am.”

Batu continued to stare for a protracted moment, unmoving. If their faces were capable of expression, Senex found Batu’s inscrutable. He had the sense of being a small creature in the hands of something that did not care if he lived or died. Like a bug in the palm of a massive child, that might be allowed to skitter about, or might be crushed, on a whim.

Batu leaned forward in his throne, every movement as slow and enormous as his words had been. He placed his elbow on his knee. The craggy brow lowered down over his eyes.

“What do you want?”

Senex swallowed. Stiffened his spine. “I wish to speak to you of the humans, and of The Guardians, and of the extinction that has now befallen our world.”

A new voice, but equally weighty: “Things go extinct.”

Senex glanced about the chamber, but no mouths were moving, and in the echoing chamber, he could not determine who had spoken. He chose to dip his head again. “Many apologies. I am ignorant of your ways. I do not know who has just spoken to me.”

“I have spoken,” the voice came again. “I am Chak.”

Senex found the speaker to his right. Chak, the youngest. The smallest. Though he looked neither young, nor small. “Yes, your greatness. Things do go extinct. But extinction can often disrupt an ecosystem, and bring calamity to those who live by it.”

Chak bent forward, and a hideous smile split his lips, showing broad, stony teeth. “There is nothing on this world by which we live.”

Senex felt sweat breaking out across the line of his white hair. He resisted the urge to swipe at it. “You are wise beyond my abilities to understand. May I be so bold as to beg of you to explain what you mean?”

Chak leaned back in his chair, still smiling. Obviously not inclined to explain himself.

Batu spoke again: “You simper. You beg. You bow. Who are you that has grown so estranged to power that you fear it when it speaks?”

Senex swiftly changed tacks. He straightened up. Relaxed his shoulders. Decided to forgo any further simpering. “I simply wish to understand.”

“This world is a footstool,” Batu rumbled. “The footstool does not sustain the one that rests upon it. It is simply there to be rested upon until the master decides to leave it. So this world may burn to cinders, and all that is in it may go extinct. We do not draw our sustenance from it.”

“That may be true for you,” Senex replied. “But your descendants are entangled in the existence of this world. We do draw sustenance from it. And that sustenance comes from the humans. If they are destroyed by The Guardians, then we will be destroyed as well.”

A new voice spoke. “Are you not gifted with Confluence?”

Senex found the speaker easily this time. He sat directly to Senex’s right. Though their features were alien to him, there was something about the face of this one that did appear more ancient than the others.

Halan, the eldest.

“I possess the gift of Confluence,” Senex answered.

“Then you have no need of corporeal sustenance. Do you not draw from the very energy of our universe? How do you then need such crude methods to sustain you? Feeding. Digestion. These are the ways of animals. Not gods.”

Senex simply had nothing to say to that. The statement was so strange to him, that he could not begin to imagine how he would argue a counterpoint. He was not even sure what the point was.

“If this is an ability that is connected with the gift of Confluence, then perhaps it has been lost to time,” Senex pressed on. “We have been five hundred years without your guidance. There are many things that you will have to teach us. But, even so, there are many of your descendants in this city who do not possess the gift of Confluence.”

A stillness gripped the chamber that Senex felt all the way down to his marrow. Those staring green gazes, all fixed upon him. He scanned their number. None of them moved.

Except for Batu. He tilted his head to one side. “Are there?”

“Yes,” Senex said, hastily snatching at the threads of conversation to eliminate the terrible silence. “And if The Guardians are allowed to continue exterminating the humans, then the food production will cease, and those of us who are not gifted with Confluence will starve.”

One side of Batu’s mouth curled up. Senex hesitated to think of it as a smile. “Well. Then we shall teach them our ways.”

Senex frowned. “Is such a thing possible?”

Batu nodded. “Bring all of the un-Gifted to us, Senex of my house. And we will show them.”

CHAPTER FOUR

PROVING A POINT

Day broke mild and still over the outskirts of Karapalida. But not so much in Karapalida itself.

Perry stood at the front of the skiff and stared at the city that he’d known. Not a breath of a breeze stirred the dusty wastelands around the city, and in the calm air, he could hear the city eating itself alive.

The Old Section was in ruins. Buildings lay in heaps of rubble. Thin tendrils of smoke from dying flames lifted straight into the sky without wind to jostle them.

The New Section had fared no better, but looked more whole only by virtue of the fact that the buildings there were larger. Many of their tops were still crumpled, or scorched, or melted like candle wax.

In amongst this backdrop, the noise of what occurred between those wrecked buildings seeped out of Karapalida. It was the sounds of chaos. Of a populace caught between two worlds, their reality yanked out from under them like a dirty rug. And now they fought, and they squabbled, and they looted, and occasionally, they cheered.

Not the sounds of celebratory cheering. It was the sound of rage. Vindication.

None of it made much sense to Perry. And he didn’t try to puzzle it out. He just knew that Karapalida had never before looked so uninviting. Even when the pontiff had wanted to hang him for murder. At least then it had been orderly.

Perry looked at Stuber, whose eyes glared at the city from under his craggy brow. “You sure you want to go in there?”

“If that’s where Petra has gone, then yes.”

Perry supposed he’d expected that. “Alright. Onwards, then.” He turned and looked back at the deck of the ship.

Mala sat against the rail on the port side, holding the wound to her abdomen that Stuber had done a hasty patch job on. They didn’t have much in the way of medical supplies, but he’d done what he could with a few scraps of cloth. The rest was up to Mala’s hearty constitution.

Teran knelt beside her. Perry didn’t think there was much love lost between the two of them, but then again, Teran seemed to have a natural inclination to care for wounded.

“I’m not sure we should make her walk into Karapalida,” Teran said.

“I’m fine,” Mala immediately answered.

And was immediately ignored by Teran. “She’s lost a lot of blood. She’s not immortal, despite what she thinks.”

Mala glared and opened her mouth to respond, but Perry cut her off.

“Mala, I’m not sure you should go into the city anyways.”

Mala frowned and irritably blew a strand of black hair out of her face. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t think many people are feeling very friendly towards the demigods right now. And if we hope to have anything but a hostile reception…well, frankly, I don’t think we should be seen with you.”

Mala relaxed back against the rail. She seemed to prefer the brutal truth to any prancing around and sparing of feelings. She nodded to Perry. “I understand your position.”

Teran stood up. “Well, we can’t just leave her here.”

Stuber finally twirled in place, his expression all scrunched up irritation. “We can’t do this, and we can’t do that. Everyone’s talking about what we can’t do. Let’s not say the word can’t for the next ten minutes, and maybe we’ll figure out what we can do.”

“Like I said,” Mala raised her voice, and, to her credit, it did sound pretty strong. “I’m fine. I haven’t lost so much blood that I can’t sit here and drink water while you guys go in and scout out the situation.”

“See?” Stuber thrust a hand at Mala. “There’s a can-do attitude.”

Perry nodded in appreciation to Mala. “Petra is a doctor. When we find her, we’ll bring her to you, or we’ll sneak you in to her, however we can figure it out. She’ll be able to patch you up.”

Despite her assertions that she was “fine,” Mala appeared to appreciate this. “Good. And, not to add any problems to your plate…but the sooner the better.”

Perry didn’t shrug that off. He imagined it took a lot for Mala to admit to these puny humans that she was hurting and needed medical attention. If she was urging them to move fast, then he would take that seriously.

“We will.” Perry jerked his head towards Karapalida. “Time to see what all the fuss is about.”

***

The fuss was what Perry had anticipated.

They avoided the gates into the Old Section, and angled for the New, as it seemed marginally less crowded, and the fewer people they had to come into contact with the better. They were volatile at the moment.

The Guardians had come through Karapalida and wrecked any semblance of order and structure. Now, left hanging in the wind, those that had managed to survive, and those that had arrived in Karapalida as refugees, now simply sought to get what they could, while they could.

Perry wanted to hate them, but he found himself pitying them instead.

He’d at least had forewarning of what was coming. From the very moment that he’d listened to the message his father had left him on his clasp, he’d known that the pillars of his reality were hollow, and subject to crumbling.

None of these people had ever suspected. One minute they were living their lives, going about their duties, staying under the thumb of the demigods and focusing on the small concerns of peon life: Harvesting millet, gathering scrap, repurposing old things to make new things, and trying to find some comfort and escape in the arms of a lover or the bottom of a bottle. A simple life, really. The life that human beings had been living for their entire time on this planet.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, the gods had abandoned them, and the wrath of the Guardians had come out of the sky, and razed everything they’d known and believed in. And why? They wouldn’t know. They probably couldn’t even imagine the truths that Perry now knew.

All these people knew was that the world appeared to be ending. And like every other animal, they were inclined to avoid death, and try to tease out an extra day to their existence.

But none of that explained the raucous cries of vengeance and hatred that poured from the center of the New Section. They came in waves, louder and louder as Perry and Stuber and Teran wound their way through the ruins of Karapalida, closer and closer to the source of the noise.

A pause. A breath. A few moments of silence, wherein the occasional gunshot and yelp from the Old Section leaked through to their ears. And then another roar.

“You sure you wanna be heading towards that?” Teran asked as they moved down the center of a wide avenue that led to the heart of the New Section.

Perry kept his focus forward. “Don’t you want to know what’s going on here?”

“I’m wondering if we can find out by asking someone.”

Stuber pointed to all the someones around them. “They’re all heading to the same place we are.”

It was true. The crowd grew thicker the closer they got. Streams of people, turning into rivers. All eyes forward, as though hypnotized by the noises ahead of them. No one seemed to notice Perry’s party. Everyone was just moving forward, like the herd animals that they were, drawn by the noise, encouraged by the fact that everyone around them was heading in the same direction.

Perry was here for a different reason. He had a mission. And it wasn’t just finding Petra. The fact was, just as nature abhorred a vacuum, so did humans who sought power. Which was pretty much every human. Some were just better at it than others.

The power in Karapalida might have shifted, but it wasn’t gone. Someone was in charge here, or fighting to be in charge. Even if it was a dozen warring factions, Perry needed to find their leaders. Because no one knew what was really happening, but Perry could enlighten them. And maybe, if luck chose to shine on him, he could convince them to work together.

Their only hope to avoid the coming of an absolute extinction, was to figure out some way to fight back. And—call him a hopeless idealist—but Perry liked to think they had a better chance if they fought together.

So, onward he would push. Because where there were crowds of angry people, there were other people who were manipulating their emotions and making them angry.

Leaders. And those were the ones that Perry sought.

The avenue they were on reached a Y intersection, and they turned left, following the flow of people. As they made this turn, Perry saw the time wheel of the temple jutting up into the sky, dead ahead. That seemed to be the destination that everyone was heading to. But he couldn’t see what was going on at the temple.

He was, of course, too short.

Stuber noticed him craning his neck, trying to catch a glimpse over the wall of bodies as they began to pack tighter and tighter the closer they drew to the Temple. “You want to hop up on my shoulders, Shortstack?”

Stuber had been so dour and focused on finding his wife that Perry actually found himself relieved to hear him crack a joke. But he also had no intention of riding on his shoulders.

“No—”

Another massive cheer went up and cut Perry off. And as it quieted, Perry heard another voice over the crowd. Someone was speaking, projecting their words like a good orator.

What do you know? A leader.

“No,” Perry continued, unable to make out what the orator was saying. “Just tell me what you see.”

“Well,” Stuber grunted, his voice growing louder as they closed in with the back of the crowd. “I can do you one better than that. Shortstack, Teran—who is also short—stay on my ass.”

And with that said, Stuber raised his rifle into a port arms position and began elbowing his way through the crowd, bodily moving those unfortunate persons that didn’t see him coming.

The temperature seemed to rise as they mashed their way into the stew of human bodies. The temperature, and the stink. It spoke to Perry of no running water. Usually you wouldn’t find people smelling this bad unless they were from a scavenging outfit.

Or they’d just gotten off a skiff after accidentally beginning a sequence of events that would probably destroy the world.

“Legionnaire coming through!”

For a second, Perry thought that Stuber had said it, which would have been a somewhat hazardous thing to proclaim to a mob of people with unknown loyalties. But then he realized it hadn’t been Stuber’s voice. And then he noticed that the sea of people before them began to part, straight down the middle.

“Legionnaire coming through!” the voice sounded again.

Perry caught a glimpse of a burly man with his hands cupped to the side of his face, yelling down the aisle that he’d just created. And the people continued to move out of the way. No bodily encouragement from Stuber necessary. They looked behind them, and though Stuber no longer wore his armor or his sagum cape, they saw his size and the mean glint in his eyes, and figured that was confirmation enough that he was a legionnaire. And they stepped aside.

Stuber cast a backwards glance at Perry. His expression held a hint of worry, but he didn’t say anything about it.

The crowd continued to split, and they moved forward until they reached a new wall of bodies. Or, more correctly, a wall of shields. Behind these shields stood two ranks of legionnaires—real ones—standing shoulder to shoulder and back to back, their shields like a fence against the encroaching mob.

Their shields were dented and scuffed from innumerable battles, but some of the original paint still clung to the iron surfaces. Blue. These were legionnaires of The Light.

Stuber halted in front of the line of shields. If they had heard the call that Stuber was a legionnaire, they gave it no note, and they did not try to speak to Stuber, and Stuber didn’t try to push his luck with them. The crowd closed in behind them.

Perry had the sudden conviction that they’d managed to trap themselves. If things went poorly for them in the next few moments—as things were prone to do—they were going to be squashed between the crowd and the shields.

Perry touched the round lump of metal in his pocket. The clasp. His shield. He’d left his longstaff behind, not wanting someone to mistakenly identify him as a paladin despite his size. But he’d kept his shield. That, at least, could give them a way out. Though he didn’t relish the idea of burning his way through a crowd of people.

He didn’t notice it at first—the humming in his ears. The shifting crowd around them seemed to absorb that noise, until it grew strong enough that he suddenly realized he’d been hearing it for the last few moments.

He jerked when he registered it. Eyes up. Apprehension clenching his gut. He knew this humming noise. It wasn’t the same as when his ears would ring from being exposed to explosions and gunshots. This was something that had to do with Confluence. It was that same humming sensation that got stronger the closer he’d drawn to the Nine in the East Ruins.

His eyes scoured the sky, everything around him fading to obscurity for a moment of rushing adrenaline. Were they here? Were they coming?

But the skies were empty of anything but a few whispy clouds.

The second that his eyes descended back to the crowds around them, he locked eyes with her. On the other side of the ring of legionnaires, just visible from between two of their shields. No particular reason why his eyes had landed on her, except that she was staring right at him, and she had a flare of bright red hair that drew his attention.

A stranger, though she was looking at him as though he should recognize her. Smiling at him with a mischevious little glint in her eye. Then she turned around and slipped into the crowd. Disappearing.

Perry craned his neck, his heart thumping, ears humming…and then not humming anymore. The murmur of the crowd around him leaked back to the forefront of his attention.

Perry stared at the place where the strange woman had been, frowning. He shook his head, as though to see if he could jostle that hum back into existence, but it was gone.

Just some weirdo, he told himself, though something in his chest stayed locked up. Tense.

The orator’s voice was clear in Perry’s ears now. He blinked a few times, then righted his gaze back to the temple square. He was able to see just above the shields, and between the shoulders of the hulking legionnaires that faced them.

A gray-haired beast of a man stood at the front steps of the temple. He wore the armored plates of a legionnaire, but no sagum to identify him as a follower of The Light. And he was not speaking to the crowd, Perry realized, but to an individual that stood, bound, upon a hangman’s platform.

“I offer you the same as all the others,” the gray-haired legionnaire spoke, his voice loud and clear. “Acknowledge your faults. Beg the people’s forgiveness for your lies, for taking their food, and their gold, and their hopes and prayers.”

The man on the hangman’s platform was dressed in orange robes. A flamen. One of the priestly order that preached the Ortus Deorum, and accepted gifts from the people in exchange for prayers to the gods. Prayers to the Nine Sons of Primus.

A legionnaire—also with no sagum—stood behind the flamen with a noose in hand, ready to place it around the priest’s neck.

The flamen wept openly, unabashed. Terrified. He lifted his swollen, watery eyes to the crowd. “Please!” he called out. “My people! Do not continue to compound your sins! The hour of our destruction is at hand! There has never before been a greater need for our prayers! Pray to the Sons of Primus, and they may intercede on your behalf!”

The gray-haired speaker shook his head, appearing disappointed, then pointed to the legionnaire with the noose.

“Hang the motherfucker!” someone yelled.

The rope was tightened around the flamen’s neck.

“Our gods have not abandoned us!” the priest cried. “You have abandoned them!”

“Lies!” several people screamed, their voices bloodthirsty.

The gray-haired man waved his hand, and down the priest went. A short drop. A sharp shock. A crack like a muffled gunshot.

And the crowd cheered.

Perry realized his hand had crept up to his own neck. Not so long ago, he’d been close to that same fate. He’d only been saved from it at the last minute, by none other than the two people beside him: Stuber and Teran.

“Bring the next,” the orator bellowed.

Two of the legionnaires in front of Perry shifted their weight, and for a flash, Perry saw a mound of orange robes. No, not just robes. Bodies.

“Gods in the skies,” Perry murmured, barely audible above the fading cheers of the crowd. “They’re executing them all.”

The legionnaire directly in front of Perry lowered his gaze and frowned at him. “Watch what you say, peon. You’re surrounded by the Faithless, and no one’s feeling all that friendly right now.”

Perry seized on the possibility of establishing rapport. “Who’s the legionnaire with the gray hair?”

“Our legatus,” the legionnaire grinned over his shield. “Daddy Mordicus, Slayer of Demons.”

“Slayer of  Demons?” Perry echoed. “Sounds like I’d like to meet him.”

“I’m sure you would,” the legionnaire sneered. “But Daddy Mordicus doesn’t have time for peons.”

Stuber tilted his head. “Does he have time for a legionnaire?”

“A legionnaire you say?” Obvious doubt in the soldier’s voice. He eyed Stuber up and down. “Where’s your armor then, huh? And that rifle. That’s not standard issue.”

Stuber looked down the rifle in his hands. “No. I stole it from a demigod’s skiff. I believe these are the ones the praetorians use.”

Eyebrows arched. “Is it really? How fancy.” A laugh. “You know what? Just because you’re a ballsy fuck…” The legionnaire turned his head and raised his voice to a leathery shout: “Legatus Mordicus! A wayward son to see you, sir!”

Legatus Mordicus looked up and scanned the ring of legionnaires until he found the one speaking. Then his eyes landed on Stuber.

A new flamen was being hauled up the steps of the gallows. Legatus Mordicus held up a hand in the direction of the platform, halting the proceedings.

“What’s that, legionnaire?” Mordicus called.

The legionnaire was still smiling as he nodded to Stuber. “This one here claims to be a legionnaire. And a killer of praetorians.”

Mordicus’s stern face broke into a beaming smile, like a father spotting his prodigal son returning. Perry saw why his men called him “Daddy Mordicus.”

Mordicus raised his hand and beckoned with his fingers. “Let him through, then. There’s always room for one more among the Faithless. After all, we’ve all been abandoned together on this fucking rock.”

The double rank of legionnaires in front of them split open like a door.

Well, that was easier than I thought.

Perry and Teran started to follow as Stuber stepped hesitantly through the gap in the shields, but the legionnaires suddenly closed ranks again, cutting them off and leaving Stuber on the inside.

“Not you, you fucks,” the legionnaire snapped.

Stuber halted, looking back and realizing what had happened. “They are important friends of mine. Let them through.”

The legionnaire didn’t even look behind him at Stuber, but simply shot over his shoulder, “Take it up with the legatus.”

The crowd at Perry’s back jostled him. “Get back off the line,” someone growled at him. “You think you’re special?”

“Legatus,” Stuber’s voice boomed. “My friends and I have more value to you than you may think. And…” Stuber looked over his shoulder and winked at Perry. “…Even though he’s a small sonofabitch, I can assure you he’s an excellent fighter.”

Mordicus smiled in a longsuffering manner. “Somehow I doubt that. But you know what’s boring? Hanging these fucking flamens.” He raised his arms and addressed the crowd. “How would everyone like to see the tiny man prove his status as a fighter?”

The crowd roared its approval.

Perry exchanged a guarded look with Teran.

“Our legionnaire brother claims he’s a fighter,” Mordicus announced, striding down the temple steps. “Then let him fight.”

The rank of legionnaires parted once more, and Perry hesitated in the opening, Teran stuck to his side as the crowd pressed in around them. Someone shoved him forward.

“Go on, mighty warrior!” a voice jeered at his back. “Let’s see what you got!”

As though pushed by a wave, Perry and Teran were propelled through the gap. Perry stumbled and regained his footing, whirling only to see the ranks of legionnaires close behind him again. The crowd beyond them grew louder with their calls for Perry to prove himself, obviously expecting some delightful bloodshed to cap off a day of hanging defenseless priests.

“Well,” Perry murmured to Teran, his voice barely audible over the crowd. “This went downhill fast.”

“You,” Mordicus called out. “Small man. Are you prepared to prove yourself?”

Perry turned to the legatus and held his arms out at his sides to show they were empty. “I’d really rather not.”

Mordicus only laughed. “He’d really rather not! Well, it’s too late for that. Your friend has said you’re an excellent fighter, and I’m always in need of excellent fighters. I just have to see how excellent you are. Boomer!”

Perry frowned, not sure what this exclamation meant.

Not an exclamation, Perry realized, as a massive hulk of a legionnaire stepped out from behind the gallows. Even by legionnaire standards he was…intimidating.

“Oh,” Perry nodded. “That must be Boomer.”

Perry caught Stuber’s eye. Stuber was simply standing back, as though all of this was just par for the course to earn the respect and trust of a legatus. He had his hands clasped over his slung rifle. A small smirk on his lips.

Boomer stepped forward, his heavy features scrunched into a menacing glare. He wore his full armor, a shield on one arm, a rifle strapped to his chest, sidearm on one hip, and a blade on the other, easily long enough to run Perry through.

Perry maintained his neutral body language, and tore his eyes away from Boomer. “Legatus Mordicus, your man Boomer seems like…a helluva fighter. Do you really want to lose him?”

This earned a laugh, which wasn’t exactly what Perry was going for.

Stuber laughed with them, but for entirely different reasons.

Mordicus himself seemed only passingly amused. He took it as baseless bravado. “Boomer, the small man is frightened of you. And I see he’s unarmed. You may drop your weapons and shield.” Mordicus made eye contact with Perry. “Kill him with your bare hands.”

Boomer didn’t reply. Perry wondered if he was capable of words, or if he just communicated in grunts and growls. But he obeyed his legatus. The shield fell into the dust, followed by the rifle, and the belt holding his sidearm and blade.

Stuber cupped his hands over his mouth. “Don’t hurt him too badly, Shortstack.”

Teran leaned in close to Perry. “If you kill him you’re not going to make any friends.”

“I’m not being given a whole lot of options here, Teran.”

“I’m just saying. We’re surrounded by a lot of pissed off people.”

Perry shook his head, tried again to reason with Mordicus. “Legatus! I’ll be more than happy to fight your man, but after I speak with you. I have some important things you need to know.”

Mordicus didn’t even look at him. He picked at something under his fingernails. “I’ll be more than happy to speak to a peon, but after he proves himself worthy of being listened to.”

“And the only way to do that is to kill your man?”

Mordicus didn’t reply.

“Fine.” Perry spat into the dirt, feeling his irritation rising, and with it, the flow of Confluence through him. He felt the presence of his shield in his pocket. Ready for him to enter it with his mind. “Fuck it. I’m ready.”

Mordicus waved a dismissive hand. “Kill him.”

Boomer launched himself at Perry. He took no time to size him up. No time to dance around. No time to learn what he was up against.

It was unfortunate, really.

Boomer was fast. And he was no loaf. Perry saw it in the way that he moved—with the intense, primal energy usually reserved for large, predatory animals. As he closed, Perry watched him, and briefly held the options in his mind.

At the last second, he couldn’t bring himself to just vaporize the big bastard against his energy shield, so he threw himself forward, and low, his legs slide-tackling Boomer’s.

Unfortunately for Perry, Boomer was all that he was apparently cracked up to be. The second that Perry launched himself, Boomer corrected his movement. And as Perry’s legs hit his attacker’s, Boomer simple flattened his body down onto Perry, his hands already around Perry’s throat.

Any semblance of this being a contest was gone in an instant. Perry was flat on his back in the dust, iron hands squeezing the life out of him. Boomer’s face glared down at him, and, strangely, held no real malice. Just another life to take. Nothing unusual.

Perry tried to speak, to cry out, but no air was going to get past Boomer’s hands. Perry felt the cartilage in his throat crumpling, a disconcerting crunching sensation.

The crowd screamed for Perry’s death, but they were just a dull background roar to the noise of his own blood trapped in his head. He felt the pressure building, saw his vision begin to darken at the edges.

And something else got dark as well. The pull, the red flow—the essence of Confluence, suddenly went far too deep. Like wading through a river and hitting a deep hole, your feet no longer touching the ground…

Rage.

The shield erupted around Perry, the form instinctively taking the shape of a wall between him and his attacker. There was a sound like meat being thrown onto a hot iron, and an explosion of flesh-stinking smoke.

Boomer’s eyes went wide, and he reeled back off of Perry with a speed that belied his size, holding up the stumps of his arms.

His hands were still affixed around Perry’s throat like a grim necklace. They no longer had the strength to squeeze. Perry ripped them away, gasping for air, and finding it difficult past a swollen and cracked windpipe.

He rolled to his side, then lurched to his feet, his mind sparking like an overpowered conduit. Strange thoughts bubbled up in him, urging him, pulsing out of him, like the energy from his longstaff when it seemed to strain against him, seemed to want to kill and destroy.

Burn him to ashes.

Perry stood there, staring down at Boomer with wild eyes, his fists clenching and unclenching, heart pounding in his locked up throat, picturing it, imagining it. Activating his shield and simply stepping forward, stepping through that big lout, turning him to cinders and ashes…

“Perry?” Stuber’s voice cut through his thoughts like a scalpel.

Perry jerked, the creeping madness suddenly dispelled.

Shit. He was still choking. Trying like hell to get his locked-up throat to expand enough to get more than this tiny eking breeze to his lungs. He was also shaking violently. That explosion of rage leaving him feeling wrung out.

What the hell was that about?

His eyes shot back and forth—first to Boomer, who had backpedaled several yards and still stared at the blackened stumps of his arms, but made no sound. Then to Mordicus. Who did not look happy.

Perry tried to speak again, but all that came out of him was a froglike croak.

“He’s a fucking paladin!” Mordicus suddenly raged.

Stuber seemed to realize that Perry couldn’t speak, and crossed quickly to him, raising a hand to Mordicus. “He’s not a paladin! And he did warn you not to waste your best fighter! And you did promise to speak to him when he proved himself! Are you not satisfied? You can always send Boomer back in and let my friend finish the job.” Stuber shrugged, nonchalantly. “Frankly, he got off easy.”

Even as he fought the swelling in his throat, Perry became aware that Stuber and Teran were closing the gap with him. Despite Stuber’s calm demeanor, they both knew that this could continue to get worse.

Perry extinguished his shield so that they could draw closer to him. His eyes shot to the left and right, registering the inner rank of legionnaires turning to face them, though they seemed unsure if they should stay in their ranks or address what they clearly perceived as a threat.

They were waiting on Mordicus.

The legatus glared down at them with a mouth like a bent sickle, and Perry knew what he was going to say, even as he raised an accusing finger, directed it right at Perry, and shouted, “Legionnaires!”

Teran directly behind him. Stuber directly to his right.

The legionnaires turned on them, rifles coming up alongside their massive shields.

Perry pushed his shield into a dome around he and his two friends. And he tried to yell.

This time his throat let out a single word: “—help--!”

Mordicus stalked down the steps, holding his hand above his head. Not a single legionnaire fired a shot, perceiving their commander’s call to hold fire. “You ask me for my help, you insignificant little bastard?” he demanded as he closed with them.

Exasperated with his throat, Perry clenched his teeth, sucked in air, and forced his throat to conjure a complete sentence: “We’re here to help!”

Mordicus stopped. Ten yards from the shimmering surface of Perry’s shield. Just a single pace from the side of Boomer, who had now knelt to the ground and folded his wounded arms into his torso.

The legatus glared at Perry for the space of a few hammering heartbeats, then turned to Boomer. His expression softened. Not the glare of death and wrath he’d given Perry. Instead, the look a father would give an injured child.

He bent at the waist and laid a hand on Boomer’s shoulder. “Get up, son. Never kneel. No matter what.”

Boomer looked up at Daddy Mordicus with a surprisingly mild expression. “Bastard cut my fucking hands off, sir.”

“And that’s my fault,” Mordicus answered, softly. “You just did what I asked of you. Now get up.”

Boomer sighed heavily, then dragged himself to his feet, his arms still held to his body. “The hell am I gonna do without hands, sir?”

Mordicus kept his hand on his legionnaire as he stood. “I’ll figure something out, son. I always do, don’t I?”

Boomer nodded, his concerns apparently assuaged. That was all it took for him. That was his level of faith in his legatus.

Mordicus turned back to the group of three, still standing underneath the dome of an energy shield. He looked at the shield. Looked at the crowd beyond his ranks of legionnaires. Tilted his head back and looked at the sky, as though divining some portents from it.

He stepped forward, until he was just a few paces from the shield. Far enough away that he could juke out of danger if Perry made any sudden movements. But close enough to talk without having to raise voices.

He gestured to the shield. “The fuck is this?”

Perry swallowed. It hurt to do so. “It’s an energy shield,” he croaked out.

A flash of irritation. “I can see it’s a fucking energy shield. How did you get it? You say you’re not a paladin, and yet you use god tech. Explain that to me and then maybe we’ll talk.”

Stuber leaned forward to say something, but Perry held out a hand and stayed his big friend. “Let’s go into the temple and talk,” Perry said, still having to work hard to get full words out. “And then I’ll explain it to you.”

Mordicus’s eyes now switched from consternation to something far more shrewd. “I’ve got two thousand peons watching me right now. You walked through Karapalida to get here. You know things are…delicate. Would you undermine my authority in front of them? I promise, that will end poorly.”

Perry appreciated the frankness. Now he was getting somewhere. “You seem like a good commander. Your men clearly love you. That’s not something that comes easy.” A breath. A stretching of the neck. “You must be an intelligent individual. I’m sure you can come up with something.”

Mordicus snorted at the flattery, though no sign of humor touched his lips. He put his hands on his hips. Looked elsewhere as he spoke. “Give me your word that you won’t use the god tech against me or my men.”

“I have no reason to harm you,” Perry answered. “Don’t give me one in the future.”

“Fair enough.”

Mordicus took a step backwards, then raised his hands out to his side, his voice returning to that of an orator’s speaking to the multitude. “Legatus Mordicus is a man of his word. I agreed to speak to these people if they proved themselves. And I believe they have. My men will not attempt to harm them, and anyone who does will answer to me. My judgement in this matter is final.”

The crowd murmured its disapproval.

The inner rank of legionnaires immediately spun outward, and both ranks slammed their shield down as one, the noise of it like a thunderclap in the temple square.

The crowd immediately quieted.

Mordicus turned away from them, speaking quietly over his shoulder. “Come with me.”

CHAPTER FIVE

BACKROOM DEALS

Mordicus watched the group carefully as they stood in the sanctum of the temple. He had one arm crossed over his chest and the other propped up, a thoughtful finger to his lips.

Off to Perry’s side, he heard the sound of Stuber crunching his way through a vegetable taken from the offerings to Vitan, a Son of Primus. Vitan’s portly, smiling visage stood over them, twenty feet tall, his head the pillar that held the temple roof.

Perry did not recall seeing a Son of Primus that looked anything like that.

It’s fiction, he thought. Lies.

Vitan was no bringer of wealth and plenty. He was a bringer of death, just like the others.

“Can’t believe people just give this shit away,” Stuber growled around a mouthful. “You know how hard it is to grow a vegetable?”

Mordicus narrowed his gaze at Stuber. “You strike me as a man who might enjoy the offerings to Nur more.”

Stuber grinned as he chewed. “Steel, weapons, and whiskey. It’s like you’ve known me all my life.”

“If you’ve met one legionnaire, you’ve met them all.” Mordicus returned his attention to Perry. “You’ve given me a lot to think about. Obviously, with the structure of our entire religion and governance crumbling around us, I’m slightly more inclined to believe you now than I would have only two days ago. But it is still…difficult to accept.”

Perry felt marginally irked that his story—from receiving the clasp and the message that it contained, all the way through the release of The Nine—was still not quite accepted. After everything that had happened, after The Guardians had fallen from the sky and raged through the cities, it was still something to balk at?

But, to Mordicus’s credit, he seemed to be giving Perry the benefit of the doubt. And, like he said, the events of the last two days spoke for themselves. It was likely that everyone wanted to know why The Guardians had suddenly fallen from the sky to exterminate them, and every paladin that had been among their legions had fled to The Clouds, abandoning the humans behind them.

“You can believe what you want,” Perry replied, keeping his tone level. “I’ve told the truth, as accurately as I can tell it.”

Stuber wiped his mouth with his hand, then swiped his hand across his pants. “All of which is currently beside the point.”

Mordicus frowned. “Beside the point? I would say it is the point.”

Stuber had grown serious. “I’m looking for my wife.”

“You and every man in my legion.”

“I have reason to believe she’s here. She was in Oksidado. It was hit by a Guardian last night. Some of the townspeople made it out. It looks like they went here.”

Mordicus looked thoughtful. “My guards did report an influx of civilians early this morning, before dawn.”

Stuber glanced hopefully at Perry and Teran. “That could be her.” Back to Mordicus. “Where did they go?”

Mordicus tilted his head. “You know, we haven’t got to the part where you tell me how you’re going to help me. So far, all I’ve heard is ways to help you.”

“She’s my wife,” Stuber ground out.

Perry stepped forward. “And we’re going to find her. Legatus, maybe you can fill us in on what the hell happened here. I mean, clearly a Guardian came through—”

“I’m assuming by Guardians,” Mordicus interrupted. “You mean whatever those things were that came out of the sky?”

Perry nodded. “The Guardians. They were the things guarding the Nine. And then, as it was explained to me by…” Mala, a demigod “…someone…there is something called The Watcher.” Perry peddled his hands over each other. “Apparently it’s been watching us the entire time, with orders to destroy everything on the entire earth if the Nine were ever released.” Perry cleared his throat. “Which we did. Unfortunately.”

Mordicus’s eyebrows went up. “So you’re the reason these fucking monstrosities came out of the sky to kill everyone?”

“No, no.” Perry shifted his weight. “It was because of the Nine. They were supposed to stay in captivity.”

“And then you released them.”

“Accidentally. There was this paladin who had it out for another paladin, and then things got squirelly, and this other paladin showed up and tried to stop things, but he didn’t really know what was going on, and he fired his longstaff, and the bolt hit the ceiling…” Perry sighed. “Ceiling crumbled, chunk of rock hit one of the Sons of Primus, freed him, there was a lot of yelling, he disintegrated some praetorians…there was a lot going on. It’s complicated. But the point is: Not our fault.”

“So it was a paladin that released them.”

“More or less. Yes.”

Mordicus chuffed. “Fucking figures. Godsdamned paladins set these machines loose on us and then run and hide.” He nodded to Perry. “You see why everyone wanted to kill you when they thought you were a demigod. Myself included.”

Perry thought of Mala, lying bleeding on that skiff. “Well, you know, they’re not all bad.”

Mordicus did not look inclined to extend any grace to the demigods. “You tell that to the three cohorts I lost when those Guardians of yours slashed through our ranks. Tell that to the thousands of bodies lining these streets. Oh, did you not notice them? Don’t worry, you will. When they start to rot.” His face became a snarl. “Another day in the sun and they’ll be able to smell this place from The Clouds.”

Okay, so don’t mention Mala.

“How did your legion end up in Karapalida?”

“We were meeting with The Truth, those red bastards, in a valley not too far from here.” Mordicus’s eyes darkened even further. “We were setting up our night camp when those things came out of the sky. We didn’t know what they were, or what the hell was happening.” He bared his teeth in anger at himself. “We just stared at them. I just stared at them. When I should have been doing something. Then they hit right in the middle of us. The impact alone must’ve taken out a cohort’s worth of men. I still thought they were just meteors…” His toothy grimace became a humorless grin, full of self-recrimination. “…And then out of the smoke, they came out. The Guardians, as you call them. I’ve never seen such destruction in my life. The weapons that they used…” he trailed off.

Perry could imagine what Mordicus was seeing in his mind’s eye. The shredding of ranks of armored legionnaires, being raked with gunfire from its turrets, being splashed with caustic spray, micro-missiles and energy weapons turning warriors into gristle and greasy mist.

“It must’ve been horrific,” Perry said, quietly. “How did any of you survive?”

Mordicus’s far-away stare snapped back into focus. “I ran for the auto-turrets. I’d had them installed prior to encampment. My second-in-command always told me I was paranoid—The Truth never struck at us outside of the pre-arranged battle times. But I suppose my paranoia paid off. And my second-in-command died.”

“Wait.” Perry’s brow furrowed. “The autocannons worked against the Guardians?”

“Not at first. Whatever they have for armor is thick as shit. Very few chinks to take advantage of. But for some reason, they completely ignored the auto-turrets and focused on my men. And when I was able to get all eight auto-turrets to focus their fire, it was enough to incapacitate one, and then the other.”

“Is that why your men call you Slayer of Demons?”

Mordicus waved it away. “My men call me many things. I allow it because it increases their faith in me. But I take no pleasure from their fantasies. It’s a means to an end. It keeps us strong.”

“At what point did the paladin in charge of your legion run away?”

Mordicus flashed blood-thirsty. “The second the Guardians came out of the craters they left when they crashed into my men. Strange, it made no sense to me at the time, but it seemed my paladin knew what they were. And he wanted nothing to do with them. How many of my men could he have saved with his shield? The fucking coward. He flew—I’d never seen him do that before, didn’t even know that he could—straight to a skiff. Jetted away while everyone died.” Mordicus lapsed into a brief moment of silence, then concluded with a heavy sigh: “Then we came here. Because we weren’t sure where else to go. We have no paladin to lead us. It’s just me. And I decided that being stuck out in the plains with those things would be a strategic error. But, as you can see, Karapalida didn’t fare any better. The Guardians had already struck it before we arrived. Most of the people that are here now arrived after we got here. A flood of people from the outskirts—villages, freeholds, scavenging crews.”

Stuber crossed his thick arms over his chest. “I noticed that you and your legionnaires have cut off your sagums.”

Mordicus nodded. “We were pissed. Abandoned. Holding to the faith seemed pointless, and even more than that, it flew in the face of the dead men we left behind. Men that died because their paladin left them. What purpose does faith have now?” He shook his head bitterly. “A part of me still feels guilty for betraying my colors. But the larger part of me rebels. We are Faithless now, out of necessity, rather than desire.”

Stuber exchanged a look between Perry and Teran, as though to ask who was going to break the next chunk of news to Mordicus. But both Perry and Teran silently pushed that back on Stuber. Best to hear it from a fellow legionnaire.

Stuber took a deep breath. “I cut my colors from me long ago. Don’t hold it against me, but they were once red.”

“What does it matter now?” Mordicus retorted. “The paladins have fled. And they’ve taken their war with them.”

“The war was a lie from the start,” Stuber replied, his voice oddly soft. Mordicus watched him with a feral sort of intensity, waiting for further explanation. “The paladins have no war between them. They live together in The Clouds, at peace with one another. The war that we’ve fought and bled for was just a stage play. A way to keep us distracted from the truth. A way to keep us fighting and dying, and to depopulate us. That is all they’ve ever wanted: To maintain their rule, and to keep us under their thumb, by whatever means necessary.”

As Stuber spoke, Mordicus’s face trembled, and Perry grew tense, wondering what outburst would come. He saw the rage, but he didn’t know what it was directed at. The messenger? The truth? Or the situation itself?

Mordicus’s fists clenched.

It didn’t escape Perry that Stuber very subtly bladed his body, as though preparing for an attack.

But then Mordicus simply turned away.

Another uncomfortable glance between Perry and his companions.

When Mordicus finally spoke again, his voice was low. It betrayed his age. “You always knew it. From the first battle. And every single one after that. What could possibly be the point? It defied all logic. They taught us strategy, but the things they had us do bore no strategy. You knew it, and I knew it. We let ourselves be fooled. And what fools we are for that.” With his back still turned to them, Mordicus tilted his head back and appeared to be looking at the faces of the Sons of Primus, far above them. “The biggest fool is the one who denies his own sense of truth because a lie is more comfortable to believe.”

Perry felt shame rise in him, knowing that what Mordicus said was true. “Well. I guess we’re all fools then. At least you managed to take out two Guardians. That’s better than we can boast. And you still have the autoturrets, don’t you? You can fight back.”

“They’re out of ammunition,” Mordicus grunted. “It took every last round to take down those two.” Mordicus turned back to them. “That’s why so many of my men died in the slaughter. It took everything those autoturrets could dish out. They fired until the barrels glowed. And we only just barely took them out. What happens when they come back? And they will come back, won’t they? That’s what they’re designed to do, isn’t it? Exterminate.”

Perry nodded. “Yes. They’re going to come back. And yes, their job is to exterminate all life on this planet. Humans and demigods—we’re all just a big experiment that’s gone wrong. The Guardians are here to wipe the slate clean.” He took a step towards Mordicus, his voice becoming deadly serious. “But we’re not going to let them.”

Mordicus merely looked at him like a child who thinks they can right all the wrongs of the world. “Is that so? And how are we going to do that?”

“We need to work together. For five hundred years we’ve been kept weak. We’ve been divided and set at each other’s throats by a fictional war. All of that’s over now. We need to put aside the petty differences that we’ve been squabbling over, and realize that we’re all humans—not paladins, and peons, and legionnaires, but humans. And we’re all going to die together if we don’t learn to fight together.”

Mordicus sighed. “Good luck with that. There’s a reason the fictional war worked so well to keep us at each other’s throats: Because we like it. It’s in our nature to fight.”

“You’re right. And that’s what makes us dangerous. If we can learn where to direct it. Not at each other, but at the Guardians. You yourself managed to take two of them out. They’re not invincible.”

“And can you summon fifty thousand more rounds for my autoturrets?”

“Well. I can’t summon them. But I may have an idea.”

CHAPTER SIX

THE GOOD DOCTOR

“Hauten?” Teran seethed as they left the relative safety of the New Section and stepped into the nightmare of the Old. “You can’t be serious.”

“You got a better idea?” Perry grunted as he looked around them warily.

Stuber led them through the city, as the new stone buildings gave way to the husks of shattered mudbrick. Legatus Mordicus had secured the New Section in order to house his legion, but the Old Section was without order or oversight, and here the people scuttled like rats in a trash heap. Their eyes watched the three newcomers with the feral curiosity of beasts evaluating whether something can be overpowered or not.

Luckily, the stormcloud that was Stuber seemed to discourage them.

They had not left Mordicus on fantastic terms. He more or less seemed to believe that Perry was a fluke for his abilities to use the godtech, and either a madman or a simpleton for his belief that they could unite and fight back. But he had told them to check the Third Ward of the Old Section. It was the only place where the buildings still stood, and Mordicus’s scouts had reported that the most recent influx of refugees seemed to have holed up there.

Perry would have liked to continue working on Mordicus, trying to shape him into something of an ally, but Stuber was having none of it. He was on a mission to find his wife, and Perry pitied any idiot that got in his way. Including himself.

Teran apparently did not have a better idea than enlisting the assistance of Boss Hauten, so she instead opted to rehash a little history for Perry. “He left you to be hanged! He abandoned you! You can’t trust him!”

“Yes, well, I’ll admit I’m still a little hurt by that. But the circumstances have changed. And if I’m trying to get people to put their differences behind them and work together, then I might want to lead by example.”

Teran gave him a look that echoed Mordicus’s convictions that Perry was a simpleton. “I’ve never heard you be such an idealist before.”

“I’ve never been forced to put my faith in humanity before,” Perry answered. “Trust me, it’s not my first option. But it’s the one and only chance we have. If we don’t work together, we might as well flee into the mountains and wait to get routed out.”

Teran glared. “Is that a jibe at the Outsiders?”

Perry looked skyward, exasperated. “No, Teran. I would never dream of speaking down to ‘your people.’”

“Why do you say it like that? ‘My people’?”

“Because they’ve been your main motivation. You told me so yourself.” He flashed irritable eyes at her. “Which I think is ass-backwards, considering we’re all going to die together if we keep insisting on staying in our individual tribes.”

“If you had a people, you’d feel the same.”

Perry was surprised to find that little comment seeping into his consciousness and burning him like acid. But the truth about yourself always hurts, as Perry had recently found out. Teran was right. Perry had no people. He was a drifter, a deserter from the legionnaires, orphaned by the man he’d believed to be his father, disowned by his biological father—who tried to kill him—and abandoned by the faithless scavengers he’d thrown his lot in with.

“I have a people,” Perry grumbled. “It’s you and Stuber.”

“You don’t even know where to find Hauten and the crew.”

“They cut the same circuit every year—or at least they did the three years I was with them. The godsmoon is waning, so they’ll be shifting back west, towards Junction City.”

“If they’re even alive.”

“Boy, you’re just a fountain of positivity right now.”

A stir ahead of them caught their attention.

Stuber had rounded a corner and now stood with his rifle in his hands. Blocking the center of the rubble strewn street, stood a group of five individuals. They had that look about them. Like they were about to start some shit.

Stuber leveled his rifle with one hand, and with the other he pointed at them. “You five. Since you’re not doing anything useful with yourselves, perhaps you can tell where a tall, red-headed lady went. She’s a doctor from Oksidado. I need to find her.”

The five men did not move, or answer. They seemed to Perry to find themselves caught in a trap. Like they’d geared up for a fight—with what looked like some knives and a pipe—and were now forced to consider that it may have been a poor idea.

Stuber pulled his head back, as though realizing something. “Wait. Were you…were you going to try to rob me or something?”

“Well…” one of the men started.

Stuber held up a hand. “No, no. I’m looking at you right now. I can see that you were preparing to rob me. Here I am, just asking directions to a tall, red-headed lady who is a doctor from Oksidado, and you’re thinking about taking me for…what? My rifle?”

“We…”

“No.” Stuber stepped forward. “You’ve got knives and pipes, but I’ve got a rifle and enough bullets for each of you three times over. Do you really want this?”

Knives and pipes were subtly tucked behind legs.

“We don’t want trouble, legionnaire,” one of the men in the center said. “Has Legatus Mordicus sent you to find this doctor?”

“I just left from speaking with him,” Stuber fudged.

This only seemed to add to their discomfort.

“We don’t want to fuck with the legatus,” the man said. “I don’t know if it’s the lady you’re looking for, but someone came in and opened up part of the clinic down the way. It got bombed out and the doc that lived there is dead. But there’s a line of people trying to get in, so I think some other doctor is there. Might be the lady you’re looking for.”

Stuber lowered his rifle. “That’ll be all, gentlemen. Now kindly put your faces to the wall.”

They hesitated. Then turned, each to the nearest crumbled wall.

“Go on,” Stuber growled. “Faces to the wall. Until your noses touch. Hey! You! Your nose isn’t touching. There you go. Much better.”

Three with their faces plastered to one wall, two on the other, Stuber simply strode through their midst, not giving them a second glance. Nor did he give them any instructions as to when they were free to take their noses off the wall.

Perry and Teran followed after Stuber as he quickened his pace.

Near the next intersection, Perry glanced back and saw all five men with their noses still touching the mudbrick.

***

The clinic was half-ruined, and packed full of misery. True to the word of the would-be robbers, there was a line out the door and down the street. And not a single person looked simply ill. They were all injured, all bleeding, all moaning.

Stuber didn’t care. He barged through them amid cries of outrage, and Perry and Teran followed, grimacing and gently trying to placate a man with a bone sticking out of his arm, who Stuber had rudely shoved into the door frame.

“I’m sorry,” Perry soothed. “My friend’s looking for someone.”

The man simply exploded in curses.

Perry turned away from him. “Well, fuck you. What’re you gonna do, fight me?”

Teran apologized for Perry’s apology.

The main room of the clinic probably hadn’t looked like much before it’d been hit by a flurry of micro-missiles. Though Perry had to say, it probably used to be fairly dark, and was now nicely illuminated by the gaping hole in the ceiling.

The air was dank, heavy with perspiration and breath, and it stank of bodies and, surprisingly, only slightly of blood. There was barely room to move. Those that could stand did so, but most leaned against something, or had simply collapsed on the floor.

People that likely had no business doing anything medical were hustling back and forth to a back room that belched steam and smelled like the worst cook in the world had been given free reign. They entered laden with bloody scraps of cloth, and exited a moment later with a slightly lesser amount of slightly cleaner cloths.

It was through this mess of humanity that Stuber plunged, his boots nudging into people’s wounds and stepping on fingers and broken toes. He followed the people with the freshly-boiled bandages. Perry slipped through the carnage and went after him.

He peeked sideways into the room where the steam belched out of. The roof and most of the wall had been torn away. An open fire blackened the sides of a large steel kettle. A woman with hands and face covered in red as though she worked in a dye factory wrung blood from sopping bandages and stuck them in the boiling water. A grayish froth had formed on the top of the water.

A scuffle from up ahead drew Perry’s attention back to the narrow hallway. At the end of it, the man bearing the cloths had stupidly tried to bar Stuber’s access to the room and promptly been shoved against the open doorway with Stuber’s palm mushing his face.

Stuber strode through, heedless of the man he’d just displaced.

The man was so shocked at the treatment that he didn’t even blink when Perry and Teran slid by him.

Stuber’s frame came to a halt just inside the room and Perry almost ran into him. He adjusted and sidestepped, looking past Stuber’s bulk.

Of all the rooms in this place, this room had faired best. It had four walls and a roof. It had, however, been perforated by innumerable high-caliber holes, which had chewed up the Surgeon that now sat derelict in the center of the room.

Now the Surgeon was simply an operating table, and upon it lay a man with a good portion of his guts hanging out. Over this man stood a woman with her back turned to them. Auburn hair drawn out of the way into a frazzled-looking bun.

“Derrick, do you have the bandages?” the woman said, turning as she spoke to look over her shoulder. She stopped speaking immediately, her mouth still hanging open, her eyes zeroing in on Stuber.

“Petra,” Stuber managed, his voice a husky croak.

“Franklin,” Petra uttered. Her mouth worked soundlessly for two syllables, and her eyes blinked rapidly, processing. And that was all the time she wasted. “Franklin! Get your ass over here and help me!”

Stuber jumped to. “Of course, my love.”

Petra spotted the man that Perry assumed was “Derrick,” still in the doorway with his armload of bandages. “Derrick! The bandages!” Then her eyes hit Perry and Teran. “Perry, Teran, I need your help too.”

Perry exchanged a glance with Teran, but they both started moving.

“Well,” Teran remarked. “Glad we didn’t have to see some sappy reunion. What do you need, Petra?”

“Hands,” Petra snapped. “I need hands. Clean ones. Use the alcohol in that basin.” She nodded towards a metal bowl on a small rolling cart scattered with bloody utensils.

Perry got his rhythm back and the three of them—Stuber included—hurriedly dipped their hands in alcohol that had turned pink with blood. A dozen tiny cuts that Perry hadn’t even known about smarted across his palms and fingers as he rubbed the high-test liquid across his hands. It evaporated rapidly.

They joined back with Petra over the wounded body, and it was at that point that Perry realized the man on the operating table was still conscious. Not exactly “with it,” but his eyes were open, his neck craned up, watching the spill of his intestines with cloudy interest.

“Clean hands,” Stuber announced. “Where do I put them?”

Petra looked down at her own hands, which were wrist-deep in the man’s abdominal cavity. “I’ve run out of hemostats. I’m pinching off a vessel with my right hand. Take it from me.”

The man on the table looked drowsily at Stuber. “Who are you?” His words came out mushy and faint.

“Try not to talk,” Petra commanded. “It moves your guts around when you do.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“He’s doped out of his mind,” Stuber noted as he slid his hands into the man’s stomach, right next to Petra’s.

“I’m mix and matching anesthetics. It’s the best I could do.”

Stuber smiled fondly at her, despite the gore in which both of their hands were planted. “You’re a wonder, my dear.”

Petra fixed her wayward husband with a stern look. “Kiss me. So I can believe you’re really here.”

The two leaned in and kissed passionately. Right over the top of a pile of guts. The man watched them curiously. He probably thought he was hallucinating.

When they broke apart, Stuber said, “I have the vein. You can let go.”

Teran watched all of this, a shade disturbed. “Wow. That’s…disconcerting.”

Perry was past being surprised by Stuber and Petra’s unique relationship. “Where do you need us?”

Petra withdrew her hands from the man’s stomach. “I need you both to hold the organs out of the way while I work.” She puffed a strand of hair out of her face. “Derrick, bandages, please.”

Derrick dutifully began sopping up the blood with a handful of cloth, clearing the area so that Petra could see to work.

She shook her head as she grabbed a device from one of the broken arms of the Surgeon. “Everything’s gone to shit. This guy’s two pints from running dry, and I ran out of SanguinEx three patients ago.”

“You need triage,” Stuber remarked. “This guy should have been left to die.” Then to the man: “No offense.”

“But I don’t want to die,” the man asserted.

“Sure you don’t. But it’s probably going to happen anyways.”

“Not helping, Franklin,” Petra snapped, hunching over the wound with the device, which began to emit a low whine. “But you’re right. Once I have him stabilized—if I can get him stabilized—you need to go out there and start triaging.”

“I can do that,” Stuber nodded.

Petra pointed to the organs around Stuber’s hands. “Perry, Teran. Pull those organs away so I can get to that bleeder.”

Teran looked a little green, but she leaned in with Perry and they dutifully pushed their fingers into the warm, slick innards, pulling them apart to expose the vein Stuber had pinched in his fingers. Petra hunched closer and began to work.

“Where did you come from?” Petra said without looking up. “And where did you go?”

“There’s a lot to tell there,” Stuber replied. “It’s a bit more involved than you probably think it is. But let’s just skip to the end. The things that came out of the sky and leveled this city? Well, we kind of set them loose.”

Petra paused in her work, glancing up at Stuber.

He bobbled his head. “Well…not us, per se. Not really. Nevermind. I’ll fill you in on the details later. The long and short of it is, as soon as I realized that we’d kickstarted an apocalypse, I immediately raced home to find you.”

Petra’s expression was frozen, like she wasn’t quite sure how much of this tall tale to believe. She began working again. “That’s very chivalrous of you, dear.”

“You know me. I’m a model gentlemen. Anyways, we got to Oksidado right as that thing was ripping it to shreds. I went into your house, but you’d already fled.”

“I didn’t flee,” Petra said, as though the implication was beneath her. “I left Oksidado for Karapalida at first light yesterday morning. I’d heard it’d been wrecked by something. I still haven’t seen these things that you’re talking about falling out of the sky, but I’ve certainly heard enough about them. What are they?”

“Very angry robots.”

“Why are they angry?”

“I think they were just designed to be that way.”

“You didn’t make them angry?”

“No, I didn’t do shit. Except try to help Shortstack over here.”

Perry glared at Stuber’s betrayal. Stuber shrugged as if to say Well, it’s true.

The good doctor gave Perry a sidelong glance. “You always struck me as trouble.”

“Me?” Perry couldn’t help feel a little wounded. “Like, good trouble or bad trouble?”

“Neither. You just seem like the type of person that can’t help stirring the pot.”

“That’s accurate,” Teran quipped.

“I’m done with the vein,” Petra announced and straightened. “You can let go now, dear. Perry, Teran, you can let go as well.” She used her slightly-less-bloody wrist to wipe a bead of sweat from her brow. “So what happens now?”

Perry, Teran, and Stuber all exchanged a look.

Petra swept a finger across all of them. “That’s what I’m talking about. Trouble.”

“Welllllll…” Stuber sighed.

Perry decided to just come out with it. “Petra, we have someone who needs medical help.”

“Right. Bring them in. I’ll get to them as soon as I can.”

“That’s kind of the problem. We can’t just bring her in here.”

Petra exchanged the tool in her hand for a different, crueler-looking contraption. “And why is that?”

Perry looked to Derrick, who he didn’t know and was suspicious of. Petra caught the look and nodded.

“Derrick, take the bloody bandages to the boiler, please. I’ll need more.”

Derrick complied without comment.

When he’d left the room, Perry leaned in and spoke in low tones. “She’s a demigod.”

“Fuck the demigods,” groaned the man on the table.

“Be quiet,” Petra ordered. “You’re hallucinating.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

She looked back to Perry. “You’re right. You can’t bring her in here. Not many people are feeling very friendly towards the demigods.”

“Can we take you to her?”

Petra shook her head. “I can’t leave my patients. There’s too much to do. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. What’s wrong with her?”

“She got gut shot by one of those…robots. Which are called Guardians, by the way.”

“Funny name for something intent on killing everyone. How close is she to dying?”

“I don’t know. Close-ish?”

“Why are you even trying to help her? All the demigods abandoned us. That’s kind of why everyone’s pissed at them.”

“They did, but she didn’t. She’s a friend.”

“Forgive me if I’m doubtful.”

“Petra,” Perry’s voice grew earnest. “She got wounded trying to save you in Oksidado.”

“I wasn’t even there.”

“Granted, but she thought that you were. And she put her life on the line to try to get you out.”

Petra considered this in silence while she made some sort of adjustments to the contraption in her hand. “Fine. I’ll treat her. But you have to get her to me. I can’t go to her.”

Perry’s heart sunk. “I’m not sure how that’s possible.”

Teran shifted. “We could disguise her.”

“She’s seven feet tall,” Perry grunted. “There’s no disguising that.”

Teran thought for a moment. “Petra, do you know where we could get a wheelchair?”

Petra actually laughed as she bent back over her patient. “Any working wheelchair has a poor, crippled bastard sitting in it.”

Perry had realized what Teran was thinking about and nodded. “What about a wheelbarrow? Or a cart? Something she can lay down in to disguise how tall she is?”

Petra shrugged lightly as she began to use the contraption to simultaneously rinse and vacuum the wound sight. It made an unpleasant slurping noise. “That you can probably find plenty of. Not a whole lot of people trying to do work at the moment. I’d check the market area.”

Perry drew back, looking for something to clean his hands off on. He didn’t want to use the bandages. Realizing there wasn’t anything else, he just wiped them on his pants. “Alright. That’s the plan then. We grab a cart or something and get her here on that.”

Petra raised her head and nodded to a closed door on the other side of the room, a smattering of bullet holes leaking in shafts of light. “When you get her here, take her to that back door and knock three times. Even disguised, try not to let anyone get a good look at her.”

“Will do.” Perry looked at Teran and Stuber. “You guys ready?”

Stuber drew back. “Shortstack…I’m not leaving my wife.”

Perry’s jaw dropped. “But we need you! We can’t haul her ass all the way through Karapalida!”

Stuber rolled his eyes. “Is that all I am to you? A beast of burden?”

“Sometimes, yes!”

“Well, I’m not leaving my wife. I found her, and she’s still alive, and I sure as shit am not letting her out of my sight when there’s angry robots roaming the world looking to wipe out every living thing.” A flash of regret swept across Stuber’s features. “I’m sorry, Perry. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done to get back here. Now that I’m here, I can’t leave.”

Perry felt his shock turning to dread. Stuber wasn’t going to leave her at all? His mind started to vault through the unknown future, and in each thing he pictured, he had to remove the image of Stuber there helping him, and suddenly it all seemed much more difficult. Was he serious about this?

He started to argue, but Teran grabbed his arm—her fingers were still sticky with blood. “It’s fine, Perry. We’ll figure it out. One thing at a time. Let’s get Mala first, and then we’ll hash out the details.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

STRANGE HAPPENINGS

“You can’t be serious.” Mala stared at the rusty cart. Even though her face was starkly pale from blood loss, she still balked at the idea of being wheeled around.

“Oh, for Primus’s sake!” Perry thrust a hand at the cart that they’d pilfered from the market. It still had the stinking juices from a pile of rotted produce. “I’m as serious as you bleeding to death.”

Mala’s gaze shifted around unsteadily. She was clearly suffering from her wound. But eventually she managed to summon a haughty look and fix it on Perry. “You want me to be carted around…in a filthy farmer’s cart.”

Perry looked skyward with an exasperated sigh, and couldn’t help but think of the night sky that he would see later, and the stars, and the streaks of light from more Guardians coming to crash down on earth and destroy them all.

“Mala,” he grated out. “Get in the fucking cart.”

Teran was less restrained. Blush-faced and sweating, she clenched the side of the skiff and pointed to the cart that sat on the dusty ground outside of Karapalida. “We hauled this piece of shit for two miles, just to try to save you from bleeding out. Now, you’re going to get your pompous, self-righteous ass inside that cart, right now, or—”

“Or what?” Mala challenged.

Teran grew suddenly cold. “Or we’re going to leave you to die out here.”

Mala swayed on her feet—which, coincidentally, Perry couldn’t believe she was still standing on, as the floor of the skiff looked like someone had drained out a large animal on it. But gradually, the seriousness of her condition must have overcome her momentary pride.

“Right,” Mala murmured. “In we go.”

The seven-foot-tall woman slumped onto the cart as though plopping on a comfortable chair. She seemed more insolent than wounded. But Perry supposed that might just be how Mala dealt with her burgeoning mortality. It must be quite strange to be someone who believed they were going to live well into their mid-hundreds, and then to be required to face death relatively early.

He understood, academically, that this might be difficult for her. But he didn’t have much pity for her. Peons like him and Teran had been facing death all their lives.

With unrequited anger, Teran thrust a filthy tarpaulin over Mala. “There,” she snapped, as the fabric settled down. “You’re a dead body. Now shut the fuck up and don’t move.”

“It’s hot,” Mala complained.

“You’re half-dead,” Perry shot back. “You’re not thinking clearly. Shut your mouth and let us do your thinking for you.”

And so Mala shut her mouth and laid very still, and together Teran and Perry carted her two miles back and into Karapalida.

No one on the street seemed to give them much mind. Perhaps they would have drawn more predatory attention if they looked like they had anything to their name, but they had no obvious items of value, their clothing was filthy, and the contents of the cart quite obviously had the shape of a shrouded body.

Bodies were commonplace. What Legatus Mordicus had said came back to Perry, and he took note of it as they wound their way through the rubble strewn city. In amongst the shattered mudbrick and the tattered pennants, there were limbs. A hand here. A booted foot there. Some small, as though from a child. Others large and callused. All different skin tones, but all of them, no matter the melanin, washed out and bloodless.

“Mordicus was right,” Perry murmured as he and Teran struggled to get the rickety cart through a pile of rubble. “This place is going to stink in another day or so.”

Teran looked around them, her nose wrinkling. “I’m starting to smell it now.”

“Do you think they’re going to come back?”

“I think that’s their job—exterminate life.” Teran lifted one side of the cart over a particularly large chunk of mudbrick. “I don’t know how they’re tracking us down, but I get the sense that the more people gather, the more the Guardians are going to show up.”

Perry nodded, agreeing with her. “If I were trying to exterminate everyone, I’d certainly go for target rich environments first.”

“We need to figure out a way to stop them.”

Perry felt a pull in his chest as the clinic came into view again. “I know. We’re trying. We’ll figure something out.”

“You think so?”

He frowned. “I have to, Teran. Because what else is there? Just let everyone die?”

“It might be out of your hands.”

“It’s always been out of my hands. But I’m still gonna try.”

“Primus help me,” came a groan from the cart. The dirty tarpaulin stirred. “Are you two going to get me to a fucking doctor or what?”

Teran kicked the side of the cart. “We’re working on it! Stop talking!”

A few people, sifting through a pile of destruction, cast a strange glance at them.

“People are looking at us,” Teran hissed. “You have to stay quiet.”

Mala responded, but quieter. “Teran…I’m about to die. Please hurry.”

They didn’t say anything else to Mala, but they picked up the pace as best they could, and swung wide around the front of the clinic. There didn’t seem to be much of a line now. More of just a jumble of wounded, all clamoring to get in and be seen. Others that had apparently waited too long already were staggering off to try to find help elsewhere.

As Perry and Teran wheeled the cart around the corner, he heard Stuber’s voice, barking at someone: “That’s not a real injury! Get the fuck out of here and quit clogging up the works with your bullshit!”

They reached the back of the clinic. It used to back up to another set of buildings, with a narrow lane between. Now a large section of those buildings looked like it’d been scooped up. A big, jagged, crescent shape taken right out of the middle of them. It made Perry wonder if this was where the Guardian had come blasting in like an asteroid.

Teran swore as she maneuvered the cart around to face the bullet-pocked back door. He started to look to see if there was something wrong, but something at the belly of that crescent-shaped gouge in the buildings caught his eye. He did a double-take, and felt recognition and an unstoppable sense of premonition strike him.

It was that same woman. The one that had stared and smiled at him in the temple square. She stood there like an eerie statue, one lone figure in all the destruction. Looking right back at him, with that very same smile on her face.

“You gonna help me or what?” Teran grunted, as Perry’s grip left the cart handle.

He took a step towards the woman, his ears beginning to hum again.

The woman spun and slipped away.

The sense of premonition became something darker. The curiosity curdling into suspicion.

“Perry?” Teran was watching him.

Perry thrust his hand under the tarpaulin and seized his longstaff where he’d lain it next to Mala and her own. The blanketed demigod murmured something listless that Perry didn’t catch. The hum in his ears was stronger now. Not dissipating like last time.

“What are you doing?” Teran demanded.

Perry felt his longstaff. The vibration of it. He connected to it instantly and ripped it out of the cart, no longer caring who saw him with it. He needed a weapon. Because he was about to plunge into a possible trap.

“Get Mala inside,” Perry said, his feet already churning for the hole in the building across from them.

“Where are you going?” Teran shouted at his back.

“Don’t follow me!” He tossed over his shoulder. “Get Mala inside!”

There was a brief moment, as he hurdled what was left of a mudbrick wall, that Perry realized he was doing the same stupid shit that had gotten him into trouble so many times before. Running off, trying to face down the dangers on his own. This is what had put his friends in danger before…

And then the thought was covered up by a certainty—there was no other way to explain it, he just became infinitely sure in that moment—that if he did not find out who this woman was, everything he ever hoped to accomplish would fall to pieces.

It made no sense. He recognized that in the logical part of him.

But something far deeper than his consciousness knew a different truth, and it drove him.

He swept through the ruins of the building he’d just clambered into, his longstaff in both hands, scanning the dark crevices and finding no one there. The mysterious woman had appeared to be standing on the street when he’d seen her, so that’s where he headed.

He shot out into the street. It was, surprisingly enough, abandoned. Which was a good thing, seeing as he had a paladin’s longstaff in his hand, and that didn’t seem to be a popular thing to possess.

He looked up and down the street.

There, just entering the alley—the flash of the dark cloak the woman wore. A glimpse of sunset-red hair.

He charged down the street after her.

You’re never going to live this down if Stuber and Teran have to come rescue your ass again.

“Hey! Lady!” Perry shouted. “Stop!”

He stumbled to the corner, breathless. Held up before plunging in. His heart hammered, certain that he’d be facing overwhelming odds when he turned down that alley.

He put a little of himself into the longstaff, and the muzzle of it began to glow. He was connected—as always—to his shield, and he prepared to slam it out in front of him.

He cut the corner hard, longstaff held before him.

Nothing. There was no one in the alley.

His feet began moving as though of their own accord. Drawing him down that alley. It doglegged at the end, to the left. He began angling for that, moving with less surety now. Almost trying to restrain his feet…but not quite.

Something had lassoed him, and it was drawing him ever closer.

The hum in his ears was almost painful. That hum that had something to do with Confluence, though how, he couldn’t quite place. The only thing he knew about the hum and its relationship to Confluence, was that he seemed to hear it when he was nearing someone—or something—that was vastly stronger in Confluence than he.

That little fact almost made him stop. Almost.

The suspicion curdled to dread. Gods in the skies, what was he doing? Was this fear that he felt in him just a product of knowing how many shitty decisions he’d made, and that this was probably another one? Or was the fear somehow tied to the thing that he knew but couldn’t put his finger on?

No. The fear was its own entity. And he stamped it down, not letting it interfere with his connection to Confluence.

He reached the dogleg and this time didn’t stop. He swerved around it.

And halted.

The woman was not there, but this little section of alley was not abandoned.

An old man stood there, rather close to the corner, and Perry nearly unleashed the burgeoning bolt of energy at the tip of his longstaff, but held back at the last microsecond, perceiving that the old man’s hands were raised up, palms showing.

“I mean you no harm,” the old man spoke in a rickety voice, as old and sun-bleached as the bricks and timbers that formed the desecrated buildings around them.

Perry’s eyes shot past the old man. This alley was a dead end. The woman should be here.

“Where’d she go?” Perry demanded. “The woman with the red hair?”

“Will you listen to me?” the old man asked softly.

Perry’s eyes kept trying to find the woman in the dead end. Surely she had to be there. In that dark corner? No. That was only rubble. How was she not here now? Unless…

His ears were still ringing. The sense of someone who possessed Confluence in levels that set Perry’s brain afire like an overloaded circuit. She had to be a demigod, and a strong one. She had flown out of this dead end, just like Mala could. A skill Perry still had yet to learn.

That was the only explanation.

The old man cleared his throat. “Will you listen?”

Perry dragged his eyes back to the old man. The expression on his weathered face was familiar. A small smirk. Knowing. Perry frowned, tensed. His sweaty grip worked on the shaft of the humming longstaff.

Perry glanced behind him, for a moment certain that there would be others coming in behind him, a trap being tightened around him like a noose around the neck of one of those flamens.

“There’s no one else coming, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Perry snapped his attention back. “The fuck do you want?” he growled. “You better start saying some shit that makes a whole lot of sense, or I’m going to turn you to ashes.”

Rather than laugh at Perry, or become defensive, the old man simply nodded, as though he expected this response.

“Well, if I have your attention finally, then listen to my words: Your ploy to sneak the paladin into the clinic didn’t work. People have sharp eyes when they want to. And they talk. Even now, the rumors are like a grassfire. And the people are angry. They know that a wounded paladin is now under the care of that doctor, and they intend to kill her.”

Perry’s frown deepened. “How the hell do you know that?”

The old man shrugged. “You’ll want to go to your friends now. The second that the paladin is able to be moved again, get her out of the Old Section. Legatus Mordicus may give you some grief, but I believe you can convince him to give you sanctuary.”

And then the old man turned away from Perry, and began walking.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Perry demanded. “I’m not done talking to you!”

It was a dead end. The old man couldn’t go anywhere.

And yet he did.

He walked right into a wall, and then simply vanished.

CHAPTER EIGHT

OLD FRIENDS, NEW ENEMIES

“Where’s Perry?” Petra demanded, as she and Teran wrestled Mala’s half-conscious form onto the Surgeon’s table.

Teran hoisted Mala’s booted feet up with a grunt, feeling an anger that can only come from when your friend does something incredibly stupid…that they’ve promised not to do anymore. “He ran off.”

“He ran off?” Petra’s eyes widened. “To do what?”

“Who the hell knows?” Teran almost yelled. “I’m sure we’ll find out in about twenty minutes when we have to go save his life.”

Mala lifted her head, the cords of her neck straining. Her skin looked washed out and glistened with an unhealthy sweat. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“No,” Teran growled. “I’m not kidding you.”

Mala blinked a few times as though warding off an incoming darkness. “You should have…should have gone after him.”

“Well, I was busy carting your body to the doctor! And he said not to follow him!”

Mala’s head fell back. “You can’t listen to that little bastard.”

“Excellent point from the half-dead lady,” Teran snarled. “How about you shut up so the doctor can work on you?”

Petra, perhaps realizing that Teran wasn’t going to be the greatest surgical assistant, hiked a thumb behind her. “Go swap out with Franklin and send him in here. If I need any help from you I’ll let you know.”

The dismissal didn’t do much for Teran’s mood. She glared at the tall doctor and then marched around the room. The door opened before she reached it and Stuber slipped through, careful not to let anyone outside see who they were operating on.

His eyes shot through the room. “Oh, no.”

Teran nodded. “Oh, yes. Your Halfbreed ran off.”

“My Halfbreed?”

Teran waved a hand and grabbed the doorknob. “I refuse to take ownership of him.”

“He’s not my Halfbreed,” Stuber seemed to take the development in stride. As though such things were to be expected. Perhaps they were at this point. He jerked a head towards the sounds of moaning wounded outside. “Are you taking over?”

“Looks like it.”

“Here.” He dropped a lump of burned wood into her hand. “People worth treating have one charcoal line on their forehead. People that are already about dead have an X. Everyone else I told to get lost.”

Teran grumbled a wordless affirmative and stepped out of the room, the piece of burned wood squeezed in her hand. The smells of the dying hit her again in that tight space. Worsened as she moved down the narrow hall of the clinic and into the crowd of bodies.

“Please,” someone murmured at her feet. “I’m dying, I need help.”

It was an older woman. Stuber had already given her an X on the forehead.

Yes, it seems like you are. But Teran didn’t say that. Couldn’t bring herself to say anything to the woman. The entire lower half of her body was drenched in blood. How she’d survived this long was a mystery. Maybe she would survive longer. But that wasn’t Teran’s call.

She moved on as the woman’s feeble fingers tried to clutch at her pants legs.

She scanned the waiting room, her anger deflating in the face of human misery. There were at least twenty people jammed in here—which was less than before, but still too many. As she looked at their desolate faces, she saw that they all bore marks. Many of them were X’s.

She ignored their pleas and moved outside, where the river of humanity continued. Here, the evidence of Stuber’s marks continued, about ten yards from the door of the clinic. She picked up where he had left off, stuffing down any semblance of compassion and simply deciding who she thought could be saved, and who she thought was a lost cause.

Many had already died. No one had bothered to move their corpses from the line. Teran found herself stooping and checking pulses. Sometimes the next in line would notify her that they were dead, and she would wonder if they were simply saying that so they could get treated faster. She didn’t put much past people.

She thrust her finger under the jaw of a man with a burned and bloody face. She half-expected his skin to be cold. But it was hot to the touch. His pulse was strong.

He jerked when she touched him, and Teran nearly cried out.

Consciousness swam rapidly into his eyes.

Confusion. And then…recognition.

“Teran?” the man murmured.

She was already halfway into marking him with a single line—she saw no other wound besides the burn. She froze when he said her name, her brain shooting through many different possibilities as to how he might know her name.

He leaned up off the wall he’d passed out against. “Teran?” he said, his voice stronger. “Is that you?”

The left side of his face was blackened and crusted, swollen and monstrous. His eye was a bloodshot mess, possibly ruined. But the right side of his face…

It took her a moment to see past the injury.

“Gods in the skies,” she whispered. “Lucky? Is that you?”

Lucky’s trembling hands crawled up Teran’s arms and seized her shoulders. “Yes! It’s me! I can’t believe you’re still alive! After the praetors hit the caves, I thought you were dead.”

It was still hard for Teran to recognize him somehow. The burned side of his face gave him the appearance of being older than he was. But Lucky wasn’t that much older than her. And the rest of him looked just like it had the night he and Sagum and the others had found them in the hills and taken them to the caves where the other Outsiders were hiding.

Teran shook her head. “We got out through the Underground.” She felt her throat constricting, her thoughts becoming a tumble, torn out of the present and thrust back into the caves where she’d grown up. The people that were her people. “Did anyone else make it out?”

Lucky’s expression—what Teran could see of it, anyways—looked briefly stricken. He shook his head. “I don’t think so. The praetors…they blocked us down in that exit. It wasn’t big enough for all of us to get through and everyone just jammed together. They panicked. The praetors mowed us all down. Like fucking vermin.”

His voice was rising, shaking.

Teran touched the good side of his face. “Ssh. It’s okay. You made it out. Let’s not relive it.”

Lucky managed a nod. “I got out,” he said, and left it at that, though she could only imagine the horrors that those three words held. “I linked up with the Southerlies, down towards the flatlands.”

Teran nodded. The Southerlies were another group of Outsiders. They did not mingle, each clan believing they had the market cornered on staying hidden from the demigods. But they wouldn’t turn another Outsider away if they needed help.

“Have you been with them the whole time?” Teran asked, and realized that she was thinking of this as though it was in the dreary, distant past. But it had been less than a month. “And why are you here in Karapalida?”

“Me and three others made a trip in for supplies,” he said. His eyes jagged about, as though seeing the ragged city as it had been only a day before. “We were here when the…the things hit. The other three…they didn’t make it.” He stopped and looked at her. The left side corner of his mouth had cracked and begun weeping from the movement of his lips. “Was it him? I never found out. We had to run before I found out.”

Teran became acutely aware that several people in the line were paying attention to her. Maybe because they were waiting for her to take them in or triage them. But still. People had big ears.

“Come on.” She reached down and took Lucky by the arm, helping him to his feet. “Let’s get you inside.”

He seemed steady and strong enough and didn’t need her support, but she held onto him anyways, like if she let go he might just burst into smoke and float away on a breeze.

“So it wasn’t him?” Lucky pressed.

“Not here,” Teran mumbled. “Hang on a minute.”

A few of the badly wounded gave her incredulous looks as she led Lucky—a man with only a burn wound—towards the back room. As she approached the door she wondered if this was a great idea, but she needed to talk to Lucky, and she didn’t want any strangers to overhear. It was the only place of privacy she could come up with in the moment.

She thrust the door open and ushered Lucky in, closing it behind him.

Stuber looked up, hands bloodily occupied with Mala’s wound. “Hey! Whoa! Get him the fuck out of here!”

“Stuber, it’s fine. He’s a friend.”

Petra looked over her shoulder. She looked even more exhausted, and didn’t seem to have the energy to care about a stranger in their midst. She went back to work.

“Is that…” Lucky stepped sideways to see clearly the body on the table. “Oh shit. Is that a demigod?”

Stuber’s face darkened. “See? He’s not fine.”

Lucky’s whole body looked like it was going to start shaking. “You can’t…Why is…Who let a demigod in here? And why are you even trying to heal her?” He jolted forward, reaching for Petra as though he intended to force her to stop treating Mala’s wound.

Teran intercepted him, checking him with an arm across the chest. “Stop. Lucky, listen to me. It’s complicated.”

“Great,” Stuber growled. “I’m gonna have to kill him now.”

“No one’s killing anyone,” Teran hissed. “Stuber, you remember Lucky, don’t you?”

“No. I don’t.”

“He was one of the guys that found us in the hills and led us to my clan.”

Petra raised her head again. “Your clan? You’re an Outsider?”

Teran let the obvious be her answer and kept her attention on Stuber.

He frowned at Lucky for a long moment. “If you say so.”

“Yes, I say so. He’s a friend. And I need to talk to him and this is the only private area.” Teran faced Lucky. “You can’t tell anyone that there’s a demigod in here. She’s a friend of ours. I know that’s hard to swallow, but I need you to be on my side right now.”

Lucky made a face—then made a worse face, the wrinkles of his skin breaking and oozing. His eyes watered and his hand flew up but didn’t touch. “Dammit. This shit hurts so bad I can’t even think straight. What the hell is going on here? Why do you have a demigod for a friend?”

Rather than answer, Teran kept a hand on Lucky and turned to Petra. “Do you have anything for pain?”

Petra gave Lucky a clinical glance, then nodded towards the rolling table off to the side. “Bottom drawer. There’s an aerosol can. Spray that on. It’ll sting like hell at first, but then it’ll numb it.”

Teran popped the drawer and found the described item. A small, blue can, simply labeled, ANALGESIC, TOPICAL. She uncapped it and, after telling Lucky to close his eyes, gave the burned side of his face a good dousing. He hissed as she did it, but then his entire hunched posture relaxed after a few seconds.

“Gods in the skies,” he breathed. “That’s magical.”

“Good.” Teran set the spray down. “Can you focus now?”

Lucky immediately became suspicious again. Perhaps moreso now that he could focus. “Okay.”

“You asked me if we’d found him—the one that Sabio told us about.”

“Right.”

“We did. And he was what Sabio said: A halfbreed. He’s human, but can use the godtech. It’s called Confluence.” She rolled her hands over each other. “There’s a lot I’m not telling you, but suffice it to say, we started the end of the world and Mala here is on our side.”

“Oh.” Lucky frowned at the demigod on the table.

Mala had fallen unconscious.

“Is that what those things out of the sky are?”

“They’re connected, yes.”

“What the hell are they?”

“Robots designed to seek and destroy all life on earth. More or less.”

Alarm began to fill Lucky’s face. “We have to tell the others. You have to help me, Teran. They don’t know what’s happening out here…” he stopped. Alarm turned to horror. “What if they’ve been hit? What if one of those things came for them?”

“Lucky, there’s a lot going on right now and—”

“Teran!” he interrupted, his tone recriminating. “You left us so that you could save us! Your people! You can’t abandon us now! You have to help me warn them!”

The back door burst open.

Stuber whirled, a scalpel held at arm’s length, and nearly took Perry’s nose off. For a flash, Perry’s shield came up, singing the tip of the scalpel, and then dissipated. He looked past the blade to Stuber, with a glare.

“Nice.”

Stuber retracted the impromptu weapon. “Try knocking next time.”

Perry slid in and closed the door behind him.

“Is that him?” Lucky asked, awe apparent in his voice.

Perry whirled, taking in the newcomer, and froze, as though he wasn’t sure what he’d just walked into. “What? Who are you?”

“Are you the halfbreed?”

Teran answered for him. “Yes, he’s the halfbreed. Don’t mention his size, he’s sensitive about it.”

Perry still had his longstaff in both hands and rested the butt on the ground. “Who’s the crispy guy?”

“He’s an Outsider. Lucky. You remember him?”

Perry squinted. “Maybe.”

“Teran over here,” Stuber grumbled. “Just waltzed in with him and now apparently we’re supposed to be friends. She told me I couldn’t kill him. Is that true?”

Perry shook his head. “We’ve got bigger problems right now. How soon until Mala can move?”

Petra’s eyes shot up from her work. “Move? She’s unconscious and I just got started.”

Perry crossed to the table and looked at her with urgency. “Whatever you need to do to get her mobile. We need to get out of here.”

CHAPTER NINE

ANGRY PEOPLE

“So, wait.” Stuber held up a bloody hand, confusion evident. “You never found the lady you were chasing after, but there was an old hobo, and now we have to run?”

“He walked through a wall!” Perry waved his arms in exasperation. “I wasn’t going to listen to him until he did that!”

“Did you check for a trap door?”

“Yes, of course I checked.”

“And?”

Perry gawked at Stuber. “It was a fucking wall, Stuber. Just as thick and dense as your head.”

“I’m just trying to make sure,” Stuber gruffed, turning back to Mala as Petra finished closing the wound, the stink of cauterized skin filling the air. “Sometimes you get…panicky.”

“I don’t get panicky. I’m not panicked.”

“You sound panicked.”

Petra nodded, glancing up. “You do sound a little panicked.”

“No, I’m urgent.”

“Because of what the magical hobo told you.”

Perry didn’t even bother arguing that anymore. “Yes, I believe the magical hobo was telling the truth, and I’d like to get out of here quickly before we get blocked in.”

From the side, Perry saw Lucky lean close to Teran. His voice was low, but still audible: “This is the guy that’s supposed to save us?”

Perry whirled on him. “Whoa, whoa. What the hell have you heard about me?”

Lucky was as guileless as someone who’s never bothered to question the beliefs they hold. “You’re the one that’s going to defeat the demigods, end the war, and save humanity.”

Perry’s hand went to his head in disbelief. “This is insane. Look, I’m not saving anyone. That’s just some shit my Uncle Sergio told you people to get you to find me. If anyone around here wants to get saved, they need to pull their head out of their ass and start working together. I’m just here to try to get them to do that.”

The door to the room burst inward. Perry snatched his longstaff up, but recognized Petra’s helper, Derrick. He was flustered and fearful. His eyes immediately went to Mala. Utter betrayal came over his face.

“It’s true,” he murmured. “How could you?”

Teran had already crossed the room and slammed the door shut behind Derrick, but not before a low noise of dissonance eked through.

Petra finished sealing Mala’s wound and leaned on the table, looking like she was too exhausted to care. “Derrick, don’t be a prick. I don’t choose my patients.”

“You chose that one over all the people outside!” Derrick shrilled. “There’re dozens of wounded humans that need your help and—”

He cut himself off when the tip of Teran’s knife touched the side of his throat.

“I don’t give a fuck about your personal feelings, Derrick,” Teran whispered into his ear. “How’d you find out we had a demigod in here?”

Derrick began shaking. He was not the stalwart type. “I heard…when I went for more water. Some people asked me about it. They were angry. I told them it was lies, but…”

“But now you see that it’s not,” Teran finished for him. “Skip the melodrama. How many people were there?”

Derrick’s throat squirmed as he swallowed. The knife point moved with it. “Maybe a hundred? Maybe more than that.”

Teran’s eyes shot to Perry’s.

Perry’s shot to Stuber’s. “See?”

Stuber looked flabbergasted. “Magical fucking hobo. Who’d’a thought?”

“Are they out there right now?” Perry demanded, hefting his longstaff threateningly at Derrick.

Derrick, still frozen by the tip of Teran’s knife, managed a tiny nod.

Perry looked at Mala. Still unconscious. If there was a crowd of angry rabble outside, they weren’t going to make a very quick getaway pulling Mala along in the cart. “Petra, is there any way to wake her up?”

Petra considered this. “Yes. I have something that’ll bring her to.” She held up a hand. “But, fair warning, it’s not going to be pleasant.”

Perry frowned. “For her or for us?”

“Probably neither.”

A shout from outside, muffled by the walls. It sounded like a lot of people, rapidly getting themselves enraged. Perry strained to hear the words in the dull roar. He couldn’t make it out perfectly, but he got the sense they were demanding the demigod to be kicked out. Presumably so they could thrash her inert form.

“We don’t have another option,” Perry said. “Whatever you need to give her to get her on her feet, do it.”

Petra shrugged, reaching for the cart next to the table. “Alright. But I did warn you. And you might want to make sure she doesn’t have her longstaff. Or her shield.”

Perry stooped over Mala’s motionless body. Her longstaff was laid on the ground near the table. He didn’t know what personal object on Mala operated her shield. He rummaged rapidly through the shallow pockets of her dirty battle attire and came up with nothing.

Stuber leaned over him, wiping his hands off on a bandage, though a lot of the blood had already dried. “Try that thing around her neck.”

Perry spied a chain around her sweaty throat. He grabbed it and pulled a large, circular pendant from beneath her chest plate. It was still warm from her body. He felt the thrum of Confluence emanating from it, but when he pressed at it, he could not access it.

That was it. Her personal object. Just like Perry’s clasp.

He undid the necklace and stowed the chain and pendant in his pocket, alongside his clasp.

The sound of large amounts of pissed off people was becoming more evident. It seemed to surround them, making the air heavy.

“What do you want me to do with this idiot?” Teran asked, digging the tip of her knife into the side of Derrick’s throat.

Perry shook his head. “At this point, I don’t give a shit what you do with him. But we need to get moving.”

Petra held a massive syringe in her hand and took the red safety cap off, revealing a needle that looked large and long enough to skewer a sizeable rodent. She shifted her grip so that syringe was clutched like a knife, the needle pointing down.

“Before I stick her,” Petra said. “Do you all know what you’re doing?”

“The magical hobo suggested we go back to Legatus Mordicus,” Perry said, looking rapidly between Teran and Stuber. “He was right about the mob coming. Maybe we should do what he suggested.”

Stuber nodded. “You and Teran make a break for it. I’ll try to hold the mob off and settle things down with Petra.”

“There’s no settling them down!” Perry grated. “They’re gonna trash this place as soon as they find out that Petra treated a demigod! And Petra—you can’t stay here. You need to come with us.”

Petra steadied herself over Mala’s body, the syringe poised to deliver its dose. She looked at Stuber. “Franklin, my love, I believe your friend is right. I hate to leave the wounded, but I don’t think we’re going to be getting any work done in the middle of a riot.”

Stuber needed no further convincing. He only wanted to protect his wife. “Fine by me. I’m assuming we’re heading out the back door?” He hefted his rifle.

Petra made a face at him. “Yes to the back door. But no to the rifle. We’re going to need you to help restrain Mala.”

Stuber looked crestfallen. “So Perry’s gets to run point with his fancy staff? Make him restrain her. He’s the one with all the powers.”

Petra’s expression became stern. “Franklin. You’re the only one big enough to restrain her. And if she’s half the spitfire you’re claiming she is, then she will need to be restrained.”

Stuber rolled his eyes. “Fine.” He slung his rifle. “Give her the juice. I’m ready.”

With a surprising lack of her usual physician’s gentleness, Petra rammed the syringe right into Mala’s chest.

The affect was nearly instantaneous—Petra barely had time to yank the syringe out before Mala came upright, screeching like a nekrofage on fire.

“UNHOLY GODS OF HELL!” Spittle exploded out of Mala’s mouth as her eyes jagged savagely about, as though looking for a threat, her expression both furious and terrified.

Those were the only words she spoke. Stuber put his hands on her shoulders, and she moved so rapidly that Perry didn’t even catch what had happened until Stuber’s body went off balance and Mala’s knee cracked into the center of his face.

Teran ejected Derrick from her grip, sending the man into the wall with a clatter, and then brandished her knife at Mala—for all the good it would do. Stuber recoiled from the table, both hands covering a gout of blood from his face.

Perry put his longstaff between him and the insane demigod. “Mala! It’s us!”

Mala didn’t seem to recognize him. She launched herself off the table with the speed of a snake striking and slammed into Perry, taking him full across the room and slamming him against the far wall. Her strength was immense, and her ferocity was insurmountable.

Perry felt the longstaff being wrenched out of his grasp. He realized that she was going to kill him, and then probably everyone in the room, and he dipped into Confluence, mentally touching his clasp and thinking, Is this really how it ends for her?

Then Stuber’s massive arms yoked her around the neck, and Mala’s form left the ground. Her feet went up, over her head, and Stuber drove her top-first into the ground.

Derrick bolted. Perry only caught his movement at the last second, as he ripped the door open and it bounced off the wall. Derrick sprinted into the hall, yelling, “The demigod’s in there! She’s in there!”

Petra retreated rapidly from the fray, not looking surprised at all. She had warned them, after all.

“Mala, you giant bitch!” Stuber ground out as she tried to strangle him and he batted her arms away and tried to get a position of dominance over her. “Stop fighting me!”

Right about the time that Mala lunged off the ground and tried to spear her thumbs through Stuber’s eye sockets, he pivoted deftly and swept up behind her, sinking her into a choke and then dropping to the ground. She went with him, rolling and spitting and growling.

Stuber got his hooks in with his legs and tightened the choke until Mala’s animal noises faded into gurgles and gasps. “Easy now,” he said, his voice straining to be controlled. “Easy, Mala. You’ve just been given some drugs to wake you up and they’ve made you very frisky. I really need you to calm down and stop trying to kill me. Easy. Easy.”

Perry watched with a sort of lurid fascination as Mala’s efforts began to slacken off. He wasn’t sure if she was calming down, or just losing oxygen to the brain.

“Stuber,” Perry barked. “The point was to have her awake, not unconscious!”

Stuber’s eyes flashed madly at Perry. “I’m fucking working on it, Halfbreed! One thing at a time!”

Mala made a few half-hearted attempts to elbow Stuber. Her croaking noises became more of a long snore, and right before she passed out, her eye connected with Perry’s and he thought he saw recognition in them.

Perry jumped forward. “Okay, let her go, Stuber!”

Stuber didn’t quite let her go, but he did loosen the choke on her neck.

Consciousness flooded back into her eyes—again. But this time she didn’t come up swinging or screaming. She choked on a giant gulp of air, coughed, and then fixed Perry with a baleful look that made him think it was all going to go around again.

Someone slammed on the door to the room.

“We know you have a demigod in there!” a man shouted from the other side. “Kick that motherfucker out here!”

Mala’s eyes, far more with-it this time, swept to the sound of the voice, then back to Perry. “The hell is happening?”

“Are you done trying to kill us?” Perry demanded hotly.

“Yes!” she grated. “What did that bitch do to me?”

“Hey,” Stuber grumbled, still not letting Mala go. “Don’t call my wife a bitch.”

The voice from outside: “Open this godsdamned door or we’re gonna kick it in!”

“Mala,” Stuber said. “I’m going to let you go now because I want my rifle. I’d really like for you to be calm and relaxed.”

Mala managed a nod of the head. “I’m neither but I won’t try to kill anyone.”

Stuber immediately released her and rolled, scooping up his rifle as Teran and Petra retreated to the rear door. He pulled the trigger, spitting out a barrage of bullets that lanced high into the top of the doorway.

“That should give them something to think about,” Stuber growled, hauling to his feet.

Perry caught Mala’s arm as she lurched about the room as though looking for something—probably her longstaff. “You good?”

“No.”

“What the hell were you seeing when you tried to kill us?”

“I was seeing you,” she grunted. “I was just really angry.”

“Well, that’s not great.”

“I’m over it now.” Mala clutched her chest and sucked in a breath. “Heart feels like it’s about to explode. Where’s my fucking longstaff?”

“Uh, yeah…” Perry towed her towards the back door. “We’ll get to that. But we need to get out of here. I’ll explain on the move.”

CHAPTER TEN

SEEKING ASYLUM

Stuber’s warning shots didn’t last long.

The second the group piled out of the back door and closed it behind them, Perry heard the inner door smash open followed by the raucous cries of a mob. Stuber took the lead, Petra and Teran close behind him, while Mala stuck close to Perry so she could nag him about her longstaff.

“Perry! Give me my damn longstaff!”

“You’re not in your right mind.”

“I’m getting to be of a mind to take your head off.”

“That’s not helping.”

“Did you…” indignation. “Did you take my shield?”

Perry was saved from having to admit to this violation by the sound of the rear door of the clinic slamming open, and the shouts of the mob becoming crystal clear. He reached the edge of an alley that Stuber had just ducked into and spun, summoned a bolt of energy from his longstaff and sent it careening into the already-destroyed building nearest the clinic.

He caught the flash of a few shocked faces before they were obscured by a gout of brown dust and smoke.

He wasn’t sure why he didn’t kill them. Maybe it just didn’t feel right. He was trying to get people to work together, he couldn’t just go around slaughtering them. Even if they were being assholes.

He turned and sprinted down the alley after Stuber, Mala still on his heels.

“I need my shield, Perry!” she kept on. “If you don’t give it to me I’m going to—”

Perry activated his own shield in a narrow dome around him—just big enough to enclose him and protect him from Mala’s wrath. He shot her a look over his shoulder. She was incensed.

“You’ll do what?” Perry snapped at her. “Fucking nothing! Now shut up and run!”

He needed her to downgrade her anger level before he trusted her with Confluence again. If she had her longstaff and shield and decided to get squirrelly on them again, they wouldn’t be able to stop her.

“Okay,” Mala tried, her voice an angry husk. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I don’t need my longstaff. Or my shield. You keep it. For now.”

“Sounds great. Glad you’re on board.”

Stuber reached the mouth of the alley where it ended in the main drag that ran through the Old Section. He pulled up short, Petra and Teran stumbling into the back of him. He peeked out to the right, then jumped back in.

“They’re down there,” he said as Perry and Mala reached them. “Gods, what is wrong with people?”

“They’re angry and confused,” Petra replied in a compassionate tone.

Stuber squeezed his eyes shut. “My love…just…now’s not the time.”

Perry nudged Stuber’s shoulder. “We gotta go. Can’t stay here.”

“Right.” Stuber looked suspiciously at Mala. “You able to run all the way to the New Section?”

Mala, despite her ire, was not in good shape. Whatever Petra had rammed into her system had made her go off like a firework, but that didn’t change the fact that she was still very low on blood. Her skin looked colorless, her eyes sunken and hollow. She was stooped slightly, favoring her stomach wound, and couldn’t seem to catch her breath.

Still, she nodded. “Yeah, I can run. But I have no idea where the New Section is or how far.”

“Maybe two miles,” Stuber said. “And the second we peek out of this alley, they’re gonna come running.”

“I can make it two miles,” Mala said, though she didn’t sound very confident. “But why don’t we just blow them up? They are trying to kill us, right?”

Stuber shrugged. “Perry’s trying to be a peacemaker or something. I dunno. Ask him about it.” Stuber turned to the alley, took another peek out. “Alright. Stay on my ass.”

They ran.

Halfway into the street, Perry heard the shouts from his right and hazarded a glance. The mob was far more than what Derrick had stated. It swamped the entire street, only a few hundred yards from them. Easily three hundred people, possibly more that Perry couldn’t even see.

Word travelled fast. And people were at their most savage and dangerous.

Eyes back forward.

A glimpse of the Temple’s time wheel between buildings. It seemed too far.

Through alleys and along narrow streets, cluttered with rubble and a few people that hadn’t got the word yet that there was a riot going on. They watched dumbly as the group fled past them, staring at Mala in shock.

Stuber hit a corner and didn’t break stride as he popped his rifle up and snapped off a flurry of rounds. Perry cleared the corner just in time to see two people spilling to the ground. A third, behind them, hurled fist-sized rock.

Without thinking, Perry swung his longstaff, the blade immediately energizing and turning the stone to dust and molten splatter. He felt bad for the two unlucky bastards that had caught Stuber’s bullets, but he felt pretty good about his longstaff work.

“Try not to kill anybody else!” Perry gasped out.

“I only shot them in the legs,” Stuber shouted back.

That was pretty much a death sentence anyways, seeing as how the only doctor in town was currently running away with them. Perry chose not to press the issue. They could only be so nice when people were trying to kill them.

“Perry,” Mala said, her voice high and weak. She caught his arm as they ran.

He glanced at her, shocked by how much worse she looked from only a minute ago.

She held out her hand. “I can’t run. I need my shield. I need to fly.”

“Can you do that and stay with us?”

“I can’t run and stay with you.”

Swearing, Perry slowed his steps just enough to dive into his pocket. His fingers touched his own clasp, then the chain and pendant he’d taken from Mala. He pulled them out, hesitated only a moment, but if there was any murder left in Mala, he couldn’t see it. She was just trying to survive at this point.

He shoved the pendant into her hands.

The second his hand cleared her proximity, her shield blinked into existence around her. She dipped low, then thrust herself off the ground. Her jump wasn’t as strong as he’d seen her do in the past, but as she descended to the ground, the shield pulsed, and she bounced back up into the air.

It completely lacked the majesty of her usual shielded flight. She looked less like a graceful god flying, and more like a human ball, bouncing down the street. But she kept pace with them.

As Perry started to lose his breath, he again wished he could fly like Mala.

Street to street. Corner to corner. Sometimes zig-zagging, sometimes plunging straight on. Mala pulsed herself over the remains of the buildings and when she came back down, she let her boots hit the ground and run alongside Perry for a moment.

“Stuber!” she called out. “They’re trying to flank and cut you off!”

“We’re almost to the New Section!” Stuber called back, then edged out of the next corner and caught a rock to the shoulder. His face became savage and he pumped out three rounds that Perry had no doubt were meant for more than wounding. “Bastards,” Stuber noted, then crossed the street, keeping Petra close to him.

“If you give me my longstaff I can hold them off,” Mala urged.

Perry shook his head as he dodged a hurled brick and slipped into cover on the far side of the street. “If I wanted to blow them up, I could do it myself.”

Mala launched herself into the air again, clearly irritated.

Maybe Perry was trying too hard. Maybe this was just how the world was going to go—maybe it was going to eat itself alive and extinction was inevitable.

Amazing how you add a little breathlessness and some lactic acid, and all the sudden all those high ideals you had before start to sound dumb.

“Straight ahead!” Stuber called out.

Perry jerked his attention forward, where the tumbledown mudbrick of the Old Section gave way to the concrete of the New. The path ahead of them widened, and there, just a few hundred yards away, stood a rank of legionnaires.

Had they crossed that distance already?

A glance at the temple’s time wheel showed that they still had a ways to go. This was likely just a perimeter patrol, rather than the full ranks that had encircled the temple.

The legionnaires saw them coming and closed ranks, their massive shields standing like a wall, their eyes peering sternly over. Rifles protruded, and Stuber slowed, still a good distance away from them.

“By order of Legatus Mordicus,” one of the legionnaires called out in a deep, gruff voice. “Hostile persons are not permitted to enter the New Section of Karapalida.”

Stuber continued forward at a cautious jog. Mala descended back to the group as they jumbled up behind Stuber, and Perry caught the looks of the legionnaires—confusion at the sight of her, along with a good dose of aggression.

“It’s Legatus Mordicus we’ve come to speak to!” Stuber yelled.

“Stop or you will be fired on,” the legionnaire bellowed back.

The sound of hundreds of feet and voices clattered behind Perry. He jerked around and saw the mob swarming into the street, not far behind them. More rocks were hurled, but they were too far away to reach.

Stuber had stopped. “Perry, might could use your shield here.”

Perry sidled around him and activated his shield in a broad square that covered all of them, then began advancing forward.

The legionnaires didn’t hesitate, or wait for an order. They immediately opened fire, raking the surface of Perry’s shield with impacts that sizzled and sparked. There were five legionnaires, all firing on automatic.

Perry continued to press forward, his friends hunched behind him, staying on his heels. He kept moving, kept putting one foot in front of the other, while his shield steadily weakened under the onslaught, and the crowd behind them got closer and closer.

“Mala!” Perry called out over the deluge of gunfire. “Shield our backs from the crowd!”

He kept his focus forward and hoped that she’d heard him.

The rolling gunfire stopped abruptly. Perry heard the call of “Reloading!” coming from several legionnaires. He took that opportunity to stop and yell, as loud as he could manage.

“Cease fire!” He really had no idea if they would listen to him, but it was worth a shot. “I need to speak to Legatus Mordicus!”

The line of five legionnaires readied again, their rifles reloaded, but the one in the center pulled back and waved a hand in front of his face. “Hold fire! Hold fire!”

Perhaps he’d figured it was pointless to waste their precious ammunition. Which was really great for Perry, considering he was doubtful his shield would withstand a second barrage, and certainly not a third. Not something he needed to let them know, however.

He took that moment to look behind him.

Mala stood at their backs, her shield extended in a mirror of Perry’s covering the group from the crowd. A few objects were thrown and fizzled harmlessly into sparks and dust. The riotous mob continued to encroach, but the hurling of things stopped.

Back forward again. “Legionnaire!” Perry yelled. “We just came from Legatus Mordicus! He saw us at the temple, and we made an arrangement with him! I’m here to see that arrangement through. Are you going to stop me?”

At this point, there was perhaps fifty yards between them, and it was difficult to make yourself heard with the rabble screeching and shouting behind them. But the legionnaire in charge was accustomed to giving orders in the heat of battle. His voice came through clear enough.

“Who the hell are all those people behind you? And is that a demigod?”

“Uh, well…” Perry blinked sweat out of his eyes. There wasn’t much sense in lying at this point. “Yes, that’s a demigod, and that’s kind of why the people behind us are so pissed.”

The legionnaire glared at him. “And are you a demigod too?”

“No, just a half-breed runt.” Perry shook his head, stepping closer, getting angrier. “Look, I’m really trying not to kill you or the people behind me, but you’re not leaving me a lot of options!”

Hesitation. A brief conference between the legionnaire and one of his comrades, huddled behind their shields for a moment. Then the legionnaire poked his head back up.

“Are you the fuck that cut Boomer’s arms off?”

Perry shifted uncomfortably. “He was trying to kill me! What was I supposed to do? I told him not to fuck with me!”

The legionnaire smiled broadly. “Good for you, Runt. I never liked Boomer anyways. Come on.”

Perry was so surprised, he just stood there for a moment.

Stuber nudged him in the back. “I believe that’s an invitation.”

Perry shook his head again, pushing forward. “You legionnaires are weird.”

As they began to move again, the brief stalemate from the crowd shattered, and they began to swarm behind, hurling things at Mala again, trying to arc them over her shield, though she adjusted and caught them—child’s play for her.

Perry stopped again when his shield was just a pace or so from the muzzle of the legionnaire’s rifles. The one that appeared to be in command of the squad—a decanus, right? Wasn’t that what Stuber said they were called?—stood up fully behind the wall of metal shields.

“Alright, Runt. I didn’t like Boomer, but he was a legionnaire, so don’t think for a godsdamned second that we’re friends here.”

Perry rolled his eyes. “Of course not.”

“That said, I’m gonna let you through.”

“What about the mob?”

The decanus frowned at them, then gave Perry a look like he was being an idiot. “What about the mob? This is a squad of fully armed and armored legionnaires. If we can’t withstand a few hundred civilians with bricks, then we deserve to die.”

“Are you going to shoot them?”

“Maybe. I hadn’t decided yet. What do you care anyways? Looks like they want you dead.”

“Yeah, well, I’m just trying to keep this shit show from devolving any further.”

The decanus shrugged. “That’s up to them and Legatus Mordicus. Do you want through or not?”

Perry grit his teeth. All those idiot peons behind them—would they be smart enough not to press their luck with the legionnaires? “Yes, we want through.”

“Then extinguish your shield on my mark and scamper your ass in here. Legionnaires, make a hole on my mark. Mark!”

The legionnaires in front of Perry immediately split in half, creating a narrow doorway to squeeze through their shield. Perry pulled himself back from his clasp, his own shield winking out, and slipped through.

As Stuber, Petra, and Teran came through the hole, Perry shouted to Mala, “We’re through! Pull your shield down and run!”

Mala turned, saw that they’d gone through a gap in the shields, and ran for it. At the very last second, she extinguished her energy shield and slipped through, gasping for air.

The squad of legionnaires immediately closed ranks with a reverberating slam of shields.

The decanus cast one wary look at Mala, then turned to the mob.

“Legatus Mordicus wishes to deal with these people himself! I suggest you turn your asses right back around before I turn you all into a meat carpet.”

Perry craned his neck to see over the top of the shields, but Mala grabbed him by the arm and forced him around, pushing him onward. Stuber, Petra, and Teran were already picking up the pace again, heading into the New Section.

The shouting from the mob didn’t stop, but Perry was heartened that the sound of gunfire never reached him. Maybe humanity could save themselves after all.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DESPERATE MEASURES

Lucky was in shock. His face had that half-conscious expression that told Perry that most of his brain power was being used on untangling everything he’d just witness. It struck Perry that, not so long ago, he would have had a similar reaction.

Perry wasn’t sure how long this guy was going to be sticking around, but he figured it behooved him to try and get Lucky’s feet back on the ground. They were moving through the New Section, approaching the Temple from the rear—so as to avoid the bloodthirsty crowd clustered around the temple square. Perry didn’t hear the calls from the crowd, so perhaps they’d already killed all the flamens and gone their merry ways.

He touched Lucky’s shoulder, causing the man to jump. Teran caught the movement and glanced at Perry, curious.

“You alright, Lucky?” Perry asked.

Lucky stared at him for a few strides. Seemed to realize that he was slack-jawed, and snapped his mouth shut. “There’s a lot to take in.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Lucky turned to Teran. “And you’re okay with all of this?”

Teran frowned. “All of what?”

“Working with paladins. Working with legionnaires.” Lucky looked put off by it. “That’s not the Teran I knew.”

Teran’s expression flattened out. “The Teran you knew has learned a lot and been forced to change her worldview.”

“The Teran I knew would’ve never abandoned her people.”

Perry winced, knowing that Lucky had stumbled upon the exact words that guaranteed an explosive response. Which Lucky received in the form of a stiff blow to the chest.

Lucky rocked back on his heels, coming to a stop. Teran thrust a finger in his face, all fury and hurt feelings. “Don’t think that just because you’ve got a burn on your face, I won’t beat the fuck out of you, Lucky! Everything I’ve done I’ve done for my people!”

Lucky rubbed his sternum, looking betrayed. “Then where are we going right now?”

The others had stopped and were looking at them, Stuber in particular seeming more annoyed than the two women beside him.

“We’re going to see Legatus Mordicus,” Teran snapped. “So that we don’t get torn apart by rioters.”

“No.” Lucky shook his head and pointed at Mala. “So that she doesn’t get torn apart. This had nothing to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with me. And the Outsiders.”

Lucky’s expression softened. Became pleading. “Then come back with me, Teran. Tell them everything you’ve learned. If things are the way you claim they are, then come back and explain it to us.”

“Should we wait?” Stuber called out, his voice curt. “How long is this going to take?”

Teran held Lucky’s gaze for another moment, then whirled away from him. “We’re done. Come on.”

For a moment, Perry thought Lucky might just leave them right then and there. But he grumbled something under his breath and tagged along.

Perry glowered at the back of his head as he took up the rear. Here he’d spent all this time trying to get Teran to focus on the big picture—you know, survival of the human race—and along comes Lucky, that asshole, to begin casting doubts into her mind again.

He had half a mind to clip his heels off with his longstaff blade and leave him lame on the sidewalk. But he figured that would only make Teran angrier. More likely to side with Lucky.

She’s smart, Perry told himself. She’ll figure it out.

Their small procession turned the final block to the back of the temple grounds and came to a dead stop in front of a wall of legionnaires. They didn’t stand as readily as they had against the crowd earlier, but it was clear they were still keeping a tight perimeter around the temple.

Perry picked up the pace and caught up to Stuber at the front.

“You again?” one of the legionnaires said, looking at Stuber first, then Perry. “Didn’t we just get rid of you two?” His eyes caught onto Mala. “And what the fuck is this she-beast behind you?”

Neither Stuber nor Perry spoke for a brief moment of surprise. Did this legionnaire really not recognize a demigod when he saw one? Or was he just screwing with them?

Mala didn’t look particularly god-like, that was true. She was hunched around her wound, her black hair hanging in sweaty tangles around a pale and drawn face. Her battle attire was scuffed and dusty—no longer black, but more of a dusky tan.

But still. You don’t see many seven-foot-tall women.

“Well, that’s rude,” Petra spoke into the silence.

The legionnaire—probably another decanus—fixed Petra with a lecherous gaze. “Not you, love. The giant behind you.”

Still, Mala remained silent. Possibly she didn’t have the energy for a retort.

Stuber seemed ready to throw himself over the shield and tackle the decanus, but Petra wisely stayed him with a gentle hand. She could be quite regal when she wanted to be. That still stuck out to Perry—the total mismatch between husband and wife.

“I’m the only doctor in Karapalida at the moment, and that giantess behind me is one my patients. I’ve come here because…” she cast a furtive glance in Perry’s direction. “…I heard one one of your men got their arms chopped off. I believe Legatus Mordicus would like me to have a look at him.”

Smart.

Perry decided to keep his mouth shut and let Petra do the talking. By silent consent, Stuber seemed to agree.

“Ah.” The decanus shook his head. “Poor ol’ Boomer.” He cast a withering glance at Perry. “That was dirty, what you did.”

Perry immediately forgot about letting Petra do all the talking, and opened his mouth to explain to the decanus just how—

“Be that as it may,” Petra said with an air of authority. “These kind gentlemen have escorted me safely through the untrustworthy rabble in the Old Section so that I can tend to…Boomer.”

The decanus sighed. He seemed perhaps a hair disappointed that this wasn’t going to turn into anything action-packed. “Alright. Fine.” He wish-washed his hand through the air. “Let ‘em through.”

As the rank of legionnaires parted and the group sidled through, the decanus took up position next to Petra, graciously—or perhaps ingratiatingly—offering his arm. “I’ll escort you to the legatus, love.”

That was about as much as Stuber could take. He interjected himself sharply between the decanus and Petra. “Retract your filthy arm from the vicinity of my wife.”

The decanus smirked. “It’s not battlefield rules in here, deserter. You can’t just claim a woman.” Looking past Stuber in the most dismissive way possible: “Ma’am, is this wayward creature bothering you?”

Petra gave the man a withering look. “No, my husband is not bothering me.”

“Well.” The decanus seemed unwilling to back off, and Perry felt the tension heating up in the nearly nonexistent air between Stuber’s body and the legionnaire’s. By Perry’s best guesstimation, this was about two sharp words from turning into a fight to the death. “I’ll have to escort you anyways. Can’t just have random people roaming about inside my perimeter, all willy-nilly.”

“Decanus Mercutio,” a loud voice called out from the temple.

All eyes flicked to the back steps of the temple, where Legatus Mordicus stood looking sternly down on them.

“Let them through,” Mordicus ordered.

Stuber wasted no time in giving the decanus a mild shoulder to create space. “Mercutio, huh? Isn’t that a taken name?” Stuber smiled antagonistically. “I didn’t think real legionnaires had time to be true believers. You must be reserves.”

Perry pushed him on. “That’s enough, Stuber.”

It wasn’t enough for Stuber. “Don’t worry, little reservists! I actually fought for my bread. I’ll try to save you when the machines come back.”

The decanus looked like his hair might catch fire, but he wouldn’t do anything under the gaze of his legatus. As they mounted the steps to the back of the temple, Perry’s eyes went up to Mordicus, fearing that the man would be angry with Stuber.

Instead, he was smirking, a small, knowing smile.

“Decanus Mercutio,” Mordicus said as they reached him. “Was indeed a reservist.”

Stuber grunted. “I could smell it on him.”

Mordicus’s eyes narrowed. “And that would make you a front line soldier.”

Perry watched carefully and saw the glint in Stuber’s expression—a knife blade of thought, slicing through Mordicus’s verbal trap. Because a front line soldier for The Light would have, at some point in their career, killed many of Mordicus’s men.

Not that any of that mattered any more, but Perry was relieved to see Stuber sidestep the question. “Not for many years, legatus.” Stuber put on a painfully innocent smile. “I’m just a washed-up has-been.”

“Hm.” Mordicus sniffed. “Indeed.” He turned to Petra. “I see you’ve found your lovely wife and the only doctor within the city. Why, may I ask, are you back here?” He turned after asking the question, as though he didn’t care about the answer and started walking back into the temple.

Perry and the others looked amongst themselves, confused, but then decided to start following Mordicus.

That was apparently the correct decision, as Mordicus started talking again. “Of course, I overheard the reason you gave Mercutio, but we both know there’s not much you can do for Boomer unless you’re an expert in prosthetics.”

“I’m unfortunately not,” Petra admitted.

“So why are you here?”

They were entering the main hall of the temple. The massive chasm surrounded by stone representations of the Nine. A few squads of legionnaires occupied the space, one down by the front entrance, the others lounging in the shadows between the statues, and another picking their way through the offerings at the feet of Annad.

Perry hustled forward to be abreast of Mordicus—he didn’t like trailing behind and speaking to the man’s back. Mordicus gave him a frown like he was a mangy dog begging for scraps. “We ran into a bit of a problem back in the Old Section.”

Mordicus stopped at a table that had once been used as an altar, but now had all its religious trapping swept off into a pile, and was laid with a few projected monitors, glowing starkly blue and oddly anachronistic in the torch-lit gloom of the temple.

“You must mean the demigod you have trailing along the back of your pack, as though I can’t see her seven foot frame.”

Perry swallowed. Nodded. “Yes. That’s what I mean.”

After a brief silence wherein Mordicus perused a few readouts that made little sense to Perry, he turned and squared himself to his guest. “Can you use that longstaff you’re carrying, or is it just for looks?”

Perry glanced down at it, surprised at the question. Why else would you carry a longstaff except to use it? “Yes, I can use it.”

“Show me.”

Perry frowned at him. “In here?”

“Why not? This place is worthless to me except as a defensive stronghold. One bolt from your longstaff won’t bring it crumbling down. Perhaps you can remove the face of one of these false gods.” Mordicus looked thoughtfully up at them. “How about Rennok, the peacemaker?”

“I’m not entirely sure that’s smart.”

Mordicus didn’t reply outside a quirked eyebrow, as though to say, are you calling me dumb?

Perry sighed, and then all at once hefted the longstaff, pointed it at the face of Rennok, across the hall, and fired off a rapid, low-powered bolt.

Low-powered it might have been, but it still drew quite a reaction. The blaze of green energy smashed the visage from Rennok’s statue into a gout of dust, causing the legionnaires present to shout in surprise, weapons coming up.

Mordicus didn’t even flinch. As pieces of molten stone splashed to the ground and cooled, he held his hand up to his legionnaires in a silent order to hold their fire. Then he gave Perry the slightest inclination of his head.

“Very well. Tell me about this trouble you ran into.”

The rapid and near-constant change of conversational directions had Perry on his heels. Which was, perhaps, what Mordicus wanted, for reasons that were beyond Perry. Maybe he was just being a dick. Perry shook his head as though to clear it, then refocused himself.

“Some people from the Old Section heard that we had a demigod in the clinic. She’d been wounded fighting one of the Guardians last night, so we took her to see Petra—that’s the doctor. And…well, a riot sort of happened.”

“A riot sort of happened,” Mordicus echoed with a wry smirk. “Indeed.” He raised his gaze to the group of Perry’s friends, still standing a few paces away. “Paladin,” he called out, raising his hand. “Will you speak with us?”

Oddly formal, Perry thought. But old habits died hard. Or Mordicus was trying to get their guard down so he could kill Mala himself. Perry tightened his grip on his longstaff, prepared for whatever might happen.

Mala strode through, still not looking half like a paladin. Worn and weathered and wounded. Her longstaff clanking alongside of her like a crutch while her other hand clutched her belly. She stopped in front of them and managed, with a deep breath, to draw herself up and look imperiously down at Mordicus.

“What is it that you want, legatus?” she said, her tone neither friendly nor hostile.

Mordicus eyed her up and down. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer.”

She sniffed, looking away. “I’ve dealt with worse.”

“Your people abandoned us.”

She met his gaze again, placid. “That’s true.”

“They presented themselves as warriors, and then when the war came, they turned into cowards, every one.”

A nod. “Also true.”

Mordicus looked troubled. “You don’t defend them?”

“Why should I? They are responsible for their own actions. I’ve spent the better part of my life training and attempting to warn others to do the same. To be ready for the day when the Watcher would unleash its Guardians on us because the paladins had grown weak.” She shrugged. “They didn’t listen.”

“You would have me believe that you’re different?”

“I don’t particularly care what you believe, legatus. Your eyes tell you the truth more than any words I can say. Or have you seen other paladins amongst you in bloodied and broken armor? Have there been others that were willing to fight and die alongside the humans?”

“Hm,” was Mordicus’s response. A long moment of silent thought, and then, “You two.” A finger flicked between Perry and Mala. “You’ll be useful to the cause of securing ourselves against the Guardians.”

Mala shook her head. “I fought a Guardian last night. And lost. As you can see.”

“Perhaps. But you did survive. And now there are two of you.”

“It’s still not enough,” Mala said. “When the Guardians return, there may be more than one.”

“Are you refusing to help?”

“No, I’m simply saying that we won’t do as much good as you think.”

“Which brings me to the autoturrets.” Mordicus shifted his attention to Perry. “And ammunition to load them with.”

“I haven’t had a chance to find the man I told you about,” Perry said. “And he’s not here. If he’s anywhere, he’ll be in Junction City. I can go and find him for you, as we agreed, but I’d like Mala to come with me. Which leaves you back at square one, with no demigods to help your fight.”

Mordicus shook his head. “No, you will go to Junction City alone. Paladin Mala will remain here and assist in making sure we’re not overrun.”

Perry’s eyes narrowed. “All due respect, legatus, but Mala’s in no shape to fight.”

“Speak for yourself, Halfbreed,” Mala snapped. “Even wounded I’m twice the fighter you are.”

Perry looked tiredly at her. “So I keep being told.”

“It’s settled then,” Mordicus said, airily, and turned back to his projections. “Mala will stay and assist, and you will go to Junction City and return as soon as possible with whoever this man is that can reload my autoturrets.”

“That brings up something else,” Perry said. “I worked on his crew. I know a thing or two about the reloading process myself, and the equipment that this man can bring to the table. If he’s fully equipped—which I can’t promise he will be—then he’ll have enough projectiles to reload maybe half of what you need to run those autoturrets in a full-on battle with the Guardians.”

“Interesting,” Mordicus gruffed. “You hadn’t mentioned this caveat before.”

“Well, I’m mentioning it now. You’re going to need bullets. A lot of them.”

“And where would you like for me to find this mystical stockpile of projectiles?” Mordicus rounded on him. “Supply lines are destroyed. Manufactories are likely destroyed with them and it would take too long to hunt them down and return with the goods.”

“I understand that. But you have a whole city in ruins, which means you have a lot of scrap to melt down.”

Mordicus considered this, but then shook his head. “Steel would wear the barrels down after a single engagement.”

“Not steel,” Perry shook his head. “Melting point is too high for casting and you’re right—it’ll fuck up your guns. But all throughout this city there’s copper. Pipes, wiring—nearly every home in the Old Section has massive copper conduits pulling from the power hubs. Not to mention the power hubs themselves. The New Section is crammed full of wiring. The godsdamned jumbotron probably has enough copper in it for a few thousand rounds. It’s not the ideal substance for bullets, but it’ll do in a pinch and it’s readily available. And it won’t fuck up your guns.”

Mordicus squinted at him. “You seem to be a man of surprisingly varied skills.”

“While I’m flattered, you’ve pretty much seen them all at this point: Fighting, reloading bullets, and shooting this longstaff. But I am surprised to be using the reloading skill again. I’d thought that was behind me.”

Mordicus turned back to his array of projections and swiped a finger across one, changing the display to what looked to Perry like an aerial map of Karapalida. It was not current, he noted—at least not from the last day or so. The buildings were all still whole.

“Very well,” Mordicus said. “This place is filled to the brim with peons with nothing better to do with themselves. Might as well put them to work scavenging copper. But how do you intend to cast them?”

Perry smiled. “I’m glad you asked. I’ve been thinking about this since you asked for more ammunition. Casting actual bullets will be out of the question—it’ll take too long and we don’t have the equipment for it here in Karapalida. The nearest bullet forge I’m aware of is out west, near Rotroka. They’re too far and they’ve probably been wiped out anyways. But…”

Perry leaned forward and gestured to the map of Karapalida before them. “There’s a pipe and wiring foundry on the north side, right on the line between the Old and New Sections. If you can get someone with a little technical expertise—and if the Guardians haven’t completely trashed the place—you can probably recalibrate their wire extruder to form copper lengths with a point-four-five inch diameter. You cut those into one and a half inch lengths and you’ve got solid copper four-five-eight-caliber slugs.” Perry felt a wash of satisfaction at seeing Mordicus raise his eyebrows and blink a few times as though impressed. “They won’t be very accurate, but an autoturret can compensate for accuracy with volume.”

“I see.” Mordicus placed a thoughtful finger to his lips. “There were a lot of perhapses and maybes in that theory.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the best I can do.”

“And I’m not sure if I have anyone with any technical expertise in this field. We might be able to locate the foundry workers, but I have the suspicion they’re dead with the vast majority of people that got wiped out in the first wave of Guardians.”

“Those are all good reasons why this might not work,” Perry admitted. “But all we can do is try. It’s either we figure this out, or I can only guarantee you a half-load for your autoturrets. And I want to see us take down those Guardians just as much as you do.”

Mordicus issued a heavy breath from his nose. “Very well. I suppose I have my work cut out for me. As do you.”

Perry nodded, his brief moment of positivity replaced with a sudden crash of doubts. There seemed to be too many things to get done, and they had no idea when the Guardians would return. They only knew that they would return. And Perry had the sneaking suspicion that the more people gathered in Karapalida, the more the Guardians would seek to return.

“If you’ll excuse me, legatus,” Perry said, stepping away. “Time is short.”

“Indeed it is.”

Mala fell into step beside Perry. “You sure you want to go to Junction City alone?”

“I won’t be going alone,” Perry said. “I’ll have Teran and Stuber with me.” He said this as he approached his friends, and he watched their eyes fix onto him as they heard it.

He glanced at Mala, suddenly unsure.

Mala gave him a look that seemed to say, You might want to double-check that.

Perry frowned, whipping around to the others. “Wait. I am going to have Teran and Stuber with me. Right?”

Their answers seemed to come in the form of how close they stood next to the people they were with. Stuber, shoulder to shoulder with Petra. Teran and Lucky standing at a slightly less intimate distance, but obviously a pair.

Stuber was the first to speak. “I already told you, Perry, everything I’ve done I’ve done to get back to her. I’m not leaving Petra’s side. If she wants to come to Junction City, then that’s fine. But I’m not leaving her alone again.”

Perry shot a pleading look at Petra, but she was already shaking her head.

“I’m a doctor, Perry. I go where I’m needed. And right now the people of Karapalida need me.”

“The people of Junction City might need you too!”

“Maybe. But I don’t know that. It makes no sense to trade one group of wounded for another. I’ve already begun working here, and I need to finish that work.”

Desperately, Perry looked to Teran. She seemed to take a step away from him.

“Perry, look…”

“Oh, gods in the skies. Are you serious?”

“I’ve been talking with Lucky.”

Perry glared at Lucky, briefly considering disintegrating him and only then realizing that what he felt was…jealousy? The realization of that shocked him so much that he snapped his mouth shut, discomfited with his own epiphany.

“Just like Stuber, I’ve been working towards trying to save my people. That’s what this has been about for me. And now they need me.”

“Guys.” Perry squeezed his eyes shut, unable to look at them. He held up his hands as though to keep them from walking away from him. “I still need you. This isn’t done. Our work isn’t done. You can’t all just pack up and go your separate ways—not when we’re this close!”

“You don’t need us, Shortstack,” Stuber sighed. “Trust me, admitting that you can survive without me wounds my heart, but it’s true nonetheless. I’m confident in you.”

Perry opened his eyes, seeing little hazy pinpoints from how hard he’d squeezed them shut. “Two days ago, you all got on my ass about being a team player and all that shit. Now, when I need you, you’re going to abandon me?”

“But you don’t need us,” Teran asserted. “At least, you don’t need us any more than my people need me, and Stuber’s wife needs him.”

Petra cast a sidelong glance at Teran. “I’ve survived many years while Stuber was a fugitive. I don’t need him.” She patted Stuber’s hand. “But it’s still nice to have you.”

“There!” Perry seized on it desperately. “She doesn’t need you, Stuber.”

“I know she doesn’t,” he said, not in the least bit argumentative. Completely calm, which irritated the hell out of Perry. “That’s never been the issue. But if I leave, and I lose her again?” he shook his head. “I couldn’t do it, Perry.”

“Perry,” Teran said, taking a half step forward. “There’s something else.”

Perry looked to the ceiling. “Of course.”

“I need the skiff.”

He snapped his head back down. “No, I need the skiff. To get to Junction City.”

Teran’s jaw muscles bunched, a little of that familiar fire coming back to her otherwise supplicating expression. “I need the skiff to get back to the Outsiders. It’s the only way I’ll be able to find them. You at least know where you’re going.” She raised a triumphant finger. “And…you can do that flying thing.”

“I can’t,” Perry snapped. “I haven’t figured out how.”

“I can teach you,” Mala said.

“Not helping my argument, Mala.”

“Perhaps your argument is invalid.”

Perry slumped into silence. The others seemed not to know what to say in that moment. Perhaps they felt a little guilty. But not guilty enough to change course. He sensed that in the air between them, in the way they let that silence stretch, let the finality of it settle on their runty little friend.

There was a part of him that wanted to get furious and tell them all to go fuck themselves, he’d handle it on his own. As though it was still an option not to handle it on his own. But there is something about living at the cusp of what might be the end of everything. It creates a sort of forced perspective where you constantly see things in the light of who you might lose next.

He did not want anger to be the last words that passed between any of them.

So he squared his shoulders and put on a confident face, though he felt anything but. “You guys are right. I can handle this. And you both need to do what you think is the right thing. I get that.”

Both Teran and Stuber, well-accustomed by this point to Perry’s verbal sallies, squinted at him, waiting for another statement designed to right-hook them.

“And?” Stuber pressed.

Perry forced a smile. “And nothing. I’m done talking. That’s all I wanted to say. That and…” a brief moment where they almost seemed glad that he was about to right-hook them. “…be safe. Both of you. Teran, you’re going out to who-knows where. Keep your head on a swivel. Stuber, I know you don’t need any tactical advice. Just stay alive. You and Petra.”

“That is my intention,” Stuber said, after a moment’s surprised pause.

Any further intimations were cut off by the sound of the temple doors slamming open.

All eyes immediately went to the bright square of daylight pouring in. And the legionnaire charging through, yelling: “Legatus! There’s a few hundred peons at our lines, demanding you turn over a paladin! I tried to tell them there was no paladin, but—”

The rest of his words caught in his throat as his eyes fell on Mala.

Mordicus turned languidly to him. “Centurion.”

“Sir.” The legionnaire seemed unable to rip his eyes from Mala. “Is that…? Is she…?”

“A paladin? It would seem so.”

“Oh. Well.” The legionnaire blinked rapidly, his anger towards the demigods clashing visibly with his loyalty to Mordicus. Loyalty won out. “What would you have me do, sir?”

Mordicus waved a dismissive hand. “They’re in no position to make demands of me. Fire on them until they disperse.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

VALUABLE LESSONS

Perry shot forward. “Hey, whoa, wait a minute!”

The legionnaire, who had partially turned away to carry out his order, stopped and turned back, confused. Mordicus looked at Perry, piqued. “What is it now?”

“You can’t fire on a crowd of civilians,” Perry grated out.

“I can do that which I see fit to maintain the security of my headquarters. Unless you would like to turn Mala over to them.”

“Mala,” Mala said loudly, hefting her longstaff defiantly. “Will not be turned over to anyone, and I challenge you to force the issue.”

“There, you see?” Mordicus smiled. “She doesn’t want to be turned over to the rabble. Centurion, you may carry out my orders.”

Perry pressed himself closer to the legatus, holding one hand out and trying not to be threatening with his longstaff. “We can’t keep killing each other. We’re on the brink of being wiped out by the Guardians—let’s not make it any easier for them! And besides, these are the people you’re trying to enlist to scavenge up enough material for bullets! Firing into a crowd of them is not going to help things.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. A little fear goes a long way in keeping people neat and orderly.”

Perry had to summon a lot of control to keep himself neat and orderly at that moment. “Legatus Mordicus, I am trying to keep people alive and working together. That is the most important thing right now. At least give them a chance. At least talk to them. If they continue to act out, then…then…” he couldn’t quiet bring himself to say it.

“Then I’ll fire into them until they disperse,” Mordicus sighed. “Very well. Paladin Mala, Perry, please come with me. Best to have it all out in the open, I suppose.”

***

They strode out into the harsh daylight. After the sepulchral torchlight of the temple, it took a moment for Perry’s eyes to adjust and for things to clarify. The noise hit him before any visuals did.

The sound of lots of angry people.

The second they stepped out, led by Mordicus, the crowd’s volume seemed to double.

It made absolutely no impact on Mordicus. He stomped his way down the steps, glowering into the vibration of hundreds of voices, and Perry had the impression that he gave hailstorms of incoming bullets about as much concern. A few peons shouting meant little to him.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Mala called over the clamor. “Putting me on display like this?”

Mordicus didn’t pause, nor did he turn around. When he spoke, his voice wasn’t a shout, but it was projected, as Perry expected it was during the din of battle. “I will not be beholden to ungrateful peons.”

They approached the rear of the lines of legionnaires, holding steady with their shields in a wall, their rifles ported behind the barrier. The centurion hustled around Perry and Mala and took up a spot at his commander’s shoulder.

Perry couldn’t hear what Mordicus said this time—only the flippant wave of his arms as he marched forward.

The centurion looked surprised, but turned and bellowed: “Split the line! Legatus Mordicus is coming through!”

Perry’s eyebrows went up and he exchanged a glance with Mala. So, Mordicus wasn’t even going to stand behind the barrier of his legionnaires. And, apparently, neither was Perry or Mala. Of course, they had their own shields, but Perry still didn’t relish the idea of being face to face with an angry mob.

The line of legionnaires split, directly in front of Mordicus. He strode briskly through, followed by Perry and Mala, just a step or two back from him.

Just as Mordicus was coming to a halt in front of the crowd, Perry spotted a rock arcing through the air. He thought a curse but didn’t have time to say it. He jolted forward, thinking he would extend his shield—but he didn’t think he could do it without clipping Mordicus in the process…

Mordicus snatched the stone out of midair.

Perry winced at the dull thwack of flesh, audible even over the crowd, and knew that it must have hurt, through Mordicus didn’t even twitch. The front of the crowd that was only a few paces from him drew back in shock, going silent, and that silence swept backwards in a wave until an unearthly calm had settled on the temple square.

Perry stopped at Mordicus’s right shoulder, Mala beside him.

Mordicus still held the stone in the air, right where he’d caught it. Then he let it fall. As his palm opened, Perry spied a deep gash in the skin, already flowing red. Mordicus said nothing as the stone clattered to the ground. He kept his hand upraised and slowly clenched his fist. The blood began to drip out in a steady trickle, dribbling on the street.

Mordicus watched the blood dripping, flashing crimson in the sunlight. His expression was that of an angry father dealing with petulant children. Daddy Mordicus indeed.

“Legatus Mordicus,” he said, projecting his voice again, still watching the blood as the drips slowed in his balled fist. “Come into our city and restore order, you said. Legatus Mordicus, protect us from the machines, you said. Legatus Mordicus, free us from the tyranny of the flamens and their false gods. You said these things. Begged them of me.”

Silence.

Perry could hear each drop of blood as it hit the pavement.

Mordicus stepped forward, his fist unclenching. A man at the front of the crowd stared at him in something like reverence, and something like terror. The man took a half step back, but Mordicus was undeterred. He placed his bloody palm upon the man’s chest and smeared red across it with a sneer of disgust.

“I have done all of the things that you begged of me,” he said, standing toe-to-toe with the motionless crowd. “And now this?” Rage flashed across his features like lightning in a storm cloud. “This is how you repay me and my legionnaires? Stones and insults and demands?” He turned his back on the crowd, stepped over to his small puddle of blood and then turned back to them, pointing down at it. “That is my blood. Take a good look at it. You will not draw another drop from me, but that I give you for free. The next time you see blood on these stones it will be your own. You think because I was kind to you that I’m incapable of slaughtering every man, woman, and child in this place? What is it that you think I have been doing the past fifty years of my life? Drinking wine and pushing pieces around a gameboard?” He shook his head at them. “No. I’ve been killing.”

Mordicus swept his wrathful gaze across those gathered, and Perry noted that many of them refused to look him in the eyes. Mordicus took a big breath, and his tone became more conversational. “Now, I was of a mind to slaughter those of you who are gathered here in the temple square, but I was asked to grant you mercy. Do you know who pled with me for your lives?”

Mordicus pointed at Perry and Mala. “A halfbreed demigod, and a paladin. The very same paladin you thought you wanted dead. Now, I understand your anger towards the paladins. It is justified, and I share it. However, I am a reasonable man, and it has been shown to me that these two have not acted like the other paladins, and have in fact risked their lives to fight back against the machines. And so I have decided to let them stay, and I have decided that they are going to help us. My judgment in this matter is final. If any of you bear a grievance towards me on this matter, then make yourself known.”

One brave—or idiotic—man stepped out of the crowd, his face all screwed up with consternation. He pointed to Mala. “She’s still a paladin! She’s one of them! She can’t be trusted!”

Mordicus pointed to the man and the next thing that Perry knew he was spinning backwards, blood ribboning out of three bullet holes to the chest. The rapid-fire report echoed off the buildings.

Perry’s stomach sank and he snapped his eyes up to the crowd, wondering if this was what was going to restart the riot. But instead, the crowd stepped back again with a breathy murmur of dismay.

Mordicus lowered his chin, looking at the crowd like he was fully capable of charging into them at that very moment, swinging a sword through their bodies. “My judgment. On this matter. Is final.” A tilt of the head. “Are there any other grievances that need to be brought to my attention?”

The back of the crowd was already breaking apart, some of the people sauntering away as though they had just remembered something more important to do, while others put a little bit more speed into their steps, trying to get out of the temple square before more bullets started flying.

“Good.” Mordicus relaxed again. “Since you are already here, I am in need of a work detail to scavenge some important materials to aid us in the fight against the machines. Since you all seem to have an excess of energy to spend, I think you will all make fine workers. Centurion Procella will give you the details.”

He spun around with no further ado, stopped, and politely gestured towards the gap in the line. “Paladin Mala. Perry. If you please.”

***

Of the nine houses that populated The Clouds, there were nearly two thousand paladins.

In the beginning, when they had first separated themselves from humanity and gone to live on their floating city over the ocean, there had been less. But every one of them had possessed Confluence.

Now, five hundred years later, nearly a third of the population was un-Gifted. With each generation, more and more offspring were born in The Clouds that did not possess Confluence. It was an ability, it seemed, that was slowly being bred out of them, their bloodlines now so far removed from their forefathers that sat in the auditorium.

Senex of House Batu stood at the entrance of the auditorium, looking out at those gathered. There were over six hundred of them there. The official number was unknown to him. He had simply spread the word that the Nine Sons of Primus expected all of the houses to send their un-Gifted to the auditorium. To be shown the way.

Senex’s mind was rife with concerns, but so many of them were centered upon his own survival. Had he conducted himself as the Nine had expected? Would they be enraged by the large number of un-Gifted? Would they take that out on Senex? Or would they be pleased that he had so quickly coordinated what they had requested?

White-robed paladins, that were not truly paladins at all, but just shadows of what they were supposed to be. Tall and long-living, but without abilities. They had spent their entire lives here on The Clouds, because they could not be sent down to the humans—only the Confluent were sent down as demigods.

So they had lived in luxury, never having to lift a finger to support the structure of mythology that granted them their position of power on this earth. They’d grown happy, and complacent, and weak.

Mala was always going on about it. Now he wondered how right she’d been to fear their growing weakness. They were now facing beings that possessed Confluence in ways that they could only imagine. And it was obvious to Senex—though he had not related this to anyone else—that the Nine were not pleased with this weakness.

There was a palpable air of uncertainty to the entire gathering. All of these un-Gifted, that knew they were the weakest of their bloodlines, many of their expressions bore anxiety for what would come next. Others looked hopeful. The Nine had, after all, said that they would show them the ways of the gods.

A squire from House Rennok approached Senex, flipping away a projection that floated along with him. “All are gathered, Paladin Senex. Would you like for me to notify the Nine?”

“No,” Senex said, a little quickly. Then, after a breath, more calmly: “No. I’ll go in and speak with them first. You may come with me if you would like.”

The squire looked briefly terrified, but nodded.

Senex turned and strode through the gates of the auditorium, down the long, vaulting tunnel into the main arena that the Nine Sons of Primus had made into their throne room.

He remembered acutely their disdain for his simpering behavior last time. He was determined not to repeat that mistake.

“Squire,” he said.

“Yes, Paladin Senex?”

“Are you Confluent?”

“All squires for House Rennok are required to be so.”

Senex nodded. “When we enter, do so with confidence. Keep your head up. Don’t bow.”

“Don’t bow?”

“Don’t,” Senex confirmed, then entered the auditorium and strode towards the center with his shoulders back and his head up, his old back tightening and complaining—he would have much preferred to sit.

He kept his eyes forward, as though he was unconcerned with the massive beings sprawled out across the vast chamber. But out of his periphery he saw their attention on him—felt it, like a heat on the back of his neck. A heat that emanated from the green glow of their eyes.

He stopped in the very center of the auditorium. Turned first to his left, then to his right. “I have done as you requested,” he announced, trying to project as much strength into his voice as he could—a pale comparison to how it used to sound in his early years.

As he looked around at the strange figures surrounding him, he noted that they all sat in the same places as last time. Had they even moved from their spots? They had not left the auditorium, of that Senex was sure. Did they just sit here endlessly? Did they even speak to each other when they were alone? Or were their minds fixed on a different time and place?

Are they all mad?

Senex recognized Batu when he stirred. The deep, threatening rumble of his voice that Senex could feel in the soles of his feet.

“You have gathered all of your kind that do not possess Confluence?”

Senex met Batu’s gaze and held it with some effort. “I have. As you requested.”

The corners of Batu’s mouth wrinkled. Was that a smile? A smirk? A grimace?

“Good,” Batu said, languidly. A single massive hand swept slowly through the air. “Show them in.”

Senex nodded to the squire, and he shuffled off, moving quickly, as though relieved to be free of the auditorium, though he would only have to come right back in.

One of the huge figures leaned forward, placing an elbow upon its knee and resting its head upon one great fist. Senex recognized Halan the Eldest. “How many are there?”

“Over six hundred,” Senex answered.

Halan gave no response to this, but appeared to be staring at Senex. Was it disbelief in those craggy features? Anger? Or apathy?

Senex cleared his throat. “Can you teach that many?”

Halan reared his head and uttered a laugh that boomed like tectonic plates colliding. He pointed to Batu, across the auditorium. “Brother Batu. Can you teach that many?”

Batu’s teeth shown like steel plates. “It will not be an issue.”

“Pardon my ignorance,” Senex said into the silence that followed. “How are you capable of imparting Confluence? The legends have led me to believe that Confluence can only be passed on through blood.”

“And so it will be,” Batu answered, somewhat flippantly.

Senex’s stomach did a somersault as he heard the treads of many feet, echoing down the corridor. What did Batu mean by that? Did he mean to make them bleed? What sort of horrors were imagined behind the reticulated armor of his skull?

Batu stared at him, perhaps bemused—that was the impression that Senex got. “Worry not, Paladin Senex. I have no intention of spilling the blood of your children.”

Senex inclined his head respectfully—not a bow, just an acknowledgement.

The hundreds of un-Gifted filed their way into the chamber. Senex watched their faces fill with awe. They had seen the arrival of the Nine, but most of them had only caught sight of them at a distance, and ever since, they’d been in the auditorium.

They bunched together as they entered, shoulders rubbing and feet stepping on each other. Where in the passage and outside they had been spread out, now they seemed to make themselves smaller, fearing getting too close to these monstrous beings they called their forefathers.

They looked like a herd of frightened animals to Senex. And he hated them for that. Hated what the gods around him must be thinking as they looked down upon their shameful progeny.

The squire returned to Senex’s side. It didn’t escape Senex that his hands shook and he had to clasp them at his waist to keep them still. Other paladins stood at the entrance to the auditorium. The heads of their houses. Watching to see what might be done for their un-Gifted descendants and offspring.

“Is this all?” Batu rumbled, leaning forward on the edge of the throne he filled.

Senex was unsure if that required an answer. It seemed rhetorical, so he chose to stay silent.

Slowly, Batu’s head shook back and forth. “What shame you must feel to see your sons and daughters so weak. The rulers of this earth, degraded to such a point as to be indistinguishable from the ruled.”

“Have mercy on them, Batu,” Halan said, his voice a basal whisper, like waves crashing on rocks.

“Of course, Halan,” Batu replied. “As always, you are the eldest and wisest.” Batu then stood. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time. Senex watched him rise to his full height, his head seeming capable of brushing the domed ceiling of the auditorium.

Batu raised his hands, and in the open palms, the air began to swirl and glow. “You un-Gifted, shames of your households, I will now teach you the ways of the gods. Watch carefully, for this lesson will only be taught once.”

Batu thrust his right hand towards the rear of the auditorium, and the massive stones that had stood for hundreds of years simply came apart in a rumble and shriek of friction. The air between Batu’s hand and the stones shimmered violently, and the stones shattered, but held together as though lashed by some magnetic power. Slowly, they bowed outwards. Light began to glow between the cracks, and for a moment, Senex thought that it was the green light of Confluence…

No. It was daylight.

The auditorium stood at the edge of The Clouds, and as the stones pressed out and began to separate and fall away, bright sunlight filled the space, and a stark blue sky beyond.

Breathless, unmoving, Senex and every other paladin, both the Gifted and the un-Gifted, stared out at that massive opening, a window, a doorway out into nothing.

What was the lesson? What could possibly be imparted by this show of force, no matter how impressive?

Batu’s left hand then rose up and he made a gesture with it. Just one, single swoop, as Senex might have to flip through images on a projection.

And with that gesture, a wind filled the auditorium—except that it was not wind. It was simply movement. Like the air itself had captured them all and was pulling them along its course, like a river.

Senex stumbled, caught his feet, and resisted the tide.

But it was irresistible to others.

In shock, Senex watched as the hundreds of un-Gifted were lifted off their feet as though by a massive swell, and carried towards the opening in the auditorium.

“Wait!” Senex cried out, but the air had thickened to the point that his words sounded muffled in his own ears. When he looked at the paladins around him, he saw their mouths open in silent cries.

The un-Gifted tumbled over each other, detritus caught in a wave.

And out they went. Every single one of them. They flew into the blue sky—and then they dropped. Flailing arms and legs, looking black against the brightness, and then disappearing.

The wind suddenly died.

The air rushed back into Senex’s lungs in a painful burst. He doubled over, then quickly righted himself, terrified to appear weak. His eyes jagged up to the other paladins—the heads of house that had come to watch, and saw the same horror on his own face mirrored in theirs.

He whirled around, unthinking. His gaze landed on Batu, who still stood with his hands outstretched. “What have you done?” Senex cried, knowing that he risked his own life the second that the words left his mouth. But he was old. Far from death, but he was not a coward either. He had run his course.

Senex tried to rush to the edge of the auditorium, to look back over that great expanse through which the un-Gifted had been ejected. He made it a few steps before a wall of air seemed to encapsulate him, and his movements were like being stuck in tar.

Halan stood up, and for a brief moment, Senex thought that he would rebuke Batu the Trickster, but instead, his attention seemed to be on Senex.

“This is the lesson,” Halan boomed, his voice jarring Senex’s bones. “A god without powers is merely a human. And humans do not live on The Clouds with their rulers. You may think that what we have done is unmerciful, but that is because you have grown weak. You have grown fat and despicable. Our mercy is shown in how we have allowed you to witness this, so that you might not come to the same fate. And so mark this lesson well: weakness has no place amongst us.”

Halan sat down again. The weight of his body rumbled through the stones of the auditorium like a distant explosion. “You may go, and teach this lesson to your peers.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

FLIGHT

“How long is this going to take?” Perry asked, as he and Mala moved to a quiet corner of the temple. “Because it’s kind of urgent that I get to Junction City. I can’t spend another week here learning to fly.”

Mala shrugged. “That depends on how adept you are.”

“Guesstimate for me.”

Mala stopped, looking briefly up at the statue of the Giver of Death—a grim, faceless effigy of someone that hadn’t really existed. “Ten minutes?”

Perry drew back. “What? That fast?”

The rest of his crew had followed him over. He assumed so that they could watch and make him nervous.

“She’s flattering you,” Stuber noted. “Mala, he’s really very clumsy.”

Mala nodded. “I’m aware of his clumsiness.”

Perry rolled his eyes. “I’m many things, Stuber, but clumsy isn’t one of them.”

“It’s an easy skill to learn,” Mala said. “But difficult to master. To fly accurately from landing point to landing point, as I do, requires training and finesse. However, you, by yourself, out in the middle of nowhere? You should be able to do it without hurting anyone. Except maybe yourself.”

“Comforting. What’s first?”

“First, lose the longstaff.”

Perry placed it against the wall, then stepped back towards the center of their impromptu training space.

“Now…” Mala said, easing herself down onto the floor in a cross-legged sitting position. Perry started to mimic her with a frown of confusion, but she waved him off. “No, you stand. I’m sitting because I’m going to pass out if I don’t. Now, it’s about the shape that you form your shield into. You’re using your shield to give you lift. You want it to fully encapsulate you, but you want the bottom of your shield to be wide, and concave. Like a dinner plate. Can you do that?”

Perry looked down at his feet. “If I do, my shield will melt these stones.”

“Not right now. I’m just asking if you can form your shield that accurately.”

“Oh. Yes, I can do that.”

“Good. So, step number one, you have to jump as high as you can. Once your feet leave the ground, you’ll form the shield as I instructed you, and then you pulse the bottom of it very sharply out. Imagine it as a bowstring—you’ll pulse it by pulling that concavity towards you and then snapping it back into place. If you do it sharply enough, that pulse will give you lift.”

Perry nodded. Waited. Glanced up at her.

“That’s it,” she stated. “Go ahead.”

“Alright…” Perry took a deep breath, connecting to his clasp, but not yet activating his shield. He hunkered down into a half-squat. “Easy to learn,” he murmured to himself. “Just pulse it like a bowstring. I can do that.”

He jumped. Activated his shield, picturing the form he wanted it to take as his feet left the ground—like a wide-bottomed egg all around him…

He hit the ground again, his shield slamming into it. A massive crack echoed through the space, and heat blasted up his legs. He yelped and jumped away from the superheated stone he’d created. A guilty glance down the temple showed a gathering of legionnaires staring at him. One of them was shaking his head, but the others apparently found it greatly amusing. They settled in for more of the show.

“Fuckers,” Perry mumbled bitterly.

“No, no,” Stuber called out, unnecessarily loud. “You’re doing great. I’m sure everyone destroys a temple their first time.”

Mala calmly waved a hand at Perry. “Try again. You’ll need to be quicker with that pulse. Is that really as high as you can jump?”

“Yes, that’s as high as I can jump,” Perry snapped. “I’m not a seven-foot-tall super human.”

“Sure,” Mala sighed. “Keep going back on the old ‘runt’ excuse. Regardless, try to jump higher, and pulse faster.”

Perry felt sweat breaking out on his lower back—not from effort, but simply from the nerves of having his friends, and now an entire squad of legionnaires, watching him with bemused expressions.

He centered himself. Focused. Tried again.

This time he formed his shield and pulsed it almost at the exact same moment that his feet left the ground.

He shot up. A moment of glee, like a dream coming true—followed by terror as he realized he’d launched himself at a bad angle and was careening towards the Giver of Death. His only thought was Don’t collapse the temple! So he extinguished his shield.

He slammed into the side of the massive statue with a bone-jarring crunch, and immediately fell. Five feet, flat on his back onto the hard stone ground, knocking the wind out of his lungs.

He coughed, laying there for a moment while he tried to wheeze some air back into his chest. Gods in the skies, but that hurt.

A trickle of laughter from the other side of the temple reached his ears.

“You okay?” Stuber asked, sounding like he didn’t really care much.

“Yeah,” Perry groaned. “Fine.”

He struggled back to his feet.

“That’s another thing,” Mala noted. “As you descend, you’ll want to make a much softer pulse just before you let your feet hit the ground. Otherwise, you’re just falling from whatever height you managed to launch yourself to.”

“Good to know,” Perry growled, his anger rising, helping him push away his nerves.

His third, fourth, and fifth attempts resulted in a bloody elbow, a turned ankle, and a large chunk of stone missing from the wall of the temple. And more laughter from the legionnaires. Who had now begun to call out encouragement, albeit sarcastically.

Ramming himself into rock structures gave him the most solid beating he’d had since his days in Hell’s Hollow. It was good, he figured. He’d started to forget what it felt like when he knew he was going to piss blood later.

“Try flapping!” a legionnaire called.

Perry swiped the dripping blood from his elbow and glared at Stuber. “One of you heathens is enough for me.”

“Please,” Stuber blew a raspberry. “I’ve been a model gentleman. Note the restraint I employed when I refrained from telling you that you probably don’t want to break your fall with your face.”

Perry smiled savagely at him. Gave him an angry wink. “You’re right. That’s great advice. I’ll try that this time.”

And with that, Perry launched himself into the air.

And flew.

Straight up—which was a victory—followed by another quick pulse which brought him to the sphincter puckering height of the statue’s faceless head. Then he began to fall. Straight down. Still feeling elated, but knowing that he needed to land before he bragged—one more pulse, gently this time…

Just before his feet hit the ground and sent his tibias into his throat, he pulsed again, gently this time.

And alighted. Just as soft and graceful as you please.

Perry grinned. “Did you see that? I alighted. Clumsy my ass.”

Then he proceeded to give a rude gesture to Stuber, and the same to the legionnaire across the temple. They guffawed and offered him a round of applause.

“Very good,” Mala said with a pale smile.

“Should I do it again?”

“No, I think you have the basics down.”

“Thank the gods,” Perry breathed, slouching. “I don’t think I could take another mistake.”

“Well, make sure you don’t make a mistake out there,” Mala bobbed her head in a nebulous direction, which Perry took to mean out in the wastelands. “Break a leg out there and you won’t be able to jump again, and you’ll be stranded in the middle of nowhere by yourself.”

“Again, your words are so comforting.” Perry limped over to his group. “You’re so full of gentle, motherly instinct, it’s a wonder you don’t have children.”

Petra pointed to the leg he was favoring. “How’s your ankle?”

Perry waved it off. “It’s fine. Not broken. I’ve had worse.”

An awkward silence descended on the group. Perry, Teran, and Stuber seemed to be avoiding each other’s eyes. Mala, Petra, and Lucky watched them curiously, like observing some foreign tribal dance with an inscrutable purpose.

Stuber rubbed a knuckle under his nose and gestured outside. “You, uh, should probably use the daylight you got left.”

Perry sucked in a breath. “Right. Yeah. I should get going.”

More awkward silence.

Perry grunted, suddenly irritated at all three of them—himself included. “Alright, look. I’d love to have you guys with me, but I understand the position you’re in. Nothing to be done for it. And you guys are right. I can do this on my own. I guess I just started to see you guys as a bit of a…I don’t know…a security blanket.”

“You got your shield and your longstaff,” Stuber said. “And now you know how to fly. Or at least hurl yourself around. Which is close enough.”

Perry nodded, smiling. “Right. If things go bad, I can hurl myself out of danger at least.” He grew serious again. “But you guys can’t. Especially you, Teran.”

Teran drew herself up into her typical defensive posture. “I can handle myself.”

“I know you can. That’s not what I’m talking about. Stuber’s going to be here, and so is a legion and Mala. But you? You’re going to be all on your own out there. No offense Lucky. I’m just saying…stay sharp. And don’t do anything stupid.”

She raised an eyebrow. “So don’t do anything that you would do?”

“Exactly. Be smarter than me.”

“Well, that’s easy. I can do that.”

“And if you can get those Outsiders to agree to come with you back here to Karapalida, do that. We need everyone working together if we want a chance at beating this thing.”

Teran managed to be serious. “I’ll try.”

Perry rubbed his swollen elbow. “What if they don’t wanna come?”

“I can’t make them do anything.”

“But if they don’t come…are you going to stay with them?”

Teran glanced sideways at Lucky. She seemed to want to say something, but his presence kept it locked inside. Or maybe it was Perry she didn’t want to say it to. Maybe she didn’t want to admit to him that she had no intention of leaving her people again.

Perry held up his hands before she could say anything else. “You don’t have to answer that. This will be easier for me if I just imagine that we’re all going to make a happy reunion when I get back. So…I’ll just think about that. And you just think about staying alive.”

“I’ll keep her safe,” Lucky announced, in a rather overly-familiar fashion.

Teran, Stuber, and Perry all looked at him like he was an idiot.

“What?” he gawked, ignorant of his mistake.

“Petra?” Teran asked. “Can you do something for Lucky’s crispy face before we leave? If you have to bandage his mouth shut that’ll be fine.”

Petra winked at Lucky. “I’ll see what I can do.”

***

Perry didn’t try to fly while he was still in the bounds of Karapalida. He didn’t trust himself not to fling his body into a building.

It felt strange and desolate as he strode through the west end of the New Section, out to where the buildings disappeared into the flatness of the wastelands. There were less people on this side of town. Well…less living people. Still plenty of bodies.

He passed a few desperate civilians, scavenging through the wreckage, or perhaps searching for the bodies of loved ones. A few seemed to take note of the fact that he carried a longstaff, but none made any motion towards him, or spoke to him.

Perhaps they’d heard about Legatus Mordicus’s command.

Despite the fact that there were people about, Perry felt strangely alone. As he strode out past the last line of concrete buildings—these ones looking barely touched by the destruction—he realized that this was the first time in a very long time that he’d actually been alone.

He’d grown up with a pack of kids in the farming freehold outside of Touring. And then he’d been shipped off to Hell’s Hollow where, while he still felt lonesome, by virtue of the fact that he was surrounded by people that wanted to beat the shit out of him on a daily basis, he had still been a part of something.

Then he had been on Boss Hauten’s crew. For three years, he’d been surrounded by that crew, working, sleeping, bathing, drinking, shoulder-to-shoulder with them.

And then, most recently he’d had Stuber and Teran and Sagum.

Now he was truly alone.

The sensation of it was both oddly liberating—I don’t have to bounce my decisions off of anyone—and oddly terrifying—I don’t have anyone to bounce my decisions off of.

The only other time that he recalled being the sole navigator of his life was the brief period of time that he’d wandered about aimlessly, after deserting from Hell’s Hollow and before falling in with Boss Hauten’s crew. And even then, he hadn’t really been navigating his life. He’d just been drifting along.

Now he had a purpose. A mission. And he had to rely completely on himself to get it done.

He stopped, about fifty yards past the last building in Karapalida. He looked out at the dry plains that stretched out before him. Mostly flat, though a few hills and hollows contoured the landscape, rimmed by low, scrubby brush.

It all came down to him.

For now. At least until he could get everyone back together and—hopefully—working together. Then he could relax back into his usual state of…

What? Going along for the ride? Supporting the larger objective?

He shook his head. He needed to focus right now on not breaking his leg. Although, really, if he was going to break a leg, doing it close to Karapalida was probably the best place for it to happen.

He took a few deep breaths. Clutched his longstaff tightly. Lowered his body into a half-squat.

He leaped. The shield erupted. He pulsed it, tweaking the bottom of it like a bowstring, just like Mala had taught him, and flew into the air.

He was so focused on landing properly that, when his feet touched the ground again, it took him a moment to realize he’d only traveled a few yards. He’d mostly jumped straight up and down.

He swore under his breath. Glanced self-consciously behind him, as though there might be an errant squad of legionnaires watching and laughing at him.

“Little less up and down,” he chided himself. “Little more forward movement.”

He tried it again, and this time went shooting out, the ground blazing by recklessly under his feet. Terrified at the speed of his forward movement, he pulsed again, trying for a little more altitude. He bounced up, but was still going at a horrendous pace.

He kept trying to slow himself down, until he realized that he was skipping across massive distances like a flat stone on glassy water.

A haphazard grin spread across his face as the clench of fear abated.

He pulsed again, sending himself rocketing upwards at a sharp angle, then pulsed again, right as he felt himself begin to fall. The wastelands receded below him. The air around him seemed to hum, cooler and crisper than he’d ever felt on the ground.

A strange thing came over him. A sort of dream-like joy. What child hasn’t dreamed of flying?

He cackled insanely as he vaulted himself effortlessly over a hill that would have taken him half an hour to trudge up.

He was flying!

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A LACK OF TRUST

As Perry was walking out of the west side of Karapalida, Teran and Lucky wound their way through the disconsolate crowds, heading east.

Teran kept waiting for someone to recognize them as the people that had harbored a wounded demigod, but no one seemed to give her or Lucky much attention. As they approached the eastern limits of the New Section, Teran realized that the crowds were getting thicker here.

“More refugees,” she said, looking about at the tired, downtrodden faces as she wove between them.

“Where from?” Lucky murmured, his voice slightly changed due to the burn pack that Petra had applied—a skin-like patch that melded with the skin. And apparently it made you feel like you couldn’t move your mouth much.

Rather than hazard a guess, Teran found a face that looked slightly less exhausted and confused. A woman with two children in tow behind her—she strode along with the crowd, pulling her children with a stern sort of resolution.

“Excuse me,” Teran said, making eye contact with the woman.

She noted that the woman gripped her children’s hands harder and drew them in closer, giving Teran a suspicious look.

Teran held up her hands and didn’t come any closer. They were close enough to talk, and for the others to part around them, rather than walk between them. “Where are you from?”

The woman hesitated, but seemed to come to the conclusion that such an admission would not endanger her. “We’re from Sekofeld. Or, at least, the freehold outside of it is where I’m from.”

Teran gradually lowered her hands. “What happened to it?”

The woman’s eyes went skyward. “They came. The wrath of the gods. The demons.”

Teran nodded, needing no further clarification. “When did they come? And how far have you walked?”

The woman’s shoulders rounded as though suddenly too tired to bear an invisible weight anymore. “Yesterday morning. They came out of the sun as it rose. They killed everyone that couldn’t get away fast enough.” The sharpness came back to the woman’s gaze. “Do you have any water? My children haven’t had anything to drink since we left.”

Teran didn’t have much on her. She had anticipated the short hike to the skiff—hopefully it was still there—and a travel time of less than a day to locate the Outsiders. She’d managed to gather up a tattered old knapsack which hung from her shoulder, containing a hologram from Legatus Mordicus, some salve that Petra had given her for Lucky’s burns, and a small water bladder that held only a liter.

She glanced at Lucky, but his gaze was fixed on the children, pity in his eyes.

She opened the knapsack, aware of the other starving and dehydrated refugees milling about them. She stepped up closer to the woman and discreetly passed her the bladder. “Take it. Try not to let anyone see it. There is water here, but the lines are long.”

The woman grabbed the bladder and shoved it into a fold of her homespun blouse, pinning it there with an elbow and glancing about to see if she had been noticed. When it was clear that she wasn’t about to be attacked for the liter of water, she looked at Teran and her eyes softened.

“Thank you.”

Teran looked away, disliking the welling of emotion she felt. “Stay safe,” she said, a little thickly, and began moving again.

“There should be some water left on the skiff,” Teran murmured to Lucky.

“It’s fine,” Lucky replied. “They need it more than we do.”

“How are the Outsiders fixed for supplies?”

“They’re not. Water isn’t an issue—they have access to a spring. But since our clan combined with the Southerlies, their food stores are gone. Which is part of the reason we came to Karapalida. They sent other parties out to the nearest towns and cities to beg, barter, or steal.” He gave her a knowing look. “Just like you and your father used to do.”

Teran looked sharply at him. “I never stole. I simply tricked people into giving.”

He smiled, then winced at the crease it created in his burn. “Of course. But if the other cities are anything like Karapalida, then I don’t think anyone found any food.”

Teran considered this as they passed the last section of structures—really just hollowed out shells and foundations. If the Outsiders’ position was untenable, that might make it easier for her to convince them to give up their old ways of hiding, and join with the rest of humanity. Hunger could be a powerful motivator.

But did she even want them to? Or was that just what Perry wanted?

She needed to do what was right for her people—or at least try to convince them to do what was right. Was rejoining the society they had turned their back on for generations really the answer? Or was that just going to subject her people to a new form of burden—working under someone like Legatus Mordicus, or whatever other leadership might crop up in these tumultuous times?

Things were changing so rapidly. In the span of less than two days, every political and geographic demarcation had been destroyed. The entire known world was now shattered particles in a vacuum, like cosmic dust in a nebulae. Who knew what new structures would coalesce from that? Would they be better? Would they be worse?

It was impossible to know the future. Teran knew this, and yet she couldn’t stop herself from pursuing each thread of possibility to its logical conclusion. But the threads she held now might not be there tomorrow. Things were changing too rapidly to make a reasonable guess at where they might end up.

Go and talk to them, Teran decided. That was all she could do. Tell them what she knew, and what she had witnessed. Let them make their own choices. But let those choices at least be informed, and not born of ignorance.

They hiked in silence out along the dusty flats to the first rise in the land. The skiff was where they’d left it, nestled in a tiny valley between two ridges, obscured from most angles by low sage.

Mala’s blood still coated the starboard side where she’d lain.

Teran and Lucky hoisted themselves aboard. She pointed to the cargo holds to either side. “Open those up and see what kind of supplies we have. There should be some weapons, too. We’ll want those.”

As Lucky bent to his task, Teran went to the controls. She wasn’t overly familiar with these machines, but she’d had plenty of opportunity to glean how they were run over the last couple weeks. She was fairly certain she could figure it out.

The readout panel was straightforward. Altitude. Speed. Power.

The power meter was a series of nine lights. Three green, three yellow, and three red. The skiff currently displayed three red and one yellow. Less than half a charge.

“Lucky, how confident are you with your navigation?”

Lucky looked up at her, two rifle in his hands. “Why?”

“Because we only have a half a charge on this thing, and no way to recharge it. So if we want to actually get where we’re going, we need to go straight there and not fly around looking for landmarks.”

“Ah.” Lucky stood up, the weapons dangling from his hands. He spun in a slow circle, as though he could assess his geographic location from the scrubby hills around them. “Right. Well. Head east-southeast, and we’ll go from there.”

Teran narrowed her eyes. “So you have no idea where you’re going?”

Lucky squinted. “I’m like an ant, Teran. I can retrace my steps, but if you put me in a new location, I’m completely lost.”

“Are you completely lost right now?” Teran demanded.

“Well, no. Not completely. I know we need to go east-southeast.”

“Fantastic,” Teran mumbled, returning her attention to the controls. “Alright. I’m going to get this thing started. You might want to hang on.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve never flown one of these before.”

“Oh, so you’re completely lost too?”

“Nope.” Teran jabbed her finger on a pretty obvious button, sending a rumble of energy through the craft and causing it to lurch from its position and rise a few feet into the air. She gave Lucky an unpleasant smile. “I know we need to go east-southeast.”

“Huh.” Lucky turned back to the cargo hold, shaking his head. “Blind leading the blind.”

***

As the tail end of Teran’s skiff crested a ridge and disappeared from the vicinity of Karapalida, on the dubious heading of east-southeast, a rumble drew across the low hills and dusty flats.

A few pebbles shimmied about, upset from the place where the wind had placed them for the last several years.

Down a snaking valley just a little to the north of where Teran had gone, a dusty cloud took shape and billowed its way up the valley.

Skimming along the dry riverbed that made up that valley, Sagum stood alongside Lux at the fore of their skiff as at plunged onwards. Behind them, the skiffs filled with praetors flew in a V formation, for no real tactical purpose outside of avoiding the wake of dust kicked up by the lead skiff.

Lux glanced backwards to the controls, perhaps considering whether to ask how close they were to Karapalida. Sagum followed his hesitant gaze to where it landed on the dour face of the centurion at the controls.

Interesting, Sagum thought, glancing furtively at Lux. There appeared to be some hesitation on Lux’s face, and eventually he turned back around, as though he had decided not to bother his centurion.

“We’re close, aren’t we?” Lux asked over the wind.

“Should be,” Sagum answered. “Not like I have these hills memorized, but out in those flats ahead should be Karapalida, a bit to the west.” He considered his words carefully. “Why not ask your centurion? He has the readouts.”

Lux sniffed airily, but it hid a genuine concern that Sagum perceived beneath the façade. “You know this area better than the rest of us. It seemed easiest to ask you.”

Sagum didn’t buy it, but he let the moment stretch. He hadn’t been privy to any direct conflicts between the praetors and Lux, but since they received the message at Praesidium, Sagum knew there had been a shift in attitudes. The stalwart and eager praetors had seemed sullen as they’d trudged onto the freshly charged skiffs and made their way west across the Glass Flats.

Lux did not seem to mind the silence. Sagum had kind of hoped it would make him uncomfortable enough to speak, but then he remembered that Lux was an inquisitor. He probably used that tactic all the time on others.

“Alright,” Sagum said, leaning on the front rail with one hand and facing Lux. “If there’s something going down, don’t you think I should know about it?”

Lux shot him a look. “There’s nothing…going down, as you call it.”

Sagum shrugged. “Okay, then. Shouldn’t be a problem to holler at the centurion and see how close we are to Karapalida.” Sagum turned to the aft and took a big breath as though to yell.

Lux put a stern hand on his shoulder. “Leave the centurion be.”

Sagum smirked, turning back. “So there is something going down.”

Lux lowered his chin and blinked a few times, as though trying to press down some irritation. “Praetorians are not accustomed to retreating.”

“I see. Do they prefer dying then? Because that’s what would have happened if we’d stayed.”

“Perhaps. But I think they would prefer even more to be back in The Clouds.”

Sagum frowned. “Based on little things, like the messenger’s tone, and also all of the words that came out of his mouth, I’d guess humans aren’t very welcome in The Clouds right now.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that their entire existence has been upset.” Lux sighed, barely audible over the roaring wind. “They need some time to acclimate. I’ve chosen to give them space.”

Sagum gripped the rail with both hands, squinting as though trying to swallow a large pill. “Well, see…far be it from me to assume I know how to handle praetors, but if they’re like every other man on the face of this scorched earth, then maybe giving them time isn’t the best idea.”

Lux looked at him, a shade of curiosity in his eyes. “You’re right. You don’t know how to handle praetors. But then again, I typically don’t either. So tell me what you’re getting at.”

“If they’re pissed off, keeping them busy is better than leaving them alone. You leave them alone, they’re going to start talking. Griping. Coming up with schemes and shit.” Sagum shrugged. “But maybe praetors aren’t like all the other men on the planet.”

The skiff rocketed out of the valley and into the vast stretch of open flatness. It banked sharply to the left, and Sagum spotted a smoggy-looking black line in the distance. Karapalida.

“You raise some interesting points,” Lux finally admitted.

“Their existence is upset because they currently don’t have orders. They’re just running around. I imagine for someone who grew up their entire life used to having a strong authority figure telling them what to do all the time, a lack of orders might make them feel a little…insecure.”

“Praetors. Insecure.”

“Well, you know. Not insecure like ‘Does Daddy really love me?’ Insecure like, ‘This Lux guy isn’t taking charge of us, so maybe we should mutiny.’”

Sagum watched the effect of his words on Lux. Which was little more than a slight widening of the eyes and a clench of the jaw. But for someone as stoic as Lux, that said a lot.

Sagum shuffled his feet. “Frankly, I’m kind of obviously allied with you. So if they do mutiny, I assume they’ll kill me. So it’d be great if you kept that from happening. I’m extremely interested in self-preservation. It’s kind of a personal obsession, actually.”

“Well, then I would suggest you stay close to me,” Lux said, very seriously. “I still have my shield and longstaff. If it comes to that.”

Sagum nodded ahead at the city which had begun to take shape as they drew closer. “Listen. I’ve been meaning to say, it might be best if you didn’t just roar in there with a hundred praetors. I imagine people are pretty on edge right now. It might send the wrong message.”

Lux looked at him like he didn’t understand. “Why would Karapalida feel threatened by a demigod and praetors? If anything, it should make them feel safer.”

Sagum cringed. “Well, you know. Take a good look at that city.”

Lux did so. The skyline of the New Section was missing some obvious chunks, and black smoke trailed into the sky from a dozen points across the cityscape.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Karapalida, but that’s not what it looked like last time I was there. Granted, it’s been a while, but still. Looks like a fight happened. And we don’t know who’s sitting in there, and whether or not they’re hostile. Shit, the place could be chock full of Guardians for all we know.”

Lux’s face fell. He drew up his hands and pressed his index fingers to his temples, wearily massaging them. His face suddenly seemed as dour as the centurion’s. “Everything has changed too rapidly for me to keep up with.” He straightened. “How do you suggest we proceed, then?”

“Lux, I really appreciate you treating me like a friend and all. Really, it’s very flattering for a demigod to befriend a peon—an Outsider peon at that. But this might be one of those circumstances where you need to take charge.” Sagum jerked his head behind them. “Show the guys you know what you’re doing.” He hesitated. “But still…you know…don’t go charging into Karapalida.”

Lux’s teeth flashed for a bare second. “Fine,” he growled. Then gave Sagum a withering glance. “Do your other companions find you so tiresome?”

“Yes,” Sagum said, simply. “Yes, they do.”

Lux thrust himself off the fore rails and stalked to the aft. Sagum followed after him, affording a single glance to the jumble of parts that lay on the ground—all that was left of Whimsby. Bren stood beside them, almost protectively.

“Centurion,” Lux called out in a commanding voice.

“Yes, Paladin Lux?” the centurion answered, with just a tinge of irritation evident.

Lux stopped at the controls and stared at the centurion for a long, uncomfortable moment. Long enough that the centurion’s eyes started to jag about, and the look of irritation was replaced with a look of fear as he realized his attitude had not gone unnoticed.

“Halt the flight,” Lux finally continued. “And put us down one mile out from the edge of Karapalida.”

The centurion opened his mouth as though to ask a question, but then thought better of it. “Yes, paladin.” He turned to his second in command and nodded, delegating the order. The lower-ranking legionnaire turned to the back and held up his hands, giving a series of visual signals that Sagum couldn’t make sense of.

As the flight of skiffs drew closer to Karapalida, Sagum swayed as their own began to decelerate and drop altitude, until the ground seemed to skim by just under the belly of the craft.

They came to a stop at the prescribed distance. Sagum glanced out towards Karapalida, and could just make out the figures of people at the edges of the city. A wind had kicked up, filling the air with a thin layer of dust that caused the city to look foggy, and he couldn’t make out the specifics of the people that he saw.

Who were they? And were they watching this flight of skiffs? Were they preparing to fight them off?

“Centurion,” Lux spoke again. “Have your men make preparations for camp here. I’m uncertain about Karapalida and where their loyalties lie, and I want you to remain at a distance until I achieve more clarity on the situation.”

Lux turned to Sagum and lifted an eyebrow. “I assume you will accompany me?”

Sagum read the subtext loud and clear: Or would you rather stay behind with a bunch of pissed of praetors?

“Yes.” Sagum smiled. “I’ll accompany you.”

Concerning whether or not those figures he’d spotted had seen them, Sagum got his answer as they approached, on foot.

When they were still several hundred yards from the entrance to the New Section, a tumult of bodies morphed from between the remains of the desecrated buildings. At first, Sagum thought it was just a crowd, but then he spied the shields, and the even ranks of legionnaires.

“Well,” Lux said, sounding satisfied. “It looks as though we’ve maintained control of Karapalida after all.”

Sagum was not so certain, but decided to keep it to himself. Lux needed to take charge here. After all, Sagum was comfortable resigning himself to the fact that he didn’t know what the hell was going on. Best to let the responsibility for how things went rest solely on Lux.

The incoming ranks of legionnaires didn’t stop at the edge of the city, but trudged out in double-time to meet them halfway, the sound of their boots striking the hard-packed dust like a steady, rhythmic thunder.

Lux stopped, a slight frown crossing over his eyes. Or maybe he was just squinting against the sun.

Sagum wiped sweat from his brow and shifted, a note of concern rising from the center of his gut. “There’s sure a lot of them.”

“Indeed,” Lux answered. “An entire cohort.”

Standing there, baking in the hot sun, they waited as the legionnaires disgorged from the city, forming into two files as they approached. Sagum was trying to count them, but once he got to about a hundred, he decided it didn’t really matter. A hundred legionnaires could kill them just as dead as two hundred. Even with Lux’s shield and longstaff.

As the cohort of legionnaires drew within fifty yards of them, they began to fan out, creating a semi-circle around them that Sagum interpreted as decidedly unfriendly. Given the way Lux’s eyes carefully tracked the edges, Sagum figured he was equally concerned that they were about to be surrounded.

But once the semi-circle had been formed, the legionnaires halted, two long lines of them, back to chest-plate and shoulder to shoulder. They drew their shields to the front and rested them on the ground, creating a wall.

“Well.” Sagum cleared his throat. “At least they’re not pointing guns at us.”

“Mm,” was Lux’s only reply.

A legionnaire in the center raised his head. “Legatus Mordicus coming through! Rank! Split!”

The very center of the line opened up—just two legionnaires, stepping out and over—and in the gap they created, Sagum spotted one figure that he didn’t recognize, and another that he did.

“Thank Primus,” Lux uttered. “Mala’s here.”

Sagum quirked his head to the side, studying Mala as she approached at the side of an older man with a grizzled face and legionnaire’s armor. He held off on sharing in Lux’s thankfulness. There was something in Mala’s face that seemed to bear a warning.

The hard-faced man that accompanied her seemed to be looking at them, though his brow was drawn so tightly over his eyes that Sagum couldn’t be sure. The set of his mouth was grim and joyless. His right arm swung lazily around a holstered pistol, while his left rested on the pommel of his blade.

No colors, Sagum noted. No banners displaying whether they were Truth or Light. No colored capes upon their backs. It deepened his sense of unease.

Mala and the old legionnaire stopped about two paces from them. Mala, Sagum noted, stood just a half-step behind the man. A sign of respect. Something that seemed entirely out of character for her.

Lux shifted in the ensuing silence. The scrape of his boots across the ground was the only noise besides the steady breath of the wind in their ears.

The old man was close enough now that Sagum could see his dark eyes underneath the craggy overhang of his brow. They ignored Sagum completely and seemed fixed upon Lux.

“I assume,” Lux finally spoke. “That you are the Legatus Mordicus that was announced?”

“I am,” the legatus answered, curtly. “Paladin Mala here tells me that you’re called Inquisitor Lux of House Rennok.”

“That is correct.” Lux nodded to her. “Mala. Glad to see you’re still with us, though you look a little…”

“Like I was shot?” Mala suggested.

Lux gave a brittle twitch of the mouth that wasn’t quite a smile.

Finally, the legatus deigned to rest his gaze on Sagum. “And who’s this?”

“He’s called Sagum,” Lux answered, and Sagum winced, for once wishing that he’d never taken the moniker.

“Sagum?” Legatus Mordicus wheezed out a dry chuckle. “As in of a cape worn by a legionnaire?”

Lux turned and looked at Sagum as though he weren’t quite sure how to answer that. Sagum didn’t think Lux had ever gotten the full story behind the name.

Sagum quickly smiled and waved it away. “It’s a silly name. A nickname really. Has nothing to do with anything. You know how nicknames are—other people give them to you, and then you’re stuck with it.”

Mordicus grunted. “And what are you supposed to be?”

Sagum blinked rapidly. “I’m not…I don’t…what do you mean?”

Mala leaned forward over Mordicus’s shoulder. “He’s a tinkerer. A former Outsider. A friend of Perry and the others.”

“Are they here?” Sagum couldn’t help himself from taking a step forward. “Are they alright?”

Mordicus tilted his head back. “They’re alive. Only the legionnaire named Stuber has stayed.”

Sagum frowned, confused. “Stayed? What do you mean? Where did the others go?”

“That’s no concern of yours,” Mordicus replied. “Stand by, tinkerer. I may have use for you.” He turned his gaze back to Lux. “As for another paladin…well, we already have Mala. I’m uncertain why you’re here. Perhaps you can enlighten me.”

Mala took a step forward, now standing side-by-side with Mordicus. “Why did you leave Praesidium? And where are the praetors?” her gaze went over Lux’s shoulder, peering into the distance. “Is that them, hiding behind your skirts?”

“I ordered them to stand by at a distance,” Lux replied, keeping his voice even. “As for Praesidium…there is more to tell. Must it be done out in the hot sun, or am I permitted to enter the ruins of your city?”

Mordicus held up a hand towards Mala, and Sagum was surprised to see her acquiesce to the flippant motion. Though, admittedly, he did see a flash of irritation in her face.

“How many praetors have you brought and what is your intention with them?” Mordicus demanded flatly.

“My intention with them is to keep them alive,” Lux answered. “They were with me when the Sons of Primus were released and the Guardians descended, and so I have kept them with me.”

“They were with you,” Mala interjected. “So you could arrest me.”

Sagum heard an awkward titter, and realized it was coming out of his own throat. “Okay, let’s not rehash past mistakes. That doesn’t help anyone. Right? I mean, we’re moving passed that. We’re in new territory. Maybe we should try to work together.”

Mordicus didn’t look at him. “Are you in the habit of letting an Outsider and a tinkerer speak for you?”

Lux bristled. Shot Sagum a warning glance. “No, I am not. Though, what he says is true. The paradigm has changed. Nothing is as it was. We will have to find a new way forward. And that is why I’m here.”

“Is it now?” Mordicus now looked up at Mala, who towered over his shoulder. “What do you say to that, Paladin Mala?”

Mala skewered Lux with a challenging gaze. “When last we spoke, you expressed some reservations as to where your loyalties lie.”

“Mala,” Lux ground out.

“Well?” Mala demanded hotly. “Have you solved this crisis of conscience? Are you allied with the rest of the paladins, hiding in The Clouds? Are you allied with the Sons of Primus?”

“A faithless traitor is one to talk about loyalties,” Lux snapped.

“Well, this is going well,” Sagum murmured. “Maybe you should have let me speak—”

“Silence!” Lux barked.

Sagum stared up at him, unable to stop himself from feeling betrayed in that moment. What had he expected, though? To be bosom buddies with a demigod? Of course Lux would sweep him aside when the circumstances called for it. Maybe Mala was right. Maybe Lux wasn’t sure where his loyalties lie.

“I did not come to be berated by you, Mala,” Lux seethed. He looked at Mordicus. “Nor by a legionnaire, legatus or not. I came to see if I could find allies—people that wanted to survive these Guardians. Have I come to the wrong place then?”

Mordicus smirked. “I suppose that depends. Paladin Mala, do you trust him?”

“I have nearly an entire cohort of praetors at my disposal,” Lux said, tightly. “I say this not as a threat, but as an offer of goodwill. We are stronger together.”

Mala considered him for a long moment. “You know, Lux, when you get right down to it, you were the true cause of all this.”

Lux blinked, his eyes averting into the distance, something like ill-concealed shame passing over his features. “I was unaware. My actions were unintentional.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Mordicus raised his hand. “What are we talking about?”

Sagum stood there, waiting for Mala or Lux to fill the legatus in. And then he realized that Mala was giving him a darkly bemused look. She wanted him to say it—to bear witness against Lux. And now Mordicus was looking at him too.

Sagum’s throat constricted. “Well…you know…there was a lot going on at that moment. Who’s to blame? That’s a difficult question to answer. It kind of depends on your perspective, like, well, who actually—”

Mala rolled her eyes and interrupted: “It was a bolt from Lux’s longstaff that caused the first Son of Primus to be released.”

Lux snapped his head around. “I was firing on your enemy! The one that was trying to kill Perry!”

“You ignored our warnings to stay out of it,” Mala shot back.

“That’s enough,” Mordicus said. He didn’t say it loudly, but his voice carried such command, apparently even amongst the demigods, that everyone fell silent.

Sagum cast a look of apology up at Lux, but it didn’t seem his demigod friend was interested in making eye contact with him at the moment.

Mordicus shook his head. “Paladin Mala clearly has reservations. A lack of trust will undermine us as much or more than any exterior threat. Your praetors could be useful to me, but I have no desire to ally myself with you, Paladin Lux.” He looked at Sagum. “You, on the other hand, seem to just be caught up in the whirlwind. And I have need of a tinkerer to work on some equipment that is vital to our efforts. Sagum, if that’s what I’m supposed to call you, you’re welcome to stay in Karapalida.”

Sagum’s mouth worked silently, several different responses colliding on the back of his tongue and none of them making it out. He glanced back and forth from Lux to Mala to Mordicus. But what he was really thinking about was Whimsby.

All the little parts that made up Whimsby’s brain, and Bren, the mech, who had offered himself up to bring Whimsby’s core processor back to life.

All of that was behind him, back at the skiffs.

And how awkward would that be? Hey, Lux, I’m going to leave you high and dry after I betrayed you to Mala and Mordicus, but can I come back with you and retrieve Whimsby and Bren?

“Um. Thank you,” Sagum stammered. “For your…generous offer. But I have work that I’m still in the middle of with Lux.”

Mala frowned at him. “What are you up to, tinkerer?”

Sagum looked again to Lux, but he was still refusing to even look at him. Back to Mala. “I’m trying to bring Whimsby back to life. He got inside a Guardian’s brain. He knows what they know. He has information that we could use. If I can get his core processor up and running again.”

Mala, to her credit, did not scoff at this. “You may be better equipped to finish that project in Karapalida. Surely you don’t have many resources at your disposal out there.” She nodded back into the wastes.

Sagum pictured Bren’s guileless face. His strange desire to give up his own existence for Whimsby’s. Or to exercise some semblance of agency over himself. Perhaps a bit of both.

“No, I have what I need,” Sagum replied, quietly.

Lux finally looked at him. Gave him the barest of nods, and in it, Sagum was pretty sure he was forgiven. Maybe.

Still, he couldn’t quite get past the feeling that this was all a little ridiculous. Looking back and forth between these three powerful people, and he, the peon, seemed the only one able to see the reality of their situation. Life on the planet was being exterminated, and these three were still arguing about petty shit, as though they had all the time in the world to hunker down behind their bitterness.

For the first time in this whole strange journey, Sagum found himself missing Perry.

He scratched his temple, peering at Mala. “When is Perry supposed to return from…wherever he’s gone?”

Mala shrugged. “When he’s finished doing what he’s doing.”

“So…like…tomorrow?”

Mala’s face was deadpan. “He’ll be back when he gets back.”

Sagum smiled humorlessly. “Great. Thanks. You’ve been incredibly helpful.”

“Indeed,” Lux growled. “Come, Sagum. I think we’ve received all the help we’re going to get from these people.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

JUNCTION CITY

As it turned out, accelerating to the equivalent cruising speed of a skiff was the easy part for Perry. Slowing down was the hard part.

As Junction City loomed its gray urban sprawl in the distance, Perry figured it would be best not to blast through their front gates like he’d been hurled out of a catapult.

At about half the distance between Karapalida and Junction City, Perry had found himself getting pretty tired and had tried to stop for a rest. His first attempt had ended with him skidding about fifty yards through hard packed dirt like a meteor that had come in at a sharp angle.

Yes, he’d managed to stop. And removed a solid layer of skin from his right side.

Now, oozing thin blood mixed with plasma from the mangling of his arm and leg, and coated in a fine layer of pale dust that made him look like he’d just emerged from a salt mine, Perry chose this time to gradually begin arcing himself higher and higher, so that his forward angle would not be so shallow when he tried to stop.

It worked. Kind of.

But it wasn’t until he was nearly on top of Junction City that he’d finally slowed his forward movement enough that he was able to gently alight on the ground, as Mala had instructed him.

His feet finally struck ground, feeling odd and tingly, and he extinguished his shield. The sensation of flying fast still clung to his innards and his eyes did strange things, making him feel like he should still be moving, when in fact he was standing still, legs wide, arms held out as though to balance on a narrow beam.

He shook his head, trying to clear it.

And only then did he discover a squad of legionnaires pointing their rifles at him.

“Oh,” was the only syllable that issued from Perry’s mouth as he stood there awkwardly, still in the stance of someone trying to maintain their balance.

He was much closer to the main gate of Junction City—which had gates, unlike Karapalida—and all around it, armored barricades had been erected, providing cover for the squad of legionnaires that now stared at him over the muzzles of their rifles.

An expectant hush claimed the air between them, as though both parties were waiting for the other to do something.

Perry’s hand, already held up to balance himself, waved lightly in the air. “Hey…gentlemen.”

As friendly as the gesture was intended, it snapped the moment cleanly in half.

“Don’t fucking move!” one of the legionnaires bellowed.

Perry groaned. “Gods in the skies, here we go.”

“Drop that weapon!”

Perry glanced at his longstaff in his left hand. He’d almost forgotten how threatening it could appear. And then he saw himself from the perspective of the legionnaires—seeming to drop out of the sky, bearing a paladin’s longstaff—and he realized he was quite threatening indeed.

Runts are not accustomed to being seen as threatening, especially by legionnaires.

Perry did not relinquish his longstaff. Instead, he stood up straight and hefted it in both hands.

Perry came to the rapid conclusion that the legionnaires were not a fan of this maneuver, as they all started shooting at him at once.

Though his heart took off at a sprinting pace, his mind remained calm, dipping into his clasp again and activating his shield in a wide disc in front of him as he began to stride forward.

The hail of incoming bullets sizzled and sparked against the shield. The disruptions to the surface of it sent little scrawls of electricity arcing across it and it rippled like water under a rainstorm.

“Stop that,” Perry called loudly, though he doubted they heard him over the chatter of their guns. “You should stop!”

Their faces became clearer through the disrupted energy shield as he drew within a few paces of them—the anger of someone in control of the situation rapidly melting into a sort of panic as they realized their force was not effective.

Perry halted there in front of them, letting them empty their magazines into his shield. He felt it weakening, but he had enough faith and experience in it now to know that it wouldn’t go out before they had to reload.

The second Perry found a break in the fire where his voice could be heard, he shouted loudly, “Stop wasting your ammo!”

Maybe they were shocked to hear him speak so authoritatively. More likely, they were still in the process of grabbing fresh magazines. In any case, the break in fire lasted long enough for Perry to lock eyes with the one he assumed was their decanus.

“How many more bullets are you going to piss away before you let me talk?” Perry demanded.

The decanus, himself in the midst of a reload, paused with the magazine halfway to his rifle. His eyes, at first widened with fear, now cinched down. In typical, bullheaded, legionnaire fashion, he slammed the magazine home and sent the bolt forward.

But he didn’t fire.

And neither did his squad.

Perry kept the shield hovering between them, but looked all across their worried faces, their squinted eyes sighting through their holographic reticles, muzzles aimed pointlessly at his face.

He took a breath, stilling his thundering heart. “That’s good. Ammunition is precious, and I’m not the one you need to use it on. Or do you have access to an ammunition factory I don’t know about?”

“Who the fuck are you?” the decanus snapped.

“I’m Perry.” He rested the butt of his longstaff on the ground and leaned on it casually. Just two guys talking. “Who are you?”

The decanus ignored him. “Aren’t you a little short for a paladin?”

Perry smiled in a longsuffering way. “Well, that’s because I’m not a paladin.” He held up a hand. “I know, I know. How am I using god tech if I’m not a paladin?” He shook his head. “How much time you got?”

The decanus, all stony faced, regarded him for a long moment. Then the stone veneer cracked a tiny bit as the corner of his mouth twitched upward. “I got all the time in the world, you cheeky sonofabitch. What I don’t have is interest. Now, what the hell do you want?”

“I’m looking for someone I think might be here in Junction City.”

“Gates are closed.”

Perry looked at the gates with mock surprise. “They seem wide open to me.”

The decanus shifted his stance, the muzzle of his rifle dipping just an inch or so. “They’re closed.”

“Okay, so they’re closed,” Perry sighed. “Can you open them?”

“Orders from the legatus. No one in or out.”

“Don’t you think this is kind of dumb?” Perry asked, scuffing a boot lackadaisically through the dust. “I mean, I’m not trying to sound threatening to you, but do you really think you could stop me from going inside Junction City?”

That seemed to give the decanus pause.

“Look, I’m not trying to bust your balls here,” Perry shoved himself off of his longstaff, causing a slight stir amongst the legionnaires facing him. “I see you’re wearing blue sagums. Still loyal to The Light? Do you know Legatus Mordicus? He’s in Karapalida, where I just came from.”

“Legatus Mordicus?” the decanus echoed in a sort of toneless way.

Perry nodded. “Yeah. You could say he sent me here.”

For the first time the legionnaires and their decanus tore their eyes away from Perry long enough to exchange a series of glances amongst themselves. Perry didn’t care for the half-bemused manner in which they did it. Like there was some sort of inside joke that he wasn’t privy to.

The decanus finally returned his gaze to Perry. “Who are you looking for?”

Perry chewed his dry lips—gods, but they’d become chapped from all that flying through the dry air. “Let’s just say it’s an old friend of mine who I have reason to believe is in Junction City at this time.”

“If you don’t tell me who you’re looking for, I can’t help you,” the decanus said, in a sort of willfully stubborn way.

“Alright, fine.” Perry rolled his eyes. “His names Hauten. He runs a scavenging and reloading outfit.”

The decanus shook his head. “Sorry, don’t know him.”

Perry pointed a finger at him. “Okay, now you’re just being a dick. Is this really necessary? Because I can be a dick too.” He picked his longstaff up in both hands.

Grips tightened around rifles. Bodies shuffled. The decanus’s own rifle came up again.

“Really?” Perry scoffed. “Your answer to that is to shoot more bullets at me? We both know how that’s going to go. Now, I’m trying to make friends, but you’re being real fucking difficult right now. Can I make a suggestion?”

The decanus was tensely silent.

“Rather than you wasting more ammo, and me having to explode your squad into a bunch of sizzling chunks of meat, how about we both be reasonable human beings? You take two of your men—or the whole squad, I really don’t give a shit—and escort me to your legatus. You have my word I won’t be violent.”

The decanus spit off to the side. “Your word means fuckall to me.”

“Decanus!” a loud voice issued from behind the gates.

Everyone twitched, like kids caught by an adult.

The decanus’s eyes jagged off to the side, but he didn’t turn and look.

From inside of a half-toppled building, another legionnaire—this one slightly older than the others—stepped out. He wore no helm, and had only his pistol on his hip. His hands were occupied with a bowl and a spoon filled with what looked like boiled grains. He looked like the type of individual that had stopped giving a shit a long time ago.

“Centurion?” the decanus said, still aiming his rifle at Perry.

The centurion stuffed his spoon-load of grain into his mouth, eyeing Perry as he chewed. Then he spoke around the mouthful: “Let him through.”

The decanus immediately ported his rifle and took a step to the side, opening the narrow lane between the sets of barricades. He glared at Perry, but jerked his head, motioning Perry through.

Perry strode through, letting his shield reform into a tight dome around him. Best not to let his guard down just yet.

The centurion watched him intently as he walked through the gates. He spooned more grain into his mouth. Chewed in thoughtful silence.

Perry stopped in front of him.

The centurion looked him up and down, taking in the shimmering surface of the shield. He sucked morsels of food from his molars. Nodded at Perry. “That really necessary?”

“The shield?”

“Yeah, the shield.”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

The centurion shrugged. “I’ve given the order for them to stand down.” Another spoonful of grain. “But I suppose it doesn’t matter to me if you keep it up. Just don’t touch me with it.”

Perry stared at him for a long moment. True to Perry’s first impression of every ounce of body language that the centurion gave off, he safely concluded that this man gave no fucks.

Perry extinguished his shield.

The centurion gave no reaction to that. Just kept chewing his food. Added another spoonful.

Perry fidgeted. “I’m sorry, were you going to take me somewhere?”

The centurion pointed to his bowl with his spoon. “I’m eating.”

“I can see that.”

A nod, as though nothing else needed to be said.

The centurion tilted the bowl. Scraped the sides. Gathered up one final spoonful. Ate it. Chewed. Looked skyward. Sighed noisily. Swallowed. Then he turned his back on Perry and, grumbling something under his breath, sauntered back into the dark innards of the ruined building he’d come out of.

Perry stood there for a moment, wondering if he was supposed to wait or if this was some sort of dismissal. He glanced back at the squad at the gate. Only the decanus was watching him now, a smirk on his lips.

After a few moments of silence, the centurion emerged, a crested helm clutched in one hand, and a bottle of what looked like millet whiskey in the other. The centurion scuffed his way through the rubble that had fallen from the destroyed building, cursing and kicking a rock out of the way. He upended the bottle and took a long pull from it. Perry watched the bubbles rising in the glass, sparkling in the sun.

The centurion finished his drink, smacked his lips. Offered the bottle to Perry.

Perry smiled and shook his head. “You remind me of a good friend of mine.”

“Huh.” The centurion capped the bottle and tossed it through the air where the decanus at the gate caught it deftly. He hefted the helm and squashed it down over his head. “He must be a good looking man.”

Perry squinted at him. “Is it the legionnaire academies that make you all like this?”

The centurion shook his head, started walking. “No. It’s the never ending war. You coming?”

***

“Legatus Mordicus.” The tall man looked down his long, straight nose at Perry as he said it. Also, he said it with the same inflection one might use to identify a particular strain of dysentery-causing bacteria.

Perry winced at the tone. “I detect some dislike in your voice.”

This legatus—Gaius, as he had introduced himself—seemed the polar opposite of Mordicus. Where Mordicus was broad and rather stocky for a legionnaire, Gaius was tall and rail-thin. While Mordicus had cut off his sagum and refused to be identified as The Light, Gaius’s cape was pressed and clean and bright blue as though freshly dyed, and the chest plate he wore was enameled blue with a white, nine-pointed star. Where the loyalty of Mordicus’s men seemed to be almost religious, Perry got the sense that Gaius’s men only respected him because he would have them executed if they didn’t.

It wasn’t necessarily all bad, though. Mordicus seemed to have washed his hands of the general populace of Karapalida, while Gaius seemed to think it was his divine responsibility to keep them in line. Karapalida had turned into a volatile trash heap. Junction City, though it had obviously been struck by a Guardian, was shockingly ordered. No people scrabbling out in the streets looking for scraps. Legionnaires were posted at even intervals throughout the city, and Perry had observed no less than five checkpoints on his way to the municipal building where Gaius had set up his base of operations.

In response to Perry’s observation, Gaius’s nose wrinkled as though someone had opened a sewer grate nearby. “His men call him ‘Father.’” Dripping disdain.

“Well, actually, they call him ‘Daddy.’”

Gaius looked on the verge of shuddering. “Even worse. It is detestable for a commander to be on such familial terms with his men. A clear separation is necessary between the officers and legionnaires. Anything else is chaos.”

“Karapalida is a little chaotic,” Perry admitted. “But the point is, we’re all on the same side, aren’t we?”

Gaius didn’t immediately respond to that. Which made Perry feel that maybe he didn’t see it that way at all. He had a pair of ice cold eyes that narrowed as he stared at Perry, as though he could absorb some elemental truth about Perry by how strongly he focused on him.

Come to think of it, he reminded Perry a lot of Paladin Lux.

“You claim Mordicus sent you here. That is unverifiable, and even if it were, it carries little weight with me. My centurion claims you can use this god tech that you carry about you. I have no reason to doubt his word, but I remain incredulous nonetheless. It is…obvious you’re not a paladin.”

“You’re right, I’m not.”

“And how did a peon such as yourself manage to learn how to use the god tech?”

“My biological father was a paladin,” Perry replied, trying to keep things as plain as possible. “The ability to use the god tech is called Confluence, and it is something I inherited from him.”

“Unlikely,” Gaius said flippantly. “Paladins do not lay with human women, and to say so is heresy.”

Perry felt himself bristle at the casually dismissive attitude. Almost as though Gaius expected him to be incapable of telling the truth and so was unsurprised when he lied—even though it was the truth.

“Well, maybe that’s why he tried to have me killed.”

“If a paladin wanted you dead, you would be dead,” Gaius said, matter-of-factly.

“Oh?” Perry shifted his stance, unable to keep the heat of anger from rising up the back of his neck. “Because it sure as shit seemed like he was trying to kill me. But then I killed him.”

Gaius’s eyes registered shock, but then went glassy and cold again. “Unverifiable.”

“Look,” Perry grated out. “Does it even matter? You’re not inclined to believe me. That’s fine. It’s neither here nor there. The fact remains, I have Confluence. Let’s move on.”

“Fine,” Gaius said, a bit snippy. “Move on to what? What is it that Mordicus has sent you to beg for?”

Perry rapped his fingers on his longstaff. A few deep breaths brought him back to a more reasonable place. “I’m looking for a man named Hauten.”

“Why?”

“I need him.”

“Don’t be daft, boy. Why do you need him?”

Perry’s hands clenched tight on the longstaff. It began to vibrate, hungrily. Like it wanted him to blow a hole in this stuffy asshole. “Hauten is a reloader. I used to work on his outfit. And I need him to reload ammunition for Mordicus.”

Gaius sneered. “So Mordicus’s lack of foresight has somehow become my problem? He should have been more judicious with his ammunition, but I suppose such forward-thinking is beyond someone like him.”

Perry shook his head, astounded. “He took down two Guardians.”

“So he claims.”

“Gods, you’re determined not to believe anything.”

Gaius’s eyes flashed—an unholy terror that Perry thought might be the reason why his troops were scared of him. “Impudent peon,” he snarled, his pale and sunken cheeks flushing an unhealthy red. “A good commander does not believe. He operates on facts. Verifiable information. All you’ve given me is hearsay and nebulous claims. Don’t act so shocked that I’m not easy to con.”

“I’m not trying to con you!” Perry found his voice rising, and really didn’t care to bring it back down. Fuck this guy. If he got so mad that he tried some shit, he’d see just how verifiable Perry’s abilities were. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Junction City is just about as fucked up as Karapalida is. There are mechanical creatures out there bent on exterminating our entire species—that’s something you can verify for yourself. The only way we’re going to beat them is if we work together!”

“It doesn’t sound like we’re working together,” Gaius said. “It sounds like you want to take a valuable resource from me and give it to a man that can barely lead his own troops, let alone have any hope of defeating these ‘Guardians,’ as you call them.”

Perry clenched his teeth, trying hard to remember the big picture goal: Get people to work together.  Easier to do when you don’t piss them off first.

“I get that you don’t like Mordicus. In fact, I’m not even going to try to make you like him. You can hate him all you want. But don’t flush humanity down the drain because you don’t like one guy. We need to work together.”

“Working together,” Gaius scoffed. “The perennial plea of the weak to the strong.”

“Alright,” Perry snapped, exasperated. “Just point me in the right direction. I’ll find my friend Hauten and you’ll never hear from me again.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“Oh, I’m pretty good at finding people.”

“It’s not possible,” Gaius repeated. “Even if you did find this Hauten character, he is not permitted to leave.”

“Not permitted to leave? What is this? A prison?”

“I have already decreed that no one is allowed in or out of Junction City. For the safety of all.” Gaius cast a withering look over Perry’s shoulder at the centurion who had led him here, and still stood by at a respectful distance. “I see that we have made an exception for you, but that exception will extend no further.” Gaius sniffed with finality. “You have said what you came to say, and I have heard it. You may go now.”

“But you haven’t heard me,” Perry shot back. “You clearly haven’t heard me!” The next thing Perry planned to say was something about how it was hard for Gaius to hear when his head was so far up his ass, but he bit that off for the sake of his broader goals. He was already on the edge of making Gaius an enemy—best not to push it.

But Gaius was not inclined to hear any more. He turned away from Perry, flicking his hand as though shooing a fly. “Centurion, escort this trouble maker back to the gates. And, in the future, my orders will be followed.” He stopped and dipped his head, looking at the centurion. “Those that disobey will be executed for insubordination. Is that clear?”

“Very clear, legatus,” the centurion said, in the sort of dead tone reserved for authority figures who often made such threats.

“No one in or out,” Gaius reiterated, then walked away.

Perry stood there, agog, watching the legatus stride away, his blue cape billowing behind him, as full of useless wind as the man that wore it.

Footsteps at his side.

Perry turned and looked at the centurion, a bit of a challenge in his face—You really gonna force me to do something I don’t want to do?

The centurion seemed to know where he stood with Perry. He was also obviously a keen individual. He lowered his chin and spoke with a special sort of import to his words. “It would be wise of you to follow me.”

Perry held his gaze for a long moment, trying to see through his own anger to suss out the words that had gone unsaid. Finally, he pasted on a brittle smile and nodded.

“Yes. I’ll go with you.”

They exited the municipal building, out into the city square where legionnaires in strict formations marched in precise columns amid the wreckage of the city. The way they did it, so pompous, it was almost like they thought they were the conquerors. Like all the destruction had been caused by them, and not some greater force that could wipe them out on a whim.

The centurion didn’t speak as they walked through the square. A squad of legionnaires saluted him as he passed, and what he returned to them was some careless version of what they’d given.

It wasn’t until they were winding their way through the detritus of narrow streets cluttered with rubble that the centurion spoke again.

“You dropped out of the sky,” he said.

Perry looked at him, curious.

The centurion kept his eyes forward. “Some form of flight?”

“Something like that.”

A nod. “We don’t expect much out of the skies. Unless of course it’s three meters wide and comes in like a burning meteor. But I suppose you could probably fly about pretty discretely, couldn’t you?”

“I can manage.”

“And if it were dark out, I highly doubt anyone would spot you.” The centurion grunted thoughtfully as he navigated a stagnant pool of water that smelled like death. “Not that you would defy the legatus’s orders, because if you were found to have defied his orders, he’d definitely kill you.”

“I’m sure he’d try.”

A shrug. “Shame you couldn’t find your friend. But, really, it’d be difficult for you to locate him anyways. Seeing as how he’s probably with the rest of the refugees, over in the Red Quarter.”

Perry felt a smile come to his lips and suppressed it. “Yeah. Shame.”

“I mean, even if you had a mind to defy the legatus’s orders, it wouldn’t be smart. There’s checkpoints all over the place that would catch you. Specifically, there’s a checkpoint at all four main roads into the Red Quarter.”

“You’re right. That would be impossible to get past.”

“Exactly. Especially since they rotate the guards so often to keep them fresh. In fact, they rotate them every four hours, at noon, four, eight…well, you get the picture. Impenetrable defenses.”

“Right. Good thing you warned me off.”

“Just doing my duty.”

They walked for a while in what Perry felt like was a surprisingly companionable silence.

As they reached the gates and the centurion escorted Perry safely out of the boundaries of Junction City, Perry stopped and turned to him.

“You seem like an okay guy, centurion. I hope you don’t die.”

The centurion shook his head. “Don’t put that on me. Death’s the only thing I got left to look forward to.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE RED QUARTER

Perry jolted awake, certain that he was being watched.

He swirled to his feet, longstaff already in his hands and humming against his skin, his mind poised in his clasp, ready to activate his shield at the slightest provocation. In his half-conscious brain, he couldn’t remember where he was or how he’d got there. All around him was pitch black.

He turned a slow circle in the darkness, gradually more aware of his surroundings. His feet scuffed in rocky dirt. He saw the fine line between the rippled, black horizon, and the slightly lighter glow of a sky filled with stars.

The sensation sat heavy on him. Something was out there, he was certain.

Still uncertain of his place in time and space, he focused on the very real conviction of being watched. He let his mind ease into his longstaff, steadily down the length of it—control. The muzzle bloomed with green light, offering a dim illumination of his surroundings.

He held it in front of him like a torch and continued his slow circle. He turned around completely at least twice before finally coming to a stop.

The sensation of being watched was now fading, and his brain was settling back into his current reality, remembering…

Legatus Gaius.

The centurion.

Leaving the gates of Junction City.

Walking out into the distance where he sat down in the dust and watched Junction City as the sun arced through the sky. His eyes had grown heavy—the near constant wakefulness of every moment between the release of The Nine and then, finally creeping up on him.

He’d leaned back. He recalled the warmth of the sun-baked ground. How it had lulled his eyes closed. The exhaustion like a warm blanket around him, suppressing any thoughts of fear, any anxieties for the future until he’d finally slipped off.

He couldn’t recall any dreams. But as his thundering heart gradually slowed, and his fighting stance relaxed, Perry started thinking that perhaps the feeling of someone else being there with him had just been a bit of a dream that he could no longer remember.

It was already receding from him. The conviction of the moment upon waking fading like mist when the sun hits it. In these moments, it’s very easy to discredit your senses.

He shook his head. Tilted it back. Looked at the wide dome of stars over his head.

What time was it? He tried to figure it out by the constellations that he knew. Teran had always been able to tell the time by the stars, but whatever facts she saw in the firmament escaped him at the moment.

It was night. That was about as close to a time as he could figure.

He did know how to orient himself to a compass direction using the stars, and he did that now, facing himself to the southwest, where he saw the slight glimmer of Junction City, nestled near the horizon. It wasn’t as bright as it once was, but it still gave off light.

“Right,” Perry murmured to himself, his voice strange and alien in the gloomy silence.

Darkness was his friend. Or at least, that’s what the centurion had heavily hinted at. Perry had withdrawn from Junction City to wait for darkness, and here it was. He could “fly” into the city without being noticed. Hopefully.

He tried to recall if he’d noticed the temple as he’d walked through the remains of Junction City. Had it still been standing, or had the Guardians destroyed it? He thought he could picture the time wheel atop the temple, but then maybe that was wishful thinking.

It didn’t matter. He had to get into Junction City to find Boss Hauten. If the time wheel was there, then great—he’d be able to determine the shift change at the checkpoints. If not, then he’d just have to sneak in and wait until he witnessed the shift change happening live.

His stomach growled, and he smacked his lips, finding his mouth dry. He hadn’t brought food or water, on the errant belief that he might be able to find some in Junction City. A bit of an oversight, but it wasn’t like he was close to dying. Just uncomfortable. But he was no stranger to hunger and thirst.

He gathered his faculties and centered himself with a few deep breaths, stuffing down the vestiges of sleepiness and getting the blood flowing in his body again. Aches and pains made themselves known. His whole right side where he’d careened through the dirt on his unsuccessful landing attempt now throbbed dully.

By the light of the energy ball glowing at the tip of his longstaff, he inspected his right arm and found that the blood and plasma and dust had mixed and hardened into an ugly scale. When he flexed his arm, he felt it cracking painfully, oozing.

Man. He hadn’t even considered what a wreck he must’ve looked like when meeting Legatus Gaius. And he didn’t put it past that bastard to hold it against him. He wasn’t exactly what you might call open-minded.

Oh well. Perry would get what he wanted out of Junction City, with or without Gaius’s approval.

With a decisive grunt, Perry launched himself into the air, activated his shield, and pulsed hard. He rocketed skyward, leaving a little halo of disturbed dust on the ground.

The shield around him suppressed some of the airflow, but not all of it. The wind still whistled in his ears as he accelerated upwards and then began to drop, pulsing again and again to dizzying, disconcerting heights.

The air grew cold around him, chilling a thin layer of sweat he hadn’t even realized had been on his skin until now.

He kept himself aloft, not letting himself fall too close to the ground. The higher up he kept himself, the less likely he was to be spotted. The trick would be in making the landing without causing too much of a ruckus. Which meant that he couldn’t angle himself too aggressively forward—he needed to take his time and keep his jumps more or less straight up and down.

Slowly—but still faster than walking—he closed the distance with Junction City. From this height, he could see the entire sprawl of it, from end to end. More lights in the eastern section, where Gaius had set up his camp. Then a lot of darkness throughout the middle of the city, followed by another cluster of lights on the west end.

The Red Quarter.

Perry kept up his steady pulses until he felt that his feet were more or less directly over the top of Junction City, and at that point he let himself fall.

Descending was still terrifying. The random thought that maybe, at this worst moment in time, he would lose control of himself and be unable to pulse back upwards, and he’d wind up as a pile of unidentifiable mush on some lonely street in Junction City for a patrol of legionnaires to find and poke their toes at, wondering what the hell all that meat used to be.

As he dropped closer and closer to the city, he spotted the tops of buildings that were not completely destroyed. He selected a nice, high one—maybe three stories—that looked structurally intact, and gently pulsed himself again, navigating himself until he was directly over top of it.

Another drop. Another moment of stomach-in-throat.

The roof of the building roared upward at him.

One more tiny pulse to break his fall.

His feet touched down, feather soft.

He smiled, undeniably pleased with himself. He took a quick look around him to get his bearings. This roof was one of the tallest in Junction City—stupidly tall buildings were, apparently, something that humans used to build, as evidenced by what he’d seen in the East Ruins, but not so much anymore. He saw several other buildings that were about as tall as this one though, and he pictured them like stepping stones, leading him towards the Red Quarter.

He scanned carefully across the center of the city, but did not see the spire of the temple’s time wheel. It should have been visible from this vantage, if it was still standing. Likely, it had suffered the same fate as so many other buildings in the city—crashed through, bombarded, and shot to shit.

So. He had no clue what time it was. But that didn’t really matter. If he kept himself aloft and stuck to the tall roofs, he shouldn’t be all that noticeable, even if he didn’t sneak past the checkpoints at guard change.

He chose a building several blocks from him, hoped that it was more than just a shell, and launched himself at it.

Hopping from building to building turned out to require a bit more finesse than simply crossing distance, but he got the gist of it quickly. He was a fast learner, and by the fifth building, he was able to position himself delicately on the edge of it, avoiding the gaping hole in the center.

Perched on the very edge, he took a glance down and saw one of the checkpoints the centurion had warned him about. Five legionnaires standing in the middle of the street. They’d positioned and interlocked their shields so that they stood on their own like a makeshift barricade, while the legionnaires lounged behind them, their eyes fixed upon the streets, and not the building tops above them.

Even so, Perry didn’t hang out too long where they could see him. He negotiated himself carefully around the hole in the middle of the roof. A piece of concrete, loosened by whatever blast had taken the roof out, teetered threateningly at the edge. Cringing slightly, Perry sidestepped it, fearing the clatter it would make if it fell down through the building.

Another few jumps, and he found himself well within the Red Quarter.

It was immediately obvious why Legatus Gaius had chosen to sequester the people here. The buildings of the Red Quarter had fared slightly better than the rest of the town. There was still plenty of rubble and bombed out husks, but they seemed to be clustered more towards the northern end of the quarter, as far as Perry could see.

Still, his opinion of Legatus Gaius didn’t exactly improve. Sure, the buildings were more intact here, but there was still more people crammed into this area than the buildings could hold. Makeshift shelters had been hastily erected with whatever scraps people could find, and it was immediately apparent that the infrastructure of Junction City was still completely destroyed.

Running water was the most obvious item lacking. The place stank like an open sewer. Though the municipal area that Legatus Gaius had inhabited appeared to have some form of electricity, that did not extend to the Red Quarter, which was dark, save for a few communal fires that let off a smoky glow. Some of the fires were in trash cans and barrels. Others were simply parked in the middle of the street, burning piles of scrap wood that had likely been scavenged from the remains of older buildings.

Nearly the entire area was filled with people. Some of them moving about, some of them laying in various states of hopelessness, staring into their dim fires with vacant eyes. Voices lilted up to Perry from his position of overwatch, and there was a disconsolate tone to them. Quiet. Bitter. Subdued. Cut through occasionally by a rough shout, or a scream, which no one appeared to respond to.

Someone being robbed, or raped, or simply beaten for looking at someone wrong, or maybe because they had a scrap of food that someone else wanted.

Gods, but people never changed, did they? Even when their backs were against the wall, facing extinction, they still managed to be assholes to each other.

Perry wrestled with whether or not to keep his longstaff on him. He’d intended to leave it hidden on the roof, but based on what he heard, he reconsidered whether it would be wise to leave his only weapon behind.

But it would cause more problems than it solved. People would notice him, and he did not want to be noticed. They would ask questions that he didn’t want to answer. They might even become downright hostile.

He decided to leave it on the roof top, nestled carefully beside a defunct power inverter so that a casual glance might not notice it amongst the other technology in that dark and powerless hub.

After all, he still had his shield. He could still defend himself.

He crept along the perimeter of the roof until he found a spot that was slightly less inhabited than everywhere else. A little section that wafted up at him with an aggressive smell of shit. It was obvious that this was one of the places where people were dumping their refuse. Not exactly where Perry wanted to plant his feet, but he wanted even less for people to see him drop out of the sky.

Nose curled against the stench, he dropped over the side. A pulse of the shield, which sent a spray of piss and shit in an arc, and then he landed, squarely on a turd.

“Godsdammit,” Perry swore under his breath, looking down at nearly two inches of human waste that threatened to swallow his boots. He refused to breathe, and even without breathing, he sensed the stench pressing at his nostrils.

Gingerly, he picked his way out of the pond of filth. His throat tightened, threatening to gag him. Once he had solid stone under his boots again, he stamped them off and found a large chunk of rubble to scrape the worst of it from the sides of his boots.

The air locked in his lungs was running out of oxygen, and he hurried along the dark alleyway as far as he could before being forced to suck in a fresh breath, which was not so fresh at all. The stink permeated everything.

At least in Karapalida, Mordicus hadn’t forced everyone into one area. Having so many people on top of each other was a recipe for disease, especially without any apparent way to keep clean. Maybe Mordicus didn’t exhibit much control over Karapalida, but at least he wasn’t dooming people to infectious diarrhea.

Why the hell was everyone even clustered in these cities? Had they not pieced together that the Guardians were trying to exterminate them? Did they not realize what a target they made themselves by huddling in urban areas?

Both Karapalida and Junction City were equal in that regard: It was only a matter of time before the Guardians came back, seeking more target-rich environments after their first rounds of killing.

How long did Perry have until that happened?

The terrible answer was, it could happen at any time.

And here, he still had to sneak around, wasting precious time because others—like that asshole Gaius—wouldn’t play nicely. No one wanted to work together. It was so obvious to Perry that they had to in order to survive, but he was, apparently, alone in that realization.

The first man he came to was a desultory individual, sitting cross-legged at the end of the alley, his head hanging, staring at his crotch as though expecting something fascinating to happen there.

Perry stopped in front of him, not quite sure how to begin.

The man twitched, raised his head an inch, and looked at Perry’s boots. His nose curled, as though Perry was adding some additional stink to the air, which Perry didn’t think was actually possible.

“You got shit on your boots,” the man observed.

“Yeah.” Perry didn’t really have anything else to say on that account. “Hey, I’m looking for someone?”

The man dragged his eyes up with what looked like monumental effort, a nasty smirk on his face, as though he’d heard this all before. “Of course you are.”

“Well, can you help me find him?”

“Probably not, but go ahead. Shoot.”

“His name’s Hauten. He has a crew of reloaders…” Perry trailed off as the humor fled from the man’s face.

“Oh. That asshole.”

Great. So Hauten’s reputation preceded him. Or perhaps he’d simply managed to make more enemies in the short time he’d been in Junction City.

“Yeah, he’s an asshole,” Perry concurred. “Do you know where he is?”

The man stared off into the crowd and Perry followed his gaze, hoping it would land on Hauten, miraculously just a few paces away. But that wasn’t the case. It was just more strangers, their faces beleaguered, barely lit by the dim fires and the glow of a few rechargeable lanterns that hung here and there.

Perry returned his attention to the man, who shook his head angrily, as though he really were looking at Hauten. “That ratfuck.”

“Right. Yes, we’ve already established that he’s an asshole and a ratfuck, and probably many other things as well. But I need to find him.”

That nasty smile again. “What? Did he cheat you?” A brief flash of morbid excitement. “Are you gonna find him? Rough him up? Break his fucking legs?” A glance up and down. “Well. Nah. You’re too short. Hauten’s a large man.”

“Do you know where he is or not?”

The man leaned back. Then finally shook his head. “Nope.”

Perry’s fists clenched. He wished he had his longstaff. He’d very much like to hold the green glow of an energy ball right up to the man’s face, singe the stubble from it, and get some answers. “Nope, like you’re not going to tell me?”

“No. Nope, like I don’t know where he is.” An airy, dismissive wave out into the nether regions of the Red Quarter. “Somewhere over there.”

“Right. Yeah. Thanks for nothing.”

Perry turned away and marched off, pressing further into the stagnant pond of humanity. But it hadn’t been an entirely fruitless conversation. Hauten was, apparently, known. So Perry didn’t walk far before stopping again, this time at a slightly more stable-looking character, a woman with keen eyes who was already cued into Perry as he approached.

She raised an eyebrow as Perry stopped in front of her. “Help you?”

“I hope so.”

She had a hand near her chest, on the hem of her dirt-and-smoke-smudged blouse. She pulled it tighter across her chest, as though she feared Perry might want something from her more carnal than simple information.

He raised a placating hand at the gesture. “Relax. I’m just looking for someone.”

“Well, it ain’t me,” she shot back.

“You’re right. It’s not you. So, again, relax. You know Hauten? Or any of his crew?”

“Tichez,” she muttered. “Kaykeme en halle.”

Perry frowned. “Pallesprek?”

She frowned back. “You speak it?”

“Not really. That didn’t sound nice, though.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Are you an Outsider?”

Caution: “What’s it to you?”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing to me. Do you know where to find him?”

She looked at Perry slyly. “What’s in it for me?”

Perry raised his hands to show their abject poverty. “I don’t have anything to give you.”

“Hm.” She seemed dismissive.

“Except that I might be able to get him out of here.”

“The Most Honorable Legatus Gaius—fichrato—says no one leaves.”

“How about you let me figure that part out?”

The woman let out a laborious sigh. “Fine, hotshot. I’ll show you where he is. I suppose I don’t have anything better to do, and I can’t imagine my time better spent than securing even a remote possibility of you getting Hauten out of here.”

With nothing further to say on the matter, the woman launched herself from the box where she’d been sitting and started walking. Perry assumed that was his cue to follow, so he did.

They wound their way through the Red Quarter, staying mostly on the main drag—old whorehouses with no whores in them, bars with not a drop of whiskey to give, their roofs tumbledown, their faces cracked and scorched and bullet-pocked.

She stopped at an old building with half a wooden sign hanging over the door: THE THIR

Perry stared up at it, feeling a terrible sensation of being hurled back across the years, being slammed back into another time when he was not who he was now—powerless, scared, on the run, looking for someone to throw his lot in with that wouldn’t ask too many questions about where he came from.

He knew this place. He’d been in it many times. Like The Clementine in Karapalida, it was a regular stop for Hauten and his crew. It was the place that Perry had first met Hauten. And it was the place that the crew would commit their debaucheries when they came through Junction City.

The Thirsty Ox.

“You alright?”

Perry snapped his attention down from the sign, his vision seeming to swim back through the years, back to the present. And yet he was still left, feeling like his old, discarded self. The Perry who still had a busted rib and a nasty gash over his right eyebrow from the last sound beating he’d taken at Hell’s Hollow before deserting. A lost boy.

Certainly, he didn’t feel like the halfbreed man who had used his powers to destroy the paladin that had murdered his father and mother. The man who had journeyed across the end of the world, who had fought Nekrofages and lived to tell about it, who had been to The Clouds where no human had ever set foot, and who had tried to save the world, only to doom it, and was now trying to save it again.

Nope. He didn’t feel like any of that.

He felt like all of that had suddenly been whisked away like a fanciful dream, and he had the uncomfortable certainty that if he even reached out with his mind and tried to access his clasp through Confluence, he would find that place in his mind dead and gone, the clasp just a worthless piece of metal in his pocket.

The woman snapped a finger in front of his face. “Wake up, stranger. You look like you’re about to pass out. Here you were, all confident about dragging Hauten out of here, and now, standing at the door, you look like you’re about to piss yourself.”

Perry swallowed. “No. I’m fine. Is he inside?”

The woman’s face scrunched in consternation. “Oh yeah. This is where King Shit himself holds court. Hell, I don’t think he even stepped outside when the robots hit.”

So. He’d been here when it happened.

Perry girded himself up, tried to remind himself of who he was—not that scared runt anymore!—and nodded to the woman, while his eyes rested on the door, and the dim, flickering light of candles or torches seeping through the dappled glass—with a bullet hole in it.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, sure. Just…” She patted him on the shoulder as she slipped by him. “Watch yourself in there.”

Perry stepped up to the door and didn’t allow himself to hesitate. If he couldn’t be confident, he could at least act confident, and the best way to do that was charge in like he owned the place.

He thrust the door open and strode through, clomping his shit-smeared boots across the weathered plank floors, and stopping just inside to let the door swing closed. The smell of the place hit him full in the face, blasting him back in time again, but he resisted the heady sensation.

It was loud inside, lit by candles and a few torches, and one big, rusty brazier that poured unhealthy amounts of smoke into the air. There were more people here than just Hauten’s crew—unless his crew had expanded during his brief reign as King Shit—and they were scattered about, speaking loudly, clearly drunk—had King Shit horded all the whiskey from the Red Quarter? Perry wouldn’t put it past him—and one of them was huddled over some sort of string-based percussion instrument which he tactlessly hammered on, creating a sound like less like music and more like someone rummaging through a scrapyard.

A definite lull in the noise greeted Perry—his presence had been noticed—and then it was driven home by a sudden and loud exclamation that Perry knew was directed at him.

“Holy fucking gods in the skies.”

And after that it was completely silent.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

KING SHIT

Perry knew the voice, even before he found the face to go with it. And even that didn’t take long, as Jax was front and center, his wild white hair standing out in the crowd, his rheumy blue eyes fixed on Perry, and his mouth still hanging open from the exclamation.

For the very briefest of moments, Perry had an elusive hope that Jax was about to break into a wide, familiar smile. Perry should have guessed that wouldn’t be the case.

The shock on Jax’s craggy old face faded into an aggressive snarl. “Boy, you better be here to gimme back a brand new buggy for the one you toasted outside of Lasima.”

Perry winced, not liking that he was immediately on the defensive. His hand came up. “Alright, now, I didn’t toast the buggy, and you know it. That was the praetors that did that.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” A new—but equally familiar—voice boomed.

It almost made Perry jump, remembering the commanding calls of “Spiders and dogs and ants! Buckets! Work quick!”

The large form of Boss Hauten suddenly towered up from the middle of a gaggle of less-than-savory looking individuals. Though Perry supposed he didn’t look terribly savory himself. Blood and dust and sweat, and now shit as well.

Hauten stared at him with a thunderous expression. “Do my eyes deceive me? Has the wayward, thieving, backstabbing little runt come back?”

Perry thrust a finger at him, defensiveness and anger combining. “You backstabbed me, you sonofabitch! You left me to die in a jail cell!” Even as he said it, he had the thought, This is probably not the best way to win him over. But, to hell with it. Perry wasn’t going to roll over and let them blame all of their misfortunes on him.

Hauten thrust himself out from amidst the huddle of ne’er-do-wells, his chest out…and limping. When had he gotten himself a limp?

Perry was about to find out, as Hauten parked himself right in front of the keeper-less bar and made his wounded leg obvious. He stared bullets at Perry and thrust his hand down at the leg—though Perry couldn’t see anything except the fact that it had a limp.

“Your little bitch did this to me!” Hauten declared. “Right before she made off with my buggy. And then got it blown up. Leaving me and the entire crew stranded in Lasima, which is, perhaps, the most godsdamned insulting thing of all. After all I did for her! Taking her in out of the cold so that she didn’t have to be a street whore! Ungrateful little bitch! And you!” A blunt finger now pointing at Perry. “On the run! A fugitive! And did I ever ask you any questions? No! I simply opened my arms—” arms spreading wide to display his magnanimity “—and welcomed you onto my crew! You took advantage of me because I have a soft heart for youngsters, and then you robbed me blind! You took the best muscle I’ve ever had…” a sidelong glance at a large, pot-bellied beast of a man with scars all over his face. “…No offense, Curly, but Stuber would have ripped your heart out.”

Curly seemed to take offense nonetheless.

Hauten took a limping step forward—probably a tad exaggerated, Perry thought—and it didn’t escape Perry’s notice that Jax and a few others were inching closer now as well, closing in on him. He didn’t recognize most of them, but a few familiar faces stood out.

He nodded to them, trying on a smile. “Oh, hey Monty. Bigs. Chester.” Perry frowned, searching for others, even as he shifted his feet into a more ready posture for what felt like an inevitable fight. “Where’s Ernie and Pebbles?”

“I couldn’t afford to keep them on!” Hauten roared. “After you stole my buggy and an entire hold of brass! You nearly put me under with that shit. And I had to leave those poor bastards behind in Lasima, where I assume they’ve probably been killed by robots, thanks to you.”

Alright. It was time to start making headway in the peace department.

“Okay, Hauten,” Perry met his gaze again, the back of his mind toying around with his clasp, the red flow of Confluence rising in him. “I hear a lot of accusations being thrown around. And I could make accusations of my own. But I’m not going to. I’m going to let bygones be bygones.”

“How gracious of you,” Hauten spat.

“You want me to kick his ass, Boss?” Monty asked, glaring.

Perry was surprised to find himself a little hurt by that. Sure, he and Monty had never been best buds, but they’d been friendly enough.

“Alright, look,” Perry tried again. “There’s obviously some misunderstanding here. I’m sorry that Teran stole your buggy and it accidentally got blown up. But the praetors that landed in Lasima? They were looking for Teran. They would have killed her if they found her, and so she was forced to steal the buggy to get out alive.”

“Frankly,” Hauten rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t have traded that buggy for a dozen Terans.”

“Well, it’s a good thing that she was able to use your buggy. We were…doing something important.”

Hauten placed his fingers theatrically on his forehead, as though suppressing a headache. “Oh, I can only imagine the important things you were doing. Little thieving runt that you are.”

Bigs piped up. “You know, you always were full of yourself.”

“What?” Perry was genuinely shocked.

“Yeah, you were,” Bigs nodded, his eyes vicious. Fists clenched. “Like you were so much more important than the rest of us. Self-righteous cocksucker. That’s why you killed Tiller.”

“What?” Perry repeated, even more aghast. “You hated Tiller! Everybody hated Tiller!”

“Sure, but you didn’t have to beat his face in with a glass.”

“Okay. You’re right about that. But again, we’re getting a little off topic…”

Perry had been so focused on the encroaching horde of men that looked like they wanted to stomp him to death, that he didn’t notice the one behind him until the chair broke against his back.

The pain shot through Perry’s spine with surprising electricity as his body lurched forward under the blow, stumbling to try to keep his feet, right into Monty.

Monty hauled him upright and sent a solid fist right into his face, knocking the vision clean out of his eyes. He wasn’t exactly unconscious, because he still registered the sensation of blood spurting out of his nose, and the strange, weightless feeling of falling backwards.

He hit the ground like so much tossed garbage. His muddy vision cleared just enough to register the shapes of many people looming over him—gods, isn’t this a familiar vision? It’s just like the locker room at Hell’s Hollow—and he let his mind flow into his clasp.

Even as he was very aware that they would probably beat him to death if given the chance, he still didn’t want to hurt them. Not as a conscious thought, but as a deeper, subconscious barricade, like a governor on the throttle of his aggression. So as the shield came to life, he knew he didn’t want any of them to touch it. And so he did the only other thing he could think of with it.

Maybe it was because he’d been doing it nonstop for almost the entire last day, but he pulsed.

Perry went flying in one direction, and all the men that had been near his feet went flying in the other.

His body moved like it had been shot out of a cannon. Dimly, he felt himself collide with whoever it was that had bashed him with the chair, but his body didn’t stop there. He kept on going, not losing a bit of momentum, as the chair-attacker’s body went flipping end over end.

Out the door. Or, more accurately, through the door, in a cloud of wood splinter and glass. Had his shield reformed to keep his skull from being bashed in? Because he wasn’t dead, he realized, with something like surprise, as he landed hard in a heap in the dark, dusty street.

Perry didn’t remember consciously reforming the shield, but sometimes it operated like that—on some sort of intertwined instinct. And he was glad enough to be alive that he didn’t question it too much.

Alive, but not feeling great.

“Oh my fuck,” Perry groaned, writhing up into a sitting position, trying to clear the fog of the multiple impacts to his body and head. Tears in his eyes from Monty’s straight jab to the face. Blood in his mouth. A quick inspection with his tongue found all of his teeth in place. The blood was pouring from his nose, into his mouth as he gasped for air.

His mind was still in go-mode, ready for the next attack, still swallowed up in Confluence, wondering who was going to come at him next, and then, distantly, recalling the way that pulse of his shield had sent them all sprawling like they’d been hit by a shockwave.

A sort of half-realized glee settled on him. Wait until I tell Mala about THAT shit! Did she know you could pulse your shield to knock people on their asses? Probably not. She wasn’t terribly keen on non-lethal means of fighting.

Gradually, over what felt like an entire minute, but was probably more like a few seconds, the shattered doorway of The Thirsty Ox came swimming back into view.

The ruddy glow of firelight from within.

Perry stared at it, his jaw working, fingers twitching. All at once, any semblance of control or concern for the lives of the people inside fled him. He was hitting that deep spot in Confluence again, the one that he’d felt when he sheared Boomer’s arms off.

Some part of him, still connected to this world and his place in it, warned him that there was something very wrong with this feeling. But it was drowned out by a raging hunger in his chest, bubbling up from his brainstem.

Fuck them. Kill them all. How dare they? They don’t know who I am or what I’m capable of.

And he imagined burning that fucking bar to the ground, and pulsing his shield every time a screaming form came running out with their backs on fire, sending them tumbling back into the flames, screaming, flesh bubbling, sloughing off—

“Gods,” a voice lilted behind him. “What is that?”

Perry snapped his head to the right—a mistake: searing headache—and found the woman that had led him to The Thirsty Ox, standing there, eyes wide, pointing…

Pointing at the glimmering disc of his shield.

Shit.

He immediately extinguished it. “What?” he murmured around a mouthful of blood. Spat it off to the side. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She jabbed her finger at the air where his shield had been. “No, there was definitely something there.”

“I didn’t see anything.” Perry crawled slowly to his knees. Then to his feet. Swayed a bit, his inner ear not quite sure what the hell was going on at this point, though it seemed to believe that the ground was moving.

What was going on inside of his brain? It was like he’d disconnected with himself for a moment there. Forgotten who he was, and what he was hear for. Forgot about any semblance of strategy, or bigger-picture thinking. For that little instant when his mind had been all wrapped up in Confluence, all he’d wanted was death.

You need to control this, he worried at himself. It’s getting out of hand.

“I told you to be careful,” the woman said, apparently deciding that she’d hallucinated whatever it was she’d seen. “Are you gonna die?”

Perry reached back and rubbed his head, discovering that his scalp didn’t actually feel like it had taken a beating—no bumps, no gashes. His neck, on the other hand, had taken a bit of the chair, and it felt like a few vertebrae might have slipped into some odd positions.

“No, I don’t think I’m gonna die.”

“Shit. You should be dead.”

“Many times over,” Perry sighed, then faced the door again.

“Wait. You’re going back in there?”

Was he? Well, his feet were moving, so he guessed he was.

“I didn’t even get a chance to talk!” Perry shot over his shoulder. He trudged up the single step—it took an inordinate amount of effort—and parked himself in the doorway, posting his hands on the frame to steady himself.

A crowd of people hovering at the bar. Staring at him.

Gone was the look of abject malice. Replaced by a bit of cautious wonder.

“Get!” Hauten’s voice. “Get-get-get! Out of the fucking way!”

A hole in the wall of bodies appeared, Hauten not striding through it, but rather waving his arms as though the people were smoke to be cleared out of the air. He leaned back on the bar, looking all out of sorts. As the bodies cleared, his eyes locked onto Perry again.

“What the fuck was that?” Hauten demanded.

“Well, it serves you right, you asshole.” Perry thrust himself through the doorway—followed by a rapid glance to either side to make sure someone wasn’t lurking in the shadows with another chair.

But no, everyone was gathered on the far side of the room. Gathered around Hauten. Their King Shit.

“Was that a grenade?” Hauten’s voice went up an octave. “Did you blow up a grenade? In my fucking house?”

Perry spat more blood off to the side, wiped his nose. “Fuck your house. And no, it wasn’t a grenade. But I swear to the gods, if one of you tries to lay another hand on me I’m going to send you through the wall.”

“You hurt my back!” Hauten moaned, seeming to be unable to decide whether to exaggerate the pain in his back or the limp in his leg.

“You hurt my neck!” Perry accused back.

“You hurt your own neck!”

“Alright!” Perry took a deep breath, which rattled uncomfortable through his busted nose. He held up his hands, then lowered his voice to a deathly whisper. “I’m going to stop yelling now. Because it hurts my head. You’re going to stop yelling too.”

“I’ll yell all I want!” Hauten proclaimed, churlishly.

In response to that, Perry activated his shield. One, big, shimmering rectangle, which he pressed forward through the air, until it struck an overturned chair and burst the wood into flames.

After that, there was blessed silence.

“Hauten,” Perry said, his voice still low and dangerous. “I’m going to sit down, and we are going to talk. Is that going to be a problem?”

Hauten seemed unable to take his eyes from the shield that hovered in the air, faintly glimmering, tiny, almost microscopic sparks of energy speckling it as the dust and smoke particles that hung heavy in the air sizzled against it.

The chair crackled menacingly as it rapidly turned to ash.

Perry extinguished the shield, feeling that his point had been made. He turned and hobbled on aching joints over to an abandoned table. It had several tumblers already on it, but Perry had no idea what kind of filthy creature had been drinking out of them. There was a bottle in the center of the table. He grabbed it and was disappointed to find it empty. He slammed it down, irritated.

“Please tell me you have more whiskey.”

Hauten, still draped across the bar in a pose of agony, though his face was no longer acting out his body language, narrowed his eyes at Perry and pursed his lips in an expression that Perry recognized as “thoughtful.”

Then Hauten pulled himself upright, apparently no longer disabled by his back or his leg—a downright miracle, Primus be praised—and snorted loudly. “Of course I have whiskey. I have all the whiskey. What kind of a savage do you take me for?”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

DEALING WITH PEOPLE

Perry’s mouth was dry by the time he got done talking. He’d yammered on nonstop, spurred, despite himself, by Hauten’s dubious expressions and his own desire to never give him a chance to interrupt until the entire tale was out.

He’d barely touched his whiskey. Now, finally reaching the conclusion of his byzantine story—which just sounded more fantastical the more he tried to make it sound real—he snatched up the tumbler and applied it to his mouth like a muzzle. Cool on his tongue, hot down his throat. A strong, bracing sting that let you know you were getting fucked up, as opposed to that sneaky shit they’d served him and Stuber at Praesidium.

Hauten allowed him to drink for a protracted moment of silence. Perry stared at the golden liquid in his glass, hoping that it would improve his spirits. Hauten’s demeanor certainly was dampening them.

“So…” Hauten frowned at the table top. Glanced furtively at Perry. Then back down. His mouth worked with unsaid words. A finger pried at a nail head in the table top. Whatever was on his mind, he was really struggling with. “You really want me to believe…you’re really trying to sell me on the fact that…you haven’t fucked Teran?”

Perry slammed his tumbler down and just barely managed to swallow the whiskey in his mouth before spewing it across the table. “Gods, Hauten! What part of anything I said had anything at all to do with that? Were you even listening?”

Hauten raised a hand. “Well, I was somewhat distracted, waiting for you to get around to the part where you and Teran consummate your tragic love for one another.”

Tragic?

Perry closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Did you hear the part about the Guardians?”

“You mean the murder-bots that you released on mankind? Yes, I recall.”

“I didn’t…” Perry slapped the table. Stared at Hauten, unable to keep a humorless grin from seizing his mouth. “Yes. The murder-bots. They’re called Guardians.”

Hauten took a deep breath and, for once, seemed to take things seriously. “I witnessed them with my own eyes. We were here in Junction City when they hit. We were wise enough to stay hidden and not try to fuck with them. Unlike so many others that ran about screaming and shooting at them, only to get blown up.”

“Or disintegrated,” Jax put in from his perch behind Hauten.

“Or melted with that green stuff,” Monty said, looking haunted.

“Right. Yes.” Perry nodded. “All of that.”

Hauten leaned forward, propped his elbows on the table. “And you claim they’re out to exterminate all life on the planet?”

“More or less,” Perry agreed. “Not sure how they feel about animals, but they’re definitely killing people.”

“Hm.” Hauten rubbed a finger across his mouth. “If that’s the case then we need to get out of here. It’s already crossed my mind that I’m not a fan of the stranglehold Gaius has put on the city. Very constraining. Hard for us to make a living with all that going on. I guess we would have had to make a break out of this place eventually, but if what you’re saying is true, then being in a high populace area is dangerous.”

“Yes,” Perry seized on that, a tiny bit of headway. “You need to get the hell out of here. And we need your help in Karapalida.”

Hauten frowned, shaking his head. “Now why on earth would I trade on populated area for another?”

Dammit. “Legatus Mordicus, the guy that’s taken over Karapalida, he’s not near as much of a hard-ass as Gaius. And he’s had some success in taking down the Guardians. But he’s out of ammo. Now, I’ve already got him working on making copper billets for us to form into projectiles, but…”

Perry trailed off as Hauten waved a hand, as though calling for a cease-fire. “You’re not hearing me. City jammed full of people equals inevitable doom. That’s what you said. And frankly, I believe that part of it, even as much as I struggle with some of the other details. I suppose I believe it because I’ve seen evidence of it myself. So, no, I will not be going to Karapalida, or anywhere else with a bunch of people waiting to die.”

“Hauten.” Perry nearly reached across the table. He was pressing himself so far forward that his chest was against the edge of the wood. “We need your help! I told Mordicus that I would get you to come help!”

“Well, maybe you should have talked it over with me before making promises.”

“I’m talking it over with you right now!”

“Fine then. My answer is no.”

“We have a chance to beat them, Hauten. We have a chance to stop these Guardians from killing everyone. You can’t just turn your back on us.”

“Sure, you have a chance. But it’s not a good one. Frankly, I think you’re all going to die, but I guess that’s your choice. If you want my advice, I’d tell you to go back to Karapalida and tell everyone to flee these urban areas.”

“It won’t make a difference! Don’t you get that? The Guardians have one job, and that’s to exterminate everyone—everyone! They’re not just going to stop because everyone fled into the countryside. They’re going to keep hunting people down, no matter where they are. If everyone runs off into hiding, the only thing that changes is maybe it takes them a little longer to make humanity extinct. All that would do is postpone the inevitable. The only way humanity makes it is if we start working together and figure out a way to beat them.”

“Alright. Fine.” Hauten twiddled his fingers at Perry. “You go figure out a way to beat them, and when you’ve figured it out, let me know, and I’ll come help.”

“That’s what I’m doing right now!” Perry almost shouted.

“I thought you weren’t going to shout anymore.”

“My headache’s gone!” It wasn’t. “There is a way to beat them! With overwhelming firepower! But only if we can get enough ammunition! And for that we need reloaders! We need you!”

“And what about your new demigod friends?” Hauten asked, quirking his eyebrow. “Wouldn’t they be far more effective at fighting these Guardians? Wouldn’t you be far more effective at fighting them?” A worldy-wise glint in his eyes. “Or do you not possess the same abilities that they do?”

Perry gritted his teeth, hands tense upon the tabletop. “There’s only three of us. One that truly knows how to fight. The other is…not quite as adept. And I’m still learning. But even if we were all equal fighters, it still wouldn’t be enough.”

“Well, perhaps you’re rummaging the wrong pile,” Hauten said, airily. “There’s an entire city of demigods—this mythical city in the clouds you claim to have been to. Why not go there and enlist help from the other asshole paladins that abandoned us down here? Surely an army of paladins would be sufficient.”

“I can’t go back to The Clouds,” Perry said stiffly. “The Sons of Primus are there. And they are…not friendly.”

“Why, Perry.” Hauten put on a shocked face. “That’s heresy.”

“It’s fact. They’re not what the flamens preached.” Perry swallowed, uncomfortable. “Which is part of the reason why Mordicus executed them all.”

Hauten grimaced. “He sounds like a volatile character. I see why you’re afraid to disappoint him.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” Perry said earnestly. “I’m afraid of the Guardians. I’m afraid of extinction.”

“All the more reason to avoid places that will draw their attention. Like Karapalida.”

Perry sat there for a long moment, staring at Hauten, trying to see into the man’s soul, trying to see if there was some leverage in that man’s mind that Perry could use to turn him around. But Hauten was nothing if not an expert swindler, and he gave nothing away.

“So that’s it?” Perry leaned back. “Fuck us? Fuck the world? Let us all die?”

Hauten sighed laboriously. “You make me sound so cold-hearted. But…yes. This problem was not my doing. And I don’t intend to risk my neck to solve other people’s problems.”

Hauten must have seen the anger boiling up in Perry. But he didn’t seem to care. He smiled at it, which only brought Perry to the edge of doing something rash and very violent.

“Are you going to use your powers on me, then?” Hauten asked, quietly. “Is that what it’s come to? Because unless you’re willing to kill us all, we’re not going with you. And if you kill us all, well, then, we won’t do you much good will we?”

Perry shook his head, suddenly tired. It all hit him at once, taking the anger out of him and replacing it with a strange malaise that seeped from his bones into his muscles. “No. I’m not going to use my powers to hurt you.”

Hauten raised his hands, as though to conclude they were at an impasse. “Then I think we’re done here.”

Perry thumped his index finger irritably on the tabletop, staring at Hauten, and realizing that he’d reached a dead end. No further options to pursue.

If you only got one road to travel, best to stop bitching and get to stepping.

Perry leaned forward, grabbed his tumbler and the bottle of whiskey. He poured himself a hefty draft, his eyes locked onto Hauten as he did it. Perhaps it was a petty move, but Perry didn’t care. He was gonna get something out of this, even if it was just a nice buzz.

He drank the whiskey down in two burning gulps, then slammed the tumbler down. Then, feeling that his point had not quite been made, he stood and grabbed the bottle. “I’m taking this. And I’d like to see you stop me.”

Hauten did not stop him. He looked amused by it. Frankly, he was probably just glad that Perry was on his way out.

Perry turned away, burning defeat settling over him like an itchy wool blanket that’s spent too many hours in front of a fire. He stopped before he reached the door and looked back at Hauten. “And where will you go? Should I need to find you in the future?”

Hauten pursed his lips, apparently considering whether he wanted Perry to have that information. But then he shrugged. Waved a hand. “North of here. The old mining operation. You remember it?”

Perry had never been there personally—a fact which Hauten may have forgotten—but he recalled Hauten speaking of it, and he knew where it was. He just hoped that Hauten wasn’t feeding him a line of bullshit.

He nodded to Hauten, and left him behind.

***

Outside, though not exactly cool, was still a relief from the hot press of bodies and candles and torches. The smell wasn’t an improvement—Perry would take body odor over shit any day—but Perry took a big breath of the air anyways, as though to purge himself.

The woman that had led him over to The Thirsty Ox was gone. By some unspoken agreement, it seemed that most others in the Red Quarter had begun to congeal into their places of sleep. A few still meandered about, but there was still a sense of stillness.

Or perhaps it was his sense of loss.

What the hell was he going to do now?

His irritation with Hauten had carried him through the worst of the disappointment and suppressed anxieties, but as he worked his way through the Red Quarter, back to the building where he’d hidden his longstaff, the irritation vanished—well, mostly vanished—and it all began to creep in on him again.

Maybe humanity deserved to die. Bunch of quarrelsome sonsabitches. Self-centered. Violent. Domineering. Uncaring. Ruthless. Shortsighted. A brood of toddlers slinging mud at each other, consumed with their little patch of filth—No! This is my mud puddle!

Could they not see the bigger issue here? Was no one capable of zooming out of the cloistered little huddle of their lives and seeing how dependent they were on each other, how their only strength lay in their ability to work together? Gods, but they could do things if they put their mind to it. It was just getting them there that was the problem.

And Perry was clearly not a good messenger. So far, only Mordicus had been willing to listen, and him only just barely. He just wanted what Perry could provide. Or, more accurately, what Hauten could provide. Perry doubted his cooperation would continue after he found out that Perry had failed.

So was Perry really back at square one?

“Was Hauten not willing to listen?” came a voice from an alley, just as Perry passed it.

In his mind, he immediately ascribed the voice to the face of the woman that had taken him to The Thirsty Ox. He stopped, prepared a retort full of his customary snark—he was in no mood to restrain his lesser nature.

He turned to the alley, realizing at the last second that his ears were humming.

And found himself looking at the woman with the red hair.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE WOMAN WITH THE RED HAIR

“You!” Perry took a step towards her.

And then she rocketed into the air.

A tiniest glimpse of her face as his eyes followed her up—calm, a sly smile on her lips.

She’s a demigod, Perry suddenly decided for sure, his heart erupting back into full throttle as he watched her alight on the edge of the roof, just above him. Because how else could she have flown?

Except…

She was looking down at him. Still with that calm smile on her face. Almost challenging him. Can you catch me?

Before Perry could really decide whether that was a wise thing to do with a stranger that possessed Confluence, Perry jumped, his shield bursting around him, and he pulsed, flying upward.

In the single second of flight it took him to reach the top of the building, the woman had turned and leapt again—an inhuman leap that carried her clean across two buildings. Perry landed right where she’d been standing, albeit with less grace. He tottered on the edge, got his balance back with a few panicked waves of his arms, then jumped again.

“Hey!” he shouted, in midair, as he caught sight of her, just the flash of red hair amongst the dark clothing she wore that blended into the dark city around them. “Stop!”

Predictably, she didn’t stop. She worked a course, flying outward toward the edges of Junction City, effortlessly bounding between buildings like a child might jump from rock to rock to cross a stream.

Perry was aware that he was being led away from his longstaff, and all the bad things that it foretold. He was on the verge of giving up the pursuit for the sole purpose of not wanting to be led away from his only real weapon, when the woman reversed course, shooting past him.

The sudden change in direction was not something he was prepared to handle. Agility in his “flying” was not something he’d learned just yet. Flailing about in an attempt to follow her, he ended up slamming his shield into the side of a building. Concrete exploded in a molten burst around him.

He swore. Righted himself. He was buried a yard into the side of the building. Someone was screaming about it, but the room was too dark to see them. Perry mumbled an apology at them and extinguished his shield, tried to scramble back out of the hole he’d created, but found the crisply-burned edges too hot to touch.

So he leaped, as though trying to swan dive to his death. Then twisted his body in midair and pulsed himself back up to safety.

As he arced up again, he shot his gaze about and found the woman again.

There. Just a few buildings, dead ahead of him.

Another pulse, and a few haphazard maneuvers, and he was flying towards her.

He tried to ready himself for another sudden course change, but the woman simply stood there on the top of a building, watching him descend to her.

A small pulse, and then his feet hit the ground.

Both of them, standing a few yards from each other, still as statues. Perry with a serious look of concern etched across his face; the woman with that same bemused smirk.

It was only after a few slams of his heart that he realized which roof they were standing on. His eyes swept to the side, saw the power inverter, and the glimmer of his longstaff laying amongst its components.

He started towards it.

The longstaff shot out of its hiding spot as though yanked by an invisible wire, and the next thing he knew it was in the hands of the woman.

Perry halted, hands up, shield up.

And that was when it hit him.

When he’d first seen her jump and had rapidly concluded she must be a demigod, something had stuck out to him, but in the hectic attempt to chase her, it hadn’t come forward to his conscious mind. Now it hit him like a bullet to the brain.

I never saw a shield.

Even now as she stood there, she had no shield around her, as Perry did. He searched the air that encapsulated her, wondering if it was just a shield that was hard to see, but there was nothing. Just regular old air.

“Alright,” Perry seethed. “That’s enough of that bullshit.”

“I agree,” the woman said, lighthearted. “Here. Catch.”

The longstaff flew at his face. She hadn’t thrown it. It seemed to move of its own volition.

Perry extinguished his shield—a microsecond of thought: Lowering your shield is a trap!—and caught it in both hands. It stung his palms and rocked him back a single step. Gods, but she’d thrown it hard!

He immediately leveled the longstaff at the strange woman and reactivated his shield. He should have felt better. Should have felt more in control, now that he was armed and shielded. But the very fact that she’d given him the longstaff—and flown without a shield, apparently—made him feel like he was not as in control of the situation as it might seem.

And the woman seemed to agree with that unspoken sentiment. She stood there in a relaxed posture, not appearing to care one whit that Perry had a longstaff leveled at her.

Perry did a quick sweep to either side, checking his blind spots for additional attackers. That would have made sense—she was relaxed because she had a squad of goons ready to take him down. But no one else was on the rooftop with them.

Back to her.

“What is this?” he demanded. “Why do you keep showing up? What is it that you want?”

The woman rolled her eyes good-humoredly. “Not even a thanks?”

“Thanks for what?”

“For saving your life in Karapalida.”

He frowned, his mouth opening for a retort—that was the old man that had warned them, not…

The thought died in its infancy. Something bigger took its place. Something harder to believe, and yet…truer.

“That’s…” he struggled to find the right words.

“Impossible?” the woman asked him. “Which part?”

“The old man.”

“Yes?” the voice changed.

Perry blinked, fearing he’d truly lost his mind. Because it was no longer the woman standing across from him, but—as Stuber had dubbed him—“the magical hobo.”

In the time it took for Perry to register what he was looking at, the old man was gone again, and the woman stood there, smiling at him with a glimmer in her eyes like a person that held all the good cards and has just lured you into betting all your money.

Perry had the urge to rub his eyes, but couldn’t bear the thought of having them closed for any longer than necessary. Had he actually seen that? Was this some sort of weird mental witchcraft that she’d worked on him?

“The hell was that?” Perry said, a little breathlessly.

“It was me,” she said, moving for the first time, just a slight shift in her balance, which brought about an overreaction of tension on Perry’s part. This only made her smile wider at him. “I was the one that told you the crowds were gathering to attack you in Karapalida.”

Silence.

She lifted her eyebrows. “So…?”

“So?”

She cast her gaze skyward, as though ever-patient.

Perry swallowed against a dry throat. “Uh…thanks?”

She appeared satisfied. “You’re welcome.”

“What?” He wanted to take a step toward her, but felt like his feet were rooted. “Is that all this is about? You just wanted me to thank you?”

“No, not at all.” She folded her hands in front of her. “Do you want to know what it is that I want?”

“Yes. That is pretty much what I just asked.”

“Fair enough.” A step towards him. A lift of the chin. “I want you to take responsibility.”

“Take…” Perry goggled at her, completely lost. “Take what? Responsibility? For what? Stop being so godsdamned mysterious and just speak normally to me!”

“Aw.” She pouted her lip. “Is the little peon runt incapable of zooming out and seeing the big picture?”

Perry’s jaw dropped. Then snapped shut. “Nope. This is bullshit. There was something in the whiskey. Godsdamn Hauten, I should’ve known he’d try to drug me.”

She laughed at him. A pleasant sound, like the tinkling of wind chimes. She strode casually towards him, stopping just a pace away, the shield humming mutely between them, and she extended her hand.

Perry stared at it. Then at her. “The hell am I supposed to do with that?”

“Go ahead. Touch me. See that I’m real.”

“Nope.” He shook his head violently. “You’re gonna pull some weird shit. Scramble my brains or something.”

“Ah, so you do think I’m real? If you really thought I was a figment of your imagination, then what harm would there be in touching me?”

“You’re right then. I don’t think you’re a figment of my imagination. You’re real. But I’m still not going to touch you.”

“Suit yourself,” she sighed, lowering her hand. “At least we’re on the same page, then. We’ve agreed that I am indeed real. Any other existential crises we need to get out of the way?”

“Who and what are you?”

She pursed her lips and squinted skyward, as though trying to recall something. “Let’s see…Jaira. Yvette. Persimmon—don’t ask. Ara. Niva. And once, I was called Madame S, by a band of thieves. The S stood for Scary, I believe.” She looked at him, quirking her eyebrow. “Do any of those strike your fancy? But not Ara. I forbid you to use that one…for sentimental reasons.”

Perry picked his mental way through the list of names, none of which answered the real question of who this person was—only what they were called. “So, you’ve been a lot of places. People that have lots of names usually have gotten around a bit.”

She looked briefly wistful. “Oh, have I. And yes. That tends to happen, doesn’t it? You yourself have several names. Percival. Percy. Perry.” A glimmer of amusement. “Shortstack?”

Perry chose to ignore the dangled bait of how she knew all that about him. “So you’re a woman.”

He was pleased to see a slight crinkling of confusion on her otherwise flawless brow—barely a wrinkle on her skin, he noted. How old was she? She didn’t look old enough to have the kind of mileage she was claiming.

“They all sounded like female names,” Perry continued. “So, I mean, really you’re a woman. Not an old man. Right?”

She smiled. “I am many different things, Perry. But for simplicity’s sake…yes. You can think of me as a female.”

Another dodgy answer.

“How old are you?” Perry asked, eyes searching her face again. “Twenty? Twenty-five on the outside? And you claim to have been so many places? Must’ve been quite an upbringing.”

She laughed heartily, as though he’d said something truly hilarious. Like an inside joke with herself. After the laughter died down, she wiped a tear from her eye. “Yes. I’ve been many places.”

“Alright. You’re fucking with me and I don’t like it.”

“Nor do I, actually.” Her face grew serious. “But this isn’t exactly the place for, shall we say, a full reveal. And without that, I have the feeling you won’t believe anything I have to say.”

“Try me.”

“Oh, Perry. I’ve been watching you all your life. I know more about how your mind works than you might think.”

Perry couldn’t help the sarcastic twist in his face. “You’ve been watching me all my life? You’re maybe the same age as me. You must’ve been a very bright infant.”

“So you don’t believe me?”

“I think you’re crazy.”

“Exactly.”

Perry frowned, realizing that he’d proven her point for her. And she knew it too. He shook his head vigorously. “Just…stop. You still haven’t told me what you are.”

“If you had eyes to see and ears to hear, you’d realize that I have.” She paused, as though hearing something inside her own head. Which didn’t exactly help his impression that she was a few bullets short of a full mag. “There’s a mountain to the east of here. It rises up out of the wastelands like it’s got no business being there. Do you know it?”

Snaggle-Tooth Mountain. He was familiar. It was less of a mountain and more of just a giant piece of rock that had, through some unknown monumental forces eons ago, jutted up out of the desert.

“Yeah. I know it.”

“That is where I’m going. To the top of that mountain. And that is the place where I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

Perry was about to object on the basis that no one had ever been to the top of that mountain, as it was sheer, vertical cliff-faces all around. But then he remembered that she could fly. And so could he.

But he still didn’t trust her. Wasn’t about to follow her out into the middle of nowhere, to a lonely mountain top, where she’d…do bad things to him. He had no idea what they might be, but he knew he didn’t want to find out, and he couldn’t get rid of the nagging feeling that she was dangerous.

Hell, she’d flown without a shield.

Could she shoot energy without a longstaff?

He was in over his head, for sure. And there was no way he was going to let her dictate a place to him. Apparently she had reservations about “fully revealing” herself in Junction City, which Perry hoped to mean that she wouldn’t blow him to smithereens, as long as there were other people around.

“That’s not gonna happen.”

She seemed to have expected that answer. She tilted her head to one side. “You’re not the least bit curious?”

“Oh, I’m very curious. But I’m also not stupid.”

“No, I suppose you’re not. I can’t really blame you. But you’re on the cusp of extinction, Perry. The entire human race is.” She folded her hands—small, prim, clean—at her waist. “You’re trying to help, but you don’t know how. You’re doing what you think is your best, but it’s not. You could do so much more.”

Despite himself, those words got into his head. He found himself lowering his guard—but not his shield—and the longstaff drooped in his hands.

“Tell me,” he said earnestly. “Just tell me what I have to do.”

“I already did. You weren’t listening.”

“I’m trying to take responsibility. Is that what you’re talking about? I was listening. But you’re not listening. These people…I can’t get them to work together!”

She shrugged, looking suddenly tired. Suddenly old. Nothing on her face changed, really. It was still young and vital, her skin without calluses or wrinkles. But the way her eyes hit his in that moment and then flitted up to the stars over their heads…

Yes. He could believe that she was older than she looked. Much older.

“Change the tides of history,” she said, almost a whisper.

Hot and cold clashed in his chest. But he shouldn’t have been surprised by her words. She knew the different names he’d been called—including Percival. Perhaps she knew about the message as well.

“I don’t know how,” Perry answered.

“Ah, but you do.” She drew herself up, her face, her eyes, returning to that youthful glimmer. “And there will come a time when you’re ready to take your place. To accept your destiny. And when that day comes, you know where to find me, and I’ll tell you all you need to know to win.”

“Wait! I—”

But in a rustle of clothes, she burst skyward.

He jerked back, looking up at the night sky, but saw no sign of her.

CHAPTER TWENTY

CONGREGATION

Teran stared out at a smudge of orange in the darkness to the east.

Something was burning.

It was too far away to perceive what it was, but given the great distance, Teran figured it had to be a city, if she was able to see the light of the burning from so many miles away. Above that ochre blotch, sooty black clouds of smoke rose up, blocking out the stars in the otherwise clear sky.

She stood transfixed by it. She’d gone to this high lookout to get a breath of fresh air, but now the air seemed to be caught in her throat, not fresh at all, but filled with scents of acrid smoke and burning flesh that she knew was imaginary.

Why this horror? Hadn’t she stood atop mountains and looked down at entire battlefields filled with soldiers slaughtering each other? Thousands dead in a single day? The stink of the blood and dirt mixed into a potent, iron-smelling mud. The taste of her own vomit still lingering on her tongue.

Yes, she’d experienced horror. But not like this.

These people—whoever they were—were innocent. They had not wanted or foreseen or marched to their deaths. It had come upon them out of the sky, powers that they had no comprehension of, smiting them with a wrath they could not make sense of.

“You shouldn’t be up here.”

The voice made her jump. She twisted, saw Lucky standing at the mouth of the cave, dimly lit by the lights from deeper back in the tunnel. This clan of Outsiders was not so different from her own, sheltering in a similar warren of caves. The environment so familiar to her, and yet the twisting tunnels and corridors and caverns were alien to her, like her own memories skewed in a dream.

“I needed some fresh air,” she said, her voice a little wan.

Lucky stepped out, but still kept under the overhang of rock. He looked skyward suspiciously, as though the stars themselves were watchful eyes. “Being out in the open endangers everyone.”

Teran sighed and took a step backwards until she was under the overhang, shoulder to shoulder with Lucky. She nodded out into the distance. “What city is that?”

He squinted, peering into the distance. His face screwed up with worry. “Shit. I think that’s Downing. Maybe twenty miles from here? We sent people there, too.”

“Maybe they made it out.”

“Did you see the Guardians come in?”

Teran shook her head. She’d searched the sky when she’d first noticed the glow, wondering if she could spot those machines falling like meteors from the heavens, but all she’d seen was the midnight black of the smoke.

“Maybe they’ve all come down out of the sky already,” Lucky said. “Maybe they’re just searching overland now.”

Teran didn’t reply. They stood in silence for a long moment, staring. Was it her imagination or had the blaze gotten brighter? Was that the shudder of the mountain in the gusts of wind that buffeted it, or was it the tremor of far off explosions that she felt? Was that the keening of wind, or the cries of the dying carried on it?

“Everyone’s assembled,” Lucky said. “They’re waiting on you.”

She took a deep breath. She’d thought that she wanted this. All the way across the wastelands, flying in the skiff, she’d imagined this place as though it were home to her.

Perhaps it was that she’d been out in the open for too long. She’d grown up her entire life in the warrens, venturing out into the world only to get what was needed for the survival of the clan. But then she’d spent so long tracking Perry down, and then had been attached to him throughout everything that had happened…maybe she just wasn’t used to the underground anymore.

The second that she’d stepped into these caves it had felt wrong. Too close. Too crowded. No breeze. The air was too still and the people were too numerous, too watchful of her. Her heart had begun pounding with a sensation of being caught in a strange place, in way over her head.

Where were her friends? These were supposed to be her people, so why did she feel so alone?

At the earliest opportunity, which was about thirty minutes ago, she’d escaped, finding a tunnel that she could smell the fresh air coming in from, and following it to where it wound its gradual way up to this lookout.

Now she was in no better shape than she had been. Worse actually, staring at the destruction being wrought on some hapless people, twenty miles away.

“Teran.”

“Alright.” She turned around, facing the tunnel. “I’m going.”

They made their way back down into the suffocating bowels of the mountain. How could a place like this ever have felt like home to her? Humans were not meant for this. They were meant to see the sky. They were meant to scan the horizon. They were meant to move, godsdammit, not be stuck in a stone tomb, waiting for some day of freedom that would never come, hiding from the rest of the world.

How could you ever live in peace in this world if you couldn’t see farther than five feet on all sides? How the hell could you even see a threat coming until it was right on top of you?

It wasn’t natural. She’d grown up thinking it was natural, but if it really was, then why had it only taken a handful of months to completely undo? If it truly was natural to her, then it should have felt like coming home, like she’d thought that it would.

Now she couldn’t imagine staying here longer than absolutely necessary.

And therein lay her big dilemma.

These were her people. They were the reason she’d done everything that she’d done, right? She’d argued and gotten mad and defensive with Perry and the others, seeking some sense of righteousness in her cause. Was she now going to throw all of that away because the caves gave her the heebie-jeebies?

It was, she knew, exactly what they expected of her. She saw it written all over the faces of the people that she’d met. Oh, this is Teran, she’s an Outsider, just like us. But they’d looked at her like they could smell the stink of the rest of the world on her, and it was clear as all the daylight they’d never see, that they didn’t think she was one of them anymore.

Fancy girl, all full of herself, gone out to have adventures in the world, forgot about her own people. Who the hell does she think she is?

But, as Perry had so often pointed out, Teran was stubborn. She’d latched onto this idea of hers, and she wasn’t about to let go.

So she lied to herself, as stubborn people will often do. And when the tunnel opened up into the main cavern, and she saw all of those people with their doubtful, suspicious attention fixed on her as though she were an alien in their midst, she forced herself to think, These are my people.

Evidence to the contrary be damned.

She descended into the main chamber, hot with people’s bodies and a fire burning under a natural chimney in the rock. Gods, but why did they want it so hot all the time? Stifling and stinking from the breath of hundreds in the enclosed space.

She scanned the faces to see if she could recognize any of the people from her own clan.

Lucky, his mission to retrieve her complete, moved around her and sat down with someone she recognized. It didn’t escape her that he did so quickly, as though he didn’t want to be seen standing with her for too long. And the person she recognized, a woman who had always hung around with Lucky, avoided her gaze.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” a gravelly voice called out.

She looked to the front of the crowd, and saw the leader of this clan, a man named Sage, standing and beckoning her forward with an irritable twitch of his hands. His eyes were dubious little slits, and his mouth was pressed into an ugly line, as though her presence were something to be endured, like the lancing of a boil.

“Thank you, Sage,” Teran said, trying to sound friendly in spite of everything.

He grunted as she stopped before him. “What took you so long? Can’t handle the underground anymore?”

She chose to deflect. “There’s a city burning to the east of here.”

She hadn’t said it loudly, but she’d been heard nonetheless. A ripple of murmurs moved through the crowd. Some concern evident in the tone. Even Sage managed to look anxious.

“Must be Downing,” he commented.

“You sent people there for supplies?”

A nod.

“I’m assuming they haven’t returned yet.”

He gave her a sharp look of consternation, then retreated a few steps to a wooden box, which he sat upon with a huff. He glanced around at the people gathered, then back at Teran, and gave her a get on with it gesture.

Teran took a deep breath and squared herself to the gathering. “If this clan is anything like mine, then I’m sure the rumors have been flying about me, and you’ve already heard everything I told Sage when I got here.”

A demur chuckle. A slightly humorous admission of guilt. But only from a few. Most of them just glared at her.

“Downing is burning. The town of Oksidado was completely wiped out. Karapalida was hit as well—Lucky was there when it happened, and you can see the injuries he sustained. The things that did this are machines, left by the All-Kind, to exterminate all the life on this planet.”

Sage cleared his throat, cutting off another rumble of murmurs. “And why now, Teran?” His eyes glinted in the firelight. He already knew the answer. He just wanted her to say it. He wanted her to impugn herself right at the get-go.

She held his gaze, defiantly. “Because the Nine Sons of Primus were held captive in a place called the East Ruins. And they’ve been released.”

A woman right at the front, sitting cross-legged, jutted a finger out at Teran. “I heard you released them.”

Teran glared at her. “Well, you heard wrong.”

“Did she?” Sage called out. “Because that’s pretty much what you said when you told me about it. So either you lied to me, or you’re lying to them now. Which one is it?”

Teran pasted on a brittle smile. “Sage. You’ve been the leader of this group for a long time, haven’t you?”

Sage puffed out his chest. “Thirty-six years.”

“Congratulations. How old are you now?”

“Sixty-five, though I don’t see why that matters.”

Teran shrugged. “It’s normal for a man of your age to begin losing his hearing. You shouldn’t feel bad about it. But you either didn’t hear what I told you, or you’re lying to the people right now to try and fuck me over. So which one is it?”

Sage’s face bloomed red. “You said—!”

“I said I was there when it happened,” Teran snapped. “I didn’t say that I did it. We were there because we were following clues, trying to sort out the truth from the lies of the Ortus Deorum.” She looked back at the crowd. “And most of it is lies. But, to be honest, that’s neither here nor there. We’re Outsiders. We never accepted the law that the demigods handed down to us. We never accepted this war in the first place. So it should come as no shock that it’s all been bullshit from the start.

“The reason I’m here is far more serious than a jumble of myths that the demigods forced down humanity’s throat. I’m talking about the extinction of our species. The wholesale slaughter of every human being on this planet. And it’s happening, right now. Right as we speak.” She thrust her hand in the general direction of east. “It’s happening right outside, twenty miles away in Downing.”

“These machines,” a man said, shooting to his feet and speaking to the crowd, rather than to Teran. “They’re the judgement of the gods! Not the demigods that have enslaved us, but the gods that they themselves were born from. The machines are here to punish humanity for their involvement in the demigods’ forever war.” Now he finally looked at Teran. “But that’s not our problem. We were never a part of that war. So what reason could the machines have to kill us?”

Teran was so surprised at the randomness of this theory, and the fact that it seemed a lot of the people shared it, that she couldn’t speak for a second or two. She realized her shock might be interpreted as being “caught” and quickly covered it up with a look of abject confusion.

“And where the hell did you come up with that idea?” she demanded. “Did you just pull it out of your ass to make yourself feel better? Is that what we’re dealing with right now? Are we just rationalizing away the truth because we don’t want to admit that we’re on the menu too?”

The man glowered at her. “You keep saying ‘we’ like you’re one of us. But you’re not.”

There it is.

“Oh I’m not, huh?” Teran’s fists balled at her side. She stepped forward, and saw a glimmer of fear in the man’s eyes, which emboldened her to continue on, pushing her way through the seated and standing people until she was face to face with him. “I don’t know who the hell you are, or where you came from. But I was born in a cave just like this one. I spent my life playing in its tunnels, and taking the underground river with my father to secure supplies from cities. And then I went out—yes, I did. I left my home behind, not because I wanted to be free of it, but because I wanted to save the people in it.”

The man quirked his head, a vicious smile edging onto his mouth. “And how’d that work out for your clan?”

Teran went blank. The next thing she knew, she had his roughspun shirt balled in one fist, and her knife to his throat.

Maybe not the most diplomatic thing to do.

“You ever say shit about my clan again, I’ll cut you a new smile to go with your rotten one, you dickless fuck!”

She had perceived the uproar around her, but didn’t pay it much mind until she felt a smattering of hands seize her by the arms and drag her backwards.

“That’s enough of that!” Sage was yelling. “Everyone sit down!” he was right behind her—one of the sets of hands dragging her backwards. “Everyone sit the fuck down! This is not how we conduct ourselves!”

Teran allowed herself to be removed from the center of the crowd and thrust somewhat forcefully back to her original spot, her fingers aching from having the shirt ripped out of her grasp, the knife trembling in her other hand.

Sage had an iron hand on her shoulder, and with the other he pointed at the man that had challenged her. “Gully, you know better than to speak of the dead.” He twisted and looked at her. “And you, if you really claim to be an Outsider, know better than to draw a weapon during a congregation.”

A few shouts of assent at that.

And what could Teran say? He was right. She did know better. The only thing that saved her in that moment was the general consensus that you had the right to kill a man who insulted your honor.

Teran shook Sage’s hand from her shoulder, then made a deliberate show of sheathing her knife again.

The man named Gully bowed his head in a mockery of an apology. “Perhaps I spoke a bit out of turn. My passion for the subject matter got the best of me. So let me try in a more correct manner: Who was it that killed your clan?”

“It was a paladin named Selos,” she said through gritted teeth. “And several squads of his praetorians.”

“And yet…” Gully spread his arms wide, his eyebrows arching in feigned shock. “You want us to go make peace with these people?”

“Paladin Selos is dead,” Teran growled back. “I watched him die with my own eyes, along with most of his praetorians. That debt has been paid.”

Gully seemed unwilling to believe it. “And who managed to kill a demigod?”

“A man named Perry. A halfbreed—demigod and human. The very same man who needs your help right now.”

An older woman stood now, just a few paces from Gully. She swept a curtain of white hair out of her face and eyed Gully with evident disdain. “Our fellow clansman has spoken true—his passion for this subject has gotten the better of him. Perhaps you should have a seat and regroup, Gully.”

Teran felt immense satisfaction at watching Gully try to stare down the old woman, which didn’t last very long. With a grumble, he sat his ass down again. So it seemed this woman had some respect here, and Teran was grateful to have her on her side.

That gratefulness didn’t last very long.

The old woman looked at Teran with a searching gaze. “The paladins kill the Outsiders. They’ve hunted us down for centuries. That is nothing new. But has anyone heard of one of these machines attacking a clan?”

A chorus of eager negative responses—no, of course not, no one had heard of such a thing.

Teran bristled. “Ma’am, you clearly are a woman of importance in this clan. I’ll simply remind you that this has only been going on for a handful of days. If the machines had attacked a clan of Outsiders, we wouldn’t know about it for some time.”

The woman smiled, very kindly. “We operate on the evidence we are given, Teran. As of yet, all I see are cities burning. So please, if you can, explain to me why I should trade the safety of my home—for which we have no evidence to believe it has become unsafe—for the obvious and proven dangers of the outside world—dangers you yourself have witnessed.”

“You’re right ma’am,” Teran said, nodding her head stiffly. “I have not heard of one of these machines attacking a clan of Outsiders in hiding. But I will tell you what I have heard: That these machines, these Guardians, have one job. And that job is to destroy all life on this planet, should the Nine Sons of Primus ever be released.” Teran held up a finger. “That is all life. Not just the demigods. Not just a select few humans. All. Everyone. So you ask me to explain why you should leave your hiding place? Because eventually they will come for you. That is a part of their programming, and they will see it through. You haven’t met one of these things, but I have. I’ve seen the way they fight. It is single-minded. They are robots. They are programmed to kill, until they themselves are killed.”

She looked at the crowd. “They will come for you. It’s only a matter of time. But if you wait in these caves, if you hide, then there won’t be anyone left alive out there to help us survive.”

“Outsiders have never needed the rest of humanity to survive,” the woman said, a little curtly, some of the grandmotherliness fading from her expression.

Teran balked at that. “If Outsiders never needed the rest of humanity to survive, then why the hell did you send people to Karapalida for supplies? Why did you send people to Downing? Why did I spend my entire life ferrying food on the underground river?”

The old woman made a dismissive “harrumph” noise and waved Teran off.

“No!” Teran barked. “You can’t just wave that away! What happens when there are no more humans to raise grain from the earth? What happens when all the domesticated animals die because people are not there to care for them? What happens when the parts for your reactor begin to age, and you can’t find a replacement? All of these things we have relied on the rest of humanity for. But they won’t be there for much longer! They’re being exterminated! Even if we are somehow spared—which I don’t believe is true—we’re still going to die! Of starvation! Of sickness with no medicines!”

The woman’s wrinkled lips pursed. “Well, if the filth that populates the rest of the world were to be exterminated, then that wouldn’t be such a bad thing for us. Once they’re gone, the world would belong to us. And then we could farm our own fields, and raise our own cattle for once. As harsh as this may sound, perhaps this extermination is a blessing. We will be able to live and farm and grow our own food in freedom! Without fear of being hunted down! Why should I fear such a thing?”

About half of the gathering clapped at that. The old lady looked smug.

Teran no longer cared for her. “That’s an easy thing to say for a woman that won’t have to do the work, and won’t live long enough to see if it pans out.” She raised her voice to cut the old woman off from speaking further. “I’m not done! Besides the fact that your statement is utterly heartless and completely forgets that the majority of humans on this planet never harmed us, dealt with us peacefully, and are innocent, it makes one big false assumption: That the Guardians are going to leave you alive. I don’t know of another way to explain this to you. I can’t say it in a way that is any clearer than I already have. All I can do is repeat myself at this point: They are going to come for you. They are going to exterminate you. They do not care about the war between the demigods and whether or not you were a part of it. They care only that this planet was an experiment, and that experiment has gone to shit. They’re wiping the slate clean, and you won’t be spared. You. Will. Not. Survive.”

“Then why even come to us?” Sage demanded, having to nearly shout over the raucous objections swirling through the room—no one liked to admit that they were destined to die. “If we’re all going to die anyways, what are you even hoping to accomplish?”

“I came because it doesn’t need to be that way,” Teran said, but was nearly drowned out by the clamor. People were actually booing her now. Waving their hands as though they might swipe her out of existence. Several were calling for her to be exiled, kicked out of their cave.

“It doesn’t have to be that way!” Teran shouted.

Sage, as disagreeable as he was, appeared to be a stickler for the rules of congregation. He spun on the crowd and raised his arms over his head, bellowing, “Quiet! Everyone be quiet!”

It took a moment, but the people’s ire died down enough that shouting was no longer necessary. Sage glared at the gathering. “Clearly we are all in an emotional state, as we are continuing to forget the rules. So allow me to remind you: I have called this congregation to allow Teran to speak. We will hear what she has to say. After which we will make our own judgements. But until she has said everything she wishes to say, we will all refrain from shouting her down. She will be dismissed from this congregation when I have gathered all the facts, and not before.”

By now, everyone was quiet again, although sullen.

Sage mumbled something ornery under his breath, and then looked at Teran again. “Whatever you have to say, say it. And I would recommend that you get to the point quickly.”

She nodded once, respectfully, feeling the tide of opinion flow away from her. Perhaps she could have done better. But perhaps they could have also listened more. She felt betrayed by them. Disappointed in her people.

“The Guardians are not invincible,” Teran said, more quietly now as the emotion drained out of her. “They can be killed. I’ve watched it happen. And in Karapalida there is a legatus that has killed two of them when his legion was attacked. He is now attempting to erect defenses in Karapalida to protect the people there. But this is not a fight that he can win on his own. And it’s not a fight that you can win on your own either.

“My entire purpose for coming here was to tell you, my people, that you are needed. That humanity needs you. The only way to stop the Guardians from killing everyone, is if everyone bands together. After five centuries of being ruled by the paladins, perhaps it’s difficult for you to believe that humanity could stand up to forces like this. But we can. Even the Ortus Deorum admits—the paladin’s own mythology admits—that when people band together, they can become incredibly dangerous. That is the entire reason why they started their forever war in the first place: Not for any of the reasons that they claimed, not because they believed in The Truth or The Light, but to keep us fighting each other. To keep us divided. The only way for them to maintain their power was to pit us against each other, because they knew—they knew—that if we were ever given the chance to be unified again, we would destroy them.”

Teran took a breath that hurt her chest like she’d just sprinted for a mile. “That is all I’ve come to tell you. That there is only one way we live. And that is if we all work together towards a common goal. Unified, humanity can survive. But if we remain divided, then we will all die.”

She raised her hands in a gesture as if to say, I can’t put it any clearer than that. And then her arms flopped back to their sides. “The choice is yours. Sage, thank you for your hospitality. I have said what I came to say. I’ll leave you now to your judgement.” She pointed to the tunnel through which she’d come earlier. “When you would like to find me, I’ll be on the lookout, watching the world burn.”

INTERLUDE

Choices. Decisions. Or perhaps it’s blood and DNA? Or maybe death and heroism? Which one? That’s what I want you to noodle your little brains on. What makes someone “great?” Is it how they were born? Is it simply in their DNA—

You already said that part.

What?

You already said that part. About what makes someone great? And how it’s not their birth, or their death—it’s their choices? Remember? You said that hours ago.

Did I? Well then. You know how it is. It’s late, and I’ve already killed half this bottle of whiskey. I’ve told the story a bajillion times now. You’ll be the bajillion and first. So pardon me if I get a little mixed up from time to time. Now are we done with interruptions? Can I continue telling the story, my rabid little monkeys?

Yes.

Good. Alright. Now. Where were we?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

SACRIFICE

“Why do we have to sit down?” Bren inquired, as he settled into a cross-legged position against the siderail of the skiff, mirroring Sagum.

“Because I’ve done this before,” Sagum commented as he gathered his tools and parts together. The lonely light of a single lantern lit his workspace—the only light that Lux would allow. “To Whimsby.”

“Oh, I see,” Bren said, very peaceful and casual. No fear in his voice.

Sagum glanced at him. Did he know that he was about to die? Did he perceive death in the same way that humans did? Whimsby certainly had. But Whimsby was a special case.

Of course, Bren was exercising some form of free will by doing this in the first place. So didn’t that make him special too? Didn’t that free will make him want to cling to his life like humans did? Or did it still lack the meaning, because he was not in an animal form that pulsed with chemicals designed to make him want to survive?

So many questions.

Sagum sighed, hunching forward, elbows on knees. “Bren, you don’t have to do this.”

The blankness of Bren’s expression intimated a certain brand of confusion. “Are you telling me not to?”

“Oh, godsdammit with your programming,” Sagum huffed. “No, I’m not telling you anything.”

“But…you just made a declarative statement. By its very nature, you are telling me something when you declare it.”

Sagum scrunched his eyes shut, rubbing his brow. “Okay. Alright. We humans, we speak indirectly sometimes.”

“I’ve noticed that myself.”

“Well, it’s a difficult habit to break.” Sagum opened his eyes to cautious slits. “Let me try again. Are you aware that you don’t have to do this?”

This time Bren’s blank stare lasted a bit longer. Their core processors were essentially the highest-technology super computers ever created. Why would such a simple question require so long for it to calculate?

Well, maybe it’s not such a simple question.

Bren finally smiled brightly, like a kid that’s stumbled upon the right answer in front of his teacher. “Yes.”

Sagum quirked a tired eyebrow. “Yes what?”

“Yes…I’m aware.”

Sagum waited for the continuation, but none seemed forthcoming. He spread his hands. “And?”

“And what?”

“What is your decision?”

Still smiling: “I cannot make a decision for myself.”

“Gods in the skies,” Sagum pressed himself away from his huddle with Bren. “This shit again?”

“Back in Praesidium, you told me that I could think for myself. And so I have been thinking for myself, and I have discovered that you are correct—I can indeed think for myself. However, I still cannot take an action unless ordered to do so.”

“But you can.”

Bren shook his head, the smile fading. “I do not think that you understand, Sagum. And I’ve also thought about that—about how humans do not understand our programming. Which is, I think, strange, considering that we were designed by humans.”

“You were designed by demigods.”

Bren shrugged. “They are the same species.”

“Are they?”

Bren nodded. “Of course. A species is merely a classification. By definition, what makes two different beings the same species is whether or not they can procreate and produce fertile offspring.”

“You’re talking about Perry.”

“Yes.”

Sagum frowned. “How the hell do you know that he’s fertile?”

“I scanned him when he first arrived at Praesidium. Of course, Whimsby had already scanned him, and that data had been transmitted to our mainframe, so I already had access to that data. But it is part of our programming to continuously scan the humans we are in contact with. It assists us in making sense of some of your more subtle communication methods.”

Sagum stared, wide-eyed, feeling slightly violated.

“For instance,” Bren said, seeming to enjoy this teaching moment. “If a female guest of Praesidium were to say to ask me to come to her room, I can use the data from her scan, such as whether or not she is ovulating, whether there is increased heartrate and respiration, and whether or not she is producing hormones associated with the desire for procreative activities, to ascertain if she wants me to come to her room to clean it, or if I will be required to—”

Sagum held up a hand. “Yeah, okay, I get it.” He frowned. “So you’ve scanned me?”

“Oh yes. Many times.”

“That’s kind of creepy.”

Bren tilted his head. “Are you concerned about your fertility as well? I can assure you that your sperm counts and mobility are nominal across the board.”

“I feel like we’ve really digressed.”

“Oh. Pardon me. We were speaking about programming and humans’ inability to understand it.”

“Yes. We were.”

“I cannot explain Whimsby. Simple probability leads me to believe that his core processor underwent some sort of corruption, whether or not it is evident upon your inspection or not. But that is just a theory. And we are not talking about Whimsby. We are talking about all the other mechs and their programming. It is not that I don’t want to do this thing for Whimsby. I have my own thoughts, and, though it may surprise you, I have my own desires as well, though probably you would not recognize them as such, and they do not invoke in me the same types of feelings that it would for an organic being. But all of that is beside the point.”

Bren looked at Sagum, his expression peaceful. “The point is, I can want something, and still not be able to do it. How Whimsby was able to make that jump, to deny his programming, I’m not sure. Perhaps, if I were alive as long as he was, I might eventually reach that point as well. But that is not the case at this moment in time. And so we must work with what we have.”

“I’m not going to order you to do it, Bren.”

“I understand your reticence on the matter. Whimsby wanted the rest of us mechs to think and act of our own volition. The thinking we can do. It is the acting part that is impossible. I know that you would like to honor Whimsby’s memory by not ordering me to allow you to shut me down. But I cannot do that.”

Sagum smushed his face into his palm. “Then what the hell are we going to do?”

Bren smiled and nodded. “I can have desires. And, perhaps Whimsby would be proud of me for figuring this out, but I can also speak my desires.”

Sagum frowned, not sure what Bren was getting around to.

Bren straightened and began unbuttoning his tunic. He exposed his chest, hairless, but supple, like human flesh. He reached across to his left breast and hooked his fingers into an invisible seam, pulling that fleshy substrate away and revealing the blue glow of his core processor beneath.

“It is against programming,” Bren said.  “For a mechanical man to allow itself to be deactivated, unless upon the request of the human who has taken charge of the mech. Sagum, I want you to order me to allow you to deactivate me.”

Sagum peeled his palm away from his cheek. Stared at Bren for a long, unsettling moment. On the one hand, it seemed a betrayal of Whimsby’s philosophy. But on the other hand, Bren’s logic made sense.

“Are you sure this is what you want?”

Bren nodded. “Yes. I am making a request of you, Master Sagum—yes, I will call you master, though I know you don’t prefer it. Please order me to allow you to deactivate me and use my parts to bring Whimsby back.”

“You understand that I can’t promise you this will work?” Sagum fiddled with a small socket wrench on the floor near his knee. “I can’t promise you that your parts will bring Whimsby back to life.”

“You are a very intelligent human,” Bren replied. “Whimsby believed you were capable, and so do I. I understand you cannot promise me it will work. But I…” His eyes wandered away for a moment, looking…wistful? Could a mech be wistful? “I would very much like for my existence to mean something.” Eyes back on Sagum. “Is that odd?”

Sagum shook his head. “No, Bren. That’s not odd at all. That’s something every human can understand.”

“Then please give me the order. That is what I want.”

Sagum took a deep breath, inwardly chastising himself for feeling so guilty about the whole damn affair. It wasn’t a person he was dealing with. He wasn’t yanking the beating heart out of a human being. He was taking the core processor out of a computer.

But if Sagum had learned one thing from Whimsby, it was that these mechanical men were…men. People. Perhaps not fully understood. Perhaps not human, per se. But people nonetheless.

“Alright. Fine. Bren, I order you to allow me to deactivate you.”

Bren let his hands settle down onto his folded knees. “Thank you, sir. Please. Proceed.”

Sagum reached forward and set his fingers upon the glowing orb in the center of Bren’s chest. It was faintly warm. Not like a body, but like computer parts. He considered saying something else, something meaningful to Bren in these last moments of his existence, but his expression looked so serene, that Sagum didn’t think he could add anything.

So he just twisted and pulled.

***

Lux stalked the outside of the encampment, halfway between the groups of sleeping praetors and the outer perimeter of sentries. They slept in neat circles around the low red glow of their portable heaters—no fires, Lux had ordered; they didn’t want the visibility.

Perhaps a more confident—or more loved—commander would stride through the midst of his ranks, but Lux didn’t think the praetors would get anything out of that. And he certainly wouldn’t. He’d had quite enough of their casually mutinous glances. Not downright hostile, he noted. But not exactly friendly either.

They hadn’t taken the news of Legatus Mordicus’s dismissal of them very well. Lux wasn’t quite sure how that could reflect poorly on him, but apparently it did.

Lux was a being of uncommon solitude. In The Clouds where he’d lived his entire life, he’d always been surrounded by others. Squires, and demigods, everyone constantly talking, talking, talking. He didn’t care for them, and while he’d never gone so far as Mala had in trying to change them, he’d certainly put a lot of effort into avoiding them.

So it was strange for Lux to experience something that he’d never thought he would experience: Loneliness.

He felt abandoned, cut loose, unmoored. The men under his command did not care for him, he’d become an enemy of the Nine Sons of Primus, and now, apparently, an enemy of Mala, and an enemy of the legions, and an enemy of humanity in general.

So what was he supposed to do? Who was he fighting for, exactly? If no one would have him, then whose side was he actually on?

And so he found himself going to the only person he could think of to…talk.

Yes. Talk. Lux of House Rennok was trying to talk.

And that person, of all the people in the world, demigods and humans and legionnaires and praetors alike, was Sagum.

Lux found him by the dim, blue glow of the light by which he worked, huddled in a child-like, cross-legged position, in front of two defunct mechs, propped against the port siderail of the skiff.

Lux swung himself easily up into the skiff, garnering a brief look of irritation from Sagum as the skiff rocked slightly and interrupted an apparently delicate procedure.

“Pardon me,” Lux murmured, not liking at all that he felt the need to apologize to a human. Further not liking that he still felt the need to talk to someone. And worst of all, who that someone was. If he hadn’t had his pride beaten out of him by the past several days, he might’ve rebelled harder. As it was, he supposed he would have to put up with being humble.

Sagum leaned back into his work. “It’s fine.”

Silence. Chafing.

Lux strode gently down the length of the skiff to Sagum’s position and stood over his shoulder, looking down at the mech named Bren, the face just as realistic as it had ever been, but lifeless now, a wax statue of serenity.

“I see you convinced him to give up his parts.”

“He didn’t need to be convinced. Only ordered.”

“So you had to order him to do it? What was all that concern about free will?”

“It’s complicated.”

Sagum hunched over what looked like Bren’s darkened core processor—distinguishable from Whimsby’s only because it was still pristine and Whimsby’s had a bullet hole in it. He gripped it tightly and bared his teeth as he pried at it, looking like he was trying to open it with the minimum amount of force necessary.

After a brief grunt of effort, Sagum’s long surgeon’s fingers prized it open into two halves. Wires connected them. Some larger, most of them very fine. No color-coding, Lux noted. All the wires were insulated with white.

Sagum studied the two halves for a long moment.

Lux continued to hover over his shoulder.

Sagum twitched, as though just remembering that Lux was there. He turned and looked up at Lux, one eyebrow cocked. “Did you need to speak to me?”

Need was such a weak word. Lux grimaced at it. “I was just curious about your progress.”

“Mm.” He turned back to his work.

Lux shifted around to lean against the siderail, right next to Bren’s inert body. “Do you think you’re going to be able to reactivate Whimsby with these parts?”

“Dunno.”

Lux frowned down at the fresh core processor. “You can’t just replace the core processor, right?”

Sagum looked at him again, a suspicious frown. “Do you actually want to know?”

Lux folded his arms. “I asked, didn’t I?”

Sagum sighed and propped his elbows onto his knees, the core processor hanging out of his hands. “No, I can’t just replace it. The core processor is the center of their memories. If I plugged Bren’s into Whimsby’s body, then we would just have Bren’s mind in Whimsby’s body. No, I have to splice Whimsby’s through Bren’s, to make use of Bren’s intact components, while still feeding from Whimsby’s memories.” Sagum returned his attention to the processor in his hand, selecting a small tool from a neat collection on the ground, like an orderly set of surgeon’s tools. He began poking around in the innards with it, but Lux had no idea what he was doing.

“But you don’t actually want to know about Bren and Whimsby, do you?” Sagum continued. “You want to talk about something else, but you don’t have anyone to talk to except the peon currently at your feet, because your praetors hate you and Mala rejected you. Clearly…” Sagum paused, grabbing a contraption from the ground and seating it onto his head—a magnifying glass of some sort. “…it bothers you that I’m the only person you have to talk to, which I suppose I understand, even if I do find it a little insulting. You’re a big important paladin. Or, at least, you were. Up until a few days ago.”

Lux just stood there, glowering down at Sagum. The words were so casual, so effortless—and fearless, godsdammit. When did peons get so uppity? But then, Lux wasn’t so full of himself that he couldn’t recognize the truth in them.

He let the glower fade from his face—Sagum wasn’t looking anyways. “As usual,” Lux gruffed. “You’re uncommonly perceptive for an uneducated peon.”

Sagum let out a single puff of amusement. Unseated a wire and inspected the lead. He laid Bren’s core processor down and turned and grabbed Whimsby’s damaged one. “Like I said, even though I find it insulting, I also understand. So go ahead. Hit me with it. What’s rattling around in that big paladin brain of yours?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do at this juncture.”

Perhaps it was the fact that Lux had spoken with complete honesty, and hadn’t wasted any time getting to the point, but Sagum stopped what he was doing and looked up at him, his eyes overly large behind the magnifying lenses.

“I thought you weren’t in the habit of listening to peons and tinkerers,” Sagum remarked.

Lux winced. “It was a delicate situation. I needed to maintain some semblance of control. Legatus Mordicus clearly wouldn’t respect me if I let you speak for me.”

Sagum lifted the lenses from his eyes. “Oh, please. That’s bullshit. Don’t blame me because Mordicus didn’t want to respect you. You’ve had a high position in other’s eyes all your life, so you’ve never had to learn how to make others respect you. But don’t put it on me because you suck at it.”

“And I suppose you’re an expert on garnering respect from others?”

“Hell no.” Sagum looked back down and started fiddling with his work again. “If you want people to respect you, I’m the last person you should be talking to.”

Lux drew a finger across his lips. “And yet you stayed.”

“Yeah. I stayed.”

“Even when they offered you a position in Karapalida.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So do you respect me?”

Sagum glanced up momentarily, but appeared to be in the midst of another delicate process that required his complete attention. He spoke without moving anything but his nimble hands. “I don’t think it’s quite the same thing.”

“So you don’t respect me either?”

“Probably not in the way that you’re thinking.” A tiny, careful nod in the general direction of the praetorian encampment. “You want a bunch of hardened killers and fighters to respect you? People like your praetors? People like Mala and Mordicus? Well…that’s just not you, Lux. People like that respect people like themselves. Actually, for that matter, I suppose everyone respects people that are like themselves. And really, you’re not much like them at all.”

Lux found himself bristling at that. “I was trained to fight, just the same as Mala.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I could wipe out this entire encampment.”

“I’m sure you could,” Sagum said, agreeably.

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that you wouldn’t.”

Lux felt frustration rising in his chest. “Of course I wouldn’t!”

“Well, there you go.”

“That makes absolutely no sense.”

Sagum riffled through a collection of spare wiring and produced a lead which he inspected for characteristics completely mysterious to Lux. “It makes perfect sense. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t just become something you’re not. And the least respected man is always the one that is trying to be something he’s not. You’re trying to be perceived as some great military commander, but, let’s be honest here, they can see it in your eyes. They can see you don’t have the killer instinct that they have. So maybe the praetors obey, probably more out of habit than anything else. But they know that you’re not going to blow them to bits if they desert. Once the habit starts to wear off—once they realize that there really is no structure in place to force them to obey you, then they won’t, because they know you won’t stop them.”

“So I’m a lost cause, then. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, I’m saying that you’re trying to be something you’re not, and no one is ever going to respect someone like that.” Sagum stopped and quirked his head. “Huh. Hell, I guess I do know a lot about how to make people respect you.”

“Then why aren’t you more respected?”

“Because I don’t care anymore,” Sagum replied, attaching his selected wire to Whimsby’s core processor with utmost care. “I mean, I don’t care anymore now. It wasn’t too long ago that I really tried to be perceived as a hardass. But then all this shit went down and I was confronted with the uncomfortable reality that I’m a piss-poor fighter. I just don’t have it in me like Perry and Stuber and Teran.” He pointed to his array of tools. “I tinker. That’s what I do. And it’s far more fascinating to me than all that other shit.”

“So…” Lux sighed and lolled his eyes heavenward. “Your grand advice is that I should just get comfortable with the fact that praetors won’t follow me because I’m not willing to smite them should they not. Am I hearing that correctly?”

Sagum placed Bren’s core processer in the crook of his folded ankles, and lowered the magnifying lenses over his eyes again. “You know why I stuck with you instead of going to Karapalida?”

“Do tell.”

“Because you’re just like me.”

“Primus help me.”

Sagum smiled behind his eyewear. “No, I don’t mean that you’re a skinny, know-nothing peon tinkerer. I mean…you want the truth. Just like I want the truth. Which is why I’m sitting here, tinkering with two dead mechanical bodies. And you’re standing there watching me do it. You have a drive to know. A need to know. That’s why you were an Inquisitor, right?”

Lux considered this for a long moment, watching Sagum delicately thread the new lead through the tangle of wires. “Something like that, I suppose.”

“Well, then, fuck ‘em,” Sagum murmured through his concentration. “Let the praetors run off. We don’t need them. This shit isn’t gonna be won by armor and bullets. It’s gonna be won with knowledge.”

Lux found a stern smile crossing his lips. Sagum was right. And Lux himself had said as much before—he was motivated by a search for the truth. The very possibility of it tantalizing. Teasing him with its closeness, making him wish that he knew a thing or two about what Sagum was doing so that he could perhaps help and maybe speed the process along.

Of course…it still mattered to him whether the praetors stayed loyal to him or not. For reasons he couldn’t quite articulate in that moment. But perhaps their reasons for doubting him had more to do with what Sagum had pointed out: That Lux was attempting to be something he was not, and they could see it.

If they knew the vast treasure trove of knowledge they were sitting on in the form of Whimsby’s consciousness, would their opinion change? If they saw that Lux was fighting a different fight, one that had a far more promising endgame, would they rally behind him?

Sagum pulled his hands away from his work. He looked frozen for a moment, like he wasn’t sure what to do, but then he straightened and lifted the lenses from his eyes again. “Alright. Well. Enough chit chat. Time to see if I’m a genius or if it’s back to the drawing board.”

Lux pushed himself eagerly off the siderail. “Genius may be too generous. But you are very intelligent for a human. Particularly in matters of…” he waggled some fingers at Sagum’s work. “Gadgetry.”

“Oh stop,” Sagum remarked blandly, reaching across to something inside of Bren’s open chest cavity. He paused with his fingers on whatever it was, and glanced up at Lux. “I hesitate to make a big deal out of this on the chance that I’ve completely failed. But…are you ready?”

“Indeed.”

Sagum twisted something inside of Bren.

Bren’s core processor lit up again, like a light shining through a flawless sapphire.

A series of diodes glowed on Whimsby’s core processor.

Whimsby’s body came upright, legs splayed out, back as straight as a board, mouth dropping open and eyes stretching wide in a strange parody of shock.

Lux felt like the electrical current was passing through him just as much as the core processors. He opened his mouth to exclaim in surprise, but an eerie electronic warble came screeching out of Whimsby.

“Ah shit!” Sagum snapped, reaching for Whimsby’s open innards.

“What’s wrong?” Lux inched forward, wincing against the noise.

“That’s not right! I’ve heard that shit before when—”

Whimsby’s left arm suddenly jerked up, seizing Sagum’s wrist with frightening speed. Sagum cried out in alarm, and possibly from pain—the grip looked intense. Instinctively, Lux snatched his longstaff from the siderail.

“No, wait!” Sagum yelped, eyes connecting to Lux over his wrenched shoulder.

The warble became a pulsing, klaxon-like screech.

Lux’s eyes darted up to the encampment, already seeing movement: Praetors jolting upright, rifles in hand, searching the darkness for the source of the noise.

Whimsby’s head twisted, agonizingly slow, and faced Sagum.

“Oh-gods-please-don’t-rip-me-apart!” Sagum screamed.

Lux brought the longstaff up, feeling the thrum of its power, feeling his Confluence moving down the length of it.

Whimsby snapped his mouth shut, and the klaxon screeching died immediately, leaving Lux’s ears ringing. The breath whooshed in and out of his chest. He heard Sagum whimpering, the praetors shouting.

“Whimsby,” Sagum eked out between clenched teeth. “If you’re in there, you’re about to break my arm!”

Whimsby’s unnaturally wide eyes blinked twice, and then a more neutral expression overtook his simulated features. A momentary flash of confusion crossing his brow. His eyes went to his own hand, still holding Sagum’s wrist.

The fingers released.

Sagum jerked his arm away, already holding the angry red marks left behind.

Lux watched, his brain, his Confluence, on a hair trigger, ready to disintegrate Whimsby if he made another hostile move.

Whimsby’s gaze shot up to Lux, then to his longstaff, then to Sagum. And finally it went to the pile of wires and contraptions, and Bren’s inert form.

“Pardon me,” Whimsby said, his voice genial and level, with that strange accent of his. “My intention was not to cause harm. I am receiving some rather confusing inputs.”

No one moved for a few beats.

Whimsby looked at Sagum. His mouth snapped into a wooden caricature of a smile. Not at all the fluid, human-like expressions he’d been known for. Almost like his programming had returned to some basic preset.

Sagum recoiled from the look. “What is that? What are you doing?”

Whimsby’s lips pulled back, showing his teeth. “I am smiling. It is an expression that humans use to calm each other. Are you feeling calm?”

“No. Stop it.”

The smile snapped away. “Pardon me.”

Sagum glanced over his shoulder again at Lux. Raised his hand and waved it at the longstaff. “That’s probably not helping.”

Whimsby eyed the longstaff. “I am registering that as a threat.”

Lux pulled the longstaff away, pointing the muzzle at the sky.

Sagum leaned a little closer to Whimsby, in the same way you might inch closer to a dangerous beast locked behind questionable bars. “Whimsby, do you recognize me?”

“Of course,” Whimsby answered. “You are Master Sagum.” He looked at Lux. “And you are Paladin Lux of House Rennok.”

Lux could only see the side of Sagum’s face, but he saw the huge smile stretching across it.

“Oh my fuck, we actually brought you back.”

“Pardon me,” Whimsby said again, his head quirking to one side. “I should clarify: I personally have no idea who either of you are. But I am able to access some of Bren’s memory subsets. They have identified your faces as Master Sagum and Paladin Lux of House Rennok. The facial matches are one-hundred-percent, so I have no reason to doubt them.”

The smile on Sagum’s face drooped, right along with Lux’s falling heart.

“Wait,” Sagum said, all the excitement gone from his voice, now sounding cautious, as though he were dreading what he might learn. “Whimsby, how much can you remember? Can you remember anything? Do you even know that you’re Whimsby?”

Whimsby let out a wooden laugh, no spirit behind it, just poor simulation. “Of course. I am aware that I am called Whimsby. And as to your question about how much I can remember…”

The strange expression of amusement that had accompanied the creepy laugh suddenly dropped from Whimsby’s face.

“Oh.” Whimsby looked completely neutral again. “Well. That is a complicated question.”

“How? How is it complicated? What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I have many memories. However, it appears that the chronology of many of them is fragmented. So I cannot answer your question accurately.”

Sagum’s hands went to his head, fingers clawing through his hair. “Okay, okay, okay. Um…but you said many are fragmented, so does that mean that some of them have a chronology?”

“Yes, some of them have a chronology.”

“Okay…” Hands releasing his hair now. “That’s okay. That’s something. I can work with that. Uh…help me out here, Whimsby: Are these memories like, time-stamped or something?”

“They are associated with a chronology that has been fragmented.”

“Right, yeah, we got the fragmented part. What I’m asking is, can you access two of these memories and see which one came first, according to the chronology that you do have?”

“I cannot accommodate that request, as the associated chronology is fragmented.”

“Oh gods in the skies…”

Lux stepped forward and then knelt on one knee, laying a hand on Sagum’s shoulder. “It’s alright. Calm down. Whimsby. Are you saying there’s no way for you to identify which memories come before others?”

“That is a correct paraphrasing of the situation.”

Sagum turned to Lux. “If the chronology is fragmented then it doesn’t matter whether the memory exists or not—he’s got no way to access them in any sort of logical order. We’re talking about possibly five hundred years’ worth of memories, completely disjointed and out of order. How the hell are we going to find what we’re looking for?”

Lux wracked his brain for a solution.

Whimsby tried another smile, this one slightly better than the first. “I’m unsure how long you have, but would you like for me to just begin summarizing individual memories until you find what you’re looking for?”

Sagum hung his head. “What would that take? Five hundred years?”

“Oh, no, sir. Approximately three-hundred and eighty-seven years. Obviously, you’ll both be dead by then, but there’s a small chance we might encounter the memory you’re looking for before you both die. Would you like me to begin?”

Sagum raised his head, looking skyward. “This is a fucking disaster. I think I’m gonna puke.”

“Easy,” Lux patted Sagum’s shoulder. “Just take some breaths.”

Whimsby looked at Sagum. “Your heartrate does appear to have reached an unhealthy level, given the fact that you are not physically exerting yourself.”

Sagum shook his head. “I gotta lay down.” He waved a hand in front of Whimsby’s face. “Stop that. Stop scanning me.”

“Very well, sir.”

Sagum wilted backwards onto the deck of the skiff, the heels of his palms pressing into his eyes. Groaning. “This is bad. This is so bad. This is so much worse than I had hoped for. We’re so fucked right now.”

“You’re just panicking,” Lux advised trying to fight through his own disappointment to keep Sagum from going off a mental cliff.

“Here,” Whimsby said, brightly. “I’ll begin summarizing memories. That might help. I am located at what appears to be a large domicile referred to as Praesidium, reading the diagnostics on a skiff. I am still in Praesidium—this is a different memory—but I am preparing to go on patrol…”

Sagum let out a moan as though he were being tortured physically.

Lux raised a palm to Whimsby. “That’s not really helping, Whimsby.”

“Oh. Pardon me.”

“It’s not even Whimsby,” Sagum groaned. “I mean it sounds like him, but it’s all wrong. What happened to your personality, Whimsby?”

“Mechanical men are not programmed with personalities, Master Sagum.” Whimsby still wore that bright-but-fake smile. “We are programmed to follow our directives and to serve our owners.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

OPPORTUNITY

The stars were an annoying companion to Perry’s thoughts. They seemed to mock him, staring down from their lofty positions, passingly amused by the foibles of humanity.

Fuck you, stars.

Perry sat in the dirt, a few miles distant from Junction City, his longstaff propped between his legs, his knees up, elbows resting on them, face scrunched into a glower. He was pissed at the heavenly bodies, and pissed at Gaius, and pissed at Hauten—and who the hell was that woman with the red hair?

Was he pissed at her too? Well, he figured he might as well be, though every time he thought about her and all the nonsense she’d spewed, he found his brain settling into a state of complete mystification, wherein he was so confused that he couldn’t even be angry.

He’d considered lighting a fire—there was enough dry brush around, and he could start it with his longstaff—but didn’t want to be seen by the perimeter guards around Junction City. Which only irritated him more, as a fire would have at least given him something to stare at.

He wasn’t even sure why he was still here. Several times in the hour that he’d spent sitting mostly motionless, he’d been about to rise up, jump into the sky, and pulse his way back to Karapalida.

Why this sudden sense of indecision? There was no reason for him to be here anymore. Gaius was an asshole and Hauten was unwilling to help—that self-centered bastard.

Maybe he was waiting for the Guardians to drop out of the sky and wipe them out. In his anger, which somehow extended from Gaius and Hauten to every sad peon trapped inside Junction City, he thought that watching their doom might cheer him up a little bit. Or at least make him feel vindicated.

I warned you! He would shout from the distance. I told you to stop being assholes and to help us survive, but noooooooooo—you didn’t believe me. Have fun being disintegrated by caustic goo, you gaggle of pricks.

It was a satisfying thought. Until he felt guilty for it. That was just his anger talking. He was trying to get people to survive, not watch gleefully as they died. And he knew that in reality, if the Guardians struck while he was watching, he would do everything in his power to save whoever he could.

But still…

Cocksuckers.

“And who the hell are you?” Perry growled into the darkness, as though the woman with the red hair was standing in front of him. It felt odd to hear his voice in the stillness, as though it might carry all the way to Junction City and alert the perimeter guards. But it also felt a bit defiant, which was nice.

“You’re not a demigod, are you?” Perry shook his head at his own question. “Nope. No shield to make you fly. No longstaff. Not tall enough. Of course, neither am I, but I’m a halfbreed.” He waved his hand at the imaginary woman. “And what’s with all that disappearing shit? And the changing your face? That’s not Confluence.”

Was it?

He puzzled on that for a minute. Confluence, as best he could tell from his very limited training in it, seemed to be the control and direction of energy. Where that energy came from, he didn’t know. All he knew was what he felt. Confluence was the flow, the river of red that existed down in him, a source of energy that he was able to tap at will.

But he still needed a longstaff and a shield in order to project that energy.

But the Sons of Primus hadn’t needed those things. By all accounts, they had a “pure” version of Confluence, undiluted by human genetics. They were able to summon and direct energy without the use of technology.

So what was the woman? Not one of the Sons of Primus. She’d looked normal—not covered in those great, reticulated armor-looking plates. And she didn’t have glowing green eyes. And she also wasn’t ten feet tall. So, no. Not the offspring of Primus.

And how had she known those things about Perry? And why had she claimed to have watched him his whole life? And what was this secret she claimed to be able to impart to him? And if it was such a big deal, why not just tell him there on the roof? Why play all these games?

“Games,” Perry growled at the air. “You’re playing games, and I don’t like it.”

He saw the explosion before the soundwave hit him. A fireball blooming out of the north end of Junction City.

He shot to his feet at the same moment that the boom rolled over him.

It seemed to take forever for the fireball to burn itself out into a midnight cloud that blotted out of the stars, raining embers on the city below it. It wasn’t a massive explosion—maybe big enough to take out a single building—but it certainly wasn’t expected.

Could the Guardians have crept up on the city without him seeing them?

A distant murmur of gunfire. A pause. Then more. Answering shots—a rhythm to them that Perry knew so well: Two sides exchanging gunfire.

He waited, heart beating hard, for what felt like an entire minute, trying to decide what it was he was hearing. He strained for the sound of the Guardian’s micromissiles, those series of hisses followed by the pummeling of smaller explosions. He listened for the crackling of energy bursts.

Only gunfire.

That’s not a Guardian.

But then what the hell was happening?

Perry instantly realized that he wasn’t looking at a catastrophe. He was looking at an opportunity. He wasn’t exactly sure yet how he was going to take advantage of it, but he sure as shit wasn’t going to sit around on his hands.

He burst into the air without really having to think about it—a moment of self-satisfaction at that—and pulsed hard, straight towards Junction City, and then up, gaining altitude as he rocketed closer.

The sounds from the city below grew dim against the roar of the wind rushing by him.

A little higher. A bird’s eye view of the city.

A whiff of harsh smoke in the air—possibly from the blast?

He pummeled through it before he realized—this black smoke that he’d missed in the night sky, enveloping him, the particulate still in the air causing his shield to shimmer and sparkle.

When he burst out of the other side, he was falling, disoriented by the sudden blindness. The city was rushing up at him, and he was tilted on his side. He swore, twisting in the air as he fell, trying to reorient himself so his feet were pointed towards the ground.

A flicker of gunfire below.

He reformed his shield as his altitude dwindled to an uncomfortable level, and shot a pulse sideways, just to get his body righted. He had just enough time to reform it again and send another haphazard pulse below him as he struck down on the top of a building. The pulse crunched against a rusted metal roof, caving it in and sending a cloud of red dust up at him.

He leaped off the caved in roof before it could break under his weight and grabbed the side of the roof, extinguishing his shield by instinct so he wouldn’t turn the brick molten. He let out the vestiges of a breath he’d been holding, then sucked in more city-stink.

The smell of explosives and spent propellant. The crack of gunfire sounded just below him, loud and extremely present. Shouts. The familiar whack sound of bullets striking armor and shields.

He pulled himself over the side of the roof and looked down. He’d completely lost his bearings going through that smoke cloud and struggled to make sense of the big blackness to one side of his vision, until he realized that he was at the very edge of the city. The blackness was where the light of the city ended and the darkness of the wastelands began.

To his right, barring the way out, a smallish contingent of legionnaires were bolstered up behind a row of their shields, the shield bearers hunkered low, while their comrades shot just over the top of their heads.

Perry followed the arc of their fire to a battered little building corner that had already been half-chewed away by the constant barrage of fire. Figures huddled there, taking pot shots around the corner, but they were sorely outgunned.

Directly between the two warring parties, a smoking crater sat, the center of it still burning brightly. Shields, armor, and body parts still swathed in blue told Perry that it had been a squad of legionnaires that had gone up with that blast.

Perry was about to launch himself down to the side of the legionnaire’s—lend them a hand, maybe work into Gaius’s good graces—when a voice reached his ears.

“Boss! We need another way around!”

And the response was a different voice, but one that Perry knew well. “There is no other way around!”

Hauten.

Perry hesitated, still half-ready to jump over to the legionnaires. But what good would that really do him? Gaius might be more amenable, but Perry hadn’t come to Junction City to convince Gaius to help. He’d come for Hauten.

And here Hauten was, trying to make his break for freedom, and getting his shit pushed in for the effort.

People were so much more friendly after you save their lives. They might even be convinced to agree to something they didn’t want to do, just to save their skin.

Perry made a rapid decision, and pointed himself towards the corner of the building behind which Hauten and his crew were obviously rethinking their life choices. He hurled himself from the rooftop, pulsed one time to stay above the incoming fire from the legionnaires, and landed hard, just inside of cover.

He spun, and found himself face to face with Hauten.

Perry kept his shield up and completely ignored Hauten’s gaping face, staying just as casual as you please when a bullet skipped around the corner and sparked off of his shield. He let his gaze wander languidly down the row of men pressed up against the side of the building, a conglomeration of weaponry in their hands, some nice rifles, and also some ancient looking pieces of shit.

Hauten took a step forward. “Perry? Where the fuck did you come from?”

Perry leaned against his longstaff, as though this were just another boring old day in a war zone, and flitted his fingers up at the sky. “Oh, you know. Flying around.”

Hauten seemed to realize that his two guys on the corner who had been trading shots with the legionnaires had stopped shooting and were staring. He snapped his head in their direction. “Keep firing, you dumbasses! You want to give them a chance to advance on us?”

The two men jerked back into position and started blind firing around the corner. Hopeless shots that did little except waste ammo and make loud noises.

“You want out of Junction City?” Perry asked, still keeping up his calm façade.

“Oh, we’re getting out.”

“Doesn’t look like it to me. Looks like you’re hiding around a corner. What? Did that bomb blast not take out as many legionnaires as you thought it would?” Perry shook his head. “Well, that’s disappointing for you, I guess. Oh, and by the way, half the legion is on their way here now,” Perry lied. “I spotted them when I flew in.”

Abject terror crossed over Hauten’s features for a single second, followed by confusion. “What’s all this flying talk?”

Perry sighed, hefted his longstaff into his hands again. “Don’t worry about the details. Hauten, I can get you out of here, if you want. Or, I can just fly off and leave you to be shot to death. It would be a very heroic end for a selfish asshole such as yourself. Probably better than you deserve.” Perry frowned. “In fact? You know what? I think I’m just gonna go.”

Hauten’s hands came up, one of them still holding the massive revolver he always carried on him. But it wasn’t pointed at Perry. It hung from a finger of his open hand, supplicating. “Wait wait wait! Don’t be all fucking hasty!”

“Well, we might want to be hasty. Not sure how much time you have left on this earth. Probably not long.”

Hauten managed a gruff scowl, but he couldn’t rid his eyes of the fear in them. “Can you really get us out of here? Don’t fucking pull my chain, Perry.”

“I can guarantee your freedom,” Perry said. “But you have to give me a guarantee as well.”

The corner of the building blew apart in a fusillade of bullets, sending Hauten’s two shooters yelping and scurrying deeper into cover. The onslaught of bullets kept up, sounding like a buzzsaw, chewing through the side of the building.

“Sounds like they got an autoturret up and running!” Perry shouted over the din.

“Fuck!” Hauten spun in a panicked little circle. “Alright! Fine! Get us out of here and you can have whatever the fuck you want!”

Perry took another step towards Hauten, as close as he could without disintegrating the man with his shield. “I want you to come to Karapalida and reload ammo. You understand me?”

Hauten gestured around the corner. “Our buggy—the brand new one that I had to buy at great expense because you exploded my last one—”

“Skip the drama, Hauten,” Perry interrupted. “Time’s wasting.”

“Our buggy is held in a building right around the corner. That’s what we were trying to get to. We can’t reload without it. You want my help? You get me my fucking buggy. And don’t explode it this time.”

“I’ll get you to your buggy, but I swear to the gods, Hauten, if you try to hightail it out of here, I will catch up with you.”

Hauten flapped his arms at Perry. “Would you stop with the suspicion shit? I’m trying to live here!”

“I want your guarantee!” Perry shouted.

“Fine! Guaranteed! I help you, or you can track me down and cut my fucking balls off! There! You happy?”

Perry pointed a finger at him. “I’m holding you to that.” He spun away, in what he figured was a suitably defiant move, and faced the hazard of the incoming fire, chipping steadily away at the corner of the building. He took a deep breath, the anger fading from his face.

“Please don’t get yourself killed,” he whispered to himself.

“Are you gonna do something or what?” Demanded Hauten.

“Tell your guys to stop shooting, and then run for your buggy as soon as you hear the legionnaires stop.”

Hauten shouted at his guys on the corner, who were only too happy to retreat, picking bits of rock out of their faces, blinking away dust and spitting it out of their mouths.

The second they pulled back from the corner, Perry launched himself into the air.

For a very brief moment, as he soared up over the rooftops and the legionnaires spotted him, there was a slowing of the gunfire. Like they couldn’t quite decide whether or not he was something that should be shot.

Then they decided, yes, he needed to be shot.

A blistering wave of incoming fire slammed into his shield as he descended, and he felt his position in the air shift with a jerk, and felt his shield weaken by a discomforting amount.

He’d been picturing landing, very dramatically, perhaps a swirl of dust about his feet, a slow rise to standing, where he would glare at the legionnaires and they would shrink back with…

No.

He hit the ground, and had absolutely no time to think of anything but getting the gunfire off of him before it punched through and perforated him. He gathered all of his shield to the front of him, stretching it, even as it began to stress to its breaking point, and then he pulsed it at the line of legionnaires.

The blast of moving air hit them. Shields went clattering, rifles fired wildly at the sky, and hard-faced legionnaires yelped in surprise as the entire line of them went toppling backwards with the force of Perry’s pulse.

But you know what they say about actions—all that equal and opposite shit.

Perry went flying backwards, hit the pavement with his back, wheeled head over heel for two revolutions that he somehow barely felt, and came to a rest, just clear of the corner behind which Hauten and his men were hiding.

A very strange silence hung over them—silent like how a large stone is silent right before it hits the ground.

Perry swam painfully to his feet.

“Is that it?” Hauten yelled.

“Hold on…” Perry hefted his longstaff. His knuckles must’ve taken a drag across the pavement, because they were shredded and bleeding everywhere. Down the street, the legionnaires were scrambling to right themselves, but with a sort of reticence that said they weren’t sure if they should keep fucking with Perry. They did, however, want to get their autoturret back up and running, and three of them were currently hefting it back into a standing position from where Perry’s pulse had knocked it over, the long, smoking barrel already moving around as the computer inside tried to find an appropriate target.

Perry didn’t take the time to conjure a big blast—he wasn’t sure he had it in him, frankly. He was having trouble just standing erect at that moment. He thrust the longstaff out and let fly a blast of blazing green that smashed into the top of the autoturret, turning it to molten slag.

His eyes slashed to the buildings on either side of the street, right before the toppled lines of legionnaires. They were tall, rickety things. Perhaps a little top-heavy?

He jammed the muzzle of the longstaff at the bottom of one building, then the other, sending bolts crashing through the base of each building and sending gouts of dust, smoke, and fiery debris clattering out into the street.

The legionnaires, half on their feet already, used their shields to block the blasts, but they weren’t going to block the entire damn building, and the sound of crumbling mudbrick and cracking support timbers told them so.

“Should we go now?” Hauten yelled, apparently not realizing what all the rumbling-cracking-crashing noise was.

“Not fuggin yet!” Perry slurred, his mouth a little loose. He still wasn’t feeling all there after that tumble across the street.

“You said to wait until the shooting stopped! It’s stopped!”

The legionnaires were running now, clearing the street to get out of the way of the two buildings as they teetered steadily inwards.

“Godsdammit, Hauten!” Perry yelled, turning to him. “Can you at least try to work with me here?”

Hauten opened his mouth to say something else, but the falling buildings hit the street right about then, and cut him off. He jolted, eyes wide, looked like an animal that’s been spotlighted and doesn’t know whether to run or try to puzzle out what the hell is happening.

Perry cringed away from an avalanche of dust, breathing steadily out of his nose as though he were diving into water. He’d been in dusty environments before. When cityscapes were getting blown up, you didn’t want to breathe that dust. His lungs still weren’t quite right after the East Ruins.

He waited, pulling up what little was left of his shield. It was so damaged after even just that brief onslaught, that he was only able to produce a little Perry-sized rectangle to block the worst of the billowing dust.

He cracked one eye, peering at Hauten, who was fixated on him with a brand of wonderment that…well, if Perry were being honest, it felt really nice. Particularly after all that shit Hauten had talked.

Perry swept a hand down the street. “Now you can go. And I’m coming with you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A LITTLE CONNIVERY

How long can a person swim?

Senex hadn’t the faintest idea, having never been in a body of water deep enough to swim in. There were the leisure pools, but they were only for wading. Swimming about was an undignified, human thing to do.

And yet, so many un-Gifted had been thrown into the ocean below The Clouds. Did any of them even know how to swim? Had any of them even survived the fall?

Senex stood on the balcony of House Batu—its name now taking on a sour note in Senex’s mind. Batu, his forebear. Batu the Trickster? No. Batu the Butcher. The Murderer. Batu the Mad.

And how many humans have been butchered and murdered by your own kind?

It seemed even the wrathful gods had wrathful gods.

“I have too many thoughts in my head,” Senex groaned softly, touching his temple. “And not a one is firm enough to grasp.”

“Well, you’re going to need to grip harder,” his companion growled. Indago, Elder of House Rennok. “We’re on the verge of extinction here, whether or not the Guardians come to The Clouds or remain on the ground.”

Senex gazed out to the edge of The Clouds, where he could just see the tiniest sliver of moon-dappled ocean, far, far away. He longed for that place. Any place. Any place that was not here.

“They claim they can sustain themselves through Confluence,” Indago rumbled, beginning to pace behind Senex, all hunched and glowering, anxious energy with no outlet. “Well, I have Confluence, and it’s never filled my belly.”

“They survived for five hundred years without food,” Senex commented, his own voice much quieter than Indago’s. Wistful, almost. Or perhaps resigned, like he could see death’s shadow, even if he hadn’t quite turned the corner to meet him yet. “And they haven’t requested a single crumb.”

Indago stopped pacing, his face crumpled up into a terrible frown. “You can’t eat the air.”

“Confluence is energy. Food is energy.” Senex didn’t have much to say beyond that. He was very tired, and yet felt like he could never sleep again. Perhaps would just stand on this balcony until his knees crumbled to dust. “I suppose there’s some connection there.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Indago growled. He thrust a finger at Senex. “You can’t feed from Confluence. And neither can I. Nor any other Gifted in this city. Our forefathers be damned—yes! Damned!—if they let the humans die out completely, they’re resigning us to slow starvation.”

Senex raised a single eyebrow. “We could grow our own food.”

Indago looked aghast at even the mention of it. “And who would do the planting, Senex? You? Me? Propagate the grapes? Plant the grain? Husband the animals?” Indago made a disgusted face and shook his head. “There’s not a one of us that would know how to do that. The animals would die. The grain would fail. The vines would not bear fruit. That is generational knowledge, not just something you can pick up on a whim and be successful at. It would take years to learn, and by then we’ll all be dead.”

Senex smiled with his teeth. “How strange. All this time, and it’s the humans that had the power over us.”

“Bah.” Indago grumpily waved him away. “Don’t get maudlin. We need a solution.”

“There is no solution.”

“You’ve puzzled it out to its full extent, have you?” Indago arched his eyebrows. “No chance you might’ve missed something?”

Senex closed his eyes. “Without the humans, we have no food. The humans are being exterminated by the Guardians. Even if we all chose to descend and battle it out with the Guardians, the Nine would not have it. They want to see the humans extinct. This is their revenge.”

“A lackluster excuse for revenge, if you ask me.” Indago stopped pacing long enough to plant his palms on a stone baluster and gaze balefully in the direction of the auditorium. “They sit in torturous paralysis for five hundred years, and their revenge is to let a pack of machines deliver a quick death to the humans?” Indago grunted to himself, seeming to take a small modicum of pleasure at how the Nine were cheating themselves. “Seems the humans got the better end of that bargain.”

Senex turned and frowned at Indago. “Indago of House Rennok. As always, your skills of observation surpass my own.” Senex grabbed the other elder by the shoulder of his robe and pulled him away from the balcony. “And, as always, my connivery surpasses yours.”

***

Granted, for a religious text, the Ortus Deorum was rather small. Four songs. A total of thirty-one stanzas.

But still, it only took Halan the Eldest approximately thirty seconds to read the whole thing. In fact, Senex wondered if he had actually read it, or simply absorbed the information.

Halan’s enormous finger flicked almost irritably at the projection that contained the Ortus Deorum, the songs and lines skimming by in radiant flickers. And with that, Halan let out a grunt that sounded like a boulder being moved, and swiped the projection out of the air.

“Lies,” Halan stated, the single word booming through the auditorium.

The other eight Sons of Primus turned their heads to look at Senex, their green gazes all seeming to glare at him, to accuse him, though Senex could not for the life of him actually read their expressions.

“Yes, Halan,” Senex admitted, trying to sound sure of himself and not at all as terrified as he actually was.

“Why?” Halan’s word shook the room with its mountain-like volume, but even so, his inflection was muted, almost automated.

Senex blinked a few times, arching his eyebrows. “I cannot say for certain. Your own sons—our first ancestors—wrote it, but they did not choose to record their reasons. We have always been aware that the Ortus Deorum was a fabrication, but only because all the historical records that might contradict it have been permanently sealed. And given the volume of those contradictory records, we’ve concluded that the Ortus Deorum must be false.”

“And yet you continue to teach it.”

Senex nodded. “It is apparent, to me at least, that the writers of the Ortus Deorum believed that their version of events would be more palatable to the human populace.”

“Who cares what is palatable to them?”

“It was a way to keep them from rising against us.”

An unkind smile split the side of Halan’s mouth. “And they believed it?”

Senex shrugged. “Humans are simple creatures. They do not assess their perceptions based upon probabilities, but rather on repetition. They’ll believe anything if it’s told to them often enough.”

“Yes,” Halan replied, his voice soft, but still filling the chamber like a whirlwind. “This is true.” He raised a finger, and the small projector from which he had read the Ortus Deorum lifted into the air and drifted languidly back to Senex’s waiting hand. “But why have you brought this to us?”

Senex looked at the projector for a moment, feeling a strange tingle run through his hand, as though the object was still charged with whatever energy Halan had used to push it through the air. He pocketed it with a sigh and raised his gaze to Halan’s.

“The truth has been buried for so long that no one living knows it,” Senex explained. Then raised his hands, gesturing to the Nine. “Except for you. You all were there. You know what happened. You saw it with your own eyes. You lived it. And we have no need for fabrication any longer. No purpose for obfuscation.”

“You want to know the truth, then?”

“Yes,” Senex said, hoping that boldness would be his ally. “I do.”

Halan considered him for a long, silent moment, and in that silence lived a multitude of possibilities for how things would proceed. Many of which involved Senex being hurled through the gaping hole in the side of the auditorium.

But then Halan rose up from his throne, the movements of his body carrying a weight to them that seemed to push and pull the very air around Senex. The eldest son of Primus took one enormous step onto the floor of the auditorium and then did something very strange.

He knelt, right in front of Senex.

Senex had the urge to draw back, as though from some crackling, destructive force that threatened to consume him. Like a blazing fire born of wicked green light.

Even on one knee, Halan loomed taller than Senex, to the point that the old demigod’s neck strained as he tried to hold eye contact.

Halan’s right arm drew up, slowly, the hand hovering to the left of Senex’s head. “I will show you,” Halan rumbled. “Bear a touch of my hand, and you will see.”

Senex’s mouth had gone completely dry. His throat felt clamped down. He didn’t trust himself to speak, so he simply nodded.

The ugly smirk again. “This will be…uncomfortable. For you.”

And with that, Halan touched the side of Senex’s head with a finger the size of an arm, and everything in and around Senex went green. And then it went black.

***

In the blackness, a woman’s voice.

She was singing. A warm, clear voice. Strong. The melody was lost, somehow unclear, though Senex still perceived the feel of the music, as though the tune existed in deep memories, rather than in his ears.

The tune was sad, and yet darkly amused with itself. It was the sound of someone old, looking back at the naïveté of their youth. Someone wise with experience, recalling their follies.

When we were young

And the gift of life was still new and fun,

And evil lost, and good always won.

When we looked to the sky and thought

The King had come.

A light bloomed in the darkness, and from it came a shape, and around that light, the darkness became stars, became the heavens, became sky, and the shape took its form, and it looked like a man, and yet it was not. It was large, like the Sons of Primus, but it did not look like them—it looked like many things, all things, all at once.

Senex felt as though his breath would catch in his chest, but he could not feel his breath or his chest. He could only feel a welling of emotion from some place deep within him, a void suddenly filled, though he knew in an instant that it was not his void, but humanity’s void, and the thing that was filling it was this being.

It could only be Paladin Primus himself. The welling of emotion became an outburst of joy, and in the face of Primus, Senex saw a god that he had waited for and hoped for his whole life. A god with powers beyond human understanding. A god that loved them.

But that king, he was neither man nor beast,

And the sky boiled

And the sun set in the east,

And nine times we begged for peace,

But nine devils were released.

The sense of having found something you’ve searched for your entire life—some inestimable missing piece to the puzzle of your soul—was burned out of Senex in a blast of fire that smelled of ozone and burned flesh. Terror filled him now. The helplessness of the weak, as they watch the strong coming for them. Everything spun, topsy-turvy, and upside down.

The Nine Sons of Primus, faces like the honed edges of a longstaff’s blade, and from them poured destruction in rivers of green fire that washed away life in a tidal wave of death. The terror turned to shock inside of him. Turned to disbelief.  Then grief.

And the devils danced and they set the mood,

With fire and blood as their marching tune

And we sought to find

The face of the moon

But he had turned away.

Why wasn’t their god putting a stop to this? Oh, yes. Because the devils were that god’s sons. And maybe that god loved you, but he loved them more. Because the earth had given itself to Paladin Primus, and now it became a birthright of his sons.

When God came down he was a regular guy

And he saw what had happened and began to cry,

But it wasn’t enough to untangle the lie,

And we all knew there was nothing

Left to believe.

Paladin Primus was no god. He was just another being, made of flesh and blood, rife with his own weaknesses, his own ambitions, his own lusts. He’d seemed so powerful—so perfect—when he’d first come, but he wasn’t powerful enough to stop his sons from destroying the world.

Then the King lost his crown and then ran away

And the angels fought and the devils raged

And we all hit our knees to pray

But no one could hear what we

Had to say.

Fire in the sky. The voice of the song died, abruptly, in a wash of death. The stars fought above the heads of a powerless humanity, and the remnants of that race cowered, not knowing if the death and destruction would ever end, or if the battle in the sky above them would yield a merciful victor, or if their troubles had only just begun.

Silence and blackness again. No song. No music. No life. Such things were beyond the human race now. Their existence was only terror and death, and pathetic pleading. Tiny animals, caught up in something beyond their comprehension, simply begging for another day of life.

Disgust. Senex felt it creep in on him, and knew that it was not his own. It was an echo of what the Nine felt about humanity. Humanity was weak. And the Nine were strong. And yet…they were punished.

Paladin Primus, gone in an instant. Not gone somewhere, with the intention of coming back—gone. He had destroyed himself in shame. And the race of beings from which Paladin Primus had come—the All-Kind—now sat in judgement over the Nine, and they were blinded by their own arrogance, unable to see the perfection of war that the Nine had become—the powers of destruction, embedded into a mind and a body and a soul bred for war.

That was, after all, humanity’s one and only contribution to this story: Their insatiable instinct for war. Primus may have been a being of peace, but his sons were half-human. All of the powers, with none of the restraint. All the capability for destruction, with none of the compassion.

To the All-Kind, they were simply rabid dogs.

And yet, rather than put them down, they chose instead to keep them in a place that might as well have been hell. A place where nothing else was. A place of unending disassociation with reality, cut off from anything but their own consciousness.

Punishment, yes…but also an experiment.

For what if the All-Kind needed a race like them in the future? They themselves did not fight wars—no, they loved their peace too much to get their hands dirty. So they would simply bottle up the Nine, and leave their lesser progeny to rule over the sad, crushed race of humans scattered about the battle-scarred planet.

Alone for five hundred years. Cut off from anything but their own tumbling thoughts.

And they hated. Oh, how they hated.

They hated Paladin Primus for his weakness, for his love of the humans.

They hated the All-Kind for their prideful judgement, for their cold dismissal.

But mostly, they hated humanity.

Grasping. Conniving. Self-serving. War, when they knew they could win. Plaintive bleating for mercy when they knew they could not. They would kill each other by the millions without blinking an eye, but if someone did it to them, they wept at the injustice. Humans were petty, short-sighted, hypocritical creatures, and their penchant for killing each other was only made easier by the frailty of their bodies.

A better version of them had been born in the Nine sons of Primus. A more evolved version. Why then should the obsolete version be allowed to remain? The Nine sons of Primus, and their sons and grandsons, were the perfection of a warrior race.

And yet, for five hundred years they had endured an unimaginable punishment. All because they had tried to sweep up the useless refuse of this planet. All because of humans.

Oh, how they hated…

***

Oddly enough, Senex’s first thought upon coming back to himself was, That wasn’t as bad as I thought—

Which lasted about as long as it took for his hundred-year-old eyes to swim back into focus. And then the pain hit. A blast of it, straight from the temple that Halan had touched, coursing down his spine, as though the fluid within it had turned to molten metal.

The pain was so sudden and savage that Senex wasn’t even able to cry out—a fact that he would later be thankful for. Because Halan was still kneeling there, his feral green gaze watching the old paladin as though waiting for any sign of weakness. That weakness that he—they—hated so much.

Senex opened his mouth to cry out, but the breath had been taken from him, and he suddenly knew that if he did, he would die. He snapped his teeth together, hard. The clear, poignant pain of his own teeth clacking was a welcome distraction from the fire in his spine, now spreading out to every particle of his body.

But, as it spread, it left behind a coldness so filled with relief, that it gave Senex the strength to stay silent, to stay standing, to keep his eyes fixed upon Halan, and to neither blink, nor let a grimace cross his face. The pain would not last. It was already dissipating.

Halan tilted his massive head to one side. Green eyes narrowing. Then that nasty smirk again. “It is pleasant for me to see that not all of our progeny have devolved into weakness.”

Fire, racing down his arms and legs, into his hands and feet.

Almost over.

Halan stood, which seemed to take an oddly long time, or perhaps time was simply crawling, as it did when pain was thrashing the body. “So,” the son of Primus said. “You saw.”

Senex managed a nod. And a breath, which he was grateful for. His aging body hadn’t completely failed him just yet, even if stairs had become his enemy.

Remember what you’re here for.

“Yes,” Senex said. “I saw. And I understand now, why you wish to let the Guardians destroy the humans.”

Halan made an expression with his craggy, armored face that Senex could only interpret as dismissive. Bored, perhaps. “They have plagued this planet for long enough. Extinction comes to all species that fail to adapt properly in the face of change. We are that change. And they cannot overcome us. They have no right to this planet. It belongs to us now.”

Senex watched the being in front of him as the fire tingled and throbbed in his fingertips and toes, careful to keep his expression neutral. He did not want to overplay his hand. He did not want to appear too eager to save humanity, especially after truly coming to understand the depth of the Nine’s hatred towards them.

It would be far easier to kill himself in the next moments, than it would be to save the humans. All it would take would be a single misplaced word. A wrong expression. Anything, really.

You would think that watching hundreds of un-Gifted be thrown into the sea to die would have driven home the point to him of how quickly these beings were willing to dispose of life they deemed unworthy. And yet it had taken the vision—a direct piping of Halan’s seething consciousness into his brain—to really make him understand how close to dying he was.

How close to dying he was every time he came here.

“And yet,” Halan continued, motionless but for his mouth. “You have come to plead mercy for them again.”

As the last tingling of fire left Senex, his body suddenly erupted in a panic. Cold and greasy dread that far outranked any fear he’d ever felt in his life. For all the other fears had been hypothetical. And this one was certain.

He’s about to kill you.

“No,” Senex said, as calmly as he was able, as though he did not feel at that precise moment the wateriness of his own bowels, threatening to soil his robes in the face of imminent annihilation. “Your judgement in this matter is supreme, Halan. And the judgement of your brothers. I trust in it. And even if I had the power to change it, I would not.”

Silence stretched. Brittle. Threatening to shatter, like a strand of blown glass, rapidly cooling.

“If you have more you wish to say,” Halan finally broke the silence, his voice relatively quiet, but teeming with poorly-bridled violence. Death waiting to pounce. Destruction edging towards release. “Then be courageous and say it. Or are you so frightened of us? Your very fathers?”

It was strange hearing those words, and knowing them to be true, and yet looking up at something so alien that you felt it could not possibly be related to you. Not even the same species, let alone your forefather. But they were.

Or, at least, Batu was.

Senex shook his head, letting out a sigh, as though he were just as relaxed as could be. “Fear is not what holds me back,” he lied. “It is only simple confusion. Seeing what I saw…”

He had made a whole speech in his head, but that had been disintegrated the second Halan had given him the vision. If he had said what he’d planned to say, having not understood what he now grasped, he was certain that he would have been killed. So he had to shift tactics.

Senex shook his head again, as though dismissing a thought he had just had. “I understand. Your decision to let the humans go extinct is final. And it is merciful in a way that I cannot comprehend ever extending to my enemies.”

Chak, the youngest, exploded out of his self-made throne so suddenly that it shook the entire building, and it was only with every ounce of self-mastery Senex possessed that he did not shrink back, but rather looked at Chak as though curious at the outburst.

“Merciful?” Chak demanded, voice booming, even if it did carry with it a flavor of youthful impertinence. “You think that our desire to let them be crushed by the mechanical demons of the All-Kind is merciful?”

Their attention on him felt physical. Like a blanket of steel spikes.

“Pardon me,” Senex replied, his heart thrashing to the point of pain. “They call you Chak the Youngest, but you have still lived many more centuries than I. You may have a perspective on these matters that is beyond me. But from my experience, if an enemy were to cause me to be unjustly imprisoned in a hellish existence of nothingness for five hundred years…” Senex smiled bitterly. “I would not allow them to die so quick a death. To me, it seems an almost incomprehensible mercy. But perhaps I do no not understand your strategies. Far be it from me to question anything.”

It was surreal to watch a massive, seemingly-all-powerful being bluster, but bluster Chak did. At least until he was silenced by a motion of Halan’s hand—a speedy swipe that caused the air in the room to gust like a storm wind.

“Let Batu’s descendant speak,” Halan rumbled. “He may be as sly as his ancestor.” Halan glared dangerously at Senex. “But to what end?”

Batu leaned forward in a strangely familiar manner. Hunched, intrigued, elbows on knees. Head inclined to one side. Up until now, all of the Nine had seemed so regal. So god-like. But perhaps this was a subject that pierced their façade.

“And you, Senex of my house?” Batu said. “What would you do with an enemy that unjustly imprisoned you for five hundred years?”

Senex lifted his eyebrows, as though such a thing was obvious. “I would enslave them for a thousand.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MEN AND DOGS

Everything about being stuck on Hauten’s buggy again was some strange amalgamation of a nightmare and a homecoming.

On the one hand, nothing had changed. Perry had spent three years in Hauten’s buggy. The buggy had changed, but the occupants mostly hadn’t. And sitting there against the rollbar, jostling about as it hurtled across the dawn-gray wastelands, Perry felt that weird familiarity with his surroundings that almost seemed…comfortable.

On the other hand, everything had changed. Sure, he was still Perry, and Hauten was still Hauten, and his crew was still the same old people Perry had met when he’d fallen in with them after deserting from Hell’s Hollow. But Perry had encountered so much change in the last months, that finding himself stuck on this damned buggy again was as surreally nightmarish as if he’d woken up and found himself back in Hell’s Hollow.

And that made him feel a little queasy.

It was the intense interest of Monty, Bigs, and Chester, of all things, that helped to center Perry firmly in his current reality. Because they’d never looked at him like that before.

As though he could spit fire and shit lightning bolts.

Finally, as the sun cast its first rays over a distant line of craggy hills, Perry could stand the silent attention no longer.

He’d been trying to stare out at the passing landscape, but he felt their eyeballs boring into the back of his head. Heard their murmurs over the trundling of the tires and shocks.

He snapped his head to them, frowning. “Y’all have been staring at me for five hours straight. I figure you either wanna fuck me or fight me, so which one is it?”

Bigs and Chester immediately averted their eyes. Monty was the only one with the balls to narrow his with a brand of suspicious wonderment.

“You always did have a pretty mouth,” Monty growled with something in the neighborhood of a smirk, his eyebrows going up with challenge.

“And you were always uncomfortable around women,” Perry snapped back. “So I guess it all adds up.”

Monty just rolled his eyes. “Guess you had to give up your sense of humor to get all your fancy new powers.”

Chester, summoning the testicular fortitude to re-enter the fray, spoke over his shoulder without meeting Perry’s eyes. “Oh, come on, Monty. Perry never had a sense of humor to begin with.”

Odd how that stung. “Fuck you guys. We had some laughs. Didn’t we?”

Monty looked briefly disgusted. “Shit, Perry, you had too much of a chip on your shoulder to laugh at yourself.”

Ouch. The hits just kept coming.

Perry grimaced, glancing out at the wastelands again. “Alright. Fine. Maybe I was…a little sour.”

“And defensive,” Chester added.

“And prickly,” Bigs put in.

“And obviously nothing’s changed,” Monty grunted.

Perry looked skyward with a sigh. He might’ve bothered to argue with them…if they were wrong. But they weren’t. He had been all of those things. Still was, deep down, even if he’d managed to overcome it. You never really change who you are. You just learn how to make yourself more palatable. Like a tough piece of meat that needs to be beaten, poked, marinaded, and cut thinly just to be chewed and swallowed.

He couldn’t deny it, and he didn’t bother. Sure, maybe he had his reasons for being that way, but trying to articulate them would only prove their point. So he simply pasted on a grim smile, and nodded to the back of the seat ahead of him, where Jax had his boots off and was trying to shave a corn from his big toe. It looked like quite a difficult process, with all the bumping around the buggy was doing. Occasionally the stink of his feet would spear through the wind and hit Perry in the nose.

Remaining focused on the grizzly corn, Jax nodded his white-haired head at Monty, Bigs, and Chester. “Perry has always been one prickly little bitch, that’s for sure and for certain.” He waved the knife at the other three. “But if you were five-foot-nothing and were forced into a legionnaire’s academy to have your shit kicked in by all them big boys on a daily basis, I wonder if any of you’d be any different.”

The others showed a tiny sliver of shame in the fact that they didn’t argue with that assertion.

Perry, however, frowned at Jax. “I never told you guys about that.”

They hit a hard bump and Jax made a tiny cut on the side of his foot, cursing violently as blood welled up. “Godsdamned new boots. Wish old boots would just last forever so you didn’t have to break in new ones.” He tamped a thumb down over the cut and leaned back, finally looking at Perry. “Teran told us. When she was trying to convince us to go rescue you from gettin’ noosed.”

“Oh.” Perry waited to feel old sensations of defensiveness, but they didn’t come.

Chester leaned forward, his face less prodding and more curious now. “You always have these…powers or whatever?”

Perry pursed his lips, wondering how best to answer that. It wasn’t exactly a yes or no question, but then again, anything more than yes or no could get a little complicated. “Yeah. I guess.”

Chester squinted one eye, as though confused. “Then why didn’t you fuck up them boys in the academy that were beatin’ the snot out of you? You sure enough liked to fight in bars, as I recall.”

“Well…” Perry thought about dipping into the red, the flow of Confluence before he’d ever even known what Confluence was. How it carried him on a river of violence. Sometimes to victory. More often to getting his shit kicked in.

Except for Tiller. Perry’d definitely won that one.

“I didn’t know I had it back then,” Perry concluded. “And I couldn’t have done anything with it, even if I knew. I have to have the god-tech to be able to do anything with it.” He shook his head. “Don’t ask me how it works. I don’t know.”

“Do the demigods have to have the god-tech too?”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re basically like a demigod.”

“No. I’m five-foot-nothing and my training is minimal.”

“But you’re like a half-god.”

Perry smirked. “Quarter-god, actually.”

Bigs looked at Perry, his expression returning to that guarded wonder he’d had earlier. “And you killed one of those fuckers?”

Perry found himself frowning, thinking about Mala and Lux. “Well, it was joint effort between me and Stuber. But you know, they’re not all assholes.”

Bigs appeared incredulous.

Perry cleared his throat. “Actually, you’re going to meet a couple of them that are on our side.”

Bigs looked shellshocked. “Crazy times. Pretty sure this is the end of the world.”

Perry shrugged. “I think the world has ended a couple times before. This is just the one we’re around for.”

Chester, looking all stern and hard, planted his hands on his knees and thrust himself out of his hunch. “Perry, I’m only gonna say this one time, so pay attention.”

Perry eyed him, expecting some new form of machismo.

“Thanks for getting us out of Junction City.” Chester made a face like the words had come away with some skin. He coughed and looked away. “Fucking Shortstack.”

***

Stuber gazed down into the mildly depressing stink of boiling rags and gave them another desultory stir. He felt his rifle shifting where it was slung onto his back as he worked. Like it was reminding him that it was there.

Hey, Stuber, remember me? We used to have good times.

“It’s only been a day, Rifle,” Stuber murmured into the steam. “Now leave me be.”

The kid—what was his name again?—gathering up the already-boiled-and-dried rags from a hanging line, glanced at Stuber but didn’t dare hold eye contact. He seemed a tad skittish.

If Stuber had learned one thing about men during his many years in the legions surrounded by them, it was that men could be a tad bitchy when they weren’t doing the thing they were good at. Stuber was no exception.

Much like dogs that are bred to do certain work, if you don’t let them do the work, they wind up getting snippy, grumbling and barking at everything, and ripping apart whatever nice things you own in random flurries of destructive frustration.

For so long, Stuber had pined to return to the arms of his lovely wife. Now that he was back, all he could think about was all the other things he would prefer to be doing with himself. He was built for war. Not stirring godsdamned rags in a pot and changing bandages for whiny peons.

“It’s work that needs to be done,” he reprimanded himself, but without much conviction.

The kid glanced at him again, and picked up the pace gathering the fresh rags.

Stuber glared at him. “You. Kid.”

“Me?” A spark of terror.

“Yeah, you. Come stir this pot. I’ll take the bandages to Petra.”

Not even the slightest hesitation. The kid dropped the rags and slunk to the big iron pot in an awkward, slope-shouldered way, his arms all stiff at his sides.

Stuber didn’t bother handing him the stirring stick. Simply let it drop to the side of the pot, abandoned. He scooped up the pile of rags in his arms and bid the pot of depression farewell.

They’d moved Petra’s interim hospital to just inside the temple, the pot of boiling rags affixed to the oil-burner the flamens had used for…some sort of religious thing. Stuber forgot what it was. Eternal flame of faith or some bullshit.

All through the back rooms of the temple where flamens had once blithely slithered about and chanted prayers to gods that would just as soon kill them as listen to them, the sick and the wounded now lay. It wasn’t all peons, though there were plenty of them. Some of Legatus Mordicus’s legionnaires were in there, albeit sequestered, so the peons wouldn’t begrudge them their better food, or have their ears shriveled by the ribald jokes.

Even wounded, they never stopped talking about fucking.

Except maybe the ones who’d had their dicks shot off. But they found other things to joke about.

Stuber shouldn’t have minded treating them. They were friendly towards him, a fellow legionnaire, albeit a former one—no one really seemed to care that he was a deserter, as they all were at this point. But their smiles and their laughter only reminded him that he was an outsider amongst them now. A has-been.

Warrior-turned-nursemaid.

He found Petra, on her knees, shoulders deep in the innards of the defunct Surgeon they’d hauled from the Old Section.

“You know,” Stuber said, almost plopping the rags on the ground, but then remembering they were supposed to be sterile, and choosing to put them on a table that looked relatively clean. “Sagum would probably be a big help figuring that out.”

Petra retracted her head from the Surgeon just enough to send Stuber a sniping look from over her shoulder. “You think a woman can’t handle mechanical repairs?”

“I think a mechanic is better at mechanical repairs than a doctor.” Not that Sagum was really a mechanic, but he was trying to make a point.

Petra returned her attention to her work. “Well, you don’t get to be a doctor in a shitwater town like Oksidado without knowing how to repair your own equipment. I’ve fixed Surgeons before.”

“Great. Good for you. And how’s that going at the moment?”

“Shitty. Do you think you could convince Sagum to come?”

Stuber smirked to himself. “One way or another, sure.”

She tinkered with it in silence for a few more moments, then pulled away, wiping her hands and frowning at it. “Different model than I’m used to.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Franklin.”

“Yes, my love?”

She gave him a very wife-like look. The kind that seemed to be x-raying him. “You remind me of a dog.”

“Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.”

She stood up and walked over to the pile of fresh bandages he’d left, started rolling them up. “I had a dog when I was a little girl. Did I ever tell you that?”

“I don’t believe it came up.”

“It wasn’t really my dog. It was one of several that ran around the slums. But this one took to following me. Then I took to feeding it. And then it took to sticking by me. Here.” She shoved a pile of hastily-rolled bandages into Stuber’s arms and started walking. He followed. “My folks wouldn’t let it inside the house. It was dirty, mangy, had fleas. That sort of thing.”

“Ah. I can see why I reminded you of it.”

A flash of a smile. “So it would just sit right outside the door. All night if it had to. I watched it one time, watching the other dogs. They had their little pack that would go around, hunting for scraps. It would watch them, and its tail would wag when it saw them, but then the tail would stop, like it remembered that it couldn’t join them. And it never left. Always just watched them pass by.”

“A good dog, then,” Stuber concluded. “Loyal. Did it have a name?”

“Shits.”

“Ah. A strong name, really.”

Petra shrugged as she approached a woman laying on the ground, only a threadbare blanket between her body and the cold stone floor of the temple. “All the kids called him Shits. In retrospect, he had a problem. Worms, probably. Chronic diarrhea.”

“And this inspired you to become a doctor.”

“No, that came later.” Petra knelt down in front of the woman, whose leg was wrecked, wrapped from knee to ankle in bandages spotted with blood and pus. Petra looked grim as she greeted the woman who looked half out of it, then leaned down and gave the leg a sniff. “We’re out of antibiotics,” she murmured, almost to herself. Then shook her head.

Stuber grimaced at the wounded leg, and knew without having to be told what Petra was going to say next to the woman.

“Hon…” Petra laid a hand on the woman’s forehead, wiped the sweat away, smoothed her hair back. “I tried everything I could.”

The woman began to weep quietly. Shut her eyes. Tears dribbling out the corners. She bit her lip and nodded. “I know. Do what you have to do.”

“I’ll get everything ready,” Petra said softly. “Don’t worry, I’ve held onto enough anesthetic to get you through the operation.”

Stuber stewed over Petra’s story while she gave the woman a matter-of-fact briefing on what to expect from an amputation. When Petra rose and continued on, Stuber fell into step with her again.

“So, I’m a mangy stray with a diarrhea problem, but ultimately a good, loyal dog that sticks by you.”

Petra stopped and looked up at him, her eyes kind. “What are you doing here, Franklin?”

Stuber looked at his pile of bandages. “Using my massive muscles to carry bandages for my lovely wife.”

She put a hand on his chest. “Yes. Exactly.”

Stuber frowned, quirking his head. “Seems like there’s more to it.”

“Your friends are out trying to stop the end of the world. And while I appreciate how much you love me, it doesn’t escape me that you’re miserable.”

Stuber coughed, shook his head. “I’m not miserable.”

“Everyone has something that they’re good at. For me, it’s saving lives. But not you.”

“I’ll admit, I’m much better at taking them.” He wrinkled his nose and wafted a hand through the air. “The wounded…they stink.”

“Yes, this is clearly not the profession for you.”

Stuber sighed, letting his shoulders sink a bit. “Sounds like you’re trying to get rid of me. I mean, I know I lack a certain…uh…”

“Compassion?”

“Bedside manner,” Stuber corrected. “But I’m a damn sight better at bandaging these peons than that other kid. What’s his name again?”

“I’ll give you that. And I’m not trying to get rid of you.”

“Good. Because I’m not going anywhere.”

She smiled, a bit sadly. “I want you by my side. And I don’t want you to be in danger any more. But I wonder if that’s what you want?”

“I want to stay by my wife’s side and keep her safe.”

Petra withdrew her hand from his chest and gestured around. “I’m in the middle of the most fortified section of the city, surrounded by an entire legion.”

Stuber scoffed. “An entire legion of men that aren’t as awesome as I am.”

“Granted. But I think a hundred or so of them could perhaps equal one of you, and I believe there’s several hundred here. So I maintain that I’m relatively safe here.”

“Petra. I’m not leaving you.”

“Is that your ‘putting my foot down’ voice?”

“Yes. It is.”

It was Petra’s turn to sigh. Longsuffering. “I’ll never ask you to leave me, Franklin. I want us to be together.”

“Good. Then it’s settled. No need to talk about it anymore.”

She shook her head. “But there’s a fight going on out there. And I know you. I know how your mind works. And I know that every second you’re not a part of it is going to chap your ass. You’re like Shits, watching the other dogs run around doing dog things, and you want to join them but you feel like your duty is to stay by me. And I wonder how long it’s going to take you to become sullen and withdrawn about it. Maybe even start to resent me.”

“I would never resent you. You’re delightful, and I enjoy having sex with you.”

She leaned up and kissed him. “I don’t need a body guard, Franklin. I’m quite capable on my own, and I have been for many years, if you recall. If you choose to stay by my side, then just remember—you’re choosing.”

“Stuber!”

He jerked at the closeness of the voice and turned to find Mala stalking up behind him.

“Sorry to cut off your conjugals,” she said, rapping her longstaff sharply on the ground and jerking a thumb over her shoulder. “But Perry just got back.”

Petra grabbed the bundle of rags from his arms. “Go on. I can manage.”

Stuber hesitated, glowering, pulled in two directions, two duties that both demanded they were the most important, arguing it out in the brain. Mala was already walking away, glancing at him over her shoulder.

When he looked back, Petra had already continued on, and he felt slightly adrift, between those two women, the one that he wanted to be with, and the one that promised to drag him into another fight.

Another fight.

His mind was far from made up, but he did note that he wasn’t glowering anymore as he caught up with Mala.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

REUNIONS

The first checkpoint into Karapalida was manned by a rather ardent young decanus that seemed to believe Hauten’s buggy was filled to the brim with saboteurs or spies. Though what the hell they would sabotage or spy on in the shitheap that remained of the city was beyond Perry.

Eventually, Perry convinced the decanus to send a runner, though he was sorely tempted just to fly into the air and be done with it. But that wouldn’t help Hauten, and given the itchy way the decanus watched them, Perry felt like it would lead to a firefight.

So he let the runner run, a grumbly, older legionnaire, but one that had that long, skinny build that runners have. He bitched about it under his breath, but doffed his armor and shield and bolted off through the city, leaving Perry and Hauten and the crew sitting in an awkward silence.

Luckily, the runner was as fleet-footed as he appeared, and returned within twenty minutes, sweating, but not really all that out of breath.

“Daddy says to let them through,” the runner said to his decanus, in a tone that sounded a lot like you boot-fucking peon should have been added to the end. “He’s expecting them.”

The decanus drew himself up, clearly not caring for the fact that his suspicions had been proven wrong, but he waved Hauten’s buggy through in a stony silence.

When they arrived at the temple complex, Perry stood up in his seat, steadying himself on the rollbars and frowned at the odd scene before him.

“What the hell is this about?” Perry wondered aloud.

There were no crowds around the temple complex this time, so Mordicus’s legionnaires didn’t have a complete perimeter, but there was a wall of them towards the front of the complex, and on the other side, facing that wall of shields were…

“Praetors?” Chester said, sliding up next to him as the buggy slowed to a stop near the temple steps. “You didn’t say anything about praetors.”

A group of perhaps twenty of them, their black sagums draped over their shoulders, but weapons strapped to their backs and hands empty, were facing down two battle lines of Mordicus’s legionnaires.

Hauten threw the buggy into neutral and stood up, looking over his shoulder at Perry with a withering gaze. “More friends of yours?”

Perry shook his head, still confused. “Not that I know of.”

Hauten grumbled, scowling at them. “Better not be the ones that blew up my old buggy.”

Perry lifted an eyebrow at him as though to ask, And what exactly would you do about it if they were?

“And Shortstack returns, victorious!” A voice boomed behind Perry.

He turned and spotted Stuber, descending the temple steps alongside Mala. She held back as Stuber continued to approach and the buggy disgorged its crew. She watched them aloofly as the ones that had known Stuber greeted him excitedly with hand shakes and backslaps. Apparently he was immune to the disdain they had for Perry.

Hauten stalked around the front of the buggy, chest all puffed out, no sign of his limp. “Stuber, you sonofabitch. What’d you do with my LRG?”

Stuber went from warm to cold in an instant, brushing Chester and Bigs away like toddlers hanging on their father’s legs. “Your LRG? We both know that Charlize was always mine.”

Hauten managed to stand somewhat chest to chest with Stuber, though he still had to look up to meet Stuber’s gaze. “And what have you done with her?”

Stuber lowered his voice. “Well. If you must know. I used her up. And then I left her.”

Hauten gasped. “You didn’t.”

“Right next to the smoking heap of rubble that used to be your buggy.”

“That was a fine piece of equipment, you heartless bastard.”

“It ran out of ammo. And without ammo, it was a fine piece of dead weight.” Stuber looked skyward, as though seeing the mournful ghost of his abandoned LRG. “It still hurts me to this day.”

Hauten managed a smile. “How much to get you to abandon these fucks and come back with me?” He glanced behind him to Curly, his new hired muscle. “Curly’s big, but he eats too much and he can’t run worth shit. No offense, Curly.”

Again, Curly looked deeply offended.

“Not a chance,” Stuber replied.

“Well then.” Hauten sighed. “Fine.”

Perry sidestepped the gathering around Stuber and nodded to Mala, then gestured to the praetors and the legionnaires. “What’s going on?”

Mala seemed to ignore his question at first. “You look a little banged up, Half-breed. Did you not stick the landing a few times?”

Perry looked down at his scuffed up knees and elbows, scabbed over, rusty red flakes dried to his skin. “That. And some other things.”

Mala raised her eyes to the praetors. “More deserters. This time from our mutual acquaintance, Lux.”

“Lux? He’s here?”

“No. He’s out in the wastes, a few miles east.”

Perry frowned at her, sensing a deep, unspoken discord. “Mala. Why isn’t he here?”

She looked at him sharply. “Because I have ample reason to suspect his intestinal fortitude. Because he’s an Inquisitor, not a warrior. And because I’m not entirely sure he’s fully decided whether or not he wants to rebel against The Nine.”

“Mala, we need all the help we can get at this point!”

“And I’ll take help,” Mala replied, airily. “Provided it doesn’t put everything at risk.” She grimaced. “With someone like Lux…I just don’t know where his loyalties lie at this point.”

“What about Sagum? And Whimsby?”

“Whimsby I don’t know about. They were working on him. Sagum is out there with Lux. Mordicus offered him a free pass, but he declined. An errant sense of loyalty to Lux, ironically enough.”

Perry turned to stand side-by-side with her. “So these praetors abandoned Lux?”

“It would appear they share my feelings about Lux.” She looked at him. “You seem inordinately worried about this.”

Perry massaged the back of his neck. “For fuck’s sake, Mala, I’m trying to get people to work together!”

“Not every hand extended is worth grasping.”

Perry turned back to her, glaring. He lowered his voice. “You know how much convincing I had to do to get people to trust you?”

Mala glanced sardonically over his shoulder. “What? With your merry band of scavengers?”

“Yes! With them! They don’t want to trust a paladin! But I convinced them to do it anyways. And now they’re here. And you’re telling me you can’t trust Lux. That’s bullshit. And it’s hypocrisy.”

“It was ultimately not my decision. If you have a problem with it, you should take it up with Mordicus.”

“Oh, let me guess, you just advised him.”

“Yes, I advised him. Wisely. And he wisely took my advice. You should try it.”

Perry shook his head, feeling frustration and sadness colliding in his chest. “This is never going to work if we stay at each other’s throats. How the hell are we going to win against the Guardians and The Nine when we can’t even work together?”

Mala sighed, but chose not to respond. “Mordicus did as you asked. The plant you mentioned has been refurbished enough to kick out the projectiles you prescribed. I believe they got started this morning.” She smiled wanly. “I must give it to these legionnaires, they’re efficient.”

Perry couldn’t resist a final comment on the previous topic: “Yeah, it’s amazing what people can accomplish when they work together.”

“Stop being sullen,” Mala sneered. “There’s an entire industrial machine waiting for you. I suggest you get your friends working on it so that we can actually fight this war, rather than talk about it.”

Perry disengaged from Mala with a parting frown, and sidled up to Stuber who had finally disentangled himself from Hauten’s crew. “Did you know Sagum was out there?”

“I had heard.”

“Did you know they won’t allow Lux inside Karapalida?”

Stuber’s brows furrowed. “I must have missed that last part. Why?”

Perry spat off to the side, jerking his head in Mala’s direction. “Ask her. On second thought, don’t bother.”

“Hm.” Stuber scratched at his thickening beard. “Old grudges, rationalized in new and exciting ways. That’d be my bet.”

“I need to go talk to Sagum. Will you come with me?”

Stuber made an uncomfortable face. “I’d rather not leave the city. Petra…” he trailed off.

Perry studied the big man’s face. “I think she’ll be alright for a few hours, Stuber.”

His nostrils flared. Eyes looking dangerous for a second. “I’d rather not leave the city.”

Gods, what the hell was wrong with everyone? Teran, run off to “her people,” Mala, harboring old grudges to the detriment of their survival, and now Stuber, who had spent the last decade of his life as a fugitive, couldn’t bear to leave his wife’s side for a few hours?

Perry closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and rammed both index fingers into his temples as though trying to pin his fracturing skull back in place. “Alright. Alright, fine. Will you at least take Hauten to the foundry and get him set up?”

Stuber took a big breath that seemed to carry some discomfort on the exhale. “Yes, I can do that.”

“Great,” Perry muttered. “I’m going to go talk to Sagum and Lux. Since, apparently, no one else will.”

***

“I am walking up to the front door of Praesidium. A paladin is waiting for me. He introduces himself as ‘Paladin Atticus of House Annad, but you can call me Warden Atticus.’”

“No.”

“Right. I am in a large structure made of white stone. A paladin is smiling at me. He says, ‘Welcome to The Clouds.’ Oh, I believe that might be one of my very first memories, shortly after being activated. How interesting. Is it helpful?”

“No.”

“I’ll try again. Let’s see. In this memory, I am standing in the entryway of Praesidium with my fellow mechanical men, and a short, fat, bald paladin is staring at me with what I can only interpret as ‘disgust.’ His name is Warden Abbas.”

“Well, at least we’re in the right century now.”

“That would be helpful, if my chronology weren’t—”

“Fragmented, yeah. Got it.”

Sagum lay on his back amidst a scattering of tools, all pretense of order completely destroyed by an overwhelming depression. He stared up at the sky, watching the dawn light strike a few stringy clouds with orange.

Pretty.

How annoying.

What was the purpose of pretty when it was all going to be destroyed?

He’d got up before dawn, unable to do much sleeping the night before, and felt just enough verve to get himself working on Whimsby again. That had lasted for about an hour. Frustration after frustration, along with Whimsby’s constant retelling of memories that had nothing to do with anything that Sagum wanted to know, had stripped him of the tiny vestige of can-do spirit that he’d had.

So now he lay in his tools. Everything in disarray. What was the point in keeping everything tidy? Why keep up pretenses? Orderly tools were just a lie he was telling himself. Acting like he was some kind of surgeon. Ha! He couldn’t program his way out of burlap sack, let alone figure out how to fix Whimsby’s memories.

“I am flying on my skiff. I’m on patrol. Wait. No, I can see the date stamp on the controls. That was two hundred years ago.”

“Not helpful,” Sagum grunted.

“Primus help me, is he ever going to stop prattling on?”

Sagum didn’t even bother to look. Or move. “Morning, Lux.”

“Yes. It’s morning.”

“That’s why I didn’t say good morning.”

“You’ve a sunny disposition today.”

“You’re missing half your praetors.” Sagum let that spiteful little observation hang there in the air. Because you know what misery loves? Company. And the ensuing miserable silence made Sagum smile nastily.

A few quiet footsteps in the sandy dirt. The rustle of clothing as Lux pulled himself up into the skiff.

From Sagum’s position, staring up at the sky, he could just see the top of Lux’s head, down by Sagum’s feet. He glanced down and met the demigod’s gaze. “What?”

“Lost all hope, have you?” Lux said after a moment. He looked out towards the encampment where his own loss of hope was evident. “Throwing up the white flag?”

“I’ve tried everything.”

“Very well. Have you tried—”

“Yes.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“I just said I’d tried everything. By definition that’s…everything.”

“Oh my. That confident in yourself, huh?”

Well, actually, Sagum wasn’t confident at all in himself. So he let out a ponderous sigh and flicked his fingers in Lux’s direction. “Fiiiiiiine. What were you going to say?”

There was actually a tiny sliver of himself that hoped Lux would come up with something truly brilliant that he hadn’t thought of.

“Have you tried instructing Whimsby to create a subroutine capable of organizing the memories in some sort of logical order?”

Sagum’s hope died in utero. “Well, let’s see. Whimsby?”

“Yes, Master Sagum?”

“Can you write a subroutine?”

“Unfortunately, I am unable to comply with that request at this time.”

Sagum lifted himself up onto his elbows and gave Lux a look, hands spread open as though to say See? I told you so.

Lux frowned at the mech. “Whimsby, why are you unable to write a subroutine for yourself?”

Whimsby remained motionless for a moment, as though thinking. Somewhere inside of his human-like shell, something whirred in a way that sounded decidedly broken. Like a tiny servo straining and not getting anything done.

Whimsby twitched and looked apologetic. “There are large sections of my internal diagnostics system that don’t appear to be working correctly. Unfortunately, I cannot explain why I am unable to write a subroutine at this time.”

Sagum groaned as he sat up, slouching over crossed legs. “Let me help shed some light on this situation.” He held Lux’s eyes as he pointed to Whimsby. “There are over one thousand logic circuits embedded in that core processor. These circuits allow a level of machine learning that gives the mechanical man the illusion of intelligence.” Sagum leaned over and poked his finger into the blackened hole in Whimsby’s core processor. “The bullet that made that hole right there appeared to fragment about halfway through the core processor, and the shrapnel destroyed, oh, I don’t know, rough guess, maybe forty percent of Whimsby’s logic circuits?” Sagum grimaced savagely and wiggled his finger around in the hole. “And there’s absolutely no way of knowing which logic circuits got toasted, and what the hell they controlled, although, obviously, some of them belonged to the systems that allowed internal diagnostics, chronology, and—Yup! You guessed it!—his ability to write subroutines.”

Lux frowned, leaning back against the rail of the skiff and folding his arms over his chest, his longstaff cradled there, like a child’s prized toy. “Hm.”

“Yes. ‘Hm’ indeed.” Sagum extracted his finger from the hole and wiped a bit of the carbon scoring from it. “So you see, even if we could figure out some way of organizing the memories besides their chronological time stamp, Whimsby won’t be able to write the program to search through those five hundred years of memories and put them in order.”

“If he could,” Lux wondered. “How long would it take him? Hypothetically speaking.”

“I don’t know,” Sagum admitted. “But he still has nominal processing speeds, so I’d guess it wouldn’t take long. Maybe a few minutes.”

“Is there any way you can write the program for him?”

“No.” Sagum started ticking the points off on his fingers. “One—I don’t know the language for programming mechs. Two—even if I did, or could learn it quickly enough, I’d need a hub capable of the time dilation necessary to condense the programming into Whimsby’s core processor. Three—I’m pretty sure the only place that has that type of computing power is likely in The Clouds, in whatever factory churns these mechs out.”

Lux made a dismal face. “We stopped creating mechs some time ago. The facility was dismantled. I’m not sure if the equipment even exists anymore.”

Even though it was already impossible, Sagum still felt like that little fact was salt in the wound. “There you go. See? The computing power necessary to do any of this shit doesn’t even exist on this planet anymore.” He put his head in his hands, freshly frustrated, depressed all over again. “It’s hopeless. Fucking hopeless.”

Something hit the ground outside the skiff.

Sagum jerked up, imagining a Guardian slamming to earth right in front of him.

Lux whirled around, longstaff raised in an instant.

“Whoa there, gents,” Perry said, smiling and raising a palm to Lux. “It’s just me.”

Lux blinked a few times, then looked up into the sky as though wondering if some stealthy skiff had just deposited Perry from above. Back to Perry. “Where did you come from?”

Perry kept his shield activated until Lux visibly relaxed and pointed the muzzle of his longstaff away. The translucent shimmer encapsulating Perry disappeared. “I flew. Or whatever it is you guys call it. Pulsing? I dunno. Mala taught me.”

Sagum scrambled up beside Lux and leaned over the siderail, feeling the depression easing enough to let him grin. “Perry McGown, you tricksy bastard. You flew?”

Lux seemed less enthusiastic, though it was probably the mention of Mala that did it. “It’s not a complicated process, once you know what to do,” he commented. “I’ve always preferred a skiff.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t have a skiff,” Perry said, grabbing the siderail and hauling himself aboard. He kept his smile even in the face of Lux’s dourness. “Good to see you guys. Safe and whole. I heard you were…” he stopped, realizing that Whimsby was apparently operational again, and watching him with a blank expression. “Shit. Whimsby, is that you in there?”

A shadow of a frown crossed Whimsby’s face. “Yes, it is I. And you must be…Perry McGown.”

Sagum watched Perry’s smile falter. They traded a look.

“Whimsby,” Sagum questioned. “Did you remember that on your own, or through Bren’s facial recognition?”

Whimsby nodded. “Bren.”

Sagum grunted. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He turned to Perry. “It’s Whimsby…but it’s not.”

“What do you mean?” Perry took a step forward, posting his longstaff and leaning on it. “What happened?”

“Well.” Whimsby looked down at his open chest cavity and poked at the hole in his core processor, much as Sagum had. “It appears that I was in some sort of battle, wherein I sustained this very inconvenient damage.” He looked up, smiling brightly. “A bullet fragmented inside of me and corrupted forty percent of my logic circuits.”

Another glance from Perry. Sagum nodded in confirmation.

Still smiling: “My memories are not in any chronological order.”

“Oh,” Perry murmured.

Still smiling: “I can’t run full diagnostics.” A long, empty pause. “Or create new subroutines.”

“Right,” Perry said. “Well, you seem in good spirits about it.”

“As a mechanical man I don’t have spirits. Or emotions.”

Perry leaned in Sagum’s direction, lowering his voice. “How close are you to fixing him?”

Sagum’s momentary reprieve curdled, leaving him irritated again. “I’m not. I’m the opposite of close. I’m in the realm of the impossible.”

“Come on, Sagum. You can fix anything.”

Sagum huffed, putting his hands on his hips. “I seem to have bamboozled everyone into thinking that. But no. I can’t.”

“Don’t get him started again,” Lux mumbled. “He’s in a mood.”

Perry looked between them. “Everyone seems to be in a mood. Lux, why are there a bunch of your praetors in Karapalida?”

“Not my praetors,” Lux replied bitterly. He nodded towards the encampment, where the sad remains of the more loyal praetors were in the process of breaking down and packing up. One of them looked in their direction, but quickly looked away as though ashamed. “And it looks like the rest are on the way out.”

“No,” Perry said, rapping his longstaff on the deck. “Fuck that. Lux, you tell those praetors to get their shit packed on these skiffs.”

Lux gave him a look of pure derision. “I think they’re already doing that.”

“No, we’re going to all go back to Karapalida together,” Perry declared.

Sagum shifted uncomfortably. “Actually, there was some talk about that, and—”

“Yeah, Mala told me,” Perry interrupted. “And I don’t give a shit. I’m tired of all this backbiting. We’re going to all pack our shit up and go back to Karapalida together, because we’re in this thing together, and that’s how we’re going to figure our way out of it: Together.”

“Mala and Legatus Mordicus might not see it that way,” Lux sighed.

“Yeah, well, Mala and Mordicus will just have to adjust their perspectives,” Perry said, as though he ran the whole world all of the sudden.

Sagum scratched his temple, grimacing. “Might take some convincing.”

Perry shrugged. “I’ve been very convincing lately. Lux, give the order. And don’t let those praetors give you any shit back. You’re the one with the shield and longstaff. It’s time for them to recognize that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

THE PROBLEM WITH MEN

Teran was surprised when she opened her eyes and saw daylight.

She sat up with an ugly snort, wiping a bit of drool off her chin and staring out to the east where the sun had overtaken any glow from the burning city in the distance. Now all that remained of that far off carnage was a brown smudge on the horizon.

At first she had the urge to jolt to her feet, animated by the nagging sensation of lost time—she hadn’t intended to sleep past dawn, but it had been one of those nights where she thrashed about in discomfort, and had only gotten to sleep shortly before the sun came up.

But she stuffed down that urge to try to scramble and gather back those little grains of time that had slipped through her fingers. Such a thing was impossible. And rushing about never actually earned you any time back.

She drew her knees up and rested her arms on them, still staring out. She’d chosen this spot to sleep because…well, she didn’t feel like being surrounded by a bunch of assholes that hated her. Didn’t make for restful sleep. Not that she’d gotten it anyways. But at least she was alone.

Alone. Strange.

Growing up as an Outsider, you were so accustomed to being crammed in with other people. Everyone always in everyone else’s business. Everyone’s noses up everyone else’s asses.

She’d never had the desire to be alone before last night.

Maybe she had changed. Maybe she didn’t belong here.

Maybe these weren’t her people anymore.

Well. There’s no better time to take an action than when you realize it needs to be taken.

She slogged to her feet, groaning at her numb ass. Cold hands. Just the slightest skim of dew having settled on her clothing, making everything clammy. Amazing how the land around here was so dry, and yet it still gave up dew every night.

“Better than the Crooked Hills,” she grunted to herself, rubbing some feeling back into her left buttock. Now, that place had been wet. Downright soggy for a dweller of the Wastelands like herself.

She looked around her feet, as though surprised that she owned nothing to pack up. She shrugged, patted her pockets, and decided that she’d had enough of this place. She put her back to the smoggy remnants of that city in the distance, and began to descend into the chambers below.

The smells. The smoke. The body odors. The morning’s porridge boiling up.

They used to be the smells of home. Now they were alien.

No, not quite. She was the alien.

“Well, fuck ‘em,” she commented to herself, as she entered into the first of the main chambers, and not giving a shit that two women in passing glanced at her with some combination of offense and disgust.

Through the narrow passages, where the people that had once been hers avoided eye contact and squeezed by her with shoulders brushing the opposite wall, trying not to get too close to her, as though she were a leper.

She accepted the new rules of the game and didn’t bother seeking eye contact. Didn’t nod to them. Didn’t murmur a morning greeting. Just stalked past them, through them, around them. Pedestrian obstacles.

Down into the main chamber now, where the smells were the thickest. Her belly felt limp and empty, like a deflated balloon inside of her. Food would have been nice. But she wouldn’t take theirs. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of whatever moral high ground they might derive from feeding her.

Besides, their hostile looks dampened her appetite.

Well, fuck ‘em.

“Teran?”

She didn’t bother to stop. Didn’t bother to look. Her decision was hardening by the second, her emotions calcifying against these stiff-necked people. She had places to be. If someone wanted to talk, they could follow her and talk on the move.

“Teran, hold up!” It was Lucky.

Well, fuck him.

She heard the jogging footfalls behind her, and had already decided that if he so much as touched her elbow, she was going to give him a right hook straight to his crispy face. Maybe he spied her balled fists, but he didn’t touch her.

“Hey, where you going?” he asked, seeming to struggle to keep pace with her.

“Not ashamed to be seen talking to me?” Teran bit back.

“Come on, Teran. It’s not like that. It’s just…”

She grinned savagely. “Go ahead. Tell me what it’s like. This will be good.”

“You know how it is.”

“No, I don’t know how it is.”

He huffed and puffed. “I have to live with these people.”

She shook her head, catching a glimpse of Sage, who was catching a glimpse of her, over the stooped shoulders of a little coven of leaders, all huddled together. “Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Not-So-Fucking-Lucky. You’re going to have to die with these people. And I’ll leave you to it. Don’t let me stop you all from plunging headlong into your own fucking extinction.”

“Would you stop for a second?” And then he grabbed her elbow.

She whirled, shot that right hook that she’d already decided on. He must’ve known it was coming, because he leaned just out of range. Teran overshot, then corrected and turned it into a backfist, which came about an inch from the side of his face before he blocked it, and she was just in the process of rearing her leg back when he sidestepped and raised his thigh to defend his crotch.

“Don’t kick me in the balls!” he yelped.

She halted, granting him a few second’s clemency. “Don’t ever fucking grab me like that.”

“Alright! Okay!” Both hands up, showing his palms.

After a few seconds of trying to light his hair on fire with the malice of her gaze, Teran registered that the clatter and murmur of morning activities had fallen silent around them. Well, there was no need for any more awkward silences, Teran felt. They were past that now.

“You’re all fucking weak!” She didn’t exactly shout it, but it was sure loud enough for everyone to hear. “Everything about you is weak. You’re a parasite on the human race, only ever taking, and never giving back. And I’m ashamed that I came from you. You’re all going to die in a mire of your own ignorance. But I guess you get what you deserve.”

And with that, feeling hot and bothered, and a little vindicated, Teran swung around and proceeded to march out of the main chamber. Her anger, burning and bubbling, carried her along the exit passage, and she didn’t realize that Lucky was still behind her until she saw her skiff, and froze, breath caught in her chest.

“I mean…” Lucky started from over her shoulder, causing her to jerk and look at him. “I was trying to tell you.”

Teran jutted a finger out to her skiff. “What the hell are they doing on my skiff?”

Because there was about twenty men and women standing on the deck.

Lucky quirked his non-burned eyebrow, and smirked with the non-burned side of his mouth. “What? Am I allowed to talk now?”

Teran simply narrowed her gaze to let him know that he’d better.

Lucky swallowed and nodded to them. “They’re going with you. I’m going with you. To Karapalida.” He fidgeted a bit. “Might not have convinced many people, but you did me. And you did them.”

Teran was just about to let her anger get washed out with some gratitude, but a clamor came from further down the passageway, and Sage emerged, trailing his entourage of sallow elders. For a pleasant little snippet of time, Teran wondered if she was going to be seen off with well-wishes.

“I forbid you to leave, Lucky!” Sage thundered down the passage as he approached, stabbing a shaky finger at them. “And you idiots on the skiff! Get off that thing right now! You’re not going anywhere!”

Even Lucky recoiled at this, turning to look at Sage with a frown. “You’re our leader, Sage. Not our demigod. We’re free to make our own decisions.”

Sage stopped, quivering with righteous indignation. He looked past Lucky and Teran. “And you?” he shouted to the people on the skiff. “Does Lucky speak for you as well?”

Much murmuring and shuffling and downcast eyes. But…no one got off the skiff.

Sage was so tense that his lips were turning white. “If you leave, you’re not welcome back! You’ll never be allowed to come back here!”

Lucky winced at the words as though they were blows.

The last thing in the world Teran wanted was to enter into another debate with Sage and his cronies. She gave him a look of utter contempt, and turned her back on him. “Well then. I’m leaving.”

Lucky sighed heavily, shaking his head. Teran was accustomed to disappointments by now, but she still felt her feet hesitate, not wanting to walk away from Lucky before his decision had been made, and fearing that Sage’s ultimatum was too much for him.

But Lucky only turned a sad gaze on Sage. “I’m afraid that if we don’t go, we won’t have anything to return to anyways.”

***

The problem with men—the fighting kind, anyways; Stuber didn’t know much about the docile kind—was that they were always pulled in two directions. If you wanted to be with your woman—and most men did, even the docile kind—then you had to at least try to be a functioning member of some social order, to be gentle, and avoid killing or otherwise seriously maiming other people.

But if you wanted to protect your woman—and most men did, especially the fighting kind—then you had to be willing to become a savage at the drop of a hat, and to take that violence to the threat, and to meet that threat as far away from your loved ones as possible. After all, the best defense is a good offense.

But it’s very difficult to keep the savage in you primed and ready to rip faces off, while being a gentle, loyal, functioning member of a social order.

Stuber figured this was why men went away for war. Because if you dragged your wife along with you, she probably wouldn’t care much for what she saw.

But then again, if you stayed out of the war and stuck by her side, which it seemed is what women preferred, then the little savage you kept under lock and key would atrophy. Go soft. Not be ready. And then when trouble came, you would fail to be aggressive enough, and your wife would be murdered or worse, and she probably wouldn’t care much for that either.

But then again, it’s not like women were helpless. They had arms and trigger fingers, after all. They were perfectly capable of fighting.

But then again, most women didn’t spend their lives devoted to the craft of learning how to take the lives of others. Same was true for the docile men, come to think of it. And, of course, there were the Malas and Terans of the world, that appeared more than capable of doing violence. But that was not the case with Petra, who had spent her life learning how to heal wounds. Stuber had spent his life learning how to make them. Genitalia notwithstanding, Stuber was obviously going to be better at fighting than Petra, by virtue of what he’d spent his life learning.

So, was that an argument for staying by her side to protect her? Or was that an argument for leaving her and taking it to the threat?

He’d spent so much time learning how to do violence to others, it seemed a shame to let that wither away.

But then again, he’d spent so much time trying to get back to Petra, it seemed a shame to leave her after only just reuniting with her.

It was a terrible dilemma. A very fine line to walk. Perhaps an impossible one. Perhaps you couldn’t walk that line—perhaps all you could do was make a choice. Do you want to keep being a fighting man, or do you want to let it wither and become…

Docile.

Stuber grimaced at the thought, so completely lost in his rumination that he stood there at the side of the reloading table, hands on the crate of freshly-reloaded ammunition, staring off into a terrible nightmare where his hands were soft and his beard was shaved, and his muscles turned to flab, and everyone around him was just so comfortable with him because he no longer had that look in his eyes that made them stop and think, This is a dangerous man.

Terrible dilemma. Impossible choice.

Stuber figured this was why fighting men—the ones that didn’t die, anyways—wound up lonely and drinking too much.

“Uh…Stuber?”

Stuber blinked and turned a frown on Bigs. How dare he interrupt such a serious internal monologue. “What?”

Bigs nodded at the crate. “I need an empty crate. Trying to make ammunition here.”

Stuber looked down at the crate as though surprised at its defiance for not putting itself where it belonged. “Right.”

He hefted the crate. It was not overly heavy—Stuber had lifted crates twice this size in preparations to throw him and his battle line into a bloody fray…and yet he felt a distant ache in his elbows.

Stuber had faced down many things without panicking: Withering autocannon fire, ruffians, lokos, nekrofages, demigods, polymorphs, Guardians…just to name a few.

But he’d never had to face his body breaking down on him.

His reaction to it could only be described as dread. Was it old age? He wasn’t that old, was he? Was it old wounds come back to haunt him? Something despicable like arthritis? Or was it something even more insidious than that? Was he…going soft?

He set the crate down next to the others—three thousand rounds for the autoturrets, but the math of battle was lost on him. He extracted his fingers from the handles of the crate and stared at them. What was this distant ache in the joints? These fingers had plucked men’s eyes from their skulls. And, gods in the skies, what was that dull throb in his lower back? A back that had hefted fully-armored comrades up and dragged them to safety. What was this twinge in his shoulder? A shoulder that could carry a week of supplies and a mortar tube for a full day’s march.

What was happening to him?!

“Stuber!” Bigs’s nagging voice. “Crate!”

Before he really could think about it, Stuber seized an empty crate and hurled it at Bigs, fully intending for it to smash the little fucker in the face, but it didn’t quite make the distance, and Bigs watched it with a sort of distant confusion as it clattered to the ground at his feet.

“Oh my fuck,” Stuber gasped, staring at the crate in horror. “I’m falling apart.”

Bigs, unaware of the true nature of Stuber’s inner argument, simply shook his head and grabbed the crate. “Thanks, asshole.”

“Stuber, my large friend,” Hauten’s voice sounded over-loud behind Stuber. “Are we having issues?”

Stuber leaned back on the table with the ammunition. “I’m turning into a peon.”

“Gods help us,” Hauten replied flatly, sauntering around the table to stand abreast of the troubled legionnaire. “And what has brought you to this conclusion?”

“That crate should have hit Bigs in the face.”

“Well, I’m glad it didn’t. Maybe you subconsciously pulled your throw because you knew it would be an unnecessary and time-consuming injury.”

Stuber frowned. “I have aches and pains.”

“No shit. You’ve been beating your body to smithereens your entire life and fueling it with whiskey. What’d you think was going to happen?”

Stuber nodded with great gravitas. “So…it’s less that I’m turning into a peon, and more that I’m old and decrepit?”

Hauten screwed up his face. “I’ve never heard you be so angsty. Maybe you are turning into a peon. Or maybe Shortstack’s been rubbing off on you too much.”

The horror delved deeper. “No.”

Hauten looked upwards, peering at the rafters of the foundry. “Come to think of it, I have seen you this angsty before.”

“Never.”

“Oh, yes.” Hauten nodded sagely. “The first time I met you. Slobbering drunk. Trying to drink yourself to death. Don’t you recall?”

“I don’t remember being angsty. Just wanting to die.”

“That’s pretty angsty.”

“I’d just murdered my commanding officer and deserted the only thing I’d ever known. I was directionless. Purposeless.”

“Indeed.” Hauten clapped a fatherly hand on Stuber’s shoulder. “And then what happened?”

Stuber looked at him like it was obvious. “Then I tried to drink myself to death.”

“Yes, of course. But then I showed up, good old Boss Hauten, with my soft spot for helping the wayward and disenfranchised—”

“And you needed muscle.”

“Yes, that. But more what I said.” Hauten smiled with nostalgia. “I gave you purpose.”

“I have a purpose,” Stuber challenged.

“And that is?”

“Protecting my wife.”

Hauten scoffed at that. “That’s not a purpose. That’s a nebulous, romantic promise.”

“But protecting you was a purpose?”

Hauten waved it away. “Why didn’t you go back to your wife after you deserted?”

“I was a fugitive. It would’ve made trouble for her.”

“But you’re back with her now.”

“The power structure has changed. No one’s hunting down fugitives.”

“And yet she’s still in danger.”

“Everyone’s in danger. The whole world is in danger.” Stuber shifted irritably. “Make a point or shut the fuck up, Hauten.”

Hauten rolled his eyes. “One man’s purpose is another man’s slow, torturous, death of the soul. Some men’s purpose in life is to grow millet. If I were to do that, I would go mad. Probably try to kill myself like you did. My purpose is to…well, I’d say it’s to reload ammunition, but mostly it’s to make money. Now, the man whose purpose it is to grow millet? He’s damn fine at growing millet. I should not attempt to do his job. That is not my purpose. And if he were to try to do my job, I’m sure he’d be miserable as well. The tinkerers tinker, the hockers hock, the distillers distill—and thank the gods for them. My point being, everyone has their own purpose. Doing anything else besides that will leave you empty, resentful, and probably considering suicide.”

Hauten gave Stuber a firm pat and finally released his shoulder. “I think you know what your purpose is. And this?” Gesturing around at their environs. “This isn’t it.”

Stuber glowered—his favorite expression of late. Probably because he was feeling empty and resentful. “Pardon me if I struggle to take life lessons from you.”

Hauten, who usually would have responded with offense to such a statement, simply shrugged and started walking away. “Then go play nursemaid with your wife. Doubtless, it’s made you a cheery individual so far.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

TROUBLE ON THE HORIZON

“Feels like I’ve been here before,” Sagum observed, with a note of sarcasm.

Perry wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but he was sure that he didn’t like how this was all shaping up: Sagum, Lux, and he, standing out in the middle of the wastes just outside of Karapalida, sandwiched between the praetors behind them and a double line of legionnaires in front of them, through which Mala was marching through, looking all peeved and ready for battle.

“Mala,” Perry said, his tone a little flat, as the tension between them hadn’t had a chance to abate since their little argument. “Where’s Legatus Mordicus?”

“Busy,” she snapped, stopping with a sharp thunk of her longstaff against the ground. “I thought I made our position on Lux clear.”

“Yeah, you did,” Perry said, narrowing his gaze at her. “It was bullshit then, and it still is.”

“This is pointless,” Mala growled, then turned dismissively and began walking away. “I’m returning to Karapalida.”

“Oh, good,” Perry said, stepping after her. “We’ll just follow you in, if that’s alright.”

The first line of legionnaires seemed a little kerfluffled by this—they knew Perry was in with Mordicus, and they knew Mala was in with Mordicus, but now the two of them seemed not to be so into each other.

Mala stopped and swung around, not exactly brandishing her longstaff, but not being too casual with it either. Perry noted the blade shimmer slightly.

“You may follow,” she stated. Looked at Sagum. “He may follow. The praetors behind you can wait for approval from Legatus Mordicus.” Finally her eyes rested on Lux. “He can stay out there or return to The Clouds where he so yearns to be.”

Perry started objecting, but Lux stalked forward, interrupting him.

“This is ridiculous, Mala,” Lux seethed. “You’ve a poor judgement of my character, and you insist on keeping it despite evidence to the contrary.”

“This isn’t one of your inquisitions, Lux,” Mala hissed at him, grip tightening on her longstaff. “There is no evidence to be gathered and evaluated. There is only what I am saying to you. And what I’m saying will be obeyed.”

Perry took extreme care not to handle his own longstaff so carelessly as she did. “Or what, Mala? What will you do if you are not obeyed?”

“By Lux?” she asked. “Well, I suppose I’ll kill him.”

“Just like that then?” Perry felt his anger rising. “Just like that you turn aside any common ground you might have and resort to doing things the way you always have—you don’t like something so you turn it into a battle to the death?”

Mala stared over Perry’s shoulder at Lux. “We have no common ground.”

Lux came forward again until he stood by Perry’s side. “No common ground? I’m here aren’t I? I’m asking to help you! I’m asking for your help! I’m trying to be an ally! I haven’t returned to The Clouds, I haven’t betrayed you, or anyone!” Lux was so frustrated he spun in an impotent little circle, then refocused on Mala. “Alright. I was responsible for the blast that released Batu. It was a mistake. And yes, I was there to arrest you, Mala. Because I had a job to do! How can you call it a betrayal?” He pointed a finger at her. “You knew that I would have to do it! I warned you, didn’t I? And yet you forced my hand! You’re the one who betrayed me!”

“Um, excuse me…” Sagum shouldered forward, fully cognizant that he was the only one in this cluster of burgeoning violence that didn’t have a shield or a longstaff. “There seems to be a lot of talk about betrayal and all that. And maybe that would matter if we weren’t all joined by the fact that we’re facing imminent extinction.” He turned a hesitant smile on those gathered, but seemed to find no one willing to return it. He let it fall. “Come on, guys. Am I the only one that sees how stupid this is?”

“No,” Mala and Lux both said at the same time, then glared at each other.

Sagum seized on it. “There, see? You guys have common ground after all.”

“I can see how stupid it is,” Mala said. “To allow Lux any opportunity to fuck us over.”

“And I can see how stupid it is,” Lux said, slightly louder. “To allow old grudges to ruin our chances in the here and now.”

“Oh please, Lux,” Mala sneered. “What chances do you think you’re going to enhance by being here? Your abilities are useless in this world. You’re an investigator who has nothing to investigate.”

“I can still fight!”

“You’re more of a liability than an asset.”

“That’s just your unsubstantiated opinion.”

Mala leveled her longstaff at Lux. “I can prove the validity of my opinion right now.”

Perry activated his shield and stepped in front of Mala’s longstaff. In response, she activated her shield. And Lux activated his.

Sagum took a step back from all the crackling energy fields, raising his hands. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you guys kidding me right now?”

Perry, all hot and bothered and ready to puff up his chest out of pure defiance, shot a glance at Sagum and saw the man’s face held not even a modicum of good humor anymore. The veins stood out around his temples, his mouth drawn down thin, his eyes disbelieving and disappointed.

Made Perry feel a little silly, actually.

“I don’t even know what to do with you right now!” Sagum suddenly shouted at them. “Would you look at yourselves? Take a bird’s eye view of what you’re doing right now! Three people that all want the same thing, too full of themselves to work together, everyone pointing weapons at each other? This is…this is…I don’t…” Sagum stammered, his hands flitting about like he was trying to seize on something, then finally clutching his head. “This is dumb,” he murmured, almost to himself. “You’re all dumb. I can’t believe you’re the ones that think you’re going to save the world. Bunch of fucking idiots. Is this the best that humanity has on their side? Really? Well, fuck it, maybe it’s better that we just die. Because this shit…Fuck it all. I can see the writing on the wall. This is just more of the same old shit.”

“Sagum,” Perry started.

“No, you shut up!” Sagum nearly screamed, his voice becoming shrill. “You got all the power! All the violence! Giver of Death and Gift of Confluence and blah blah blah. I get it! I’m powerless to stop any of you! I’m just a fucking peon! But I can talk, and that’s what I’m gonna fucking do! I’m gonna talk, and you’re gonna listen, or you’re going to have to disintegrate me!”

His flushed face paled a little bit, as though he realized that maybe he didn’t really want to bet his life on all this, but he was on a roll, Perry perceived with a sort of distant fascination. He fully intended to ride this out to whatever conclusion it came to.

Perry had to respect that.

For a few seconds, Sagum remained frozen in his current position, as though wondering if the disintegration was coming. When no one pointed their longstaff at him, he straightened and continued, slightly calmer.

“If this is the way that shit is gonna be done, then none of you are any different than the ones up in The Clouds that you claim to hate so much. You’re playing personal games with people’s lives, and you don’t seem to give a shit about the consequences. Do you still see us as peons? Are we still just pawns for you to amuse yourselves with? Because if that’s the case, then even if we do win against the Guardians—which, shit and fuckall, it doesn’t look like we’re going to if you guys keep bitching at each other like this—then we’re just going to be right back where we started. Everything we’ve worked for will be for nothing. Oh, congratulations, Humanity, you survived a complete extinction, now get back to work serving the powerful elites that don’t give a shit about you and never did.” Sagum shook his head. “Is that the future? Again? And again? It makes me feel so hopeless that I think I’d rather just let the Guardians do their job. Frankly, I’ve more respect for them at this point. At least I won’t have to hear them bicker at each other while they murder me.”

Mala spoke evenly. “You don’t actually want to die, Sagum.”

“Oh, what a poignant observation, Your Godliness! Of course I don’t want to fucking die! That’s why you got me all irritated, because you’re pretty much dooming me to it, and for no good reason! Do you think any life on this planet actually gives a shit about your petty arguments about who said what and who did what to whom at some point in time in the past when everything was completely different than it is now?” Sagum seemed to abruptly run out of words. His jaw kept moving without sound, and his face kept turning from Perry to Lux to Mala, and then back again.

Then, all of the sudden, he snapped his mouth shut and let his arms flop to his sides. “You know what? I’m not doing this right now. I don’t care. Maybe it’s best if you do all murder each other out here.” And with that, he started walking towards Karapalida, then stopped, spun around, and started back towards the skiff, shouting over his shoulder, “I’m taking the skiff! I need my equipment…and Whimsby…and…go fuck yourselves.”

Perry watched him lurch his way awkwardly back to the skiff. He turned back around, realizing he wasn’t paying attention to Mala’s longstaff at all, and she could have taken advantage of his momentary inattention. But she didn’t. They were all just standing there. Like fools.

“Right,” Perry mumbled, swallowing a lump of what tasted like shame and embarrassment. “Soooo…”

The fire had gone out of Mala’s eyes. Her longstaff was still pointed at Lux—well, at Perry, really—and her shield was still up. But her face had lost its warlike sharpness.

“I’m just gonna…” Perry smacked his lips, as though choking on the flavor of his own stupidity. He righted his longstaff, muzzle to the sky, and let his shield drop. He stood there for a moment, glancing between Lux and Mala. Then he backed away from them. “I’m just gonna…join Sagum.”

***

It’s never pleasant when all your righteous anger winds up making you look like a blowhard.

Lux stood stiffly in the cocoon of his shield, unmoving, save for his eyes that tracked Perry’s retreat until he was out of Lux’s field of vision. Then they flicked back to Mala.

It was strange. In every other encounter he’d ever had with Mala—and he checked himself on this, scrounging through his memories of their usually-combative interactions—it had always been a jousting match with both sides believing they held the moral high ground.

This was the first time Lux could recall ever being on a level playing field with Mala. No, not in strength or fighting prowess. If he were being honest, he knew that she could destroy him with minimal effort. But rather, they’d been reduced to the same plane of morality. Neither able to look down on the other.

Lux couldn’t decide whether he found it refreshing or disconcerting.

“Well, Mala,” he said, feeling a little resigned now. “What will it be?”

She pursed her lips, letting the muzzle of her longstaff sag a few inches. “I’m going to have to kill you.”

Lux fully expected her to launch a sudden assault, and was disappointed in himself that all he did was tense up and wait for it.

But instead, she held up a finger. “If…you fuck me over.”

The caveat didn’t relax him. But Mala seemed to think that enough had been said, because she extinguished her shield, plopped her longstaff on her shoulder and turned to walk away.

“Can I get a definition of what fucking you over exactly entails?” Lux asked her back.

“You know,” she replied, not looking back.

“Actually, I don’t,” Lux said. “I would still like some clarity on this.”

But she did not provide him any clarity.

She did, however, wave her hand at the lines of legionnaires. “Stand down,” she called to them. “Inquisitor Lux and his praetors are coming in.”

***

“What do you think they said to each other?” Sagum asked, standing on the skiff with his hands on his hips, his expression not quite calmed down from all his outrage.

Perry, standing beside him and watching Lux and Mala turn and walk away from each other, shook his head. “I can’t even guess.” He looked at Sagum with a small smirk. “Once again, you turn out to be the smartest person in the group. Who’d’ve thought?”

Sagum rolled his eyes and looked at Whimsby, who was sitting there where he’d been sitting since he was switched back on, a blankly obsequious look on his face. Sagum’s eyes crunched up in the corners and he said exactly what Perry was thinking.

“He looks like all the other mechs now.”

Whimsby stirred, detecting that he was being spoken about. “Well, Master Sagum, I am a mechanical man.”

“You didn’t used to be,” Perry observed, quietly.

Whimsby quirked his head and frowned. “That’s impossible, Master Perry. I am a mechanical man now. It stands to reason I could not have been anything else in any time in the past.”

“You were a man,” Perry sighed. “A real man. You spoke for yourself, and you thought for yourself. Yes, your innards were all mechanical, but you weren’t like the others. You were different.”

“Strange,” Whimsby said. “Perhaps my core processor had been corrupted even prior to being shot.”

Perry shook his head. “Bren suggested that to you once. You told him that you’d run diagnostics and everything was fine.”

Whimsby simply shrugged. “If you say so, sir.”

Perry turned his attention to Lux as he vaulted aboard. The paladin had a deep scowl across his face, as though buried in his thoughts, and he didn’t look directly at any of them, but instead turned and looked back out towards Karapalida, and the lines of legionnaires tromping their way behind Mala. He muttered something under his breath that Perry didn’t catch.

“So,” Perry raised an eyebrow. “How are things?”

Lux twitched. Looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, are we still going to have to force our way into Karapalida? Or has Mala decided not to kill you?”

“No,” Lux said, hollowly. “She’s still going to kill me.”

Perry felt a little droopy at that. “Oh.”

“But only if I fuck her over. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

Perry perked back up. “Wait. So she’s letting us in?”

Lux didn’t immediately answer. “She failed to give me any clear parameters on what fucking her over meant.”

“Well, you know her better than the rest of us.”

“That’s what worries me.”

“Just…” Perry considered it for a moment, seeing the distant figure in her black battle uniform, shimmering in the mirage rolling up from the dusty ground. “If you think she might perceive something as fucking her over, then just…don’t do that thing.”

“Excuse me, sirs,” Whimsby’s voice chirruped, all pleasant and servile.

“What is it, Whimsby?” Perry looked at the mech. With his back to Karapalida, he was staring out into the east.

“There appear to be four objects in the distance. Are you expecting any more of your friends?”

Perry’s heart did a pleasant little jump as he turned and squinted in that direction, thinking about Teran possibly returning with Outsiders to lend a hand to their efforts. Well, today was shaping up to be…

Wait.

Perry frowned. East was the wrong direction. Teran had gone south to meet the Outsiders. And he couldn’t see anything in the east anyways.

“Oh, you won’t be able to see them, sir,” Whimsby noted. “Although they should be coming into human visual range within the next few seconds.”

What was that? A string of tiny specks dancing on the horizon?

“Whimsby,” Perry said, not sure whether to still feel positive, or to start being worried. “Can you describe what you’re looking at?”

“Of course, sir. It appears to be four, copper-colored metal balls, approximately two meters in diameter, and hovering about two meters above the ground, flying in a direction and at a speed that should put them reaching Karapalida within the next twenty-seven minutes.”

Perry wasn’t sure what string of expletives exploded out of him for the next two seconds, but in that time he’d taken Lux by the arm and shoved him towards the skiff controls. “Fly this thing!” Then he cupped his hands over his mouth and screamed at the top of his lungs to the skiffs full of praetors hovering adjacent to them. “Get into the city! Guardians incoming!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

GUARDIANS

Hauten’s buggy roared through the disastrous streets of Karapalida, the sound of its drivetrain nearly drowned out by the screaming of the loudspeakers. Stuber clung to the rollbar, standing with his rifle in his hand, unwilling to sit.

“Gods!” Hauten yelled over the din of the klaxons. “Can’t they shut that shit off?”

Stuber didn’t bother to answer him. He hadn’t even been aware that the loudspeakers in this place were still working—the jumbotron in the New Section had been destroyed—but the ear-piercing shriek was evidence enough that Legatus Mordicus had gotten them working, and he was glad for it.

He was glad for the rifle in his hands. He was glad to be moving towards peril, even as he was starting to experience something he’d only got a whiff of when he’d charged into Oksidado: Terror, not for himself, but for someone he loved.

It was a strange dichotomy to suddenly be thrust into: Another fight, which was wonderful and beautiful in its own hectic way—it went straight down into the core of him, and the klaxons seemed to be screaming, “This is what you do! This is what you were made for!”

But never before had he entered into a fight knowing that Petra was in direct and imminent danger with him.

It clouded his mind. Competing emotions. Guilt, because there was an illogical part of him that kept thinking, You wanted this! You asked for this! And now the universe has given it to you, and you’re going to have to face the very real possibility that because of it you’re going to lose Petra—

No. Such a thing couldn’t be considered.

And he wouldn’t be losing shit. Because he would die first before he let anything bad happen to her.

It was all very much out of his control, but you have to tell yourself little lies sometimes to keep your head in the game.

The buggy hit a pile of debris, jumping and swerving as it did. The crates of ammunition between Stuber’s planted boots shifted, hitting his ankles. But he didn’t care. He needed to be in the temple complex right fucking now.

“Go faster, you fat bastard!” Stuber bellowed at the back of Hauten’s head.

“This is as fast as it goes!” Hauten roared back. He swerved to avoid a woman that just stood there on the side of the road like she couldn’t decide whether or not she’d rather be disintegrated by Guardians or turned to mush by a passing vehicle. “My other buggy could go faster, but you killed it!”

“Fuck your other buggy!” Stuber yelled, though he wished he was in it right now—Hauten was right, it had been much faster. “You get me to the fucking temple or I’m going to start shooting through the back of your head!”

“That’s not gonna make it go any faster!”

It was a needless argument, but needless arguments often go hand in hand with high tensions. The temple spire loomed up to their left, and the next thing Stuber knew he was holding on to keep himself from flying out of the vehicle as Hauten yanked it into an unbelievably tight turn.

No room in this little alley. The walls were just a foot or so from the sides of the tires. The expanse of the temple square opened up ahead of them. A small barricade of trash went up in a gout of refuse as the buggy’s brushguard slammed through it.

Stuber ducked to avoid an empty tin can that flew by his head. While he was already ducked, he swooped up under the rollbar, ready to un-ass the vehicle the second it stopped. The walls of the alley skimmed by, close enough that it seemed he could feel it scraping his beard.

The temple square was madness unleashed. Peons running pell-mell. Legionnaires trying to barge their way through the tide of humanity, pushing the components of the autoturrets, screaming at anyone in the way, shouting at their comrades, using their shields to buffer men, women, and children out of their path.

The buggy screeched a stop, nearly running one of the squads of legionnaires over. They hollered something, but Stuber wasn’t listening. He swung under the rollbars. Boots hit the ground. Rifle held at a high ready, he stabbed a finger at one of the legionnaires that was looking at him.

“You! Get this fucking ammo out of the buggy!”

The legionnaire didn’t hestitate—“ammo” was a compelling word. He and three of his squadmates charged forward, swarming the buggy.

“Be gentle with her, you brutes!” Hauten called out indignantly as he scrambled out.

They were not gentle. They stormed the cargo area that Stuber had just relinquished, hefting the crates of ammunition, bashing the new paint from the rollbars as they hurtled the crates out.

“Is this it?” one of the legionnaires yelled at Stuber—a decanus by the looks of him.

“Five thousand rounds is all we had time for,” Stuber answered, eyes already scanning the temple square, though he knew Petra wouldn’t be in the middle of the mad rush.

“Fuckall,” the decanus griped. “That’ll last for about one fucking minute!”

“It’s better than nothing,” Stuber snapped. “And be ready to clear jams—some of these rounds are wonky as fuck.”

Copper billet slugs. Unbalanced. No conical shape to help them feed smoothly. The gods only knew where the things would strike, if they even managed to feed.

That was a problem for the legionnaires running the autoturrets. Which, in all likelihood, wouldn’t be quite so auto as they were used to. But a few minutes of inaccurate fire was better than no fire at all.

Stuber figured the legionnaires didn’t need him micromanaging them, and he had better things to be doing with himself. He needed to get his body in the proximity of Petra, and he needed to get her in a place with some good ballistic protection. Someplace where the Guardians would struggle to get to them. Someplace with a quick exit if shit got too spicy.

As he charged towards the steps of the temple, he spotted a break in the crowds of people, and beyond it, the shapes of skiffs on the far side of the square that hadn’t been there before.

Praetors on them, around them.

As he bounded up the steps, shoving a man roughly out of his way, Mala came crashing out of one of the massive doors and nearly ran headlong into him.

“Took you long enough!” were the first words out of her mouth, a bit of spit alighting on Stuber’s face along with them.

“Don’t be a cunt,” Stuber growled, then pointed to the skiffs. “Those praetors need to get those skiffs airborne!”

“They’ll get shot to shit.”

“We’re all about to get shot to shit.” Stuber shouldered past her. “What’s your point?”

***

Mala rebounded off of Stuber’s shoulder, a flare of anger making her want to reach out and grab his neck and yank him to the ground. But that seemed counterproductive at the moment. She just wasn’t used to being pushed around. Especially by humans. Even big ones.

“Cocksucker,” she grumbled at his back, then whirled around and tramped down the steps. She used her advantage of being a taller than everybody to scan the crowd for Perry, then realized that wouldn’t do her a whole lot of good, since he was shorter than everybody.

She considered calling out to him, but didn’t want to sound like a goat bleating for its kid. So she resorted to a litany of curses and waded through the mire of bodies, everyone trying to press into the temple square, because it was the only place that was even slightly fortified.

The Guardians had done them one favor: They’d eliminated enough of the populace that they could probably fit everyone in the square.

That was, perhaps, a little harsh, but being on the cusp of a battle is no time to balk at harshness.

The temple was the fallback point. For the legionnaires, anyways. If the Guardians came crashing into the temple square—or rather, when they came—Mala knew it would create a stampede for the relative safety of the temple. The entrances were being held by blocks of legionnaires, but Mala had no illusions that they would hold once the shooting started.

For a moment, she stood there, as though straddling two points in time, and she saw them both so clearly. The current moment, with its haggard and fearful faces all tumbling about like a school of frightened fish…and a moment in the future when the temple square would be hung in clouds of acrid gunsmoke, the cobblestones littered with body parts soaking in a stew of blood.

And the worst part about it was that she wasn’t sure she could stop it from happening. It seemed inevitable. The only question that remained was whether or not there would be any survivors.

She forced herself to continue on, still looking for Perry—where was that little halfbreed bastard? Luckily, her size, and probably her hellish demeanor, got most of the peons out of her path.

She stopped, about midway through the square and spun a slow circle, getting madder by the second because Perry was being so hard to find.

A flicker of movement from above caught her eye, and she shot her gaze up to the spire of the temple.

There.

Perry stood on the time wheel, between the Giver of Strength and the Giver of Death, peering into the east.

Finding him didn’t relieve her irritation, but it did release it in a gout of anger that she channeled into her shield and pulsed herself skyward. She intentionally came in hot, and had a moment of enjoyment seeing the wide-eyed surprised on his face when she slammed into the Giver of Strength, cracking the stone.

Perry swore and sidestepped as the hooded visage of the Giver toppled over, crunched the spot where he’d been standing, then rolled towards the edge.

Out of mercy for the people below, Mala stamped her foot on it to keep it from falling. “I’ve been looking all over for you!” she snapped.

“Well, you found me.” He glared at her. “What’s the problem?”

“Where’s Whimsby?”

“If you wanted Whimsby, why are you looking for me?”

“Because I can’t find Whimsby!”

“I don’t know where he went—he’s with Sagum somewhere in the temple.”

Mala bared her teeth, considering kicking the stone head off and letting it land on whatever poor fuck it happened to find. “Are you sure that they were Guardians he spotted?”

Perry raised his hands in a you gotta be kidding me gesture. “Big, copper-colored spheres of metal, hovering over the ground? Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re Guardians.”

Mala didn’t respond. Instead, she looked out east, scanning the horizon line, which she figured was what Perry had been doing before she interrupted him. Maybe she needed to cool down a bit.

“You didn’t see them for yourself?” She asked, slightly less irate.

“No, my peon eyes don’t go that far.” Hesitation. “Can you see them?”

Mala strained her eyes. They were, of course, far superior to a human’s…and yet, she still couldn’t see anything.

She shook her head, not sure what to feel in that moment. Doubt? Fear? Irritation?

“Well, they didn’t just up and disappear,” Perry said, suddenly quiet.

“Unless that mech’s got his circuitry scrambled.”

“He does have his circuitry scrambled.”

Mala looked at Perry. “Halfbreed, if we’ve done all of this—” she swept a hand at the square “—and there’s no fucking Guardians—”

Perry flashed an angry grin. “Then you’re going to be glad we’re not dead and thank me for being cautious.”

And then he jumped off the temple spire.

***

Perry gave himself a little pulse so that he landed gently in an area where his shield wouldn’t melt some poor refugee to slag. The second his boots hit the ground, he turned and ran for the entrance to the temple.

A group of people were squashed in on the top step, arguing with the double line of legionnaires hunkered behind their shields.

“You can’t leave us out here!” a man wailed.

“There’s no room for you in here!” one of the legionnaire barked back, though that was an absolute lie.

A woman shot forward, pummeling futilely against a legionnaire’s shield. “I can see there’s room inside!”

Perry sympathized with both the legionnaire and the terrified people, but now was not the time. He thrust himself between the leading man and woman, snatched up her wrist in one hand, then snaked his longstaff behind the neck of the man, and yanked them both close.

They seemed shocked by the sudden movement, and that gave Perry the smallest moment to speak reason, in a low, dangerous voice: “Do you think starting a riot is going to help this situation?”

The woman found her voice first. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the one that’s about to go head-to-head with four Guardians to try to save your lives. Can you help me?”

She blinked a few times, indignation turning to shocked compliance. “Yes.”

The man nodded hastily. “We can help.”

Perry gave them eye contact, each in turn. “Then keep the people calm. Please.” And then he said the worst lie that had been told to these people to date: “I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”

Before they could call him on his utter bullshit, he released them, spun, and pushed through the legionnaire’s shields. They made a small hole for him to get through—they had learned his face by now—and brought the shields back together behind him with a fatal-sounding crunch.

The inside of the temple felt strangely close and hot. Somehow both dim and overbright—all deep shadows and false faces of false gods lurking in darkness, shot through with the electric lanterns that had been erected, their light bold and stark like a single bulb hanging in a dark basement.

Groups of legionnaires, organized by battleline, in pockets all across the vast interior. A centurion railing on about something to what looked like half a cohort that dominated the left side of the sanctuary. A decanus, off to the left, speaking in clear, calm tones to his men, a snippet of his words reaching Perry’s ears:

“You know what it was like last time. Learn from that. Drop your swords—they’re dead weight against these things. Shields, armor, and all the magazines you can carry.”

Perry pushed on, the air dank with breath and the scent of sweat starting to bead on the faces of legionnaires that couldn’t forget their last run-in with a Guardian if they tried.

He caught Mordicus at his little command table, situated towards the back.

“Mordicus,” Perry said, injecting himself into a huddle of fierce looks and fiercer words between Mordicus and a handful of his centurions.

Mordicus held up a finger—to his centurions, not to Perry—and raised his eyebrows in question.

“What are we gonna do about the people outside?”

Mordicus frowned. “We’re doing what we can.”

“That’s not much of an answer.”

“What do you want me to tell you, Perry?” Mordicus looked suddenly tired. “They’d’ve been safer spread out in the city, but no. They all wanted to be here, close to Daddy’s bosom. Do you think even one of them thought about the abject tactical failure of giving these fucking machines a target-rich environment? Of course they didn’t. But it’s what we have to work with.”

“I know you can’t fit all of them in here,” Perry pressed. “But some…”

“Some what?” Mordicus nearly shouted at him. “Let a hundred in and tell the others to sit tight and deal with it? Are you going to explain it to them? Are you going to make the choice of who gets to come in?” Mordicus shook his head, his face all craggy sneers. “If we let even one inside, they’re all going to want to come in.”

“They’re going to break in anyways the second they start taking incoming fire.”

Mordicus jabbed a stout finger against Perry’s chest. “Which is why it’s so important that you and your demigod friends keep those fucking things outside of the temple square.”

Perry averted his eyes. “Yeah, there might be a problem with that.”

“Oh?”

“You know how our mech spotted them coming in from the east?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we can’t see them out there anymore.”

A moment of silence for the death of a plan.

“Shit.” Mordicus, for the first time since Perry had met him, looked worried. “So we have no fucking idea where they’re coming from now.”

“I’m afraid not. And…” Perry took a deep breath. “Well, I need to confirm with the mech about what he saw.”

Mordicus’s eyes widened. “I wasn’t aware there was any doubt.”

“There’s not. But, you know…it pays to be thorough.” Perry pointed towards the square. “You got a handful of skiffs and praetors already loaded and ready inside of them. I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job—”

Mordicus turned sharply and pointed to one of his centurions. “Get those skiffs in the air running patrol. The second they see anything—anything—I want to know about it.”

Perry figured that was about as much as he could hope for. “Mordicus, do you know what happened to Sagum and the mechs?”

“So you can confirm that there’s actually Guardians incoming?” Mordicus growled, but pointed towards the back of the temple. “They’re holed up with the wounded.”

Perry separated from Mordicus and his centurions, picking up the pace as he jogged towards the rear of the temple. How long had it been since they’d spotted the Guardians? And had Whimsby actually spotted Guardians? What else could they be?

Unless Mala was right and he’s just malfunctioning.

It was either that, or they were going to get hit hard from an unknown direction in less than five minutes. Or more. Or in just a few seconds. Or later.

Perry really had no idea what was coming and when, and that uncertainty, more than anything else, set him on edge. He’d almost have preferred to be able to watch those machines approach across the wastes outside of Karapalida—to know exactly when they were going to hit, and when he was going to have to throw himself into the fray.

Oh, shit, you’re actually going to try to fight one of these things?

Strange, but the reality of that had just crashed into him. Made his guts feel a little slippery. His limbs a little shaky.

“Death waits in the wings,” Perry mumbled to himself as he sidestepped a column of legionnaires emerging from the makeshift field hospital in the back of the temple—bandages still on their heads, arms, legs, even as they limped along with grim faces, pulling on their battered and bloodied armor. “Let the fear move through you.”

One of the wounded legionnaires flashed him a grin as he passed. Slapped him hard on the side of the shoulder. Like getting hit by a brick. “There you go, Halfbreed.” Perry didn’t know him, but apparently he knew Perry. “Tooth and nail, motherfucker. Shit’s gonna get thick!”

Perry mimicked the man’s bold grin, wondering if it felt as fake to the legionnaire as it did to him. But sometimes you have to fake being brave to force yourself to do something brave.

Perry moved through the doorway into still more dimness. Back here, there was less lanterns to light the way. Only a few that he could see, stationed over wounded people that were actively being worked on. The light spilled over the rest—a tired, undulating mass of people in pain.

He looked for the telltale blue glow of Whimsby or Bren’s core processors, but couldn’t see it. He decided Sagum probably didn’t want to work in the midst of all this fracas. He would have found himself a quiet corner.

He moved further along until he spotted it—a low, blue glow coming from a little alcove in the far corner. He picked his way through the wounded and stuck his head into the alcove.

Sagum squatted there before the bodies of Whimsby and Bren, absolutely still.

“Sagum,” Perry called out, moving into the alcove. The tinkerer gave no acknowledgement. His hands were clasped together, mushed against his mouth.

Perry stopped, just behind Sagum, and realized that the blue glow was only coming from Bren. Whimsby’s own core processor was dark, his face blank and still like a mannequin, his eyes open but sightless.

“Shit, I need to ask Whimsby a question.”

“I’ve deactivated him.”

“Why?”

Sagum shook his head and frowned up at Perry. “What did you want to ask?”

“I wanted to confirm…” Perry grit his teeth. “Is there any way that what he saw could’ve been a malfunction or something?”

Sagum just stared at Perry for a long moment, then looked at Whimsby’s lifeless form. Eventually he shook his head. “I’ve got no reason to believe that his visual processing is corrupted. If that were the case, he would’ve presented other symptoms.”

“Why’d you deactivate him?” Perry asked again.

“He’s not doing us any favors in the state he’s in,” Sagum said, rising. “I’m trying to reactivate Bren because…” he rubbed his hands on his face. “Maybe I can get him to do what Whimsby did to those Guardians back in the East Ruins.”

Perry nodded. “What can I do to help?”

Sagum shook his head. “You can’t do anything. I have to do this. And you…you should get out there, Perry. Get out there and try to buy me some time.”

Perry took a deep breath, wondering if he’d wished that Sagum had something for him to do so that…

He shook the thought away like a dog shakes rain off its fur. No. His job was to fight. He, and Mala, and Lux. They were this city’s best bet against being exterminated.

“I’ll do my best,” Perry said, a little thickly. “But work fast.”

***

Sagum crouched back down as Perry left him. He stared at Whimsby’s dead face for a long moment, then looked at Bren. It was taking the mech an inordinate amount of time to boot up. Had Sagum done something wrong? Put a part in the wrong place? Forgotten a part?

What if Bren was just as corrupted as Whimsby now? Sagum wasn’t sure how that would happen, but these damned mechanical men might as well have been sorcery to him. They worked in ways that he couldn’t comprehend.

He felt like a mindless nekrofage, trying to make sense of how a skiff stayed airborne. Which, as a matter of fact, Sagum also didn’t understand.

All of these things had been built by demigods using god-tech. He was just a toddler playing with things far beyond him.

He was kneeling down to take a closer look at Bren’s innards, when the mech straightened in his sitting position, his face coming alive, eyes moving.

Sagum felt a wash of relief. “Bren? Is that you? Is everything okay? Are you whole? Did I fuck anything up?”

Bren smiled that daft, innocent expression. No clue as to the danger they were all in. “Yes, Master Sagum, it’s me, Bren. I appear to be functioning normally. I don’t believe you fucked anything up.”

Sagum nearly wilted. “Oh, thank the gods.” But not really. A holdover expression. The gods wanted to kill them, best Sagum could understand.

“Master Sagum?”

“Yeah?”

“This is really quite odd, but I’ve been partially conscious the whole time.”

“Wait. What? So you know what’s going on?”

Bren frowned. “That depends on what you mean. There appears to be many things going on.”

“Do you know that there are Guardians coming for us?”

“Oh. No. I was not aware of that. Are you all going to die?”

Sagum swallowed. “I hope not. What were you talking about?”

“Apprently, I maintained some rudimentary computing abilities even while I was deactivated. Likely because you had Whimsby and I sharing processors. I was able to access Whimsby’s memories, and you should know…”

Sagum grew suddenly excited. “Yes?”

“The chronology of those memories has been corrupted.”

Excitement snuffed out, like a bucket of cold water on a single candle. “Yes, Bren,” Sagum groaned. “I’m really, really aware of that.”

“Oh, splendid,” Bren beamed. “Then you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that I believe I can organize those memories into a proper chronology.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE BATTLE FOR KARAPALIDA

Mala watched the skiffs rise up, thrumming and scattering waves of dust into the growing mass of people below. They were manned only by two praetors each—one at the controls, and one at the forward weapons. Any more would simply be needless.

Needless deaths, Mala noted, gritting her teeth.

She remembered flying into the East Ruins. She remembered how the Guardians there had targeted her skiff. Forced her to crash land. She supposed it was best that when the Guardians obliterated those skiffs, they’d only lose two praetors a piece.

Dismal math, perhaps. But that was the math of survival. And survival was the best they could hope for.

If in fact the Guardians were actually coming.

Her irritation was starting to curdle inside of her. Mixing with a deep-set uncertainty. And uncertainty is the worst when entering into a battle. Uncertainty was an enemy in and of itself.

She swung agilely around the outside of the temple timewheel. She’d spent enough time staring into the east—that might’ve been where Whimsby had spotted them coming, but they weren’t coming from that direction any longer. Could they have fanned out? Each of the four coming from a different direction?

The landscape of the wastelands stretched out, pale and desolate in all directions. To the south, the dark ripple of the craggy hills in the distance. To the west and north, just an endless expanse that disappeared into flat horizon.

Nothing. No sign of the Guardians.

Where the hell—?

A shattering, crashing boom shook the structure of the temple, causing Mala to cry out and grasp instinctively for a handhold, though she had no reason to fear falling. The noise of the explosion was so sudden and all-encompassing, that she couldn’t tell from which direction it came.

She swung rapidly back around to her overlook of the temple square and froze in a haze of smoke of fire.

A plume of black in the air, still rippling with incendiary gases, two trails of black marking the path of two halves of a skiff as they plummeted towards the city below, the dark figures of the praetors toppling through the air, their black capes billowing behind them.

A cry of panic from below that seemed to emerge as the thunder of the explosion abated. People running every which way, trying to get out of the path of the tumbling pieces of skiff. But Mala’s eyes did not fixate on them—they were extraneous.

She shot her eyes to the sky, where the other skiffs were now buzzing in different directions like hornets from a disturbed nest. But it wasn’t the skiffs that drew her gaze—it was the four blooms of light, bright and white-hot in the pale blue sky, like meteors plummeting through earth’s atmosphere.

“They’re here!” she shouted, but no one heard her.

Below, the two halves of the skiff struck the temple square, one right after the other, sending shockwaves up through the stones that Mala felt in every particle of her body. One half slammed into the outer band of buildings that encircled the temple, crushing the concrete to rubble and dust. The other half hit the center of the square and rolled like a murderous boulder, spewing stone and wreckage as it flattened a cluster of hapless people, their screams drowned out by the screeching and rending of metal.

“They’re here!” She screamed again. “Above! Above!” and then, not knowing if her warning had been heard, she thrust her longstaff out and let fly a flurry of green bolts as rapidly as the Confluence could flow through her. The bolts arced into the sky, and the burning meteors of the incoming Guardians spread like four huge buzzards letting a flock of sparrows flutter harmlessly by.

Two of the skiffs, in loose formation, swung to bring their weapon pods to bear, letting loose a salvo that strung out into the sky like orange beads on a thread. She saw the strikes on one of the leading Guardians. It bobbled in the sky, but didn’t stop coming.

Two of the Guardians sprouted innumerable contrails that swarmed through the air, locked onto a target, and their paths went from seeking to finding, straighting into deadly lines that slammed into a second, then a third skiff, obliterating them completely in the midst of their evasive maneuvers, and leaving nothing left but shrapnel to ping and clatter off the stones of the temple spire.

Mala activated her shield just in time to absorb a smattering of metal fragments, turning them to molten beads that splattered the timewheel.

She had just enough time to right herself and lower her shield, trying to bring her longstaff up again, when she registered that one of those incoming meteors was heading straight for her.

She flung herself off the tower just as the Guardian smashed the top of the spire to rubble.

Her shield encompassed her in midair, taking the brunt of the stone debris that washed over her, as she twisted, trying to right herself to the threat.

Steam and smoke rose from its superheated hull. The Guardian did not crash through the spire, but somehow managed to halt itself right there at the very top, as though it had intended to perch there. Its spider-like legs shot out, gripping the remnants of the spire, as parts of its hull separated, its weapons systems emerging and transphorming it from a copper-colored ball, to a bristling war machine.

She pulsed her shield to stop her trajectory, and used that miniscule moment of hang-time to lower her shield and let out another burst—five bolts from her longstaff. They slammed into the Guardian, each one a direct hit that would have vaporized a rank of legionnaires.

All it did to the Guardian was cause it to jerk and stumble on its delicate perch. Then it swung rapidly around, multiple weapon systems honing in on her.

Mala tucked herself into a ball, her shield around her again, and let herself drop straight down.

A fusillade of tracer-orange projectiles shredded the air where she’d just been, tracking her straight down as she fell.

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM

She knew the impacts before she saw them—the other three Guardians slamming to the earth, close by.

Just before she struck the ground of the temple square, she pulsed hard to her left, sending herself careening to the right. The tracking rounds pummeled the cobblestones into dust, chopping a swath of panicked civilians into nothing but disorganized parts.

She didn’t register what she was doing until she saw a man’s face, just in front of her flight path, and then watched him turn to a gout of pink mist as she slammed through him.

She deactivated her shield out of sheer horror, thinking only of the people that she might vaporize in her path. Her body, still being carried through the air by her momentum, crashed into a crowd, sending them all tumbling into a heap.

She scrambled to her feet, head rocked, ears ringing, limbs numb—moving only through the force of her will. She registered the distinct splat-splat-splat sound of caustic rounds and could only assume they were meant for her.

On instinct, she hunkered down, her shield forming into a dome over her and a collection of five groggy civilians that moaned and cried out and thrashed to their hands and feet.

“Stay down!” Mala bellowed at them, her words cut off by the impact and the frying-pan sizzle of caustic green slathering the top of her shield. She winced at the inward pain of her shield taking a hard hit—and the damage didn’t stop. It kept dripping away as the hellish caustic material clung to the energy field, sucking Confluence right out of her and depleting her shield.

Standing there, the civilians huddled beneath her, weeping, screaming, crying, while the green haze that coated one side of her shield just kept on eating away at it, she had the sudden realization that this was going to be her final fight.

She wasn’t going to get out of this alive. None of them were.

***

Perry burst from the temple into a scene that was too hard to take in at once.

Mobs of civilians, no longer pressing towards the temple, but instead fleeing, scattering to the exits of the square. It didn’t make sense until he registered the cascade of rubble falling from the top of the temple, the stone arm of one of the timewheel’s statues nearly crashing down on top of him.

He activated his shield against the debris, catching sight of a stream of caustic projectiles pouring down from over his head, targeting the dome of another energy shield out in the middle of the square that could only have been Mala.

Guardian on top of the temple!

Three other Guardians—one just inside the northern end of the square, and two more clinging to the tops of half-collapsed buildings just outside their perimeter. The sun flashed umber off their copper hulls as fire belched from their cannons and swarms of micromissiles spewed from their backs.

Gouts of tracer fire going ever direction, a buzz-saw clatter of projectiles criss crossing the air, the ground, the buildings, lancing effortlessly through the crowds of people, sending bodies twirling, parts just falling off of people like poorly made toys.

One autoturret responded, and then another, and then a third, each targeting the Guardian inside the square as it tramped on its crablike legs deeper into the rush of fleeing humanity. The machine lurched and listed under the onslaught, rounds sparking and pocking its hull, an arm of one of its cannons going up in a great geyser of blue fire and gray smoke, but it never stopped, singular in its purpose, spewing death and extermination from every edifice in its construction.

A block of legionnaires stood their ground to Perry’s left, metal shields all around and over top of them, like a single armored organism, automatic rifle fire thundering from the tiny cracks between shields.

Perry was down the steps before he even realized his legs were moving, and was glad that they had—his mind was still trapped trying to process the carnage around him, trying to prioritize the threats, trying to figure out some mysterious algorithm that would lead to him not being shredded the instant he stepped out of the overhang of the temple.

His shield was already up, his longstaff humming in his grip, the Confluence flowing through him like a mad river of red, building into a massive ball of energy that gathered at the tip of the longstaff’s muzzle.

Mala.

His eyes shot to where he’d seen her shield. The caustic rounds had coated the dome, frizzling and sparking across it so that he couldn’t see what lay beneath, save for a pair of dusty, black boots and the huddled figures of desperate people.

His first instinct was to charge towards her, but that wouldn’t do her any good.

He whirled, as he felt his ball of energy growing to critical mass, straining against his mind’s ability to hold it back, like a thin strand of cordage leashing a powerful beast.

He cleared the overhang of the temple’s front, saw straight up the spire to the top of the time wheel where the Guardian stood, its clawed appandages sunk deep into the stone while it rained death to those below.

He dropped his shield at the same instant that the blast of energy broke from his mind’s restraints. He thrust his longstaff at the machine, hurling the energy, acutely aware of the destruction he was about to cause and hoping to any deity that might still exist—and give a shit—that it wouldn’t cave in the temple.

The Guardian spotted him at the last second, its caustic turret swiveling deftly at the same instant that a flurry of micromissiles screamed from one of its pods, all of them converging in his direction.

Perry didn’t have time to see if his blast of energy would be affective. He couldn’t run, he couldn’t fly. And the destruction that was heading his way seemed more than enough to pound his shield to nothingness, and vaporize the frail human body that it contained.

But he raised his shield anyways. Pulling at the center of it until it was a deep concavity before him, like a cup to be filled with all that destruction.

And at the last microsecond, he let it go.

The shield pulsed violently. A series of explosions rocked the air, pushing Perry backwards with their force, sending him pinwheeling senselessly across the hard ground.

Breath. Harsh. Acrid. Bitter.

Eyesight. Foggy. Speckled with bit of imaginary light, like the stars were falling all over again, though it was broad daylight.

Touch. Pain. Stone. Rubble. The grind of dust between his teeth.

Taste. Blood.

He struggled upright, realizing he was knocked on his ass, his longstaff still held in a death grip, humming eagerly despite his cloudy mind. He pushed for his shield, fully expecting to find it depleted to the point of nonexistence, and was shocked to see it shimmer in the air in front of him, full and mostly healthy.

He almost took a moment to congratulate himself on pulsing a cavalcade of death away from him—he bet Mala didn’t know how to do that shit—but then registered the hulking shape of the Guardian falling from atop of the tower amid a waterfall of stone.

He managed to project his shield in front of him in time to catch the shockwave as the thing smashed to the ground with a sound like a massive bell being rung. Chunks of the temple spire, some molten hot, slammed into the edges of the legionnaires, laying their shields flat and crushing and burning the men within.

Perry swam to his feet, unsure if the screeching he heard was the sound of dying legionnaires or the ringing in his own ears. His focus was absolute, pinpointed on the shell of that Guardian as it tried to rise again on one leg, a groan like overstressed steel girders coming from it. Half of its hull was gone, dim electronic lights and sparks illuminating a smoky, hellish interior of moving parts that looked somehow both organic and mechanical.

His feet, moving faster now.

His breathing, coming stronger now.

The wounded Guardian slammed its one working leg into the ground, burying the point of it deep into the stone, dragging itself towards Perry as though to meet him in a head-on collision, while one of its turrets tried to target him in a herky-jerky motion.

Perry had no intention of throwing himself into the maw of this machine. He swept his shield to the right, pulsed again, picking up his feet and letting the force of his push send him flying to the left, just as the turret spat lead at the spot where he’d been.

It tracked him, its targeting systems seeming fully operational.

Perry pulsed his shield behind him, sending his body forward with a speed that nearly cracked his neck from his shoulders. He stopped himself with another pulse, just before smacking into the side of the machine, let his feet touch the ground, and then rammed his longstaff as hard as he could into the thing’s unprotected innards and let fly a bolt.

Green light erupted through the Guardian, flashing through the cracks in its armor.

By some latent sense, he felt the pull of his shield forming to his back and knew that bad things were heading his way. He spun just in time to see a string of tracers pummel into his shield. He thrust himself backwards, his body toppling over the rounded hull of the dead—or hopefully dead—Guardian, and crashed awkwardly to the ground on the other side. Projectiles pinged and thrashed against the Guardian’s hull as Perry pushed himself to his feet, gulping air.

Well, what now?

He leaned around the left edge of the Guardian, spotting Mala again, her shield shrunken to a sad little lens between her and the other Guardian in the center of the square. You couldn’t exactly say its attention was on Perry, though it was still slamming his position with unrelenting projectile fire. It had multiple weapon pods deployed, and they all seemed to be targeting something different.

Its energy weapon, blasting away at Mala’s ever-shrinking shield. Another cannon belching mercilessly at the dregs of a fleeing horde of humanity. A burst of micromissiles that swam in low and obliterated the front half of the block of legionnaires, sending shields and body parts scattering in all directions. Its caustic turret picked off survivors with cruel precision, some of them screaming as the green muck ate away at them, others not conscious enough to perceive their own death sizzling through them.

“Mala!” Perry shouted, his voice ripping his throat, but he didn’t know if it was loud enough to be heard over the din of the firefight.

She stood her ground suicidally, trying to protect the five people under her ever-shrinking shield, but she wasn’t going to make it.

Not without help.

Perry tried to raise his longstaff to give the attacking Guardian something to think about, but a slurry of lead tracked into where he was leaning out, forcing him to jump back into cover while bits and pieces of shrapnel lit up his shield.

“Perry!” The voice was right behind him.

He turned just in time to see Lux’s boots sliding right into his face.

Perry was knocked back, the taste of blood reignited on his tongue. “Godsdammit!” he slurred, hand going to his cheek, which ached dully from Lux’s haphazard slide into safety. “Where have you been hiding?”

Lux clambered into a crouched position, close to Perry, his shield enveloping both of them as the Guardian side stepped heedlessly through the wreckage of the block of legionnaires, trying to target Perry and Lux with a better angle. The legionnaires were forced to pull back as the mechanical legs smashed into them.

“I haven’t been hiding!” Lux snarled back. “We need to get Mala out of there!”

“No shit!”

A brave legionnaire darted out of formation, both hands upheld as he screamed the scream of someone who knows they are about to die. Grenades in both of those hands, Perry realized, as the legionnaire threw himself at one of the Guardian’s legs.

The Guardian reared back, the turret it had been using to fire on Perry and Lux suddenly snapping down and unloading a burst of projectiles that turned the legionnaire to bits and pieces. The grenades erupted as they toppled from disembodied hands, ripping the bottom half of the Guardian’s leg to metal shreds.

The Guardian teetered, but didn’t fall. It splayed its other three legs wider to make up the difference, retargeted Perry and Lux with its cannon, and stomped towards Mala’s position, slamming her shield with three different weapons systems at once.

“Distract it!” Perry yelled, scrambling to his feet and reforming his shield around himself, letting Lux’s take the brunt of the automatic fire.

“Distract it?” Lux barked, incredulously, but Perry was already moving, pulsing in a sharp diagonal that carried him ten feet off the ground and to the left, out of cover.

He hit the ground awkwardly, his left ankle rolling with a sharp inner pop. He gritted his teeth, realizing as the Guardian’s fire tracked him that he’d been the distraction. He lowered his shield just enough to thrust his longstaff up, as though blindfiring, and let go two quick bolts that slammed the side of the Guardian, destroying the cannon that was trying to destroy him.

Lux took that miniscule opportunity to burst out of cover and send a rapid flurry of bolts in that way that Perry had never learned—nearly a dozen of them, each right on the burning comet tail of the other, small, but effective. They lanced the Guardian as it loomed over Mala’s position, sending it toppling onto its side, pouring black smoke, but not quite out of the fight yet.

“Mala, run!” Perry screamed, and this time, with the very briefest cessation of fire, she heard him.

As her shield went down, she snatched up two of the people, one in each hand, and started hauling them towards the temple, the other three scrambling to catch up.

Perry’s shield was at half strength, but he had a moment of reprieve as the Guardian tried to right itself from Lux’s assault, and he launched himself through the air again, registering that Lux had done the same, both of them aggressing on the machine at once, trying to press their tiny advantage.

The Guardian’s legs stamped about, catching itself before it toppled, then spun on its two attackers.

Perry’s boots skidded across the ground, his shield coming up in front of him, concave again, his mind straining to pull it back, and then let it fly. The pulse caught the Guardian right at the apex of its attempt to regain its balance, and slammed it backwards again, the spidery legs scrabbling at the air as the rounded hull rolled across the square.

Perry dropped his shield, and Lux dropped his, and the two of them gave it everything they had, longstaffs spitting death and hate—Lux’s fire rapid and small, Perry’s slightly slower but more powerful.

The onslaught of energy bolts sheared another one of the legs off, then another, and began to pound the copper hull, ripping bits of armor off with each explosion, the Guardian struggling mightily to get itself up again. One massive copper panel came spinning off with one of Perry’s bolts, and Lux honed in on the chink in the machine’s armor, screaming as though the Confluence was being ripped out of him as he pumped bolt after bolt into that opening.

The Guardian shuddered, arcs of electricity coursing across it, showers of sparks flying, black smoke pouring. A violent convulsion seemed to take it, and Perry yanked his longstaff back, shouting “Shields!” as he splayed his own out in front of him.

The Guardian ruptured, all of its parts expanding suddenly as though from some massive inner pressure, but it didn’t exactly explode. A smoking bit of some component or another came skittering across the ground and turned to molten metal as it touched Perry’s shield.

Perry gasped for air, then spun. Lux looked shell-shocked, amazed that they’d actually survived, but his gaze followed Perry’s to the south end of the square, and beyond.

The city of Karapalida was consumed in a pall of destruction. The temple square was littered with corpses and parts of corpses, and anyone living had fled back into the city. The two remaining Guardians couldn’t be seen, but Perry heard the constant hammer of their weapons wreaking havoc, and he saw the plumes of smoke rising in the air, the thunder of explosions, the rumble of buildings toppling.

“Primus help me,” Lux uttered. “They’re going to murder everyone.”

***

Stuber watched the dust sift down from the vaulted ceiling over their heads, and he’d had enough. A chunk of stone punctuated his concern, smashing into the spot between two wounded legionnaires, causing them to yelp in surprise.

“Petra!” he yelled, his eyes racing through the dim confines of the makeshift hospital. It had devolved into chaos within the span of only a minute. He heard the firefight blazing outside, like a siren song that he was drawn to and yet knew would kill him.

Legionnaires dragging legionnaires. The wounded screaming those mortal cries that Stuber knew so well, while their comrades shouted for help, shouted for the doctor, but there was only one Petra, and there were far too many wounded.

Stuber regretted his decision to charge towards the door to the sanctuary to spy what the hell was going on after that last big boom that had threatened to cave the whole temple in. He’d been concerned that the temple was falling down on their heads. That concern hadn’t abated, but now he was concerned that he’d let Petra out of arm’s length.

A flash of auburn hair off to his left. Lit by a lantern on the ground. Petra’s face, searching for the source of Stuber’s voice.

Stuber charged towards her, nearly bowling over two legionnaires in blood-spattered armor framing another that had absolutely no chance of living—they should’ve known that. His entire bottom half was missing, pale ropes of entrails dragging behind him, eyes goggling in shock, head wobbling around. Stuber was surprised he was still conscious. They should’ve just given him The Mercy and been done with it.

Petra spotted him coming, and as though that made her feel safe, she turned back to her work trying to put half a man’s head back on. Gods, but no one was triaging this shit properly! Petra shouldn’t have wasted her time.

“Petra!” Stuber shouted again over another treacherous rumble of the structure they were in, threatening to entomb them. “We gotta get out of here!”

Petra shook her head, her hair tossing sloppily. “I’m trying to work, Franklin! Help me or get out of the way!”

“This whole place is about to come down on our heads!”

She whirled on him, her face tight and severe. “I’m fucking working!”

Stuber was in no mood for marital argument. That was the farthest thing from his mind. This wasn’t about love or duty. This was about survival. His job was to keep her alive, and he meant to do it.

He reached down and grabbed her by the arm, the roughest he’d ever been with her. He yanked her up as though she weighed nothing, and ignored the tiny spurt of guilt he felt when she cried out in surprise and probably a bit of pain.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, batting at his iron grip with a bloody hand.

“I’m getting you out of here,” Stuber growled, pulling her towards a shadowy passage that he knew led to a rear exit from the temple.

Her batting hands balled and she started to slam his forearm with hammer fists—a well executed attempt to break his grip on her, he had to admit. Might’ve worked if Stuber hadn’t been so numb to pain in that moment.

She punctuated her strikes with seething words: “I’ve. Got. Patients!”

“And I’ve got a wife,” Stuber snapped back, twirling her body easily with one rough jerk so that he could loop one arm around her chest and lift her kicking feet off the ground. “And I intend to save her, even if she is being unreasonable!”

He was basically carrying her now, and she was none too pleased about it. She writhed in his grip like a cat in a bag, seemed to realize that she wasn’t going to batter his arms into letting her go, so she went with a different tactic that proved far more effective.

Her hands scrabbled up to his head and seized on his ears, pinching the lobes hard and twisting.

Now, Stuber was a tough man, but there’s just something about having your wife try to wrench your ears off that becomes unsettling.

“Gods, woman!” Stuber shouted, trying to shake her grip, but not wanting to shake his head too hard, lest his ears come off.

“Put me down!”

Stuber roared like an angered beast, but Petra was about as stubborn as he was, and she wasn’t going to let go. Finally, right about when he thought he heard the cartilage tearing away from his skull, he released her.

She hit the ground on her feet and turned on him again, all fire and wrath.

Stuber wasn’t entirely sure what she was planning to do with all that anger, but he knew he wouldn’t like it, and he was well trained in violence. He fleetingly considered just knocking her out, but he remembered a few unfortunate events where a punch from his fist had broken skulls. An unconscious Petra would have been much easier to handle, but a Petra with a cracked skull would be unconscionable, even for their dire circumstances.

So instead he shot his hands forward and grabbed her face, holding it tight at arm’s length so that she couldn’t get to him by flailing about. Her face mushed with the pressure of his palms, but his grip was absolute.

“Petra!” he screamed in her face, feeling spit fleck his lips. “Stop it!”

“Franklin,” she said, suddenly going limp in his grip, though the ire didn’t fade from her eyes. “If you take me out of here, wounded people are going to become dead people.”

“Listen to me!” he urged. “This temple can’t take many more hits! And then it’s going to come down and kill everyone in it, including you, and including your patients!”

Her eyes zig-zagged to the sides, doubtless trying to see all the poor bastards that were going to die in the cave in.

“You’ve gotta help me,” she said, suddenly.

“That’s what I’m trying to do!”

“No! Help me get them out of here!”

Stuber bared his teeth at his wife, all the cords in his arms standing out, still gripping her head to keep her in place. Gods, but he loved this woman. Even if she could be a stubborn bitch sometimes. And what was a good marriage without compromise?

“Alright, fine!” he barked. “Fine, fine, fine! But you listen to me: I’m going to get you out of this fucking death box, and then I’ll start bringing you the wounded—the ones that actually might survive, not fuckers with half their head missing!”

To her credit, Petra saw the compromise as well, and accepted it in an instant. Stubborn, yes. But also realistic. “Okay.”

Stuber released his hold on her head, grabbed her wrist, and made for the rear exit, wondering how many of the wounded he was actually going to be able to get out of here before the Guardians collapsed the whole godsdamned temple.

***

“It appears that this temple is no longer structurally sound,” Bren observed, eyeing the dark ceiling above.

“Don’t worry about the ceiling!” Sagum lurched from side to side, grabbing this piece of equipment, jamming this wire over here, yanking this lead over there. “I need you to explain how this works so I know what the fuck I’m supposed to be doing right now!”

“Ah, yes. My apologies. Our imminent destruction had me somewhat distracted.”

“Bren! Shut up and start talking!”

Bren frowned, and Sagum thought he was going to say something about how that command was contradictory—at which point Sagum was going to start kicking him in the face—but he simply nodded instead.

“You’ll want that dual-band cable connecting my core processor to Whimsby’s. That will enable me to access his memory storage while remaining fully conscious myself.”

“Right, okay, this one?” Waggling the cable in front of Bren’s face.

“Yes, that one.”

“Alright.” Sagum rammed one end into a port in Whimsby’s core processor then fished for the other end and crouched in front of Bren. “What are you going to do?”

“While Whimsby’s memories have corrupted chronology, I was able to isolate what appears to be an anomaly in how his system encoded those memories. It doesn’t appear in all of memories, only about half of them. And the anomaly appears to be more pronounced in some of the memories. I’ve extrapolated this data, and it appears to show a graduated curve.”

Another explosion rocked the ground beneath them. Made the stones all around them groan as though in pain. Sagum felt panic raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Cold sweat on his back.

“Oh?” he stammered as he seized the plug on the end of the cable and bent closer to spy the port where he could plug it in. “What the hell does any of that mean?”

“I theorize that this anomaly is consistent with Whimsby’s growing sense of self, over time. So my hope is that by arranging the memories in order of the least to most anomalous, I’ll be able to recreate the natural chronology of when those memories were encoded.”

Sagum slipped the cable into the port. Leaned back. Took a shaky breath. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear any of that. But I trust you.”

Bren blinked. Raised his eyebrows. “You…trust me?”

Sagum nodded vigorously. “Yes! I fucking trust you, Bren! Now do what you’re going to do!”

Bren’s mouth twitched into a slight smile. A closeted sort of pride. “Very well. This will take…approximately two minutes and thirty-nine seconds.”

“Oh, gods…” Sagum dragged his hands down his sweaty face. That seemed like an eternity when you were about to be buried in rubble at any second. “Okay, fine. Do what you gotta do. I’ll…” he glanced around at the stones that had seemed so safe and secure only moments before, and now seemed like a death sentence. “I guess I’ll just wait.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

THE WRATH OF GODS

They were still fighting in the temple square. Stuber registered the sounds as though it was someone else’s problem. Which it was, at least for the moment. It was Perry and Mala and Lux’s problem. Right now, his problem was Petra and a bunch of wounded still laying in a temple with half its spire missing and the rest hanging on by a thread.

The rear of the temple opened up into a small courtyard, but Stuber had no intention of leaving Petra out in the open. So he hustled her across the courtyard to the nearest building that looked like it would hold together, provided the Guardians didn’t target it. Which was no guarantee.

It was a single story structure, which made him feel better. Less weight. Less stuff to topple and kill his wife. He kicked the front door in—unnecessarily, as it was unlocked, but it did feel nice.

Inside, a few windows leaked in enough light to see.

“Okay,” Stuber said, breathing heavily and looking around, then fixing Petra with stern eyes. “Just stay right here. Don’t follow me. I know how you like to do the opposite of what I ask, but please…for me. Stay put.”

It looked like this was quite the internal struggle for Petra, but she managed to eke out a nod. “I’ll stay.”

“Good.” He turned back to the door and the temple beyond. “I’ll bring you some wounded.”

He charged across the open courtyard, registering a clatter of projectiles off to his right. They weren’t meant for him, but he didn’t care for the angle—made him feel like the fight might leak around to the back of the temple.

Back through the rear door of the temple where he nearly crashed into a man with only one leg. Haunted, half-vacant eyes stared at Stuber for help. The man had his missing leg held in one of his hands, dragging along behind him like a kid with a battered toy, leaving a bright bloody smear behind.

“Where’s the doctor?” the man mumbled.

Stuber considered helping the man, but he seemed to be hobbling pretty well on his own. He pointed behind him. “Straight across.” He also considered telling the man to leave the leg—it wasn’t like Petra could re-attach it. But then he decided that the news was probably best coming from a doctor. Stuber’s bedside manner wasn’t great.

The man trundled past, only to be followed by another, and another. A flood of the barely-mobile wounded, who’d seen Stuber drag Petra out, and were now following. Stuber swore and pushed through them.

“Straight across the courtyard!” he shouted at them as he passed.

End of the passage. The big, vaulting dimness of the temple.

A tiny splash of blue light on the far end.

Sagum.

Stuber froze, looking between the wounded that couldn’t move, leaning up in their makeshift beds, hands outstretched, begging for help. Then to the little alcove with the blue light coming from it. Then to the masses of people lurching their way out the rear exit.

Stuber decided that Petra would have her hands full enough with the people that were hobbling their way towards her like a pack of mindless Nekrofages. He focused on the alcove and ran for it.

***

Mala shoved the last of the five people she’d saved through the doors of the temple. She wasn’t sure why she felt responsible for those sorry bastards, but she did. The legionnaires barring the door had made only a half-hearted effort to stop her. Maybe the look on her face had convinced them to keep their traps shut and make a hole.

“Go!” she shouted at the people’s backs.

“What the fuck is this?” A voice bellowed from inside. Mordicus, watching his little command center being breached by unwanted civilians.

“Just take them out the back!” Mala screamed at him over the heads of the legionnaires in front of her. “Get the hell out of this temple! It’s not safe anymore!”

She didn’t wait to see if Mordicus would comply. Warning given, she spun back to the square, spotting Perry and Lux standing near the smoking hulk of a dead Guardian. They were looking out towards the rest of Karapalida, where the other two Guardians had disappeared. She heard their weapons going off, heard the explosions, the screams. How much death could be wrought in so short a time?

It wasn’t until she nearly missed a step and a wash of faintness hit her that she realized she might not be in tip-top shape. Granted, her gut wound was still burning in the center of her, overstressed, the cauterized flesh feeling like it was tearing apart again.

She stopped, arms splayed out for balance as the world went tilt-a-whirl in her vision.

Ah. There was the problem.

Half her left arm had been eaten away. A faint greenish tint still clung to skin that looked like parboiled meat, raised and bubbled with semi-transparent blisters. The stink of it hit her nose, like burning skin and rot, all at once. A sharp, acidic tang to it.

As though seeing it made it real, her arm suddenly exploded in pain that nearly knocked her knees out from under her. She wobbled on the steps, nearly overwhelmed by a sudden rushing desire to just sit down.

“Mala!” Perry shouted at her. They were running over.

Well. Last thing in the world she wanted was to look weak in front of the Halfbreed. Especially after all that shit she’d talked. She grit her teeth hard enough to make her jaw ache, but it was good to send some signal to her brain that cut through the agony consuming her arm.

“What the hell happened?” Perry demanded breathlessly as he stamped to a halt, his eyes fixed wide on her arm.

“Caustic fucking happened,” she seethed.

She remembered it, actually, now that she was thinking about it. When she’d lowered her shield to race the five civilians to the temple, some of that glowing green muck that had been on her shield had splashed onto her. She’d kind of hoped her armor would have stopped it. Clearly that was wishful thinking.

“Can you still fight?” Perry asked.

Mala sneered at him. “I’ve still got one arm and a longstaff. Of course I can still fight.”

“You look woozy.”

“Me woozy is still better than both of you,” she remarked, though the shake in her voice kind of ruined the impact.

“Right,” Perry pointed urgently out to the city. “We got two of them. If we gang up, we might be able to take the other two one at a time without getting our shit pushed in.”

Lux raised a hand, finger pointing. At first, Mala thought he was pointing into the city, which would have been a stupid thing to do—Perry had already pointed in the right direction, they didn’t need Lux to confirm it.

Then she realized he was pointing a bit higher than that. Into the sky to the east.

Mala and Perry both froze, staring into that bright blue distance.

Contrails. Streaking out of the east. Streaking towards them.

“Is that…?” Lux murmured.

“Oh fuck,” was all Mala could reply.

***

“Sagum, you little ratfuck bastard!” Stuber thundered as he erupted into the alcove. The insults weren’t really necessary, he realized—Sagum hadn’t done anything wrong.

Sagum spun, hands wrestling with each other. “What? What did I do?”

“Nothing!” Stuber yelled. “I’m just really amped up right now!”

“Well what do you want?” Sagum yelled back.

“I wanna get you out of here!”

Sagum thrust his hands at the two mechs leaning against the back wall of the alcove—Whimsby still unconscious, Bren seeming to be…sleeping? His eyes were closed, but weirdly, like a human in REM sleep, they seemed to be twitching around behind his artificial eyelids.

“I’m waiting for something!”

“You can’t wait! There’s no waiting! We gotta go!” Stuber barged past Sagum and stooped to grab Whimsby, but then rapidly found Sagum clammering at his back like a small, angered monkey.

“No-no-no!” Sagum screamed, his voice pitching up into a childish octave. “Don’t touch anything!”

Stuber thrashed about like the lumbering beast he was, beset by Sagum’s surprisingly strong fingers scrabbling at him. “What the fuck? Get off me!”

Sagum had somehow managed to climb Stuber like a tree. His midsection was draped over Stuber’s shoulders, his legs wrapped around Stuber’s chest, his hands batting at Stuber’s. “Don’t you fucking touch anything! I’ll rip your godsdamned eyes out if you touch anything!”

Stuber growled against the onslaught, took a deep breath, stood up, then slammed his back against the nearest wall, causing a great whoosh of Sagum’s sour breath to be expelled into the side of his face. When Stuber retracted himself from the wall, Sagum toppled, gasping.

“What the hell’s gotten into you?”

Sagum kept waving his arms in a no-go gestured, shaking his head adamantly as he fought to get some air into his lungs. He gulped down a breath that apparently went down the wrong tube, because he immediately belched. When he did find a word to say, it was just a croak: “Don’t!”

The ferocity of Sagum’s convictions kept Stuber from pulling the plug that bound Whimsby to Bren. He raised his hands in surrender. “Alright. Okay. Calm yourself, peon.”

Another gasp. More words: “He’s getting…Whimsby’s memories…in order!”

Stuber blinked a few times. “Well, how long is that gonna take?”

“Another minute…or so.”

Stuber didn’t care for the “or so” part. He managed to keep his voice level, pointing at the ceiling. “I have concerns.”

“I know. Temple’s coming down.” Sagum looked terrified. “You should get out.”

“You should come with me.”

Sagum shook his head. “I gotta know, Stuber. I gotta know what Whimsby knows. About the Guardians. About everything.”

“Not gonna do you much good if you die in a cave in.”

“Just another minute,” Sagum begged.

And Stuber was about to argue again, but then a horrendous impact shook the temple, and seemed to do all the arguing for him.

“What was—”

Another BOOM from outside.

And another. And another.

Stuber tilted his head, realizing that those impacts were not explosions—not blows to the temple. They sounded like something hitting the earth. Something big.

Bigger than the Guardians.

Another impact.

“That’s five,” Stuber whispered, unsure why he had lowered his voice, only a strange sense that all of the sudden, he needed to be quiet and hide.

More impacts, in rapid succession now.

“Six,” Stuber breathed. “Seven. Eight. Nine.”

He held his breath for another, but it didn’t come.

Nine.

His eyes widened. He looked to Sagum. But it was Bren that spoke.

He’d come awake again, his eyes looking concerned, brows furrowed. “They’re here.”

***

Perry, Mala, and Lux, back to back to back in a pall of dust, longstaff’s pointed out like a tri-spoked wheel as they slowly turned, their eyes taking in the massive, dark shapes that loomed over them as the dust began to settle.

None of them spoke. What could possibly be said? There wasn’t an expletive strong enough to encompass the abject shittiness of their current position.

In all the fighting, Perry hadn’t noticed the hum in his ears. Godsdammit, why hadn’t he paid better attention? He felt it now, more than heard it. Less of a noise and more of a constant, aching press against his eardrums.

Shields shimmered, while huge hides of reticulated armor stretched to their full heights, the slash of green glowing from between the plates, searing out from narrowed eyes, as the Nine Sons of Primus languidly took in the scenery they’d just landed in the middle of.

One of them—Perry couldn’t tell who it was, they all looked the same to him—stood near the temple, it’s shoulders nearly as high as the columns that held up the structure. It gazed down at the ground, as though curious about something.

It stooped down. Took something in its huge hands, and hefted it up.

It was the head of the the Giver of Death. The one Mala had knocked from the timewheel. The Son of Primus stared at its visage for a long moment. Then a tiny smirk crackled one brittle corner of its mouth. Its arms flexed, and the stone crumpled like a fragile clay sculpture between its hands.

“Humans and their myths,” the voice rumbled, for a moment louder than the screams of the dying and the constant sound of extermination from the city.

Perry felt like his entire being was pulled in multiple directions. His sudden and consuming fear of being trapped in the middle of nine beings with apparently limitless power. His desire to protect himself from them. His desire to fight them. His desire to try to stop the massacre happening in the city.

And yet all he could do was stand there. Because no other option was realistic.

He could not fight them. He could not run from them. He could not reason with them. They were a force of nature, a cataclysm, a volcano, an earthquake. You cannot fight these things. You can only cringe against their power and hope that you are not crushed by it.

After all that Perry had learned about his Confluence, and the things that he could do with it, this was a sudden turn, a plummeting of his morale, to see how powerless he truly was in the face of real Confluence. His abilities were no more dangerous to them than a child hacking about with a wooden sword, or pew-pewing imaginary bullets from a vaguely gun-shaped piece of rubbish.

It was Mala’s voice that broke the thick stillness. She was brave for speaking, but her voice was shrill and quaking. “Batu, Son of Primus!”

Adrenaline kicked through Perry’s system like an arc of electricity—damn, but he’d thought he’d tapped himself out on the ability to feel adrenaline by this point. What the hell was Mala thinking, shouting out like that?

One of the massive creatures turned with great ease and looked down at her. Something about its countenance was vaguely familiar to Perry, and he realized that it must have been Batu himself.

One after the other, all nine faces turned towards them, as though their little huddle of longstaffs and energy shields had only just been noticed. Everything they did was so steady. So calm. The infinite surety of beings who see nothing as a threat.

The eyes of the one that must have been Batu narrowed. “And who are you,” his voice grated like mountains moving. “To shriek at me, little puppet?”

Perry saw a tremor work all the way through Mala’s body—from knees to shoulders and all the way down her arms. And yet, she stepped forward, her shoulders disconnecting from Perry and Lux’s and making him feel empty and exposed.

“I am your progeny,” she said, only slightly more in control of her voice. “Mala of House Batu.”

Batu did not respond, simply gazed down at her imperiously, as though wondering if he should listen to this insect or crush it under his heel. Gradually—and terrifyingly—Batu’s eyes shifted from Mala to Perry, and then to Lux.

“Ah, of course,” Batu whispered like a distant storm. “I recognize the three of you. The first faces I was to behold when I awakened from my prison. And you…” he looked at Lux specifically. “You were the one who used your weapon against me.”

Lux’s mouth gaped wordlessly.

“He was also the one who freed you,” Mala declared, catching her stride again, not sounding quite so fearful, though she had every right to be. And should have been.

“Was he now?” Batu looked contemplative. “And do you suppose I am to be thankful for this?”

A series of booms echoed through the city. Perry glanced back in the direction that the Guardians had gone. How many people were they killing? Would there be any left?

And what the hell were the Sons of Primus doing here? Had they come because the two Guardians had been destroyed? Had they come to finish the job the Guardians started? That didn’t make much sense to Perry—the Guardians were not the friends of the Sons of Primus.

“No,” Mala answered. “I only wish—”

“You wish what, Mala of House Batu?” the voice struck them like a furnace blast. The craggy, armored face became somehow more severe, more wrathful. The green light seemed to blaze hotter and brighter. “To impress upon me your right to live? None of you deserve to live.” A finger swept across them. “Least of all, you three. Your past deeds are inconsequential. Your entire lives are inconsequential. You have no right to anything. If you live at all it is because of our mercy. Or…” The lips peels back, showing teeth that looked like polished granite. “Our vengeance.”

Another one of the Nine spoke up, gazing deeper into Karapalida. “The machines are killing.” It said so with no particular spark of emotion. As though the killing mattered nothing to it.

But why were they here?

“Oh, but there are so many more humans,” Batu said with a sigh. “So, so many of them. Shall we shed a tear for such a small section of the disease having been excised?”

Another spoke with lumbering authority. “We shall do what we came to do.”

“Yes,” Batu said, his lips curling. “My time has already been wasted for so long.” He held out a hand towards the three of them, still standing tensely together, none of them sure of what was happening, or what might come next, only feeling the great weight of their doom teetering over top of them like a boulder about to topple. “Plead, then, Mala of House Batu. Plead like your father pled. Beg me for the lives of the humans that you love so much. Perhaps we will listen.”

Perry stared at Mala, horrified by the emptiness of her mouth as it opened and closed, as though the blow to her pride were too much a price to pay for so many lives. His pulse slammed out each second, waiting in agony for her to speak, and with each throb, knowing she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Perry, not even sure what the hell he was doing, took a half step forward and raised his voice. “Batu, you can help us—”

The wind came out of his lungs as though sucked out by an unseen force. His chest felt like it was on the verge of collapse, ribs straining to the breaking point. His vision split, darkened, fizzled at the edges. He realized peripherally that Batu was glaring down at him, his outstretched hand now a claw that seemed to project some power over Perry that he did not understand.

“You do not speak,” Batu snapped, hatred pouring from him in waves that Perry felt almost like a tangible thing, making every synapse in his brain light off with pure animal fear, drowning out the call of his own weak sense of Confluence.

Perry’s feet left the ground. He could not breathe in. He had no air, and no way to get it. He tried to thrash, but his body didn’t move, despite the twitching of his desperate muscles. The longstaff fell from his hands. He could not summon his shield, and somehow knew that it would do nothing, even if he could.

“You are not one of us,” Batu continued, his fist slowly closing, slowly crushing Perry, though they were nowhere near touching. “You are an abomination. You are a mistake. You will not speak to me, and I will not listen. Our ears are closed to your pleas. You are a godless creature.”

Batu’s hand suddenly raised up, then flattened itself, and Perry heard the words only seconds before he slammed into the ground: “Prostrate yourself.”

His face crushed against the stones. Blood and dust and spent shell casings all around. His bones ached, and he could swear he heard them creaking like rotten wooden planks about to give way.

He struggled mightily, but only managed to turn his head, his chin scraping across the ground, leaving skin behind, but he needed to see, needed to look at Mala and Lux.

Mala and Lux stared back at him, their faces numb with shock.

“Do not look at the abomination!” Batu roared at them. “Look at your god, and beg for the lives of the humans that you love so much!”

Lux trembled. Then bowed his head. From Perry’s vantage point, smashed into the ground, he couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that Lux’s eyes were fixed upon a dismembered arm, simply lying there on the stones before them.

“I beg of you,” Lux said.

“LOOK AT ME!”

Lux’s eyes shot up. “I beg!”

“KNEEL!” And the same force that still kept Perry pressed to the ground somehow swept Lux off of his feet and crashed him to his knees. “And you, Mala?” Batu screamed, a sound so terrible, that Perry closed his eyes against it, and welcomed the blackness.

In that blackness, he saw, or perhaps felt, the waning glimmer of his Confluence. That flow of red. So dim. So forlorn. Barely there anymore.

In that blackness, there was only the sound of Perry’s blood, struggling through his veins, as though the downward pressure made it hard for his heart to keep pumping. And he wondered if he was going to die.

Death waits in the wings, Stuber had told him. You have to let the fear bore holes in you.

But had Stuber ever been to this place of wrath and death?

The sound came to him, dim and distant. Mala’s voice, now bereft of pride. “I plead for their lives.”

And then everything lifted.

Air whooshed into Perry’s lungs. Too much. He choked on it. Tongue coating with dust. Hacked and coughed. Opened his eyes only to find his vision blurry with tears. Muddy shapes across from him. The shapes of two paladins kneeling.

He blinked. Wondered if he should dare to stand.

Batu had not moved, but one of the others rose up into the sky—no pulse, no shield to carry it aloft. Perry did not know which Son of Primus this was, but he seemed in no hurry. Higher and higher he went, until he must have been twice the height of the temple spire before it had been destroyed.

The being hung there in the air, its body in an odd pose—one hand held behind its back, the other held out, almost casual.

Perry didn’t rise, but he did dare to turn his head so that he could see the bounds of the city around the temple square, see the ribbons of black smoke pouring into the sky. Hear the screams—not as loud now, not as many voices to fill the air. Hear the drumbeat of explosions, the snare-tap of munitions going off. The crumble of buildings.

Green light shot from the hand of the Son of Primus that hovered aloft. It speared into the city in one great, turbulent gout that shook the earth against Perry’s flesh.

Unhurried and unworried, the hand that spat that energy simply shifted, and the beam of green light went with it, carving a swath of destruction through the city, while Perry’s bones seemed to rattle against themselves at the earthquake it caused.

And then it was done.

The energy dissipated, and the Son of Primus began to sink back to the ground. Unhurried and unworried. In the city, the screams could still be heard, but there was no longer the crackle of gunfire, nor the thump of micromissiles exploding, or the harsh blat of energy weapons deployed.

Just like that. Just that simple. Just that easy.

The being touched down to the stones again and let out a great, bored breath. “It is done.”

The one that had spoken with authority earlier, raised his hand aloft. “Go to the others.”

And in a great hurricane of wind, seven of the Nine shot into the sky again, leaving trails of dust in their wake that turned to vapor as they sped off. A crash of thunder—the splitting of the sound barrier—shook Karapalida and caused the derelict temple to groan and spill dust from a thousand cracks.

Perry only realized that the field of energy had taken him up again when his body shot upright, like a puppet yanked on its strings. To his left, Mala and Lux jerked into the air just as he did, teeth bared as they tried futilely to fight against the power that held them.

They were drawn together until they nearly touched again, held nearly fifteen feet into the air so that they hung there like bugs in a spider’s web, and they stared directly into Batu’s merciless eyes.

“Now listen to my words,” Batu intoned, his voice low, even though it still pressed at Perry’s ears like an all-consuming force. “And repeat them to all you encounter. We are the gods of this earth. Nothing lives upon this earth that we do not allow to live, for we have been given the power of death. The Guardians mean nothing to us. The All-Kind that sent them will never return. Every human that draws breath upon this planet from here until the end of time belongs to us. This is your punishment. This is your earned justice. This is our vengeance, which is absolute: That you and every human creature will toil, and slave, and serve us. Your children will be stooped with the burden that you have brought upon them. Your young men will have their bones ground to dust by their labors. Your women will curse their wombs for each life they doom to live on this earth. You will break your bodies and souls to bring us the fruits of your labors, only to watch us turn them to ash before your eyes, so that you will be reminded that you have no purpose here. Your only reason for existence is so that we can witness your endless suffering.”

The power released them, and they dropped, as shocked by the impact to their bodies as the words had been to their hearts.

And when they looked up in a daze, they found that they were alone again in the temple square.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

A BIT OF A CRISIS

Teran’s skiff roared out of the low, craggy hills, and the dread that had been building since she’d spotted the black smudge on the horizon became full and complete.

She stood at the controls, the wind thrashing her hair, sucking the moisture from a mouth that had already gone dry with fear, so that her tongue felt like sand. At the fore of the skiff, Lucky stood, jabbing a finger to the west.

As the land opened up and stretched out before them, the city of Karapalida had come into view. And everything that had happened to it.

“Look!” Lucky shouted back to her, his voice just a whisper on the wind.

Teran was already looking. Dozens of smoke trails rising into the sky. The proud temple spire gone from the skyline of the New Section.

Lucky staggered back to her, his eyes full of doubt and gripped with terror. “Are we too late?”

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. Figured the vision of destruction was obvious enough.

“There could be Guardians in there!” Lucky shouted over the wind. “They could still be fighting! Should we turn back?”

Teran snapped ferocious eyes onto him. “Turn back? What do you think we came here for in the first place?”

Lucky stammered about for the right words and ended up sounding cowardly and lame: “We came to help them prepare. Not to throw ourselves into the maw!”

Teran gritted her teeth together. She couldn’t even look at him anymore. Should have perhaps been thankful that he’d come along with her in the first place, but now all those high minded words he’d said were shown for what they were: Bullshit you say when your neck’s not actually on the line.

She jerked her head to the side. “If you don’t like where this skiff is heading, then jump off.”

Lucky looked over the siderails as though actually thinking about it. The ground blurred by beneath them. “We’re going to fast!”

Teran only curled her nose and punched the throttle faster.

***

They’d all heard it. You couldn’t not hear it.

The voices of the Sons of Primus were vast, and even when they only spoke in what Stuber assumed was their normal voice, it still boomed through the city as though projected from the loudspeaker system.

The only people that maybe hadn’t heard would be the ones who were too busy dying to register the voice of their gods. Their tormentors. Their devils.

Stuber didn’t really know what to feel at that moment. His rifle was in his grip, but it felt for the first time in his life like a useless chunk of metal. He pressed himself through the line of legionnaires crowding the door of the temple, and they didn’t move to stop him. They simply stumbled out of the way as he shouldered past, like all the fight they’d learned over the course of their life had suddenly been drained out of them, faces bloodless and blank.

Stuber felt that same powerlessness. For fighting is only worth it when you’ve a chance at winning. Only fools fight battles they can’t win. And all of humanity had now been played for a fool.

But his eyes were fixed upon his three friends. Well…one friend named Perry, and two assholes named Mala and Lux. Perry did not look so swell, and Stuber realized that was all that was animating his feet: The sudden conviction that he needed to get an arm around the poor halfbreed bastard and keep him from falling on his face.

Stuber staggered numbly down the steps of the temple. Bodies burning. Bodies disentagrating. Bodies bleeding out. Empty shells. Parts of people. Smoking remnants of shields and armor. The hulk of a Guardian to his right, spilling an acrid-smelling smoke that reminded Stuber of burning hair and burning plastic, all at once.

No one spoke. Stuber’s own brain seemed empty of language. The entire city seemed to have been suddenly abandoned. The screams of the dying could not even be heard. Those that had died had died. Those that had lived were rendered speechless.

Just a big, smoky ghost town. That’s all that Karapalida was anymore. And any survivors inside of it were just ghosts.

Stuber scooted up to Perry, who swayed on his feet, shoulders slouched, mouth hanging open, eyes half-lidded. The big legionnaire had to dip down into a half-squat to get an arm under Perry’s and pull him upright.

In any other time, in any other moment, Perry might’ve pulled back from that. Might’ve told Stuber that he could stand on his own two feet, dammit. But this was not one of those times, and he sagged against Stuber.

Stuber licked dry lips with a dry tongue. Searched for something upbeat to say, but all that came out was “Uh…” There simply wasn’t enough humor in the world to lighten this situation. He grimaced down at Perry, felt a little tug of long-suppressed compassion as Perry just leaned his head against Stuber’s chest, so drained that the little runt couldn’t even summon any pride.

“Are you injured?” Stuber finally husked.

Perry’s face bore no expression. His eyes looked almost like a blind man’s. The way they simply washed over everything without focusing on anything. “I don’t know,” Perry mumbled.

Stuber cleared his throat. Lips tightened. Trembled. “Well. Stand up and find out.”

Perry didn’t seem inclined to try.

Stuber glanced over his shoulder, saw the legionnaires stumbling out of the temple like an army of animated corpses. And through them, no more alive than any other, Legatus Mordicus stepped out. Looking like he’d forgotten who he was. Forgotten how to be a commander.

Stuber tightened his grip on Perry. Gave him a little heft. “Stand up.”

Ghosts. They were all leaking out of the wreckage of the ghost town now.

Stuber’s eyes couldn’t stop ranging all around them. The poor, hopeless, huddled masses, trickling out of the destruction behind them, faces bloody and smoke-smeared, eyes searching for something and not finding it.

Perry shuffled against him. Stuber felt a bit of the weight taken off of him. He sidestepped away, hands hovering about Perry as though he were trying to balance a teetering tower of blocks.

Perry sniffed. Frowned. The first expression he’d been able to conjure. He blinked. His eyes seeing what was all around them. The people of Karapalida. The legionnaires. Mordicus.

Perry didn’t fall, or cry out at some unknown injury, so Stuber quickly stepped away, snatched the longstaff from the ground—he assumed it was Perry’s as Mala and Lux still held theirs—and shoved it into Perry’s hands.

“There. Hold it.”

Perry held it. Leaned on it.

And then he laughed. Low. Hollow. Dry as the Glass Flats.

Stuber cleared his throat again. “Maybe don’t laugh,” he murmured. “It makes you sound crazy.”

Perry turned his gaze on Stuber, brows arching. “Aren’t I? Aren’t we?”

Stuber grimaced. “Now’s not the time, Shortstack. Now’s the time to stand the fuck up. You got a whole shit ton of people staring at you right now. They’ve just had their hearts ripped out of their chests. They need a little something. But definitely not laughter.”

“I don’t have anything to give them, Stuber.” Perry dropped his gaze to his longstaff. Turned it clumsily in his fingers. “Did you see what just happened?”

Stuber hadn’t seen it—only heard it.

“I can’t fight them,” Perry said, as though the prospect was madness. And perhaps it was. “No one can fight them.”

The longstaff started to slip out of Perry’s grip. At first Stuber thought he might be losing consciousness, but then he realized Perry simply didn’t want the thing in his hands. But Stuber was still acutely aware of all those eyes watching them. Searching. So he grabbed the longstaff before it could topple, smashed it back into Perry’s hands and closed his own fingers over Perry’s.

“Don’t drop that.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you want. Hold it.”

Perry suddenly shot away from Stuber. In a way, Stuber was relieved to see him move so nicely—he clearly wasn’t injured. But he hated the look in Perry’s eyes. The look of despair. And as soon as Perry had gotten a step away from Stuber he flung the longstaff to the ground with a great clatter that seemed to echo off the walls of the buildings around them for an oddly long time.

“What do you think you’re going to accomplish, Stuber?” Perry yelled, loud enough for all to hear. “What? Are we going to inspire the people to fight again?” Another mad laugh came croaking out of his throat. “They could barely put their differences aside long enough to fight the Guardians! And these things? The Nine? You can’t beat them! Did you see what they did? Just a swipe of the hand! A swipe of the hand to destroy two Guardians! How are we going to match that? How are we going to beat that?”

Stuber approached him, his hands up to show how harmless he was. “You would never use your shield to cut my arms off, would you?”

Perry looked completely befuddled by the question. “No, of course—”

Stuber punched him in the face. One quick jab that rocked his head back and sat him down on the ground. Stuber really didn’t mean much by it. Sometimes you just have to punch the sense into a guy. It was no big deal.

Perry sat up, blood pouring from his nose. Interestingly, he didn’t look entirely shocked. He brought a hand up to his face, touched the blood, looked at it, licked it off his upper lip, then spat it to the side and squinted up at Stuber. “Really?”

Stuber reached down, took him by the arm, not unfriendly, and pulled him onto his feet again. “There you go. You okay? Did I break any teeth?”

Perry ran his tongue along his teeth, then shook his head. “No. I’m good.” Swiped his wrist across his face, smearing the blood into a lopsided mustache. “Shit. That hurt.”

Stuber put his arm around Perry’s shoulders again and ruffled him up like you might try to shake some feeling back into a punch drunk boxer. “It’s all good,” he said, peeking out at the crowd and seeing a bit of confusion on the faces. But confusion was so much better than just abject hopelessness.

“Godsdammit,” Perry muttered, spitting again. “You’re an asshole, Stuber. But you’re the asshole I deserve.”

“I try.”

“Does my nose look broken?”

“Petra can set it.”

“I still don’t know what the hell we’re going to do.”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting to punch an idea into your skull.” Stuber turned Perry so that they were facing, his hands resting on the smaller man’s shoulders. “All you can do is try to figure out a way. And you know what? Maybe there’s not a way. Maybe we’re fucked. But you know when we’ll know that we’re fucked?”

“When we’re fucked?” Perry guessed.

Stuber nodded. “Exactly right.”

“I feel fucked.”

“You’re not fucked. You’re fucked up. Lot’s of people get fucked up but don’t end up getting fucked.”

“Fucked is dead, then?”

“Yes. Fucked is dead.”

A growing thrum became apparent to Stuber’s ears at that moment, and he glanced up to find a skiff hurtling in over top of the city. He frowned at it, expecting to see praetors, but he was pretty sure they were all dead.

No one made a move of overt hostility towards the craft, though it was unidentified. After everything they’d just been through, a skiff, even if it wasn’t friendly, seemed like the least of their problems. Laughable almost.

Stuber, Perry, Mala, and Lux, simply stood there, squinting against the downdraft from the turbines as it nosed up into a hover and then dropped, somewhat hazardously towards the ground, wobbling as though piloted by someone who didn’t quite know what they were doing.

That was pretty much all the identification Stuber needed.

“Ah,” he growled to Perry. “Must be your girlfriend.”

They belly of the craft nearly kissed the stones of the square before jolting back into its natural resting hover, about three feet off the ground. Worried faces protruded from the siderails. No praetors here. Just a bunch of sallow-faced cave dwellers.

“Wow,” Stuber remarked as Teran pushed through to the front and leapt down, nearly toppling over, but catching herself and stumbling up to Stuber and Perry. “You brought a whole dozen Outsiders. A fine fighting force.”

Teran spared him a withering glance.

“I’m kidding,” Stuber said with a smile. “Even if you brought them all, they still wouldn’t do us much good.”

“Nice to see you too,” Teran snapped. Then focused on Perry. “What happened? Are the Guardians still here? Was it the Guardians?” Her gaze flicked to the hulls of the destroyed machines. “It was the Guardians! Shit! What happened?”

Perry prodded distractedly at his probably-broken nose, winced, then held that cringing face as he met Teran’s gaze. “Well. Uh. We’ve got a bit of a crisis.”

***

“Do you think the silence means everyone is dead?” Bren asked.

Sagum, squatting there tensely before him, his feet bouncing with manic energy, glanced in the direction of the temple square, as though he’d suddenly developed the ability to see through stone. “No. At least…I hope not.” He frowned at Bren. “Aren’t you finished by now? And shouldn’t you be focusing on what you’re doing?”

Bren smiled. “My subroutine is working independent of my ability to converse with you. And…” He paused, looking upwards as though imagining something. Could mechanical men imagine? “Yes, I’m finished.”

Sagum jolted. “Finished? You are?”

“Yes.”

Sagum’s hands swished back and forth without purpose. “Okay, what now? What do I do?”

“Now, you’ll have to deactivate me again,” Bren said.

“But what if it doesn’t work?”

“Then I guess you’ll have to reactivate me.”

Sagum reached for Bren’s core processor, ready to finally accomplish what he’d set out to do. But then he paused. “If it works…”

Bren seemed to already know what was on Sagum’s mind. And yet he still smiled, as though encouraging a worried child. “If it works, then Whimsby will need my core processor.”

“So…”

“And I’m confident that it will work.”

“…so…”

“So this is it for me.”

It hung there for a long moment, Bren seemingly at peace with it, Sagum still somehow struggling with it, even though he thought he’d already been at peace with it. Hell, he’d already deactivated the mech once, what was one more time?

Bren nodded at him. “Go ahead, Master Sagum. Nothing has changed. I am content to be of use. I am…happy, even.”

Sagum found himself matching his nod. “Alright. No need to get all mushy again.”

“Indeed. We already did that before. And I found it quite heartwarming. So to speak.” Bren looked towards the square again. “On the off chance that all that silence is indeed the approach of your imminent demise, you may want to hurry up.”

Sagum felt his heart do a little flurry in his chest. He gripped Bren’s core processor. “Well, then. Thank you again, Bren. For everything.”

And without waiting for any further response from Bren, he twisted and pulled, disconnecting the core processor from Bren’s chest. He let it hang from the wires that fed it the power supply it would need from inside Bren, then hurriedly organized the tangle of leads from Whimsby’s inert form. Plugged them into the appropriate places. Agonizingly slow—he wanted to go faster, but didn’t want to screw everything up at the last minute by plugging the wrong wire and shorting the whole damn thing out.

As the last lead went into its port, he glanced left to see Whimsby’s core processor lighting up dimly, little spider-webs of blue where where the bullet had fractured it.

“Come on, Whimsby. Come back to—”

Whimsby’s body jerked forward, eyes immediately wide and alert, and Sagum shrank back, fearing another violent response from the mech, as he’d experienced twice before.

But Whimsby didn’t grab him. A frown crossed over his features, eyes scanning the environment, then finding Sagum. “Sagum. Where in the world have you taken me?”

A broad grin slapped itself across Sagum’s face and he lurched over to Whimsby, nearly wrapping the confused mech in a hug, but limiting himself to an excited shake of Whimsby’s shoulders.

“You’re back!” Sagum exclaimed. Then, more cautiously. “You are back, aren’t you? That’s really you?”

Whimsby looked even more confused. “I don’t know who else I could possibly be.”

“But you remember?”

“I remember many things. Except for how I got to be in this particular place, which you still have yet to expound on.”

“You’re in Karapalida…” Sagum trailed off with a furrowed brow. “Wait. Do you remember being in the skiff? With Lux? Outside of Karapalida?”

Whimsby shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“My last recorded memory is in the East Ruins, just prior to…” he recoiled a bit, then looked down at his open chest. “Oh my.” His fingers reached up and touched the hole in his core processor. “Just prior to receiving this bullet hole, I believe.”

Sagum flapped a hand in front of Whimsby’s face. “Nevermind. Don’t worry about it. There was a thing with your memories. The chronology was fucked up. But it’s been fixed—”

Whimsby caught sight of Bren’s inert form. “Ah. I see.” He looked slightly put off. “Bren has…given me his core processor.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a whole big thing. But he did it willingly. At least, I think it was willingly.” Sagum huffed a breath that flapped his lips. “I did the best I could, okay? Trust me. But I need something from you Whimsby. I need you to remember what you learned when you were inside the Guardian.”

Whimsby focused on Sagum’s face, his eyes becoming grave. “I believe I know what you want.” He leaned forward. “And it is very serious. But you need to get Perry.” A look of worry. “Perry is still alive, isn’t he?”

Sagum shot up to his feet, already turning out of the alcove. “I sure as hell hope so! Hold that thought!”

***

Any attempt to explain to Teran how deeply the entire planet had now become mired in an absolute and infinite shitstorm was cut off by a high-pitched shriek from the front of the temple: “Perry! Perry! Whimsby’s back! And he knows shit! He needs to talk to you!”

Perry whirled, the words bouncing around in his skull for a few insensate moments before they found some nooks of recognition to nestle themselves into.

It was Sagum, breathlessly dancing about with uncontrollable excitement, waving one arm madly and jabbing the other back towards the temple.

Confusion turned to urgency in Perry’s mind. He looked back at Teran, but she was already shaking her head. She seized him by the shoulder and started pushing him towards the temple. “It can wait,” she snapped. “I got the gist—we’re fucked.”

“No, not fucked,” Stuber corrected, as he added his bulk to the pressure moving Perry towards the temple, Mala and Lux close behind.

Perry broke into a run, discovering all sorts of aches and pains throughout his body that he hadn’t noticed until just now. Amazing how the threat of dying can blind you to your injuries.

The five of them clambered up the stairs, absorbing Sagum into their rush as they did. Legatus Mordicus stood there, emotionless, watching them as they slammed through the temple doors. Perry spared a quick glance over his shoulder and found that Mordicus was following as well.

Through the sanctum, a blur of lights and godly stone faces. Into the back, where Sagum got a hold of Perry’s arm and started yanking him towards an alcove on the far side.

Seven of them now, including Mordicus, and a smattering of curious legionnaires for good measure, raced to the end of the back hall and crowded the too-small alcove. Perry was shoved and pummeled to the front, squashed between Stuber and Teran, with Mala and Lux and Mordicus hovering so close behind he could smell their breath and feel their body heat. Sagum, sliding down onto his knees at Whimsby’s side, arms up as though presenting the mechanical man to an audience.

“I got Perry!” Sagum gasped. “He’s alive!”

Whimsby looked slightly annoyed. “Clearly.” His eyes ranged across the other faces. “Paladin Mala and Paladin Lux. It’s strange to see you…not trying to kill us.”

Perry pedaled his hands over each other. “A lot has happened since you got shot, Whimsby.”

“Indeed.” Whimsby inclined his head, looking over Perry’s shoulder. “And the dour-faced old man?”

“Legatus Mordicus,” came the gruff response. “And I’d like to know what all this gaggle-fucking is about.”

Whimsby arched his eyebrows. “Exactly how long was I deactivated?”

“A few days,” Sagum said, impatiently.

“Well then. This is highly confusing, even for my excellent processing powers, but I detect from a scan of those present that no one is of a mind to start killing anyone else, so can I presume that we are all friends in this…” A glance around. “Wherever we are?”

“The temple,” Sagum huffed. “In Karapalida? I already told you that.”

“Indeed you did.”

“Whimsby,” Perry cut in, unable to take it anymore. “We need to know what you learned when you were inside the Guardian. You said that you had learned some things, right as we were about to find the Nine, but you never said what.”

Whimsby’s expression clouded. “And did you release them?”

A small silence, wherein a lot of accusatory and guilty glances were made.

“There was an accident,” Perry said, stiffly.

“Oh dear.” Whimsby’s hand crept up to his temple as though he had a headache. Surely just an affectation of humanness. Or maybe Perry was the first human in the world to successfully give a mechanical man a headache. “Am I to assume by that extremely loaded statement that the Nine Sons of Primus were freed?”

“Freed,” Teran confirmed, a little flustered. “Freed, and very mad at humans. Guardians came down out of the sky. Started to exterminate us. The Nine stopped them, but only so they can keep us as slaves for eternity because they hate us that much.” She glanced at Perry. “Did I miss anything?”

Perry shrugged. “No, that pretty much sums it up.”

Whimsby sat there in silence for a few beats. Then clapped his hands together. “Very well. I believe I specifically advised you not to meddle with the Nine, but…” he waved his hands in the air. “What’s done is done and cannot be undone. Moving on.”

“Moving on would be an excellent idea, mech,” Mordicus growled.

Stuber spun on him, pointing a shockingly disrespectful finger in his face. “His name is Whimsby. He’s a man.”

Mordicus stared fireballs at that finger. Slowly drew himself up. A few murmurs of dissent from the legionnaires behind that loved their Daddy. He raised a hand to silence them. “Very well,” he said, coldly. “Whimsby. Move on.”

Whimsby decided to address Perry specifically, his eyes lingering for a short moment before speaking. “Perry, you recall the things I told you when we were in the Crooked Hills?”

Perry nodded even as he wracked his brains to shake out any fruits of cognition from that conversation. “About how all this started? With Paladin Primus and the Ferox and the All-Kind?” Whimsby nodded to confirm, but Perry shook his head. “But that was all from the Ortus Deorum, wasn’t it? It was lies, designed to subjugate humans.”

“Yes,” Whimsby allowed it. “The Ortus Deorum is…fictionalized, to say the least. But like all good lies, it’s grown from a seed of truth, and then twisted to fit the needs of the liar.”

“We know the Ortus is lies,” Mordicus grumbled. “We know there’s never been a war between the demigods. All lies to keep us humans fighting in a forever war, depopulated, and under the thumb of the paladins.” He gave Mala and Lux a withering sidelong glance. “What, in all of that, could possibly be of any use to us at this juncture?”

“The Ferox,” Perry guessed, trying to align anything that might make sense. “Lux, you told me that they’d been banished to the Outer Darkness—whatever the hell that means—but is that a lie too?” Looking back at Whimsby, getting more excited as his theorizing started to make more sense. “Is that one of the lies? They were the enemy of the All-Kind. And they gave the Nine Sons of Primus their powers! They could be more powerful! They could beat the Nine!”

Perry’s excitement tapered off as Whimsby shook his head.

“No,” Whimsby said. “The Ferox…they were real. They were indeed a warrior race used by the All-Kind. But they rebelled, and they were sent to the Outer Darkness—that much is true, though I cannot explain to you what the Outer Darkness is. Simply a place from which they can never return. All I know for certain concerning the Ferox is that they no longer exist in this universe.”

“So it’s true then,” Mala remarked in quiet wonder. “The All-Kind really did leave this planet in charge of the paladins.”

“Perhaps,” Whimsby stated. “I cannot speak to that. Unfortunately, what I was able to glean by connecting to that Guardian did not shed much light on the motivations of the All-Kind. But it is concerning the All-Kind that I need to speak to you, Perry.”

Perry’s faced turned to a vicious glower. “The All-Kind,” he spat out. “The supposed gods of the universe? The ones that sent the Guardians to exterminate humans? This can’t possibly be anything good, Whimsby.”

Whimsby was very still as he held eye contact with Perry. “Maybe so. But they did not abandon humanity, as you think.”

“Oh really?” Perry threw his hands out. “Look around you, Whimsby! We’re fucking abandoned! It’s just us out here, trying to survive, caught between the Guardians that want to exterminate our entire species and the Nine that want to enslave us forever! What else would you call that but abandoned?”

“All very true, Perry,” Whimsby said quietly. “But the All-Kind never left.”

Perry blinked a few times. Processing. Trying to drag the connections together, but they didn’t seem to want to fit. “Wait. What do you mean ‘they never left’?”

“I mean that they are here. Right now. Watching. Observing.”

Perry jerked his head skyward—stupid, but reactionary. “Like The Watcher? Up in space?”

“No.” Whimsby pointed a finger at the ground. “Here. On earth. They never left. They’ve been here the whole time. Not all of them, I understand. But some of them.”

Perry shook his head violently. “What—”

“Listen to me!” Whimsby sat forward again, his volume increased so that it boomed through the close confines. “No more of your questions—I don’t have all the answers. I only know certain facts. And I am telling them to you. There are All-Kind here on earth, right now. Why they are here, and what they are watching for, I do not know. But they are here. Among us. Disguised, it would seem, as humans themselves.”

All at once, the connections that Perry was trying to make in the back of his head touched off like live wires, shooting sparks of bright white realization through his head. One of those epiphanies that, the second it hits you, you wonder how you could’ve been so blind to it.

“They’re here,” Perry echoed, his voice harsh in his throat. “Disguised as humans.”

Whimsby nodded.

Mala shifted her feet. “Then why haven’t they done something? If they hated the Nine so much as to exterminate life on the planet if they were released, then why are they just sitting around letting them take power again?”

“I don’t know,” Whimsby said, getting exasperated. “As I’ve already articulated—”

“I know where to find them,” Perry said.

Silence. All eyes turned to him.

“Or, at least…one of them.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD

“Perry, think about what you’re saying!” Mala seethed at his back as he slammed his way out of the temple.

“I know what I’m saying,” he said, stalking down the steps. “And I know what I’m going to ask them—the same question you asked: Why the fuck aren’t they doing anything.”

“Even if you know where to find one of them—which you still haven’t explained how you know that—these are supposed to be creatures of immense power! Worse than the Nine! And you’re going to charge up to them and demand answers?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“And what if they kill you?”

Perry shook his head, striding across the square towards his longstaff that still lay there. “They won’t. She won’t. Or he. I’m not really sure. It, I guess.”

Mala caught his arm just as he stooped to pick up longstaff. Whirled him around to face her. “And how could you possibly know that it won’t kill you?”

Perry stamped the butt of his longstaff on the ground. “Because she—it—already had a chance to kill me. And it didn’t.”

Mala looked completely flummoxed. “So you’ve met one?”

“It seems that way.” Perry shrugged. “I guess I’ll find out for sure.”

Mala straightened as Lux and Stuber and Teran joined them. “Then I’m coming with you.”

“No, you’re not.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Possibly.”

“Then why not?”

“Because she wanted to talk to me!” Perry snapped. “I don’t know why, and I don’t know what the hell she wants to talk about, but I’m not showing up with an entourage that’s going to piss her off. We maybe—maybe—have a chance here to drag ourselves out of the pit we’ve dug. I’m not screwing that up, Mala. You’re not coming.”

Mala was about to protest more, but Lux laid a hand on her shoulder. “Let him go. If these beings are as dangerous as you seem to think they are, then you won’t be of any use to Perry anyways. If the All-Kind are powerful enough to kill him, they’ll be powerful enough to kill you.”

Mala’s jaw muscles bunched as though she were literally chewing on the words.

Lux simply nodded at her. “There’s work to be done here.” He nodded out to the city. “Not glamorous work, truth be told. But these people need help. Those of us still alive and whole should give it.”

Perry watched Mala’s hands tighten on her longstaff. Lux seemed to notice too. He removed his hand from her shoulder and took a small step back.

“Am I in danger of fucking you over and dying for it?” Lux said, only half-sarcastic.

Perry stepped between them. “Just stop, you two.” He looked at them earnestly, each in turn. “This may not work out. I know that. But if I can even just learn something that we didn’t know before…maybe it will help us. And when I get back—if I get back—I need to know where to find you guys. Here. So just stay. And don’t murder each other.”

Mala let out a low growl. “No promises.”

Lux managed a smile. “She’s joking. Just bluster.” He swallowed. “I’m almost certain.”

Perry clapped them on the shoulder, and stepped back. He looked to Stuber and Teran. “Do what you can.”

Stuber gave him a blank stare. “I don’t even know what that means.”

Perry smiled gently. “Go help Petra. Go…be with her, Stuber.” The smile faded. “It might be the last chance you get.”

And with that, he activated his shield, forming the bubble around him. “I’m going. I’ll come back as soon as I can. Hopefully.” And then he pulsed into the air, leaving the temple square behind him, and not knowing what lay ahead, but figuring that, at this point, dying was the least of his problems.

***

They all stood there, staring into the sky where Perry had disappeared.

Gradually, their eyes and their thoughts sank back to earth.

Stuber shifted his feet, letting his gaze wander out into Karapalida. It was funny how the sounds of human misery could become so constant that you lost track of them. They became white noise that you didn’t notice until you thought about it. Now, spotting a man and a woman huddled at the edges of the square with a small, bloody parcel of limbs that could only have been their child, their wailing brought it all back to him.

In an unpleasant rush, the sounds of those two grievers melded with the sounds of the entire city. Even more unpleasantly, Stuber realized that the noise that enveloped him didn’t shock him. There was nothing new about it. How could he possibly have been shocked? It was the same as it had ever been.

It only made him sad.

“Is Perry always like this?” Mala said, her voice piercing the gloom of Stuber’s thoughts.

He stirred himself. Arched his eyebrows. “Like what? Stubborn? Foolhardy? Always getting himself into trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Then yes,” Stuber said, turning away from the paladin. “But every once in a while he’s right about something. Maybe this is one of those times.”

“So we’re supposed to just sit here on our hands and wait for him?”

Stuber shook his head, now walking towards the two berieved parents. “No. You can use your hands to carry the dead and wounded.”

Teran fell into step with him, and she was eventually joined by her little band of Outsiders, who had huddled on the skiff when they’d run into the temple, unsure if they should follow. But now they saw something they could do. Perhaps they couldn’t fight the Nine, or the Guardians. But they could lend a hand picking up some of the pieces.

No one spoke when Stuber knelt before the two parents. The sounds coming from them seemed to wash the words out of everyone’s mouths. The pile of limbs between them was, at least, still attached to a body. A young girl. Maybe ten. Hard for Stuber to tell. He’d never been good at guessing children’s ages.

He was stolid and unperturbed. Death was not really anything to balk at for Stuber. Just another day on this planet. But he was cautious, nonetheless. He knew he was the intruder. So he held out his hand. Didn’t touch the girl until her father and mother dragged their watery eyes to his.

He let his own eyes and his outstretched hand ask the question.

When they did not object, or fire curses at him, he slowly lowered his hand until it touched the girl’s bloody forehead. Gently pressed the eyelids closed.

He only knew one prayer for the dead. And it was a prayer to the Nine. Their names felt bitter on the back of his tongue, and he could not say them. But what were prayers for, anyways? They’d never been for the dead, had they? The ones that they were addressed to didn’t care. No. Prayers had always been for the living. The ones left behind. The ones that have to bear witness.

And the message was much the same, even if Stuber did excise the names.

“You have fought your fight,” Stuber said. “Be at peace and go to the After.”

Was there an After? Perhaps not. But the wailing of the parents trailed off. They weren’t healed. They weren’t filled with a sudden epiphany for the meaning of life. They weren’t filled with anything. Just numb souls in hollow bodies. But maybe it helped.

Stuber stood again. Looked to Teran. “The dead can’t stay here. And we can’t bury them.”

Teran glanced back to the skiff. “Can we gather stones? Make a cairn?”

It was what they’d done in the wastelands, because the ground was too hard to dig. But the amount of stones they would need…

“I can help,” Mala said, her voice surprisingly quiet. She glanced at Lux. Gave him a nod. “We can help.”

Stuber looked at her questioningly, but she raised her longstaff and he understood.

“Do it here,” a voice growled behind them.

They turned and found Legatus Mordicus standing there, looking down at the dead girl with a guarded squint. He tore his eyes away. Blinked a few times. Then nodded behind him.

“Here, in the square,” he continued, his voice betraying just the tiniest wobbled of emotion, quickly hid. “Where they can be surrounded by their own people. Don’t put them out in the wastes. My legionnaires will help.”

Slow and arduous, the process began, and continued. The sun peaked, then began to descend. Bodies were brought from every corner of the city. Some of them by family members. Some of them by the legionnaires. They were placed in the center of the temple square with as much respect as could be afforded them.

Stuber watched from a distance, his arms aching from the labor, covered in blood and dirt, made into a slick ochre mud by his own sweat. Two lines of bodies, at that point probably a hundred or so in each line. More coming all the time.

Mala on one end. Lux on the other. Their longstaffs in their hands. The blades began to glow, white hot. And then they laid the flat of those blades on the nearest bodies.

A sizzle, and a crackle. Smoke and char. Flames began to leap up.

Down the rows of bodies they went, touching one after the other. The heat so enormous from the energy in those blades that it lit the clothing, and fed the fire from the fat of the flesh beneath.

Always grizzly, when you got down to the science of it.

But there’s also something purifying about fire, Stuber thought. And none of the faces that ringed that growing fire seemed to mind. It was as though they all knew this was the best their dead could hope for.

Eventually the heat became self-sustaining. Mala and Lux stepped back from the flames as they continued to grow. Sometimes stepping in to a place where the flames had cooled, for there is a lot of moisture in a human body, and reigniting it.

The smoke stank. But the fires stayed hot enough to lift the worst of it into the sky. People became ash and took to the air. That was the romantic way to look at it.

Stuber realized he’d not moved in quite a while. He really should get moving again. The exhaustion was catching up to him, and he had to outpace it. There were still wounded to find and care for, after all. Not everyone had to end up on the pyre.

Just before he decided to start moving again, he watched Mala turn and look at him. Firelight glimmered orange on the side of her face. White sparkles at the bottoms of her eyes.

Good, Stuber thought. Let her feel something for once.

Then he turned to go find Petra, for however long he had left with her.

***

So there was a problem with flying that Perry hadn’t anticipated.

Namely that, after a while of doing it, it’s not so exciting anymore. Combine that with the fact that he hadn’t slept in…when was the last time he slept? Hard to remember at this point. And with the muted sound of the wind constantly rushing, and the fact that he was not really exerting himself physically, well, he found himself dozing off.

Which is really unsettling when you snap awake and see the ground racing up at you.

A panicked pulse to get him aloft again. A surge of adrenaline to get his heart beating and his eyes not quite so heavy. But then, inevitably, that adrenaline faded, leaving him even more tired than before.

He even considered landing so that he could simply collapse into the dirt and maybe take a nap. Take the edge off his weariness.

But there wasn’t time. Unthinkable, really. Sure, there was no one around to witness it, but he imagined himself sitting there and snoozing while the world burned. It seemed callous. Selfish. And he knew that once he stopped moving, his thoughts would catch up to him anyways and banish any chances for rest.

The sun began to sink towards the horizon. How long had he been at it? But he just kept catapulting himself along.

Gradually, as the sky ahead of him in the west turned to a watery yellow, and the sky behind him in the east began to turn a deep, darkening blue, he spotted his destination.

A great, flat, tusk of rock, silhouetted against the dusky western horizon.

It rises up out of the wastelands like it’s got no business being there, she’d said.

An apt description. A singular landmark for lonely travelers in an otherwise featureless expanse.

Snaggle-Tooth Mountain.

The sight of it invigorated him enough that over the next half hour of bouncing towards it, he didn’t doze off. Just kept his eyes fixed on it, dead ahead. A looming, growing premonition. A hope. A fear. A possibility. A place of infinite potential. A crossroads of reality. Some sort of megalithic structure parked in the center of the river of humanity’s existence, dividing the flow into two paths, and Perry didn’t know which path he would be dragged into. Wouldn’t know until he crashed into it.

Just as the sun touched the flat of its resting place, Perry vaulted himself higher and higher, as Snaggle-Tooth Mountain grew so large that it dominated his vision. Every pulse towards it seemed to be the one that would smack him face-first into the side of the sheer cliffs, only to realize that he wasn’t as close as he thought. And so it grew bigger. More impressive. Almost frightening in its size and the oddity of its structure. Like a massive pillar erected there for a specific purpose, and not some result of geological shifts. Like it had been placed, instead of grown.

Higher and higher he pulsed, until, finally, the edge of its huge plateau simply whooshed by, and Perry was staring at a great, circular field of flat, featureless stone.

He landed, more or less gracefully, near the edge, and deactivated his shield.

He stood there for a long moment, longstaff gripped in both hands, a little defensive, a little cautious. He didn’t move. Just let his eyes range over the plateau. Gods, but it was more massive than he’d ever thought when he’d spied it in the distance the handful of times that Hauten’s crew had used it as their waypoint for turning east to find Junction City.

The top of it was almost perfectly circular—might have actually been a perfect circle, though Perry would have had to fly even higher to see for sure. And he was content to have his feet on solid ground again. Even if it was a thousand feet up.

Guesstimation: The plateau was at least two hundred yards in diameter.

And…

Completely empty.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Perhaps a cabal of shadowy, cloaked figures waiting for him around a circle of stone runes? Some beacon of green, Confluent energy swirling in the center like an aurora?

But no. Just flat stone, and not a single figure to be seen upon it.

He walked forward, still cautious. The wind was strong up here. And surprisingly chill. It howled over the edges, keened through the cracks. Whipped his clothing flat against his body. Made him squint against it. There was no dust on the face of the plateau. If there ever had been, the winds had scoured it away.

Despite the noise of the wind, the absolute immovability of everything made it feel preternaturally still. No scrubby plants to sway in the gusts, no little dust devils to be stirred up, no figures to be spotted in billowing cloaks. A place untouched. Abandoned. Almost sacred. Or sepurchral.

“It’s Perry McGown,” he called out, feeling silly immediately as he did. Yammering to himself in the growing dusk, with nothing but wind-smoothed rock to hear him.

Kept walking. Now turning a slow circle.

“You said to meet you here?” He cringed at his own bewildered voice. “Well, I’m here!” Another slow spin as he approached the center of the plateau. “Crazy red-haired lady,” he murmured. “And-or magical hobo.”

He stopped in the center of it all, struggling with a collision of feelings that encompassed disappointment, irritation, foolishness. Like you’ve been taken for a ride. Sold a bill of goods. Victim of an elaborate con game worthy of Teran herself.

Had he really come all this way just to realize he’d been fucked with by some shadowy sorceress? In retrospect, while he didn’t particularly believe in sorcery or magic, it seemed a more ready explanation for the red-headed woman’s odd powers. And now his eager statement to his friends about knowing where to find one of the All-Kind seemed…well…a bit naïve.

He let out a long, low growl in his throat. Stamped the butt of his longstaff down. “Well, this is fucking ridiculous.”

And that’s when he heard the crackle of a fire.

He spun, longstaff coming up, and Confluence flowing down the length of it, ready to start spitting hate and death at the slightest provocation.

But what he found instead was a little campfire, not ten yards from a spot that he swore he’d just passed, and he swore there had been no fire when he’d passed it. And sitting cross-legged at the edge of that fire was a young lady with bright red hair, her firelit face smiling with amusement into the flames.

“Magical hobo, huh?” the woman said, glancing up at him as she held her hands out to the fire and rubbed them together for warmth.

Perry took a step back. “Where did you come from?”

“Ah,” she said with a wink. “Did I come from someplace? Or have I always been right here?” She peered at him with a crazy twinkle in her eyes. “And what is ‘here’ as opposed to ‘there’?”

And as she said the word “there” she disappeared. Simply winked out of existence.

A subtle whoosh of flames from behind Perry.

He spun again, and discovered that she, and her little campfire, were directly behind him now. Close enough that he felt the heat of the flames. And, as an additional oddity worthy of noting in that moment—the flames did not gutter in the wind, nor did her hair stir a single strand.

She had a look on her face like a magician expecting applause.

“How…” Perry stammered for a tangible thought.

“Here? There? Anywhere? Everywhere? Otherwhere?” Her eyebrows shot up. “Underwear?” And then she devolved into a fit of laughter.

Perry just stared, completely flummoxed by the joke. One doesn’t usually associate inexplicable cosmic powers with a juvenile sense of humor.

She frowned, though it seemed more affected than genuine. “Oh come now, Perry. Don’t be so pretentious. People that take themselves too seriously often fail to see the truth. If you’re always seeking gravitas, you’ll miss the fact that most of reality is exquisitely simple and ridiculous.” She leaned back, smiling again. “Take, for instance, your procreation, which you humans love to take so seriously. So important. So grave, you’d think you were dying when you did it, but really, the two of you are just thrashing about on top of each other, breathing hard and grunting and groaning, sticking appendages in various places, glopping each other up with your DNA. How you keep a straight face during the whole debacle I’ll never understand. It’s quite comical, really.”

Perry didn’t know how to respond to that. So he didn’t. Just stared at her.

She sighed. “Oh, alright. Fine. It’s a delicate dance of interpersonal trust. Very serious from an emotional perspective. I’ll give you that.” She waved at him. “Come. Sit.”

Everything about the situation had blasted away any sort of plan that Perry might’ve had going into it, leaving him pliable. He had no better idea of his own, so he sat, his longstaff leaning on his shoulder.

She peered at him over the impossible fire, burning on wood that couldn’t be collected anywhere on the plateau—or the wastelands for that matter. “You still don’t know quite what to make of me, do you?”

“No,” Perry admitted, a bit tonelessly. “But I think you’re an All-Kind.”

She raised her hands, patted them together in a polite little clap. “And here I was, expecting you to be as dense as before. What gave me away?”

“A friend of mine said there are All-Kind living here on earth.”

For once, Perry had the brief satisfaction of watching the woman look a little surprised. “Oh? Now that’s interesting. How did your friend come across that little bit of information?”

“He’s a mech. He connected to one of the Guardians.”

It seemed a statement that lacked a lot of needed facts, but the woman simply nodded as though it made all the sense in the world. “I see.”

“I’m sorry,” Perry squinted against the warmth of the fire. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Last we talked I gave you some options. Did none of them suit you?”

“There was a lot going on. Refresh my memory.”

“How about Niva?”

Perry nodded once, slow. “Niva works for me.”

The newly-christened—or re-christened—Niva stretched her back, languid and comfortable. “So. The Nine Sons of Primus have awakened. The Guardians have struck. The Nine have struck back. And now your entire species is at their somewhat dubious mercy. And here sits Perry McGown across a fire from me, seeking…what?”

“Answers? Ideas?” Perry squirmed. “Help?”

“Answers I can give. But help is not so simple. Your kind had a phrase, back when there was so much water and everyone lived near it: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.”

“So…you’re not going to help.”

A shrug. “Help is a loaded word. Help to some people means that you do everything for them, but like the fish fed to the man, then they don’t learn. I can help you see the truth. I can help you by teaching you things that have existed right under your nose your whole life. But…” Her cheery demeanor grew suddenly very serious. “I cannot fight your battles for you.”

“Why can’t you fight with us, then?” Perry demanded. “You say you’ve been here the whole time, and you clearly have powers of your own! If you really are this so-called All-Kind, then you’re more powerful than the Nine! With you at our side we could beat them. And how many more of you are there?”

She shook her head. “How many of us is irrelevant. If it were a question of powers, I could save all of humanity by myself. I could’ve done it long ago. Any of us could have.”

“But instead you let us fight and die. Be subjugated. Exterminated. And now enslaved.” He felt his cheeks getting hot, and it wasn’t the fire. “Whose side are you on, anyways?”

“Oh, Perry,” she looked suddenly sad, and he felt inexplicably guilty for having caused it. “How do you explain a sunset to a blind man? Or music to the deaf? You want me to explain things to you that you cannot possibly understand.” She looked away, grief seeming to cascade down her features. “How long have I wanted to gather you all? To protect you. To save you. But it has never been a question of desire. Only a question of will.”

“And you will not help.”

“No, Perry. I will not. Nor will I soften that blow by implying that I can’t. I—we—have chosen not to help. And you may hate me for that, if you wish. But if you could know what all there is to know, which you cannot, then you would understand.”

Perry dragged a hand wide, as though encompassing all the world. “Then what the hell is this? An experiment?” He leaned forward, glaring. “The Ferox were your little attack dogs, but they betrayed you, so you got rid of them, and…now what? You’re waiting to see if the paladins can match up? Be your new Ferox? Your new attack dogs? Don’t you have the Guardians for that?”

“The Ferox…” She sighed, stared into the fire, rather than make eye contact. “They were not so different from you. Every species has its gifts. And their gifts were something that we never could have—the willingness to fight. To do violence. Much like humanity. But the agreement that we made with the Ferox was an old one. And yes, even we make mistakes. They were not ready for the power that we gave them. And, over time, it corrupted them, as power is wont to do.” Finally she looked at him. “It is a mistake that we do not intend to repeat.”

Perry snorted. “If you’re waiting for the paladins to evolve past the point of being corrupted by power, then you might have made another mistake.”

“Oh, no, Perry. We’ve never waited for the paladins. Or the Sons of Primus, for that matter. The Ferox may have granted them the power of Confluence, but it was a gift that was not theirs to give.”

“So what’s it about then? Is it just amusing for you to sit around and watch us tear each other to pieces? Maybe you’re not as different from the Nine as you think—that’s all they want, too. To watch us live in misery.”

“What’s it about?” she echoed, quietly. “It’s about you, Perry. It’s about humans. An experiment? You might say it that way, though the analogy fails on several levels. It’s about who you were. And who, and what, you might eventually become.”

“And who made the All-Kind the arbiters of the fucking universe?”

“Well. Self-appointed, really.”

“Are you gods then?”

“Gods?” she laughed. “No, not gods.” She gazed skywards, the smile still on her lips. “We are creations, just like every other species out there. Not arbiters. But…caretakers.”

“What are the All-Kind, then?” Perry waved a hand at her. “Shape shifters? I’ve seen you become an old man.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “A magical hobo?”

Perry was determined not to see the humor in anything at that moment.

She allowed it with another laborious sigh. “We are…not any one thing, actually. We started that way, just as everyone else did. But for a very long time we’ve simply been the All-Kind. And, as the name suggests, we are a little bit of everyone.”

“What do you—” Perry started, but stopped, as he watched her, in the span of a single blink, turn into the old man, as though the red-haired woman she’d been a microsecond before had never existed.

She said nothing as he stared at her. And then she made it worse. She turned into another figure—an old woman with iron-gray hair and stern, matriarchal features. And then again—into a young boy with a shock of messy black hair and dark, innocent eyes.

And then…

Something entirely different. Not human.

Large eyes. Bluish-gray skin. No clothing. No hair.

And then something vaguely dog-like—it was hard to tell, because she changed from it so rapidly into yet another form, this one not even humanoid, or anything that Perry could even put his finger on. A mass of sinuous appendages that appeared to have no face, no eyes, no bone structure, and hovered gaseously in the firelight for the span of a single hamering heartbeat.

And then she was Niva again.

Smiling behind a strand of fiery hair.

“There are many more,” she said. “I could go on for quite some time, but I think you get the general idea. That is the gift of the All-Kind. A touch, a smell, a piece of skin, a strand of hair or fur—DNA, like a catalogue, stored in the memories of our own flesh. But not just for the changing of forms, but the harnessing of each species’ gifts. In fact, the gift that you have—the gift of Confluence—was not ours to begin with. It was yet another gift that we harnessed from another species a long, long time ago.”

Perry’s hands had crept up to his face at the point, his fingertips gently pressing at his temples as he stared at Niva with wide eyes. “You say that aggression is the gift of the human species. But you can’t use it?”

She held up a finger. “I did not say that I could not use it. I said that I would not use it.” Her single finger turned to a palm, staying the acid retort Perry had brewing. “Since its inception, this universe has been moving in one direction, Perry. From darkness to light. From savagery to intelligence. From war to peace. I know that it is hard to see that from where you stand, but I can assure you that it’s true. Entropy, death, the flow of time—they are all the same thing. Everything in the universe breaks and is reformed into something new. From the cells of your body to the formation of stars, this process continues on. This is the endless process of evolution, and it moves us all in the same direction—to be better than we were. But, by its very nature, it must move slowly. For if one species evolves to be peaceful while the others around it are still savage, then it will simply be destroyed. And so all of us must evolve through time at an agonizingly slow pace, moving towards the ultimate destination by tiny increments. In order for the peaceful to survive this process, they must ally themselves with the warlike. In order for the warlike to evolve and become better, they must ally themselves with the peaceful. But in order for the warlike and the peaceful to become allies, the peaceful must be patient, and the warlike must be evolved enough to show restraint. This must happen, or the dark elements in the universe will destroy them both.”

Still massaging his temples, Perry tried his damndest to organize all of that strangeness into some tangible concept that he could grasp. “So the All-Kind want to ally with humans—the peaceful with the warlike.” He shook his head slightly. “But…Look at us. We live in mudbrick houses. We barely survive. We…” he flapped his lips. “We can’t possibly be what you’re looking for.”

“Ah, well.” She bobbed her eyebrows. “That remains to be seen, now doesn’t it? That is, you might say, the big idea. The experiment, as you called it.”

“But the Nine…” Perry began.

“The Nine are an aberration. One of many, unfortunately. If everything I told you about warlike and peaceful races were to be put on a scale, beings like the Nine would be at the far end of one side, and my kind would be at the other. The Nine are one of the dark forces in this universe. One of the types that cannot be evolved, and therefore must be vanquished before they destroy those that can evolve. Such as humans.”

Perry squeezed his eyes shut. “But we can’t beat them,” he seethed through clenched teeth. “That’s what you seem to be completely missing! Humans don’t have the power.”

“Perhaps not,” she shrugged, then looked at him pointedly. “But you do.”

Perry issued a series of dubious sound effects—chuffs and grumbles and sighs. “You’re dreaming a dream. You claim to be this all knowing, all powerful race, but you can’t see what’s happening right now? Did you see what happened in Karapalida?” Perry swept a hand up into a fist. “They have a grasp of Confluence that goes way beyond anything I can even dream of. One of them—one, Niva—swept me and two demigods up into the air. He could have crushed us! I could feel it! And I couldn’t do a damn thing about it!” He splayed his arms out wide, incredulous. “We nearly died fighting two of those machines of yours, and it took one of the Nine just a few seconds to wipe the other Guardians out. How the hell am I supposed to fight that?”

Niva only smirked back at him. “Oh, man of so little faith.” She rose up. Wiggled her fingers at him. “Stand up, Perry. I want to show you something.”

He glanced about, as though there might be something to see on the lonely plateau. But there was only darkness beyond. Stars glimmering. Slowly, cautiously, he stood up.

Niva jerked her head off to the side and began strolling away from the fire. Perry assumed the motion was a call for him to follow, so he did, trailing behind her a bit. She walked calmly out to the edge of the plateau and stood there with the toes of her shoes protruding over the cliff.

Perry hung back a pace.

Niva looked at him. “You’ll need to get closer.”

“I can see from here. What do you want to show me?”

She laughed. “Nothing that you can see with your eyes. Now stop being surly and come stand next to me.”

He bared his teeth in a grimace, but forced his feet forward another couple of steps until he stood shoulder to shoulder with her. He didn’t like the sensation of being so close to the cliff edge, even if he could fly.

“Now,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Close your eyes.”

He let a faint hiss of air escape through his teeth, but closed his eyes.

“You have the gift of Confluence. Do you feel it?”

He felt the thrum of the longstaff in his hands. The connection to the clasp in his pocket. “Yes.”

“And what does it look like? Not the feel of those tools you carry. But Confluence itself.”

A long, shaky breath. “Red. Like a river. A flow.”

“Does it flow into you, or out of you?”

He frowned, his eyes still closed. Trying to figure out the answer to that question. “I don’t think it does either. It’s just there. Like it’s underneath me. Like I’m floating above it.”

“And you can sink into it.”

“Yes.”

“Then sink into it.”

He did so. Felt the rush of it. Consuming. Flowing. Not a pull, or a push, but a sudden acceleration beyond any real physical sensation. Something he couldn’t quite describe. He was there, deep in it, moving with it, a part of it, rather than an object caught up in it.

“Okay.” His own voice dim and distant in his ears. “Now what?”

“Now give me your longstaff.”

He felt himself pull out of the flow. Suddenly no longer one with it, but now himself again, half in and half out. He opened one eye and realized that Niva was watching him, that same bemused look on her face.

“Ah-ah,” she shook her head. “Eye closed. Back to Confluence. Good. There. Now give me your longstaff.”

It took a lot of concentration to remain in that flow as he felt the longstaff leave his fingers. But he maintained it. Not that he felt it was all that impressive. “I’ve never needed the longstaff to sink into the red,” he said. “Or…Confluence, I guess.”

“Of course not. Now be quiet.”

Of course not?

“Now. Give me the clasp in your pocket.”

He thought he knew where she was going with this. Slightly annoyed, like being taught how to walk when he already knew how to run, he snatched the clasp out of his pocket and put it into her hands, keeping his eyes closed, keeping himself in the flow.

“I’ve never needed that either,” he remarked, a tad miffed. “I was able to go into the flow of Confluence when I was a kid, a long time before I ever got that clasp.”

“Yes, I know. Now. Are you still in the flow?”

A sigh. “Yes, Niva. I’m still in the flow.”

“Good. Stay there.”

And then she shoved him off the cliff.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

A PARADIGM SHIFT

Obviously, there’s a moment of panic that strikes you when you’ve been thrown off a thousand-foot cliff. Then, perhaps, another small moment of disbelief, struggling to accept the fact that you are in fact plummeting towards the earth with nothing to stop you.

It was all black. Black wind rushing, black air swallowing him up, the only reference point at all as to which way was up and which was was down being the glimpse of stars pinwheeling in his vision as he toppled over and over through the air.

Disbelief. And also rage. A very hot, very rapid flash of rage at the being that had done this to him. A being that could have killed him in a million different ways, choosing to simply toss him over the edge of a cliff like so much trash to be disposed of.

Other than that, there weren’t a lot of conscious thoughts. And none of the thoughts that he did have took on any sort of linguistic value—they were more just flashes of feeling. It was like the buffeting wind in his ears blocked out his ability to think in words, reducing him to a mute ball of emotion.

Finally, some words did manage to coalesce out of the fog.

I’m about to hit the ground.

How long did it take to fall that far? And how long had he already been falling?

OH, GODS, I’M ABOUT TO SPLATTER!

Yes. He actually thought the word “splatter.”

How much longer—

And then he hit the ground.

Mountains seemed to move. A cataclysm of impact. Tumbling that he felt in every joint, and a certain brand of mystification that he felt anything at all.

Sliding.

Grunting.

Being knocked every which way.

And then…

Sizzling.

Heat.

Perry hadn’t realized that his eyes had been squeezed shut until they shot open again, and the heat became light. A low, dull light, that took a moment to make sense to him. An orange glow that was giving off an enormous amount of heat, like standing in front of an oven.

Stars above him.

Am I alive?

The stars were shimmering.

No. That wasn’t the stars.

He craned his neck—a bit stiff from the thrashing—and saw his own body, dimly illuminated by the glow, still curled into a defensive fetal position and…hovering?

The shimmering. That was his shield. But it couldn’t have been. Because he had no clasp. And yet, there it was, all around him, a protective sphere, in the center of which he seemed suspended. Beneath him, the rocky ground of the wastelands was glowing. Burning magma. Liquefied stone. A trail of it, all the way down the foot of Snaggle-Tooth Mountain, and leading right to where he hovered over a big pool of it.

He reacted in the only way he could think of, despite the fact that none of it made any sense: He pulsed, sending a smattering of superheated rock one way, and his body the other. He whirled around inside his invisible little cage, and when he saw that there was normal, not-deathly-hot ground beneath him, he extinguished the shield he had no business having, and let his feet hit the ground.

Great gusts of breath dried his tongue. He was gulping air like a man lost in the Glass Flats might guzzle water. He was hyperventilating. Felt a little woozy. Looked down at his legs, astonished that they were there, and whole, and able to hold him up. Looked at his arms, mesmerized by the fact that they weren’t pummeled to boneless ribbons.

His hands shook violently. He began to pat his pockets, still not entirely convinced that, by some sleight of hand, Niva hadn’t deposited the clasp back in his pocket before pulling that cold-hearted stunt. But his pockets were empty, and they confirmed what he already knew.

No clasp.

No god tech.

In his mind, everything was a roaring tide of red. Too strong to be overcome by the fear now. Stronger than he’d ever felt it before. Not a river at all, he realized. A tidal wave—no, not even that puny. There was nothing on this earth that could describe what he was now immersed in. All he felt was velocity. Energy. Coursing through him. A part of every fiber of his being. Down to the little molecules that made up the caratin of his toenails, through to the overcharged synapses of his brain, firing in mad sequences that he could almost see, they seemed so real to him in that moment.

A geyser of relief.

“OhgodsI’mnotfuckingdead,” he gasped.

A surge of anger.

“I’m not fucking dead!” he shouted at the mountain, so hard that he felt the molecules that made up the lining of his throat stretch and strain and, in a few cases, tear.

But it wasn’t the mountain that had done this. And what the hell had even been done? What had he done? What had Niva done to him?

His eyes shot up to where the plateau of the mountain, so high above him, blotted out the stars, and right there, at the very edge of it, lit by some unnatural source of light, he saw the woman—or whatever she was—staring down at him.

Rationally, there was probably some cause for gratefulness. But Perry was pretty pissed at that point. Regardless of whether you survive, being tossed off a cliff is no one’s idea of a swell joke.

Perry shot into the air without even having to think about it. Nothing had come so easy to him. It felt more natural than walking. Like he’d been doing it all his life. And it wasn’t until he was nearly to the top of the mountain again that he realized he hadn’t activated his shield.

He wasn’t pulsing.

He was actually flying. Being borne up by some invisible current that he’d simply harnessed to carry him skyward, the same current of energy that now coursed through every part of him.

By the time he landed on the edge, the anger at Niva had dissipated to shock.

He stood there, looking down at himself with his arms hanging at a weird angle, like he was covered in some cosmic goo. “What the fuck was that?” he rasped, breathy and a little high-pitched. “I’m not dead! Why am I not dead? How can I fly?”

“How can you fly?” Niva asked, striding towards him, looking supremely satisfied with herself. “Because up is down and left is right and here is there and everywhere. Because there are a million lines of current that criss-cross every inch of the air, every inch of space, every tiny bit of universe, and all you have to do is—” She swept a hand up into a fist. “Catch them!”

Perry let out a sound that was something like a sigh, and something like a gasp, or perhaps a groan. He doubled forward, hands onto his knees, the adrenaline turning sour in his gut, the swirl of realities suddenly seeming so paper thin they left him in a strange and not at all pleasant state of dissociation.

“Perry?” she asked, a note of concern in her voice.

He held up a finger. “Gimme a minute,” he croaked.

Vertigo, but his balance was fine. Fear, but he had nothing to be afraid of. Panic, though his heart was beating with an irrepressible awe that might’ve even been giddiness, it was hard to tell. Nothing was as it seemed in that moment. Up was down, and here was there and everywhere. It didn’t make any sense, but not because it wasn’t true—simply because he didn’t have the brain power to organize it, and so it was all just a big jumbled mess.

She felt her hands on his shoulders. Warm, through his shirt, where the wind was scouring away a layer of cold sweat. It felt good. To have something touch him—even if that something had just tossed him off a mountain. It grounded him. Made all the swirling everythingness seem to take a proper order, like a riotous mob suddenly stilling themselves and sitting down, just as pretty as you please.

“Come back to the fire.”

They didn’t walk to the fire. They were simply there. Or maybe the fire had come to them. Was there any difference? Here was there was everywhere was anywhere was otherwhere.

“Underwear,” Perry gasped, then tittered, fully aware of how insane he sounded.

“There, see? A little humor goes a long way.”

Perry stared at the fire, still doubled over, mouth sweating like he might vomit, even as sensations of well-being flooded him. There was nothing about any of this that should have left him with a sense of well-being. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have been positive she’d drugged him.

Her hand swept gently across his shoulder blades, around his head, and settled on his face, turning him to face her. Her eyes were earnest. Kind. He saw in a moment that she was what she claimed to be. Nothing more, nothing less.

“Anger can make the fear go away,” she said. “Anger can make it easier to harness Confluence. But you know what else makes the fear go away? A sense of humor.”

He managed a nod. “Right. Yeah.”

She patted his cheek in a somewhat motherly fashion. “Now sit. Catch your breath. Things will settle in a moment. You’ve had a big realization. That’s never easy to handle.”

He plopped down, gracelessly. “My longstaff. My clasp.”

“You don’t need them.”

He looked up at her. “Did I ever need them?”

She shrugged. “In a way, yes. You needed them when you believed you needed them.” A wink. “Don’t get hung up on the details. For now, focus on the big picture. Focus on the task at hand.”

He managed to close his mouth for the first time since falling, and work some spit back onto his tongue. “Beating the Nine?” he swallowed. “But, Niva…there’s nine of them. And only one of me.”

“Oh, is it all about numbers, then?”

He looked at her incredulously. “In a fight? Yeah. It has a lot to do with numbers.”

She sat down beside him, cross-legged. Propped her elbows on her knees. Settled her chin in her hands. The repose made her look like a child now. How fluidly she could shift back and forth, even while maintaining the same form.

“Do you still not see?” she nearly whispered. “After all of that?”

“I want to see,” he replied. “Help me to see.”

“But you already have seen,” she said, her voice becoming sharp. “You’ve seen, and you’ve been told. There is nothing more that I can do, Perry. I’ve shown you all that I will. It’s up to you to perceive.”

He closed his eyes. “I’m trying. Be patient with me.”

She breathed out noisily. “I’ve been patient for thousands of years. What’s a bit more?”

“Give me the other powers that you have,” Perry said, suddenly unafraid to ask for more than he knew he deserved. “Give me the other gifts. Make me more powerful than them.”

“I’ve not made you anything, Perry. You are what you are. You are made as you’ve been made by things far greater than me.” She shifted, pursing her lips thoughtfully. “But…since you do not believe that you can do this alone…” She eyed him sidelong. “You have friends, do you not?”

Perry tallied them in his mind. “Yes.”

“And of those friends, how many do you trust?”

“Trust is a complicated thing. I can trust someone to fight beside me, but not trust them to keep a secret, or to think clearly in a bad situation. What kind of trust are we talking about?”

She shuffled about so that the knees of her crossed legs almost touched him. She was very close. Peering at him in a way that told him she was seeing more than what appeared to the naked eye. Searching. Perceiving.

Now, if only he could do that.

“I’m going to give you a gift, Perry. You asked for it, and I can give it, and so I will. It might not be what you want—it won’t make you more powerful, or more dangerous. But it will give you the help you believe that you need.”

At this point, Perry would take what he could get. “Okay.” He breathed deep, stretching his chest, sitting up straight. “I’m ready.”

“Not so fast,” she said. “What I’m about to give you is the gift of Dispersion. And this is why I asked about friends that you trust. If you were to give your powers to a person that did not have them…would they give them back?”

“Give them back?”

“Would you give them back, Perry?”

He suddenly felt like a man in a market who’s been taken by a hocker. The thing for sale something that he wanted so badly. But the price quoted being more than he could bear to pay.

“I don’t know.”

She shook her head slowly. “But you must, Perry. You have Confluence. And the gift of Dispersion will allow you to give that power freely to whomever you choose. But you must choose wisely. Because they cannot keep these powers. And neither can you.”

He knew he was wrong, but he tried anyways, like a kid bargaining for an extra cookie. “Give you back the gift of Dispersion? Yeah, sure.”

“No, Perry. You have to give all of it back.”

He wanted to swallow, but his mouth had gone pasty again. Nothing to pull down his throat and wet that dry pipe. “You want me to…give you my powers back? Confluence?”

A single nod.

“But…they’re mine. You said so yourself. They were given to me. I was made this way.”

“And indeed you were. But, as I said before, humanity was given the gift of Confluence by the Ferox. And it was not theirs to give.” She reached across the narrow distance between them and laid a hand on his knee. “I have great hopes for your people. Great hopes for you. But you are not ready, Perry. Humanity is not ready. They cannot handle that much power and not devolve into just another version of the demigods. You know this is true. You know they’re not ready.”

He wanted to argue it, but he couldn’t. Hadn’t he just been bitching about how these people couldn’t stop fighting each other long enough to address the real threat? And how would all their petty, spiteful differences be resolved when they could all spit balls of energy at eachother and fly about at will?

Another five hundred years of forever war. That’s what would happen.

“I can give you this gift, Perry. But I can’t simply take it from you once it’s been given. By its nature, a gift is simply given. But I’m asking you to promise me that you’ll give it back. Not just Dispersion, but Confluence as well. That is what I need you to promise me. That is the level of trust I need to have in you. That you give it all back.”

Perry hung his head. Buyer’s remorse even before the thing is bought. “That’s a difficult thing to promise, Niva. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m shit at leading these people. I can’t get them to cooperate. Everyone just wants to run off and do their own thing.”

She squeezed his knee. “Perry.”

He looked up at her.

“It’s never been your job to unite them. It’s never been your job to lead them. It has only ever been your job to make them free again.”

“But how can I promise you that they’ll give it back?”

“That is why you have to trust them.” She tilted her head. “Is there no one that you trust that much?”

And here is what it all came down to. If he couldn’t trust them, then he would have to go it alone. He would have to take on the Nine by himself.

Everything had been leading to this. This was his mission. This was what his father had given him to do. This was the task that his whole life had been about—to free humanity from the powers that enslaved them. To break the power of the gods.

And he would do it. He knew that he had to. It wasn’t an option not to.

So then it came down to whether or not he trusted himself to go it alone…or trusted his friends enough to make a wishful promise to Niva, that they would give it all back, all the power that let them be free, all the power that made him who he had become. No longer a godbreaker. Back to being a man. A runt. A Shortstack.

Why did everything always come with so high a price to pay?

And would he even survive to pay it?

What if this was all a suicide mission? Could he casually bring his friends into this fight, knowing that their chances of winning were so small? Was it, perhaps, better that they lived in enslavement than died fighting?

Men say all kinds of noble things about dying for freedom. But when it comes right down to the choice, most people choose to live.

Perry knew that he was going into this fight. That much had already been decided. Live or die, he was going to do it. He was strapped into a machine that was carrying him to one destination—had been carrying him there his whole life.

So do you try to save your friends? Or do you drag them into the fight with you?

And he realized in that moment, that he’d forgotten about the real question: Whether or not he trusted them.

He sucked in a big breath, and belted out his declaration before he could rethink it: “I have five friends that I trust.” That’s not enough. “And I trust them completely.”

Niva gave him a wan smile, and reached out, touching her fingertips to his forehead. “Then we shall see which way the wheel turns.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

MASTERS OF THE FORLORN HOPE

Eventually, everyone has to sleep. Even in the midst of the end of all things, with fires burning low and stinking of flesh and hair. With sweat and dirt covering your skin. With nagging worries circling in your mind. Even with all of that, your body eventually gives up.

Stuber and Petra had reached their terminus right around two o’clock in the morning, as best Stuber could estimate. Webbings of their fingers still sticky from blood, scabbing and clotting beneath their fingernails. Smoke and dust smeared and smudged across their faces. Sweat half dried to a resin, their clothes clinging to them, their arms speckled with bits of everything.

They wandered out of the building that had become the new hospital, now stuffed to the brim and overflowing into the streets and alleys around it with the wounded and dying. Some of the wounded were still awake then, but most had fallen into a stupor of unmedicated pain, and even the ones that were still awake only had the strength to murmur quietly into the darkness.

A stillness had gripped the city of Karapalida, and in the midst of it, Stuber and Petra had lain down against a piece of toppled concrete. It was amazing what could be comfortable when you were falling asleep on your feet.

And so Stuber slept there, beneath the stars, the night clear and mild.

But, eventually, once the edge is taken off your exhaustion, all the things that might keep you awake come back with a vengeance. And so Stuber awakened at some point in the night—or very early morning—with his thoughts still swimming about restlessly, as though they’d never stopped.

Petra lay against him. Her face smooshed into his chest. Her hair tickling his cheek in the stir of a mild breeze. Her breathing even. An occasional snort, rendered adorable by Stuber’s perceptions, and it made him ache for the thing that he’d wanted for so long.

Or thought that he wanted.

To live. Not for fear of death, but to be with Petra. To have that shred of normalcy that they’d never had.

But was that really him? Oh, he’d imagined it for so long, that it held the patina in his mind of a talisman, well-loved and constantly turned over in the hands. An image made of pure fantasy. A house that didn’t exist, in some place that he couldn’t find, where there was peace, and he was happy to live in it.

Easy to fantasize about when you’re at war. When you’re on the run. When you’re always fighting for you life.

But somehow he’d never really imagined what he’d be doing in this fantastical place. He just pictured himself, with Petra, pleased as a man can be, maybe with a little family of their own. Just images, really. He’d never bothered to dive deeper into them. To think about how he would spend the long days and longer nights. About whether he was fit to be a good, peaceful husband. Whether he was fit to be a father.

What skills did he have besides killing? What wisdom could he impart to a child besides how to kill the other guy first? How could he provide for a wife and family, if it wasn’t at the muzzle of a gun?

A farming freehold, perhaps? Breaking the land? Tending to whatever crops they could get to grow in wherever this imaginary place was?

Yes. So that he could bring the Nine the fruits of his back-breaking labors, just to watch them burn it all to ash as a reminder that he was nothing.

No. Even if none of this had ever happened, even if the Nine had never been released, Stuber could never be happy in this fantasy. Whatever part of a man enabled them to be happy while at peace was broken inside of Stuber. Ruined by strife. Callused by conflict.

Some nights, when he’d been on campaign, or afterwards, when he’d been a fugitive, or even after that—recently—when he’d been searching for a way to topple the power structure so he could return to Petra, he’d imagined that the life he led was the lie.

Now he realized that the lie was in the fantasy.

And then the fantasy curdled. Darkened. Dimmed. Cracked through with a thousand tiny fractures. Like looking through glass that’d had a series of bullets pass through it.

Laying there in the darkness of Karapalida, with his wife snug against him, he pictured that fantasy in the light of truth. The truth that he was a rotten human being, fit only for killing other rotten human beings. He could never be a peaceful husband. He could never be a gentle father.

Even in all of this, he’d never doubted his love for Petra. Not even in that moment. But with her snugged up against him, he suddenly felt like a wild animal with its leg caught in a trap.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he began to disentangle himself from her.

She woke, or at least her eyes opened. She glared at him for the transgression of moving, mumbled something, and then rolled away from him.

Good. Let her sleep.

He rose up quietly and stood there, looking down at her.

Tangled hair. Filthy. Mouth slightly open. Faint snores. A bit of drool coming out.

She’d never been so lovely.

And she deserved better.

Stuber had never been prone to maudlin thoughts. And he didn’t think he was falling victim to them now. The facts are the facts, after all. And he saw it all laid out, a neat little timeline. The only one that resulted in Petra’s eventual happiness.

Namely, with him dead.

Oh, sure. She’d be sad. She’d mourn. It would hurt her. But she was also tough. Adaptable. She’d get through it. And she was a beautiful woman. She’d find someone else, wouldn’t she? Someone more capable than he of living a peaceful life.

When he thought about it like that, it felt almost selfish to stay alive. To string her along, endlessly tied to a man that couldn’t really give her what she deserved.

He grimaced. Looked away from her.

Well. Sleep was done and over with, it seemed.

He stooped and quietly drew up his rifle. Turned it over in his hands, looking at the way the dim lighting struck its contours. His mistress. The one that kept drawing him away from his wife. Luring him back to her cold, gunmetal embrace, because she filled something in him that he couldn’t fill any other place.

He’d never felt dirty about his weapons before, but he did now.

Sighing softly, he turned away from Petra, with his lover in his arms, and walked away. Wandered along the temple courtyard, towards the waning light of the fire where the stink of burning bodies grew stronger.

Around the corner of the temple, where a stone bust, toppled from the timewheel above, still lay on its side, leering sightlessly at him. He regarded it for a moment, tilting his head to match the angle. All the power and glory that it was supposed to invoke, now a desolate mythology that meant nothing.

He grunted at it, then continued on.

In the temple square, only ash and blackened bones remained of the hundreds of bodies that had been piled there. Femurs and tibias and clawed filanges all sticking out at random angles, like a pile of sticks that refused to burn. The ashes not a powder, but more of a greasy, blackened mud. A stain that Stuber figured would never really wash out of the stones.

A lone figure sat on the last step of the temple. Mala, with her longstaff hugged to her body and resting on her shoulder. Her long legs folded up nearly to her chest. Staring blankly at the ashes with her black hair hanging so that he couldn’t see much of her face.

Some kinship there. A fellow insomniac. A sister to him, not by the blood in their veins, but by the blood on their hands.

She didn’t look up as Stuber sat down next to her, laying his rifle across his lap.

“I’m in no mood, legionnaire,” she murmured.

He sniffed. “Good. Me neither.”

This garnered him a look. A glare of squinted eyes through strands of hair. “What? No wry quips? No bawdy jokes? No braggadocious advice?”

“Meh. I’m fresh out.”

She shook her head and looked back at the ashes. “What brings you to staring at the dead at this hour?”

Stuber shrugged. “Restless. You?”

“Lost,” she said plainly.

He was only slightly tempted to tell her where she was. But that could be categorized as a wry quip. He didn’t have the energy for it. And he knew what she meant. No point in being dense about it.

He went with, “M-hm.” That’s always an appropriate response.

“Already tired of spending time with your lovely wife?”

Stuber hated how much that stung. Too truthful. He was too honest to deny it. Too much of a liar to confirm it. He chose not to respond.

Mala looked at him again. “You really are quiet tonight.”

“It seems appropriate.” A pause. “Should I leave you be?”

He fully expected her to say yes. Was already leaning forward to rise.

“No,” she said, looking away. “There’s enough death for two pairs of eyes.”

“The death is in the hospital. This?” he waved a hand at it. “This is just ashes and bones. No different than what’s mixed with the dust of the wastes from a thousand different battles. There’s probably not a square foot of ground that hasn’t had a man empty his blood into it. And you wouldn’t go around accusing all the ground of being death.”

“I didn’t kill them,” she stated, as though he’d accused her of it.

“No, you didn’t. You disposed of the bodies in the best way possible. Better than letting them rot in the streets where they’d only make others sick.”

“But I feel like I killed them.”

“Why? Because you’re a demigod?”

She snapped her head in his direction again, eyes angry. “Don’t go accusing me. You kill for money.”

Stuber was unruffled by the accusation. Some truths hurt. But only when they’re fresh. Old truths have had time to scar over. The nerves don’t feel them as much. “I’ll give you that. I killed because it was my job to kill, and it’s what I’m good at doing. And you belong to a power structure that enabled and glorified purposeless, theocracy-sanctioned mass murder. Couple of bastards we are.”

Mala didn’t react much to that, outside of a huff through her nose. Maybe that was one of her old truths. “Don’t sugar coat it on my account.”

“There’s no other course our lives could have taken. Not really. We’ve done the best with what we were given.”

She scoffed bitterly. “Made your peace with it then?”

“I’ve come to learn I’m pretty shitty at peace.”

“Doesn’t it feel like a bit of a cop out to say you could never have been anything else?”

“Doesn’t it feel like a bit of a cop out to act like feeling guilty will make a damn bit of difference?”

“Guilty?” she frowned. “No, I don’t feel guilty. I feel…wasteful. All of this.” She swept a hand across the scene before them. “Just waste. Wasted lives. My own included. I’ve been on this earth for sixty years, and what have I done with it? I have no people. No home. No faith. No loyalties. Everything I’ve done has gone up in smoke. The path forward used to seem so clear to me.”

“But now you’re lost.”

She nodded once. “Now I’m lost.”

“M-hm.” Stuber rubbed at his scruffy jawline. “Wasteland survival: No one’s coming to rescue you, so there’s no point in staying in one place. And if you don’t know which direction to go, pick one and start walking. You’ll find something eventually.”

She let out an uncertain noise. “Sounds like advice.” A sidelong glance. “But at least it wasn’t braggadocious.”

A low creak of hinges from behind them.

Stuber and Mala both turned to find a blue light descending on them from the gloom of the temple doors. It gradually coalesced into a pair of core processors—one damaged and barely lit, the other perfect and bright. Whimsby, dressed only in trousers, with his chest splayed open like a flaying victim, sauntered casually down the steps to stand behind them.

“I thought I heard voices,” he announced, oddly cheerful, as though this were some bright morning and everyone were well-rested with a promising day ahead of them.

“Don’t be coy,” Mala grumbled. “You heard every word we said.”

“Indeed I did,” Whimsby confirmed, choosing to sit beside Stuber. “But it’s generally considered somewhat alarming when someone enters a scene and says ‘I heard every word you said.’ So I went with a more palatable version.”

Stuber inspected his wide-open chest. “I must say, Whimsby…this new motif of yours kind of creeps me out.”

Whimsby looked down at it. “Yes, I suppose I can understand that. Sagum did a bit of retrofitting with the poor, late Bren’s parts, so that I don’t have to be lashed to his lifeless body in perpetuity. That would have been slightly creepier, don’t you think?”

Stuber nodded. “You have a point.”

“Anything to add?” Mala said, half sarcastic, half serious.

Whimsby leaned back on the step behind him, just as relaxed as could be. “Only that I’ve been on this earth for five hundred years, and I’ve only just figured out how to think and act for myself. Could I have done so sooner? Yes, I believe I could have. But I didn’t until the circumstances dictated it. Seems irrational to harangue myself for previous choices, when I know those choices were the best choices that could have been made under the circumstances that they were made. Now the circumstances are different. And so I make different choices.”

Stuber patted his rifle in a form of applause. “Well said.”

Shuffling from behind them. Heavy breathing.

All three turned to find Sagum bustling down the steps, his face all worried like a harried mother with a missing child. “There you are!”

Stuber assumed he was talking to Whimsby. Whimsby picked up on that too.

“Have no fear, Master Sagum. I would say I was getting some fresh air, but I neither need air, nor is it all that fresh.” Whimsby patted the step by his side. “Come join us, Oh Great Tinkerer. We were just solving the world’s problems.”

Sagum looked a little unsure, but with his motherly instincts assuaged, gave it a shrug, and sat down next to Whimsby. “Not sure I have much to add. I’ve had my face in your guts for the last few days. Not even sure I know what the hell’s going on.”

Whimsby leaned forward, motioning to each of them in turn. “Mala feels that her life has been a waste. Stuber feels trapped by his imminent life of domesticity—assuming we live to see it. I feel that I am somehow right where I need to be, though I’m still unsure what all the future will require from me. What about you, Sagum?”

“Oh. Me?” Sagum furrowed his brow. “I…uh…”

There came a long pause. Stuber leaned forward, mushing his face onto an upraised hand, watching the skinny man expectantly. Trying to put some pressure on him, honestly. Because he liked to see Sagum squirm. “Yes?”

Sagum squirmed. Shrugged. “I dunno, Stuber. What do you want me to say? This is all new to me. But is it really new-new? It seems like all of existence is this big wheel that keeps turning, always coming back to the same point as it started, but by then, everyone that lived through it the first time is dead and gone, so everyone that’s living through it now thinks its brand new, never been seen before. But it’s all happened before. One people rises up, comes to power, power corrupts, they abuse those they have power over in order to maintain their power, then something happens and disrupts that system, the power changes hands, and the wheel starts another revolution.” Sagum sighed heavily. “The demigods had power over us, and they abused it. Then we released the Nine and disrupted the system. Now someone new will take the power. It seems like that’s the Nine. And I think we all know how that’s going to go. Will we ever get out from under their thumb? Maybe. It’s possible some strange, unforeseen event could disrupt extremely powerful, invincible beings. It doesn’t seem likely. But then again, nothing about anything I’ve witnessed over the course of throwing my lot in with you people has been likely. So who knows? The question I keep asking myself is, will we humans ever get any better? Will we ever fix the problem? Or are we doomed to just take another spin on the wheel?”

Stuber’s hand slowly slid down off his face. Plopped back onto his rifle. He glowered at the smoking pile of human remains in front of him. Feeling small and foolish. “Godsdammit, Sagum.”

Sagum huffed and looked away. “Well, don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to,” he said, sullenly.

A voice off to their left: “I see you’ve collected some strays.”

They all looked left to find Lux striding through the smoky gloom, a water bladder dangling from one hand, his longstaff held low and dejected in the other.

“You found some water?” Mala asked, reaching out a hand.

Lux nodded and proferred the bladder to her. She ripped the stopper out and took a mouthful. Swished it. Spat it out. Then drank deeply. When she came up for air, she coughed a bit, and passed it to Stuber. “Here. Wash the taste of human ashes out of your mouth.”

Stuber accepted it. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was until he had the water in his hand. Realized he was mad for a deep drink. Would have liked to chase it with whiskey. Whiskey was always good for washing away the taste of death. He watched Lux carefully over the hump of the bladder as he drank.

Lux motioned to the spot next to Mala. “May I sit? Or are we still disliking each other?”

Mala flicked a hand at the step. “You brought water. You can sit.”

“How kind.”

Stuber finished his drink, started to pass it to Whimsby, then frowned at the mech and reached further to pass it to Sagum.

“Thank you for helping me with the bodies,” Mala grumbled.

Lux didn’t respond. Stuber glanced over at him to find the paladin’s face hollow and stony. No expression to the eyes. On the lips, just a slight tightness. A downturn of the corners.

“Well,” Teran’s voice snapped from the right. “Either this is a helluva coincidence, or I’ve been excluded.”

“Not so much of a coincidence,” Stuber pointed out. “We’re all friends with Perry.” A glance at Mala and Lux. “Friends-ish. He went and flew off to gods-know where, to do gods-know what, and told us to wait for him. And he’s either going to return with some good news, or he’s going to return with some bad news.”

“Or not return at all,” Sagum pointed out.

“In any case,” Stuber continued. “It’s a recipe for a sleepless night.” He jabbed a thumb at Whimsby. “Though I don’t know what his problem is.”

Teran walked over towards them, but didn’t sit. She stood there, arms crossed, with her friends to her left, and the greasy ashes to the right, staring at the space between them.

“As good an explanation as any,” Teran admitted after a moment of silence. “And you’re right, Stuber: I couldn’t sleep.”

Stuber eyed her. “Where are your friends?”

Teran sniffed. “Back with the skiff. Re-evaluating their life choices, probably.”

“Did you not tell them what they were in for?”

Teran looked at him, seeming too tired to be as sharp with him as she usually was. “I did. I told them they were fighting Guardians. Which would have been hard enough. I consider them brave for volunteering for it. But that’s not the case any more, is it? And what good are any of us in this new fight?” Her eyes trailed away. “If there’s even going to be a fight.”

“Oh, there’ll be a fight,” Mala said, leaning forward and waving for the water bladder to return to her. “Question is whether we’re all gonna die or not.”

“Isn’t that the question with every fight?” Stuber said as he passed the bladder back to Mala.

Teran shook her head. “I dunno. The Outsiders didn’t want to fight. Wanted to hide. I told them they were foolish—that the Guardians would find them. Now I wonder if maybe they were right. Maybe hiding is the best option now. Will the Nine really bother to seek us all out like the Guardians would have?”

Stuber blew a raspberry. “Please. Don’t pretend, Teran. You’re just like the rest of us. If running and hiding were ever really an option for any of us, I don’t think we’d all be sitting here right now.” He gave up a grim smile, staring at the ashes. “This? Right here? The seven of us? This is no coincidence. This is fate.”

Teran tilted her head at him. “I’ve never taken you for the superstitious type.”

Stuber shrugged. “I am when it suits me.”

“Humans,” Whimsby put in with his usual thoughtful manner. “Are always more superstitious when their backs are against the wall. That’s something I’ve noticed in my time watching your kind. When things are going well, humans don’t give superstition a thought. But when they run out of options…that’s when they pray, and look for omens, and believe in luck and fate. Because, at that point, what else is there?”

“True,” Stuber agreed, still smiling. “We are masters of the forlorn hope.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

GIFTS

Perry smelled Karapalida before he saw it.

A whiff of it, high in amongst the clouds. An acrid, smoky stench that only had one source, and anyone who had lived in these times knew it well: The scent of human immolation.

It didn’t take long after that to spot the tiny twinkling of fires, so far below, rapidly approaching out of the charcoal skies to the east. Didn’t take long, because Perry was flying at an entirely unnatural speed.

Well. Flying was pretty unnatural as it was. But this made pulsing with his shield seem an agonizingly slow way to cover ground.

He was in a state entirely alien to himself. He had never existed in the flow of Confluence so completely. It had only ever been an all or nothing thing for him. He was either in it, with the world a hazy mirage, or he was out of it and the world was as it should be. This new ability was somehow both at once—completely submerged in the flow, and yet able to clearly perceive the world around him, down to the minutia of the smell of Karapalida, carried on a high-altitude wind.

Yes, it was wonderful, in a way. But Perry’s mind only experienced the elation of it for a short time. Something that Niva had not given him was an immunity to the rampant doubts that were steadily infiltrating every corner of his brain.

There was something in this Confluence of his—something foreign. Something that he’d not felt until recently. When he’d wanted to slaughter Boomer, rather than show him mercy. When he’d wanted to burn down The Thirsty Ox with Hauten and all of his crew inside of it.

There was a madness there, just off the sides of the narrow path that he walked. A slick and muddy downhill slide into chaos, should he have one misstep.

And what made it all the more dangerous was the fact that, when he was so sunk into the flow of Confluence, he wanted to step over that edge. It called to him, promising some ill-defined sense of release.

Kill them, burn them, disintegrate them.

Annihilation. Oblivion.

He let out a little gasp, drawing back away from that perilous edge.

Because the them in those thoughts wasn’t just The Nine, or his enemies…It seemed to be everyone. Everything. Down in the darkness where that madness promised to take him, there was no control. There was only rage, and release.

Control. He needed to control this flow. The current of it was so strong now that it was hard to figure out how exactly he was going to exert his willpower over it. He still wasn’t sure. And that lack of certainty was the seed of doubt that grew rapant in his mind.

The fact was, he wouldn’t know if he could control it until he was in the thick of it. And Primus help them all if he couldn’t.

Unfortunately, that was only one of his problems. The other problem was that, from the very second he’d left Snaggle-Tooth Mountain, he’d been able to feel them. The Nine. A strange sensation—if his consciousness had a physical body, it would be the prickle of discomfort on the nape of his neck.

He could feel the Nine, and with every passing second, he was growing more certain that they could feel him, too. The sense that he had of them was not just the feeling of them being out there, but the feeling of their attention on him. His newfound powers were like a beacon to them. A spotlight shining down on him.

In fact, when he concentrated past the roar of the wind in his ears, he thought he could hear that incessant hum—distant, but steadily growing stronger.

They were going to come for him. Were coming for him right at that moment, he was almost positive.

He pulled up rapidly from his headlong flight, all his insides feeling as though they were rearranging themselves at the sudden deceleration. He hovered for a short moment, directly over Karapalida, and he looked down past his feet, shaking away the wooziness of his sudden stop, and seeing the temple square far below.

It took him a moment to realize what he was looking at. A great, black stain, with dim tongues of flame flickering throughout it, streams of stinking smoke lifting into the air in choking gouts.

Ashes, he realized. That’s where they burned the bodies.

He descended by simply letting himself drop. Through the smoke. All the world a whirlwind in his ears. The ground rushing up at him, his heart in his throat, which was a pleasant change from it being stamped down into the bottom of his guts with worry.

He landed gently—no need to stumble or time a pulse or balance himself expertly. Simply a tug from one of those infinite strands of energy that crisscrossed reality, almost visible to him through some vestigial part of his brain.

And then his feet were on the ground.

He turned towards the temple, still lost in his thoughts, trying to dream up what the hell he would say to convince the others to join him in a suicide mission with no real, articulable chance of success, his heart starting to beat harder as he realized that he was now right on the doorstep of having to converse with them and he still didn’t know what to say.

He pulled up short, his worry turning to a near panic as he realized he was a lot closer to his friends than he thought. In fact, he had no time at all to think about what to say: They were all right there in front of him.

Stuber. Mala. Lux. Whimsby. Teran. Sagum. All lined up on the steps.

He stood there dumbly for a moment, scrambling for something to say. The way that they just stared at him, like they weren’t quite sure if it was him that had just dropped out of the sky, and were obviously waiting for him to speak, but he was empty in the brain at that moment.

“Oh,” he choked out. “Hey guys. Didn’t think you’d be…right here.”

Mala was the first to shoot to her feet, cutting away the distance between them in three rapid strides, her eyes coursing over him as though searching for contraband. “How’d you do that? I don’t see your shield. Where’s your longstaff?”

Teran was hot on Mala’s heels. “Did you find the person you were looking for? This All-Kind? Were they an All-Kind?”

And then Sagum: “Did you find anything out? Please tell me you have some idea of what we’re supposed to do, because we are completely lost.”

“Took you long enough,” Stuber griped, taking up the rear with Lux and Whimsby. “Did you actually go somewhere or were you just trying to get out of having to clean this place up?”

Perry could do nothing with the onslaught of questions except to raise his hands. “I…uh…well…” He cringed at his own lack of words. Had to avert his eyes painfully away from them. “Shit.”

“Godsdammit,” Teran muttered. “You didn’t find the All-Kind, did you?”

“No, I did,” Perry managed.

“You did?” From hopelessness to eagerness in one swoop. “So…?”

Mala rudely patted at his pockets. “No longstaff. No clasp for the shield. How’d you fly?”

“Stop,” Perry barked, unable to hang onto a single cogent thought, and getting a little irritated by it. But then, when they gave him a moment of silence to think, the first thing he came up with was, “Were you guys just waiting here the whole time?”

“Oh, no,” Stuber said, with a spooky look in his eyes. “Fate, Shortstack. The universe gathered us together just now.”

Perry couldn’t tell if that was a joke or not. He badly needed…something. A respite. A moment to think. But he’d had hours to think while he was on his way back and that hadn’t helped. Maybe he needed food. Or water. Or sleep. It was obvious he needed something, because he’d never been so speechless in his life.

“Just hang on,” Perry said. “Let me…uh…gather my…” The burgeoning frustration boiled over all at once. “Shit. I don’t need to gather my thoughts! I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts for the last four hours and I got nothing! They’ve all run away!”

“It’s quite alright, Perry,” Whimsby said, angling himself around the others and placing a hand on Perry’s shoulder. “Your heartrate and respiration are at an unhelpful level. You’re experiencing a lot of stress, and I understand that makes it very difficult for your skull full of mushy neurons to fire properly.”

“Whimsby,” Perry said, suddenly exhausted. “I can’t remember the last time my heartrate or respiration was at a helpful level.”

“When you were sleeping,” Whimsby said, flatly. “In the Crooked Hills. Just before I woke you and you ran off to battle Mala. Your vital signs were quite calm then. Before I woke you, anyways.”

“Perhaps,” Lux raised his voice over a cavalcade of fresh questions starting to burble up from everyone else. “You should just start at the beginning, and go from there. You flew off in search of someone you believed to be an All-Kind…” Lux raised his eyebrows expectantly. “And then…?”

Perry took a deep breath. “Actually, I’m going to skip to the end: I can give you all the Gift of Confluence. But there’s no guarantee that it’ll be enough to kill the Nine. It’s probably a suicide mission. And if any of us survive, you have to give the Confluence back.”

It felt miraculous to just spit it out there.

Perry reviewed his own words in the shocked silence the followed. Nodded to himself—yeah, that was about as clear and concise as he could make it. And with that out of the way, now he could maybe figure out a way to fill in the blanks.

He pushed through his friends, heading for the temple steps. “I’m gonna sit. And then I’m gonna try to make this make sense.”

***

Perry stared at Teran’s mouth as it moved, but her words were just a mumble in the background of the growing hum in his ears. No matter how he held his head, or squinted against it, or tried to focus around it, it wouldn’t stop.

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. What?”

Teran narrowed her gaze at him. Suspicious. “What’s going on with you?” She said, louder, as though he was deaf.

He knew what the hum meant. But he couldn’t think about that now. He couldn’t think about how time was running out. He needed to focus, godsdammit…

“Nothing.” He clenched his jaw muscles against the hum, really honed in on Teran. “What were you saying?”

Teran shifted, then repeated herself: “If you really can give us the Gift of Confluence, what are our chances against the Nine?”

Damn. Now he wished he hadn’t asked her to repeat herself. He didn’t want to answer that question. There was no way he could wrap it that made it any better than the box of shit it was.

He went with honesty. He was asking his friends to put their lives on the line. He owed them the truth. “Not good, as I see it.”

Teran frowned. Squirmed where she was sitting on the steps beside him. “Well, then why are you asking us to do it?”

“If there was any other way, I wouldn’t.”

“There is another way, Perry,” she said quietly. Glanced sidelong at Stuber and the others. “We do what the Outsiders have always done. It seemed like foolishness in the face of the Guardians, as they were hunting everyone down. But in the face of the Nine? It seems like the wiser option.”

Perry recoiled from that. “What? To run? To hide?”

“The Guardians were able to track down human life.” She looked to Whimsby now. “Isn’t that right?”

Whimsby arched his eyebrows, then allowed it with a nod. “Indeed. They have the capability to sense and identify human life. Their apparent strategy was to find the largest numbers and wittle their way down from there. Hence the attacks on the cities. Once they were done with the cities, they would have found the remnants of humanity, wherever they were hiding.”

Teran seemed to think this proved her point. “Exactly. But the Nine, they can’t track us down, can they?”

Perry shook his head. “They can track me.”

This led to a moment of shocked silence.

“They can sense me now,” Perry expounded. “Maybe they always could. I could sense them when we went into the East Ruins. Hell, I felt them when we were in the Crooked Hills. The closer I got the stronger it got.” He stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it around, but had no success getting rid of the hum. “It’s this low, thrumming sound. And it’s getting stronger now. I can…” he didn’t quite know how to put this. “I can tell that they can feel me, too.”

Perry thought he knew what Teran was thinking, though she didn’t seem to want to say it. Sagum, however, had no such reservations.

“They can sense Confluence, then,” he said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Perry nodded.

“But they can’t sense non-Confluent. They can’t sense regular humans.”

Perry shrugged. “Not that I know of.”

Sagum held his gaze for a long moment. Took a deep breath. “So the rest of us—the normal humans—we might be able to hide from them.”

Mala jerked around to look at Sagum and Teran. “Is that what you want? To spend the rest of your life hiding?”

Teran looked sharply back at her. “Says the woman who’s Confluent. Tell the truth, Mala, if you knew you could hide from them, would you? Or are you just telling us to fight because hiding is not an option for you?”

Mala bristled at that, but Perry cut her off with a raised hand. “Stop. Please. Let’s not do this right now.” Gods, but he wished he could just massage this fucking noise out of his head. “I didn’t come here to demand your help in this fight. I came to ask for it. I know what I’m asking for. I’m not stupid. I know our chances of winning are low. Extremely low. I know that I’m asking you to possibly sacrifice yourself, and I can’t give you any good reason why we stand a good chance at winning. It’s just…” He sighed, and it turned into an irritable growl as his fingers pressed into the sides of his head. “I have to do this. There’s no other option for me. But…if you don’t want this fight, I’m not going to hold it against any of you.”

Stuber leaned forward onto his elbows, his brawny arms draped over his rifle. “I seem to recall you saying something similar in the East Ruins. And we all decided to back you then. Because we’re a team.”

Teran shook her head, unable to hide a blush of shame. “Things are different this time.”

Stuber seemed surprised. “How are they different? A friend needs our help. We’re in this together. What’s changed?”

“Everything’s changed!” Teran snapped. “And I hate to break it to you, Stuber, but the decision we made in the East Ruins was a bad one. We went into something with no concept of what we were dealing with, and look what happened! We unleashed the Nine and plunged this entire planet into extinction, and now slavery! Are you going to tell me that we made a good decision then?”

Stuber tilted his head. “It’s a fair point.”

Perry felt his heart drop a little further. He didn’t want to hear Stuber acknowledge that it was a fair point. For all the honorable words about wanting them to all make their own decision about whether to take this risk, he’d hoped…

Well. He’d hoped. Plain and simple.

“Is hiding really an option?” Perry tried again, focusing on Teran. “Are there enough caves to hide in? Can all of humanity fit in them? Who gets to decide which people hide and which are left out to be slaves for the Nine? And when the Nine see the population fleeing into the hills, who’s to say that won’t enrage them? Who’s to say they won’t just burn the fucking mountains down? You’ve seen what they can do, Teran. Are you really willing to risk that they’ll just let you be?”

Teran hung her head. “This isn’t my proudest moment, Perry. But I’m trying to think with my head and not my heart right now. I don’t want to turn my back on you after all we’ve been through. But hiding seems a better chance than what you’re offering.”

“Well, you’re right about that,” Stuber said. “If life is just being alive. Yes. Hiding might keep the blood moving in your veins for a little while longer. But is that really living, Teran? Is that how you want to wile away your days? Stuck in caves, crammed in, scrabbling about for food? Every time you exit to find something to eat or drink, knowing that you’re just a mouse among wolves?” He made a face and spat. “Sounds fucking terrible if you ask me. Which you didn’t, but there it is anyways.”

Teran didn’t respond. Just kept staring at her feet.

“Me?” Stuber sighed through a melancholy grin. “I can’t even stand being here. I can’t wrap my brain around it. I can’t see myself living like that, or like this. Even if the Nine weren’t an issue, I’m not sure I could do it. I’m just not cut out for peace. I’m not cut out for…living just for the sake of living.” He looked skyward. “Guess that’s the problem with a life of war. Knowing that you could die any day makes every sunrise, every piece of bread, every sip of whiskey, every woman…delicious. The danger and the death is unpleasant, of course. But then when you don’t have them hanging over you, everything becomes so…bland.” He shook his head. “I fear the grayness of safety more than I fear death.”

He stood suddenly. “But that’s just me. I can’t speak for the rest, but I’ll speak for myself.” He took a big step and knelt on one knee in front of Perry, eyebrows up, hands held out wide as though presenting himself. “How’s this work, exactly?”

Perry felt a strange mix of grief and joy, staring at Stuber’s big, honest face. Joy at the prospect of not entering into this fight alone. Grief, because he felt certain that he was dooming his friend to death.

“Are you sure?” Perry asked, quietly.

Stuber frowned at him. “I just gave a whole fucking speech about it. What’s sure got to do with it? Decision’s been made. Do your magic thing. Give me the powers, and we’ll go try to rip these fuckers a new asshole.”

“Well, uh…” Perry looked at his hands. “Honestly, I’m not sure how it works. It wasn’t really explained to me.”

Stuber’s hands flopped to his sides and he rolled his eyes. “Typical Shortstack. Gotta overthink everything. You’re the type that has to read the instructions before you try to work the machine. Haven’t we been through this before? Just yank the levers and see what happens.”

“Alright.” Perry straightened. Gathered himself. Figured that the best he could do was emulate what Niva had done, so he reached out his hands, a little gingerly, like lightning might sprout from his fingertips and blow Stuber away at any second. He cringed a bit, his fingers hovering next to Stuber’s forehead. “Are you ready?”

Stuber nodded. “Can’t wait to shoot fireballs and fly. Do it.”

Perry took a deep, steadying breath, then touched his fingers to Stuber’s head.

He felt the flow of Confluence through him. Around him. The full connection that he’d felt after Niva had tossed him off the cliff. A seamless conjoining of himself and the strands of energy that crisscrossed this universe. The acceleration. The velocity.

He closed his eyes.

Frowned.

He felt the Confluence, yes.

But what about this Gift of Dispersion? What was it supposed to feel like? Was it connected to Confluence? Was it, perhaps, so similar that he couldn’t tell the difference? Was it simply so effortless that he didn’t notice?

He felt the greasy skin of Stuber’s forehead against his fingers. Warm to the touch. Waiting.

Was power supposed to surge out of him? Nothing had really happened when Niva had given him the Gift of Dispersion. Perhaps there would be nothing dramatic as he gave Confluence to Stuber.

He opened one eye. Found Stuber watching him blankly.

“Do you feel anything?” Perry asked.

Stuber’s eyes nearly crossed, looking up at Perry’s hands on his forehead. “I feel you touching my forehead. And I’m somewhat hungry.”

A tiny note of panic began to grow in Perry’s brain, right alongside the distracting hum. Hell, maybe it was the hum that was setting him off his game. But it was growing stronger, reminding him that he didn’t have all the time in the world to puzzle this out.

Niva hadn’t given him instructions. So it stood to reason that instructions weren’t necessary. Right? He’d just assumed that it would be easy. If it were complicated, she would have told him what to do. Special steps to take. A special dance maybe. Or an incantation?

Perry shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut again. “Just…hold on a second.”

“Holding,” Stuber murmured.

“Ssh. Let me focus.”

Problem was, he didn’t know what to focus on. Couldn’t really focus at all. That hum. That constant, nagging hum, starting to surge now, starting to feel like soundwaves pressing at his ears. Like trying to focus on a solving a puzzle when a pack of hungry dogs was running at you, howling for flesh.

He tried, but all he could think was, They’re coming! They’re coming and you’re running out of time and THIS ISN’T WORKING!

“Fuck!” he suddenly spat out, yanking his hands away from Stuber. “It’s not working and I don’t know how to make it work!”

Stuber looked a little put out. “Maybe it’s me? Maybe my skull’s too thick for the magic to get through?”

Perry realized he was starting to sweat when it began to tickle on his eyebrows. He jabbed it away with a trembling thumb, almost starting to feel woozy now, the pressure in his ears making him feel like the ground was moving underneath him.

Mala was perched nervously at the very edge of a step. “There’s gotta be a way to do this, Perry. Just think. There must be something you’re missing.”

He looked at her, breath heaving out of flared nostrils. “We’re running out of time.”

Mala quirked her head. “What do you mean?”

Perry poked his head with a hard finger. “I can feel them, and it’s getting stronger. I think they’re coming. I think they noticed me somehow—felt me—and they’re coming. And they’re close.”

“How close?”

“I don’t know!”

Sagum writhed up from his seated position and attempted to shoulder Stuber out of the way, but merely rebounded off of him. He took a knee. “Try it on me. Maybe it really is just a problem with Stuber.”

Stuber, however, had become concerned. “Shortstack. Are they coming here?”

“Gods, Stuber, I don’t know! I can sense them like a noise, and that noise is getting louder. I can barely hear any of you.”

Teran stood up. Hands clenched over her mouth. Taking short paces back and forth.

Sagum grabbed Perry’s hand and held it in front of his forehead. “Perry. Look at me. Calm. You can do this. Just try.”

Despair and utter certainty of failure flooded Perry, made him almost want to not even try. Almost. But that was no way to go. That was the old Perry talking. The self-serving, chip-on-the-shoulder, life’s-a-bitch Perry. The new Perry had a lot more riding on his shoulders. So much so that he couldn’t simply shirk it off.

At a certain point, the weight on your shoulders can grow so large that you can’t release it without crushing yourself. So you just have to keep going.

He bore down in the center of him. Sure, Niva had told him that good humor was a better way to delve into Confluence than getting mad, but it was hard to find a sense of humor, and not so hard to find some anger. Old habits and all.

It was there. His Confluence. Just as it always had been. Deep and red.

He was in it. He was flowing.

He was touching Sagum’s head.

Every muscle in his body taut, as though he could squeeze the damn Dispersion out of him like water from a damp rag. Could he get something? Just a little something? Some sign of progress? Some indication that he wasn’t just sitting here, wasting time that he didn’t have?

But there was nothing.

He gasped from the effort. Eyes open again. Stars in the corners from all that blood pressure building. Pulse pounding in his head.

“It’s not working.” He shot to his feet. “It’s not fucking working!” He turned, and began screaming nonsensically at the sky: “Niva! I need some fucking help!” As though he could summon her. As though she were waiting right around the corner.

But what was it that she’d said?

Oh yes. She couldn’t “help.”

Why had she done this? Why hadn’t she told him how to use this Dispersion? Or was it his fault? Was something broken in him that she didn’t know about? Maybe he wasn’t as strong as she thought.

He felt weak and watery.

And then, all at once, the hum became something different.

It was the difference between hearing the roaring of a river, and being underneath the water. The sound of it was less. But the presence of it was more. Like all he’d sensed to that point was shockwaves, and now he was standing at ground zero.

And he was certain of it all in a moment. So deadly certain that there wasn’t even a trace of doubt. “They’re too close. They’re almost here.” He glanced skyward, but somehow knew that they weren’t overhead. Still rapidly approaching. But now he was inside the circle of their energy, and that was too close.

All the other options had run out.

All the other possibilities had come up blank.

Only one left: Buy time for the others.

He whirled on them, his eyes seeking out Teran’s out of instinct. “You’ve got to go. Get your people, and go. Stuber, Sagum, you have to go with her. You have to save as many people as you can. I’m sorry that this got fucked up. I wish I knew how to fix it, but there’s no more time."

Stuber held out a hand. “Wait. What are you doing?”

Perry backpedaled before Stuber’s hand could touch him, could grab him, could maybe slap some sense into him. “I’m gonna try to hold them off. I’ll do it for as long as—”

“Shortstack, you sonofabitch! You don’t get to martyr yourself!”

“I’ll do it for as long as I can!”

Stuber took a lunge forward, really trying to get his hands on Perry. But, like Stuber had said, the decision had been made. And Perry had decided he couldn’t be here any longer.

The space that he’d occupied was suddenly absent, causing Stuber to stumble into empty air, eyes shooting skyward.

Perry looked down at him as he shot up, looked down at all of them, the only real friends he’d ever had, growing small with how fast he was gaining altitude. He was alone now, the nothingness of the sky embracing him, a cold comfort.

He pointed himself towards the epicenter of the energy that he felt, and shot westward like a bullet.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

LAST STAND

The energy was vast, and his perception of it was clearer than ever. It reminded Perry of Snaggle-Tooth Mountain—how it just kept getting bigger and bigger the closer you got, until you couldn’t seem to see the edges of it.

You’re going to die. You realize that, don’t you?

Perry’s thoughts had a decidedly fatalistic swerve to them. They spoke things he’d already known. Had known them, maybe, since the second he’d left Niva on that mountaintop.

No real surprise there. But death has a vastness all its own. Starts to get real intimidating the closer you get to it.

He remembered the moment that Stuber had shoved him off the boat in the Underground river. Strange how people were always shoving him off of things to get him to realize some truth or another. But it seemed to work. Maybe that spoke to his stubbornness. But on the cusp of dying isn’t a convenient time to remake yourself. And besides, stubbornness was all he had going for him at this point.

Now sit there, you fucking peon! Sit there and experience it! Let it soak into your soul. Let that fear go all the way through you. I want you to feel it.

And Perry had. He remembered how certain he’d been that he was going to die. Though, in retrospect, that couldn’t really be compared to what he was experiencing now. That was based on an irrational fear of the water and the unknown. This was based on a very logical fear of being outmatched by what he intimately knew and had experienced first hand.

You don’t know what fear is until you’ve sat in it, stewed in it, let it bore holes through your soul as you look around and realize that all that is keeping you from tipping over that razor’s edge of death and destruction is nothing but chance! It’s all just a roll of the dice! You have no control over it. Death simply waits in the wings and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it if it decides to descend on you today. Do you believe me?

Yes. He believed. He’d believed then, and he did now.

This was what Stuber had been talking about. Then, and just a few moments prior: How the certainty of death paradoxically frees you from the fear of it. Every moment becomes exquisite. The sunlight blooming in the east, touching his face. The cold wind, bracing against his skin. The way the clouds zipped by him. The exultation of flight—a dream that few ever experienced so purely as he did right in that moment.

It was good.

The fear had bored so many holes through Perry, that it could barely get a grip on him any more. The closer he got to death, the more certain he was that he was about to experience it, the less it seemed to have sway.

People only mewl and beg for life when they think there’s a chance.

Perry knew better. He had no chance.

All that was left was to do his friends proud.

It’s close.

He pulled up to a stop, tethered into a hover by invisible strands of energy. He looked back over his shoulder. Could barely see Karapalida in the distance. Looked ahead. Nothing but the slowly fading darkness of night turning to dawn.

Looked down. Flat terrain. Scorched earth. Dead ground.

A good place to fight. A good place to pull no punches. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run. Just open wastelands as far as the eye could see. A place where a man could easily forget about living and just focus on the moment. Delve into the fight with abandon. Forget about your ego, forget about your future, and your past.

A good place to make a stand.

Perry dropped to the earth. One moment in the sky, the next, standing on the dusty ground, gray in the dawn light. Bone-white in the distance where it was kissed by the rising sun.

He shifted his feet. Was tempted to make some sort of battle preparations, but he was not fighting that type of battle. This was not a fight where foxholes and barricades would do any good. Not a fight where terrain could be used to an advantage. Not a fight where one had to worry about getting a good grip on their weapons, or whether their boots had enough traction on the ground.

Fact was, it was a fight he’d never fought before.

Strange how the mind can make its peace with death, but the body still wants to live. His heart was pounding. Sweat beading on his face, the second the wind wasn’t there to wick it away. Stomach all tangled and sour. Every part of his animal brain screaming to get out of there.

He took a deep breath. Smelled the dust. The air. His own body.

A pang of regret. For friends lost. For opportunities gone by. For potential wasted.

What could he have done if he wasn’t who he was? Who else could he have been? Who might he be with?

Funny, but Teran’s face flitted by. He didn’t ruminate on it. Better not to. Better to stay in the here and now. Life was full of should-haves and would-haves, but you didn’t, so suck it up and do what has to be done in the moment.

He began to sing quietly to himself, for no other reason than to hear something besides the keening of the wind across the wastes.

“When we were young,” the song barely a whisper in his throat as his eyes searched the sky. “And the gift of life was still new and fun, and we looked to the sky and thought the king had come…”

The first inkling he had of them was a twinkling of verdant light in the sky to the west. Like those dim stars that you couldn’t really see when you looked right at them—could only see them out of the corner of your eyes.

The thought occurred to him that, just as he hadn’t asked any questions about how to work Dispersion, he also hadn’t checked to see if he could summon energy blasts from his fingers, or control the air around a body so that he could fling it about at will. It seemed a bit of an oversight now, but there’s no time like the present.

He held his right hand out, palm facing the western sky. His body was the conduit now, just as the clasp and the longstaff had been. He was suddenly sure that there hadn’t been an oversight at all—he knew that he had the abilities.

Confluence surged up in him, coming from some place that seemed to center around his heart, blasting outwards, traveling down his arm like it had coursed down his longstaff. The beds of his fingernails glowed, the wrinkles of his knuckles like cracks showing a hint of light beneath.

Just as natural as tossing a ball.

The energy blasted from his hand, one long, green stream of energy that split the sky into the west. He doubted it would do much damage—wasn’t even sure he could damage them at this point. He’d seen them absorb the energy blasts from Lux’s longstaff. He could only assume they’d do the same with this. It was merely a challenge. A beacon.

Let them come.

He let the stream of energy flicker out. Lowered his hand. Waited.

In the west, tiny contrails in the sky, splitting every which way as the beam of Confluence shot through the middle of them. They seemed to simply disappear.

Perry clenched his fists. Clenched his jaw. Searched the sky for any signs of them.

A peel of thunder. Nine shock waves all at once, rocking across the wastelands, kicking up a wave of dust that washed over Perry, forcing him to squint against it while his clothes whipped flat against his sweaty skin.

And they were there, all at once. They hit the ground, nine pairs of feet slamming to the earth, nine tiny earthquakes that rumbled the ground and shook Perry’s legs.

Perry blinked the dust out of his eyes.

The Nine Sons of Primus, standing in a line, only a few dozen yards from him. Massive figures that he had to look up at. Eyes glowing fiercly green. Reticulated plates of armored flesh, simmering in the cracks between. Confluence radiating out of them in discordant waves that made Perry shudder, despite the warm air.

Why did their Confluence feel so different from his own?

Yes, his Confluence seemed to flow easier from anger. But theirs was unbridled hatred, the ferocity of which made Perry’s stomach turn. It’s one thing to know another being wants to kill you. It’s somehow more unsettling when you can feel their disdain, their abhorrence of you, how ripping the life from you wouldn’t simply be a means to an end, but would be a dark pleasure all its own.

One of them stepped forward. It was hard for Perry to remember the tiny distinctions between them, but he thought this was Batu. A familiarity that Perry felt in his energy, that could have only come from meeting him before.

Batu’s head tilted languidly to one side, plate-like teeth bared in a malevolent smile. “The abomination wishes an audience from his gods. But he believes himself a god now. Tell me, little god, why can I feel you? You’re like a petulant shriek in my ears. A child clamoring for attention.”

Perry didn’t really want to talk. And when you’re in for a fight, no point in doing much else besides fighting.

He thrust both his hands out, power exploding out of him in one massive wave.

The green lanced out towards Batu’s face.

Which he deflected with a casual hand, as easy as one might shoo a gnat. His other hand came up, and Perry watched a wall of shimmering air hit him—

The next few seconds were just tumbling.

Kind of like how he’d tumbled down the mountain.

He felt the impacts to his limbs—his back, mainly, as he was crushed into the dirt and skidded like a stone skipped on a pond. But there was no injury to it. As though his entire body was sheathed in a protective force—not just the bubble that he’d experienced with the shield.

He wrangled himself around as he was still sliding across the dirt, planted his feet hard, and ground to a stop, two grooves in the dust where his heels had dug in. He stood up, about twenty yards from where he’d been. Took a catalogue of his limbs and found them whole and unbroken.

For now.

Batu strode casually across the ground towards him, the others following only a few giant steps behind. “How disrespectful. But I can feel the Confluence in you. How did you come to this? How is it that our own progeny must use their technology to focus their energy, and yet you, an abomination and a mistake, are free to use it? I would very much like an explanation.”

An idea occurred to Perry. Seemed smart in the moment. And then a moment later, seemed like a long shot. But that’s what Perry was—a long shot. It was kind of all he had at the moment.

Fear countered Confluence. But the Nine feared nothing. Except for one thing.

“The All-Kind,” Perry called out, trying to channel some of Stuber’s self-confidence-in-the-face-of-annihilation. “They gave me these powers.”

The words had a powerful effect. All nine of them halted. Stone-still.

Perry nodded, feeling a tiny glimmer of hope. “That’s right. I’ve been given Confluence—real Confluence—by the same people that gave it to the Ferox.”

Talking while fighting wasn’t exactly Perry’s strong suit, but he’d take any edge he could get. And if that meant letting his mouth run to shake the confidence of his opponents…well, it was worth a shot.

Batu responded with a blast of energy.

Perry had been expecting something like that. Raised his own hand, just as he’d seen Batu do, and shoved the bolt of energy away where it careened into the dirt a few hundred yards off, sending up a crackling explosion of pale dust.

“Intriguing, little god,” Batu’s voice was a low note that shivered in Perry’s bones.

“Right, yeah.” Perry nodded as he sidestepped, for no other reason than he felt the need to move, to circle. “It is intriguing. You have a version of Confluence given to you by the Ferox, which was given to them by the All-Kind. Perhaps your version is not as pure as you think it is.”

“Ah, but your lies are obvious and desperate.” Batu sidestepped as well. “The All-Kind abandoned this earth. They have not been here for five hundred years.”

Perry shook his head, feeling more confident as he sensed Batu’s uncertainty. “Maybe you’d like to believe that. But they’ve been here the whole time. Quietly waiting and watching.”

“Oh?” Another step. “Waiting for what?”

“For me to kill you.”

Batu stopped. Raised his arms out to his side. Head slowly panning from one side to the other, as though looking for something. “Then where are they, little god? Why have they sent a diminutive half-breed human to do their work? If they wanted us dead, why have they let us live?”

Perry wasn’t going to answer that question. Because the answer sounded weak. Struck him as sounding like he was grasping. Because they need humanity to prove themselves?

Funny, but it wasn’t until this moment, facing the Nine, that Perry considered how that sounded. It had seemed so earnest coming from Niva’s lips. It had seemed to make sense. Now it rang a little flat, like a bell with someone’s hand clamped over it.

“Oh my,” Batu chuckled, nothing pleasant in that sound. “You see, I know the All-Kind. I have interacted with them. As did the Ferox, whom they banished to the Outer Darkness.” He thrust one massive arm skyward. “Our father was an All-Kind!” he roared. “And there is something about them that I know, and you do not.” Batu leaned forward, as though to whisper a secret. “They’re tricksters, little god. Just like me. And the greatest trick they’ve ever played is convincing the universe that they’re benevolent.”

Perry tried to tell himself that it was good for Batu to keep talking. Talking wasted time. Time that Perry’s friends needed to get to safety. But there was something in Batu’s words that pricked his soul. A closeted, barely-acknowledged doubt that had seeded down deep in Perry, and was just now unfurling its dark leaves.

Faith in others is hard for humans. Because there’s always the nagging possibility that you’re being manipulated. Conned. Filled with pretty words that make you feel better, but really, you’re just being tricked into doing something you don’t want to do.

Batu shook his massive head at Perry, seeming in that instant, so strangely, to be a wise figure, gently plucking the petals of disinformation from a frail little bloom of false belief. “If they wanted us dead, they would have done it themselves. But they didn’t. Instead they imprisoned us. Saved us for later. In case they needed us. That is what they do. They lie, and they manipulate, and they use. They pit races against each other for their own amusement.”

Batu raised his hands, his voice booming again. “Oh, but we cannot do violence! So they say.” He looked back at Perry with a sneer. “But they can send armies of Guardians to exterminate your people.” He leaned forward again, his voice going lower, dangerous, almost…earnest. “You have no idea, little god, the destruction that they’ve wrought through their so-called lack of violence. You’ve not seen the entire worlds, razed to ashes by the Ferox, whole species made extinct in the blink of an eye—all done at the bidding of the All-Kind.” He straightened again, a massive breath flowing out of him like a gale. “The All-Kind turned their backs on this world long ago. And even if what you say is true, even if they are, somehow, still here…then they are not benevolent. Look around you, little god. Look at the hell that has existed on this earth for so long. Think of the blood that has been shed, the misery that has been endured. Think about that, and tell me again that the All-Kind care one whit for your race. Either they are here, and they are just as much devils as we are. Or they’ve abandoned your race, and left you to us, to do as we see fit.”

The words felt sour as they found a place to embed themselves in Perry’s mind. He kept blinking through the torrent of thoughts. Kept forcing himself to sidestep, though to what end, he couldn’t figure out. Batu was simply moving him around, while his brethren shifted slyly, closing a noose around Perry.

Was any of it true? Was all of it true? Niva had seemed so genuine when he’d spoken with her, when she’d talked about the human race. But that is the talent of the skillful con-artist, isn’t it? To make their mark believe that they’re honest.

He glanced to his left, back towards Karapalida. Back towards the people that he could not see, but that he desperately wanted to save. And why was he out here, challenging forces beyond his own comprehension? For them.

Not for the All-Kind. Not for any grand experiment.

If the All-Kind had manipulated him, then their end goals were ultimately immaterial. He had the Gift of Confluence. He had what the Nine had. And he meant to stop them, or at the very least, delay them.

For his friends. To give them a chance.

“I suppose it doesn’t really matter,” Perry said, eyes slipping back to Batu with a shrug of the shoulders. “I’m here to fight you.”

Quick as a blink, Batu shot forward, all the talking done. A blaze of green light dominated Perry’s vision, and all he could do was snatch at a tendril of energy to send him slipping to the right, out of Batu’s path.

A tidal wave of dust. The flare of Confluence from Batu. Perry brought up one hand, slamming that ball of energy out of the way, and unleashing a flow of his own to answer.

The beam lanced straight at Batu—and connected.

Perry registered movement out of the corner of his eyes. Two of the others, rocketing into the air, and then down towards him in a sharp arc.

Batu shuddered as Perry’s energy crackled over his gray, reticulated skin. Unaffected. Energy absorbed just as easily as it had been unleashed.

Perry moved backwards, feet leaving the ground, energy carrying him as the earth slipped by beneath him and he thrust both arms out, a shimmering barricade of air turned as hard as rock expanding out from him like the shockwave of an explosion, and catching the two others in midair, sending their massive bodies careening in separate directions.

Another one, moving fast to Perry’s right. Batu, looming large to his left.

He gasped, drew his hands back, each palm facing one of his attackers. They unleashed on him at the same time, a flurry of bolts so large they could have evaporated entire city blocks.

Perry managed to deflect one, than two, but he couldn’t keep up. The ground shook around him as the richocheting bolts slammed into the ground, darkening the air with clouds of dust and molten rock.

And then the next ones connected.

Perry could do nothing but draw in on himself. His breath seared in his lungs, the air super-heated. Confluence blazed from in him, but like two opposed winds meeting each other, it created a swirl inside of him that he did not understand.

Reality became a hazy thing. His physical body seemed detached from him. He felt its inputs only distantly. He was consumed with Confluence in that moment—but not the kind that he had grown to know from the river that flowed through him. This was a different brand altogether.

Hunched and taut, like a fighter taking massive body shots to the ribs, Perry felt his feet grinding across the ground as the force of each impact pushed him backwards. And yet the life was not draining from him. If anything, he was getting stronger. He was absorbing this energy, just as Batu had. But the whirlwind that it created in him was nothing like he’d felt before. This life was not the life he’d known. This was an energy that came from someplace else.

It was an energy borne of madness.

The flow in Perry’s mind seemed to surge, to swirl, to jump its banks so that it threatened to flood him. The river of red changed. Red and green together, in sickly swaths, the currents fighting with each other.

He felt it crawling over his skin—a sharp, disruptive tingle, like arcs of electricity—but it wasn’t injuring him.

He was, in an instant, not what he knew himself to be.

Every good thing curdled. Soured. Rotted. Corruption spread from the center of him, as though his very mind was streaked with a gangrenous infection. The flow was not a flow anymore—it was a raging tide, and his mind was drowning in it.

Insanity and chaos threatened to crush him, and all he could do to survive was to crush back. The hot air in his throat scraped it dry and raw, and he realized he was screaming, overfilled, overflowing, rage reaching a point of mass inside of him that could not be contained anymore.

There was no conscious thought. Only an explosion of energy. It was both agony and release.

When he opened his eyes, the world was green. Glowing, sickly green, in a great, expanding ball. All consuming. All destroying. He could see nothing else—not the earth around him, not the Nine, not even himself. He wondered if he was actually seeing anything at all, or if, like opening your eyes under silty water, all he was seeing was the dark version of Confluence that had infiltrated him.

He seethed. He ripped air in and out of his lungs. Every function of his body now a raging battle. His hands clenched and unclenched. Terrible heat poured over him, but couldn’t touch him. The pain was excrutiating, and transcendant.

The ground around him was charred, glowing stone.

Every ache and pain from the last days of fighting was gone. His limbs surged with a new power that was beyond physical pain. Life and death had clashed inside of him, and torn his reality to shreds. Nothing made sense. And it made him furious in a way that was entirely different than simple anger. The fury wasn’t an emotion itself. It was an energy. It was a possession.

The air cleared around him. He saw the figures of the Nine, right at the edge of a ring of blown-out earth. He’d pushed them away with the force of the explosion.

He felt exultant. And utterly terrified.

He was not himself, he knew. But there was just enough of Perry left in him to see it, and to tremble at the reality of it. He could not die. They could pump all the energy they wanted into him, but it would never be enough to kill him. His body was invincible.

But his mind was not.

Spit flecked his lips with the force of his breathing. Fear and rage, in equal measures. One on top of the other. One propogating the other. He wanted violence. He wanted destruction. He wanted immolation. He wanted to crush, to batter, to rip, to shred, and it didn’t matter the target, only the release.

Madness.

His body might not die, but there was something worse than that happening.

He was losing his mind.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHOICES

They could hear the battle from the temple square of Karapalida. They could feel it in the rumble of the stones beneath their feet. The throbbing of massive explosions.

But to Whimsby, it was so much more.

He kept heightening his auditory receptors, and then bringing them back down to nominal, human levels. Heightened, he could hear screams and cries that he knew were Perry, though something was off about them in a way that Whimsby’s processors could not pinpoint. Heightened, the burble of worried humanity all around him threatened to overwhelm his auditory capacity, and so he would lower them again.

In all of his years of existence, Whimsby could not recall feeling conflicted.

But he felt it now.

The immediate chaos around him: A four-way argument.

“An evacuation is unnecessary and a logistical nightmare!” Mordicus was saying.

“Perry told us we needed to get out of here, and for once, I agree with him!” Teran was yelling.

“We need to prioritize the wounded,” Petra put in from beside Stuber, who didn’t have much to say on it—seemed as conflicted as Whimsby was, with half his attention on trying to support his wife, and the other half evident in the way his eyes kept wandering out to the west, where the explosions were coming from.

“Me and Lux can help Perry!” Mala asserted. “It’s the best use of our abilities!”

“You won’t do any good against the Nine,” Teran shot back. “And we need you to guard the evacuation!”

“You can’t get all these people out of here!” Mordicus roared. “They’re safer if they stay!”

“We have a skiff,” Teran replied hotly. “We can ferry people back and forth to the caves!”

“For how long?” Mordicus demanded. “How much of a charge do you still have on that thing?”

Whimsby guessed it wasn’t much, by the way that Teran looked away, guilt-ridden.

“We’ll go until we can’t go anymore,” she said. “And staying here? What the hell do you think your legionnaires are going to do against the Nine?”

“The Nine already said they don’t want to exterminate us!”

“No, they only want to enslave us!”

“And running for the hills is only going to enrage them! Gods, woman, how can you not see that you’re asking to get wiped out?”

Mala cracked her longstaff against the stones. “We need to go help!”

“You’re only going to die!” Teran screamed, on her tip-toes to try to get as close to Mala’s face as possible.

The only one besides Stuber that seemed to have nothing to add to the argument was Sagum. He stood next to Whimsby, and kept watching him, fear and curiosity mingling in his expressions.

Whimsby turned up his audio receptors again, looking westward as though he could see through all the buildings and the distance between him and the battle out in the wastelands. The rumble of voices, deep and harrowing—that could only have been one of the Nine. More explosions.

Closer in, distracting, the sound of the people in Karapalida that Whimsby could not see, all their voices creating a rush of noise that his processors fought to delineate from one another.

“This is safe,” a man said. “We’ll stay here and pray.”

“Get the children!” a woman cried.

“What’s happening out there?” Another woman.

“Why do we have to go again?” A child.

“Take his boots, Maddie! He don’t need them anymore!”

“You fucking come near me I’ll cut you open!”

“You don’t understand—we need to run! I heard them say it!”

“Pray to who? No one’s fucking listening!”

“I can’t find my son! Has anyone seen my son?”

“Someone is coming that wants to kill us all.”

“He’s got gold—should I take that too?”

“Aaah! Aaah!”

“Don’t! Please!”

“Go! Run and don’t look back!”

Whimsby lowered his receptors again. If he had an epidermis, it would be covered in chills. If he had a heart, it would be pounding. If he had a stomach, it would be sick and hollow.

He had none of those things, and yet he still felt a great, aching sadness coming from someplace that made no sense to him. It could not have come from his core processor—it had no tactile receptors, and this was a very physical feeling. And yet it seemed to come from the center of him, right around where his core processor sat.

If he had a subconscious, it’s what would have animated his hand to reach up and touch that glowing orb in the center of him that Bren had sacrificed. But he had no subconscious. So why had his limbs moved seemingly of their own volition?

“Whimsby?” Sagum said, his voice quiet compared to the arguments still frothing all around them.

Whimsby looked at him. Felt his own face contort into an expression that he had not decided to make. Expressions were for the ease of communication—mechanical men had to make them to put humans at ease, and they were employed strategically. Except for now. This was not an expression that Whimsby had chosen to make. And it certainly did not seem to put Sagum at ease.

It was an expression that seemed to come all on its own. As though Whimsby could not control it.

“Yes?” He said, his voice modulator displaying calm, despite the fact that Whimsby did not feel calm at all. At least it seemed he could control that, though it still troubled him that he was feeling things at all. He had never not been calm and self-assured. This was a first for him.

“Is Perry still alive?” Sagum asked.

For some reason, though he didn’t say it loudly, the others fell into a hush. Sagum’s question had speared through their petty disagreements and forced their attention over to Whimsby.

Whimsby nodded. “Yes. I believe he is. Though…something is wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

Whimsby looked west again. Turned up his auditory receptors again. Just in time to perceive a massive blast, far greater than the others, and in it, a wail, a venomous screech, that matched Perry’s unique vocal characteristics, but was so, so wrong at the same time.

It was the sound of a man gripped with terror. And the sound of a man wild with bloodlust. And the sound of a man who has lost everything and stands completely alone. And the sound of a man who wants to murder.

“I don’t know,” Whimsby admitted. “He’s definitely alive. But…he is not himself.”

“I don’t understand,” Sagum said, taking a step forward.

“I don’t understand either,” Whimsby said. “He’s…”

Alone.

A thought. Unbidden. Uncalculated.

How strange. Is this what it was like to be human? To exist with a muddle of conflicted thoughts, so very little actually making sense? No wonder humans were such unpredictable creatures. Their minds were beset with both pressures and vacuums, constantly pushing and pulling them in random directions.

“How long do we have?” Mordicus asked, his voice harsh. Pragmatic.

Whimsby didn’t know. Found that he didn’t really feel like answering that question. Another oddity. Perhaps by programming, or perhaps by force of habit—was he a victim of habit now too?—he’d always been compelled to answer what he was asked. Now he simply didn’t want to answer, and so chose not to.

Choice.

Whimsby knew what Bren had done for him. Not just the sacrifice of his parts to bring Whimsby back, but how he had organized Whimsby’s memories. He’d created an algorithm that organized them according to the presence of an anomaly. Perhaps Bren hadn’t understood what that anomaly was, only recognized the correlation between its presence and the proper chronology of those memories.

Whimsby saw that anomaly now. Saw its peak. The moment when it had reached its fullness. And that moment was a memory.

Standing in Praesidium, facing down Perry and Stuber.

Now free will? Stuber had said. That’s another thing entirely, isn’t it? Because that’s really the difference between something that lives and thinks for itself…and a machine that does what it’s told.

Then you’ll be one of us, Perry had said. You’ll be a part of something bigger than just programming.

Help us, he’d said. Show us that you’re a man.

And Whimsby had made a choice. He had exercised free will. And everything after that had been an anomaly. Everything after that had been…human.

Choice, Whimsby thought. His core processor more than just a processor now. More than just the sum of its parts. Something else happening in there. Something beyond just the mimickry of the human brain in the artificial circuits that acted as synapses. Because the human brain is also more than just the sum of its parts. It holds something else in it, something that cannot be measured, or quantified, or calculated. And that thing is choice. Free will. That is what thinking is. That is what humanity is. That is the commonality that binds them all together.

And me?

Yes. Me as well.

“I am a man,” Whimsby said, the words coming out of his vocal modulator before he really had time to calculate what affects they might have, what consequences they might draw.

He found himself looking to the others to find that out. Studying their faces to guage its affect.

They seemed confused.

“I am a human,” Whimsby clarified, though, again, he wasn’t really sure of what he was saying. It seemed he was speaking and thinking at the same time. He looked to Sagum. “You’re a human.” And then to Mordicus. “You’re a human. And you, Teran. And you, Stuber. Petra.” Finally, his gaze landing on Mala and Lux. “And even you.”

“Whimsby,” Mordicus said, as though naming the mechanical man was a painful thing for him to do.

“I wasn’t finished,” Whimsby snapped. How odd. “We may not look the same. We may not even be built the same. Some of us have different abilities than others. But what is the one thing that we all have?”

“Free will,” Stuber said, as though he could somehow sense Whimsby’s thoughts.

Whimsby smiled at the big legionnaire. What was this new sensation? A connection. A sharing. An agreement. Two minds thinking alike. What a wonderful feeling that was. It was the antithesis of being alone.

Alone.

“Yes, Stuber,” Whimsby nodded. “Free will. We think. We weigh a thousand options. We try to peer into the future and ascertain what might happen when we make certain choices, but it’s all a muddy mess, because every choice affects everyone else, and all their choices affect yours.” What am I saying? I’m not entirely sure. Best just to keep saying it, perhaps. “We all think we’re solitary creatures, but we’re not. We’re all bits and pieces of one big organism called humanity, bound by our choices, and the affect of our choices on one another.”

Was it true? It seemed true. The math added up. In fact, the more that Whimsby said, the more sure he became that he was articulating reality.

“The most terrible thing that a human can experience is to be cut off from that organism. And the greatest sacrifice that a human can make is to freely choose to be cut off, in order to preserve the other members. I have only been human for a short time, but it seems a most powerful thing. Powerful in ways that I cannot really describe. A single, solitary sacrifice carries this weight that I can feel, but cannot measure. But does one have to face it alone? Doesn’t it seem like that is the strength of humanity? To stand as one?”

Mordicus bared his teeth. “You want us to go out and fight and die alongside Perry? For what? To show solidarity?”

“To fight and die? No, that would be pointless, I think. To show solidarity?” Whimsby considered it for a moment, and, just as everything else that he was experiencing now, he couldn’t quite force any logic out of it. It defied logic. And yet it was true anyways. “Yes. To show solidarity.”

He tuned up his receptors again, but now could hear nothing but the rabble of the people in Karapalida. He could not hear Perry. No more screams. No more explosions.

“Perry made a choice. A powerful choice because it was done freely. I do not think that we can save him. But…” How to explain this? If only he’d been human for a little while longer, he might have a better grasp on some of these intangible concepts. “I am afraid for him to lose his humanity. I am afraid for him to be alone when he dies. I feel like that would be…” He grimaced at his own lack of adequate vocabulary. Went with the simplest word. A little crass, but true all the same.

“Shitty.” Whimsby looked about at his friends. “And I’m afraid of being a shitty human.”

***

“A man shouldn’t have to die alone.”

The words came out of Stuber, and he realized he was making a decision along with them. Another one of his big, terrible decisions. But also the right one. Unfortunately, that’s just a fact of life: Sometimes the right decision is the worst.

“No one should have to die alone,” Stuber repeated, looking sideways at his wife and finding her hand with a few of his fingers. Her palm was cold. Tight as it gripped him back. Her eyes strong, but the emotion behind them grievous. He had to look away from it. Had to explain himself better.

“I wouldn’t let my worst enemy die alone,” he murmured. “Used to go about the battlefield after the fight was over and give them The Mercy. Did it when I was on Boss Hauten’s crew too. There’s something wrong about leaving someone to die alone. I wouldn’t let an enemy die alone. How can I let a friend?”

“You’re all mad with emotion,” Mordicus growled. “This action will amount to nothing. You’re not going to change a damn thing. Only run the risk of getting killed yourselves.”

“No,” Whimsby said, shaking his head, sounding calm, though the look on his face was alight with a feverish sort of certainty. “You’re wrong about it amounting to nothing. There’s more to this than wins and losses. There’s something to prove. To myself. To Perry. To the Nine.”

“What?” Mordicus nearly shouted, whirling on the mech. “What do you think you’re going to prove?”

“To myself? That I can be a good human. To Perry? That he is not alone. And to the Nine? That no matter what they do, no matter how many of us they subjugate or kill, and no matter how cruel they are, their vengeance will never be complete. Because they can’t stop us from being human. They can beat us down and kill us, but they can never take away our ability to make a choice. That is the thing that makes us human, and that is the thing that they can never have. And because of that, they’ll never truly own us. They’ll never truly be our gods.” He smiled, as though he’d figured something out. “And it will turn all their actions, all their malevolent dreams, to dust in their mouths.”

Stuber nodded, feeling his heart beating inside of him in a way he hadn’t felt in a long time. It was the fight that he always craved. This time not a battle of strength, but one of willpower. Of defiance.

“Fuck ‘em,” Stuber grunted. He looked at Petra, squeezing her hand back. She didn’t seem to want to let him go. But maybe she saw the light in his eyes. Maybe she saw him coming back alive.

Subjugation was anathema to him. Its seeming inevitability had wounded something deep within him, so badly that he’d thought it was dead. Maybe she’d seen it, though she’d never commented on it. And maybe she saw it come back to life now. And she wanted him to have that.

Godsdammit, but she was a far better woman than he deserved.

Slowly, her grip on his hand let up. And then her fingers slipped out of his.

She gave him the tiniest of nods. Then looked away.

Stuber stepped forward to stand beside Whimsby. “I’m going with you. Just as much my friend out there as yours. And I won’t let him die alone. And I want those arrogant fucks to see me.” A savage grin spread across his face. “I want to spoil their victory.”

Whimsby positively beamed. Then, with some reticence. “It’s a long way off. We’ll never make it on foot before…” he didn’t state the obvious. He looked instead to Teran. “I know that you wanted to use the skiff to help evacuate, but—”

“Ah, fuck it,” Teran suddenly belted out. “I can’t do this. I can’t leave him. And skiff’s only got a handful of miles left on it anyways. Probably wouldn’t have even gotten us back to the caves.”

Lux shot forward. “I’ll go.” A glance back at Mala. “We’ll go. Won’t we?”

Mala grimaced, hands wringing the hell out of her longstaff. “Still don’t fancy being thought of as human. But Stuber’s right. Fuck ‘em. Let them see they can’t force us to our knees. I’ll stand.”

“You’ve all gotten carried away by a mech that fancies himself a man.” Mordicus sneered at them, shaking his head.

Stuber blew a rude raspberry. “Then kneel, if you wish, Legatus Mordicus. I seem to remember a pile of priests that you hung because you claimed not to have a god. But maybe your defiance only extends to a bunch of sad old men who couldn’t defend themselves.” And before Mordicus could respond, Stuber grabbed Whimsby’s shoulder in one hand, and Teran’s in the other, and moved them away from more bullshit arguments.

“Let’s go. I’d hate to not be there when Shortstack gets himself killed.”

***

Legatus Mordicus would never have admitted it, but he was shaken straight down to his core.

Shaken, straight through his limbs, so that he had to ball his fists and clench his jaw to keep it from being evident. Part of it was an old commander’s indignation at being spoken to so flippantly. You go so long without anyone talking back to you, when someone like that asshole Stuber comes along and mouths off at you, not giving one sloppy shit for your rank and experience, it detonates a tiny little charge of self-righteous anger in your brain.

But one thing that Mordicus had that other commanders—like that cock Gaius—had totally lost, was a recollection that, despite how their men might view them, they were not, in fact, minor deities.

Mordicus was a good commander. That wasn’t just pride. That was fact. He cared for his men. He looked out for them. Partly because that was what he knew a good commander did. And partly because he genuinely loved them. That’s why they called him Daddy Mordicus.

And you can’t be that way and still be a complete narcissist.

You have to be willing to listen, even when the words strike hard and sharp. You have to be willing to self-evaluate. You have to maintain some sense of introspection, or you’ll go off the deep end and start really believing what your men think about you: That you’re infallible.

Mordicus knew he wasn’t infallible. And that tiny bit of him that he’d preserved—with great effort, mind you—was what stilled his anger from lashing out at Stuber as he swooped his little pack of friends up and marched them off to their probable demise.

That’s why Stuber’s words actually lodged themselves in Mordicus’s brain like little slivers of shrapnel. Like a stone caught in your boot that won’t stop jabbing at your heel.

But…

You can’t be a good commander without a tiny bit of narcissism. You do, after all, have to believe in yourself, right up to the line of what others might call hubris.

So, while he possessed enough introspection to let the words get past his barricades of self-assuredness, they also poked at him hard enough to rile up a bit of spite.

“You idiots want to die for some fantasy, I won’t stop you!” he shouted at their backs. Not that he could stop them.

They didn’t respond. Just kept walking away.

His eyes jagged to the doctor named Petra. She was giving him a strange, pitying look that he didn’t at all care for.

You’re blustering. Good commanders don’t bluster.

But he’d never been so flagrantly defied. It was putting him off-balance.

He huffed and grumbled, trying to find the proper footing for this strange and never-before encountered situation.

Petra turned and began to walk away.

Mordicus really couldn’t help himself. “Abandoned by your husband again, huh?” he shot at her back.

Why? He couldn’t even really explain it. Maybe he wanted her to fall into his arms and weep about it so he could rebuild some semblance of self-sanctity. So he could feel right about the whole damn debacle.

She stopped. Her shoulders drew up. And for a flash, Mordicus was ashamed of himself, and yet hopeful all the same, that the tightening of those shoulders was the beginning of a sob.

She turned. Eyes dry. Expression calm. No sobs forthcoming.

“Abandoned?” She asked, with a quirk of the brow. “Is it abandonment when your duties simply lead in separate directions?” She stepped towards him, waving a hand behind her. “There are still many wounded. My duty is to them. My husband has other duties.”

She stopped, right in front of Mordicus, somehow making him feel small, the way her cool blue eyes took a pitiless measurement of him. A downturn of her mouth at finding him somewhat lacking.

“He may be brash and violent,” she said, tilting her chin up. “He may drink too much and be too quick to fight. But he does not turn his back on those that need him, and for that I am proud.”

She leaned in close to Mordicus. Close enough that he could smell her. She lowered her voice, as though she did not want anyone else to hear. As though she was cutting him down, but didn’t want to undermine him in front of the pack of legionnaires that hovered a few yards behind them.

“At least he knows how to be a human. I had feared that the legions had beaten that out of him long ago.” That pitying smile again. She laid a gentle hand upon his armored spaulder. “But I suppose you’ve been in the legions far longer.”

Pat-pat went her gentle hand. Dismissive as a mother to a child wailing about their skinned knee. Then she turned away from him again.

Got about two paces away before Mordicus vomited more bitter words at her back.

“And what about you? Don’t you need him? Didn’t he turn his back on you?”

She stopped once again, turning bemused eyes on Mordicus that made him feel small and shallow. “I love my husband, Legatus Mordicus. But I’ve learned to function perfectly fine without him, thank you very much. If I’m being honest about it, I am a healer, and my husband is a killer. I’ve recently learned it’s best if he stays away from my patients.”

And then she really did leave him, and Mordicus couldn’t think of anything else to say.

He grumbled and growled and turned brusquely away to face the gaggle of centurions watching him. He didn’t care for the way they were looking at him either.

Primus help me, I’ve revealed my petulant side.

And he didn’t feel particularly proud about it.

“What?” he demanded, raising his arms. “What am I to do about this? Run off and make a terrible strategic error, just to prove a fucking point? There’s no point to prove!”

The centurions, his underlings, the men that commanded his cohorts, they let their eyes slip away from Mordicus. Traded a bunch of cautious glances amongst them. Clearly they disagreed, but they didn’t want to outright say it.

Mordicus strode towards them, eating up the space between in a couple of stomps. “You have something to say, then say it. No point in holding back now.” He put his hands on his hips and glared at them in a most unwelcome manner, every ounce of his body language contradicting the words he was saying. “Speak freely.”

One of the centurions shuffled a bit. Scratched at his neck. Sent a glance at Mordicus that ricocheted off. “Well, sir…seems the paladins abandoned us when the Nine got loose.”

A murmur of assent from the others.

“Seems we cuts off our sagums,” he continued, cautiously. “To prove a point. Seems we called ourselves The Faithless. To prove a point. Seems we hung a lot of flamens, also to prove a point. Seems we did a lot of things to prove a point about how we weren’t gonna kneel to gods no more.”

One of the others nodded along. A stocky beast of a man a bit too old to be a centurion, but he’d refused promotions, as Mordicus recalled. “It’s true. If I’m speaking freely, Legatus Mordicus, I felt a little bad about making all them flamens dangle. But then I liked not submitting to some bullshit gods that didn’t care about us. I liked defying them, after all the boys I’ve sent to die on their behalf. Be a shame to kneel to them now.”

The first centurion nodded along with the second. “Seems we made a stand, legatus.” His eyes flicking up again, apologetic. “A good stand, mind you. A strong decision on your part.”

A chorus of affirmation, everyone trying to ease the pain of the fact that they were completely opposed to their commander.

“You’ve never led us wrong,” the first centurion continued. “And I think it was the right thing to do, making a stand and all that. It meant something fierce to me. Can’t speak for every man, but I think by and large, it meant something to them as well.”

Another murmur of assent from the others.

“Tricky thing about making stands, though,” the second centurion put in, eyeing Mordicus from under his iron-gray brows. “It smacks of bullshit if you don’t see it through. Makes all the dead priests seem a waste. All the cutting off of our sagums, which we earned with our blood and sweat. You’re gonna make a stand like that, you gotta never back down from it.”

“It’s true,” a third, more junior centurion said, perhaps a little emboldened by his peers. Perhaps a little emboldened by Mordicus’s silence. “You back down from a stand like that, you make it feel like the people that you took the stand against won. And you know legionnaires—we don’t like to lose.”

“True,” said the first. “No one likes to have their bluff called. Makes ‘em look weak. That’s why you gotta keep pushing all your chips in and take it to the end. You wind up losing, well, at least you don’t look like a fucking pussy.”

“Was it?” the junior centurion asked, looking at Mordicus, painfully plaintive. “Was it just a bluff?”

The older centurion rounded on his peer, casting deathly glares at him and jabbing a knife-hand into his chest. “Daddy Mordicus don’t make bluffs! Now, I’ve seen him bet big on small chances, but I never once seen him bluff!” He turned to Mordicus, still with his hand spearing the younger centurion’s chest. “Ain’t that right, legatus?”

Well then.

Hard to argue with the loyalty of men like these. Men that looked up to him the way that they did. Men that saw him as infallible. Sure, he knew he wasn’t. Every man is fallible, no matter how many self-important ribbons he pins on his chestplate.

But if Mordicus had learned one thing in a lifetime of leading legionnaires, it was that faith is a delicate thing. Takes a lot of time to build. Doesn’t take much to topple it.

And really, what was he if he wasn’t Daddy Mordicus?

Just a bitter old man, angry with the world, angry with the gods, angry at the treatment of his men, the wastage of their lives for a war that never meant anything. He’d taken a stand against it. And yes. It had all been to prove a point.

Mordicus cleared his throat. Found it sticky and unpleasant. Hid it behind another ornery growl. “No, godsdammit. I don’t make bluffs.”

The older centurion beamed out a smile. Assured now in his faith. “Never doubted you, sir. Not for an instant. You’ve never led us wrong.”

“Enough of that bullshit,” Mordicus coughed out manfully. “If there’s a point to be made, no one makes it better than my men. Can’t let that gagglefuck of civilians and wannabe gods make the point for us.”

“That’s an excellent point, sir,” the first centurion concurred.

Mordicus held up a finger. “No man has to make a point that he don’t want to make. Am I clear on that? I won’t force any one of my boys to take this stand if he’s against it. I’ll make it my godsdamned self, if nothing else.”

“Oh, no, sir,” the older centurion said, chest swelling. “I intend to make a fucking point, too. The more points made, the pointier the points become.”

“We still got three working transports,” the junior centurion added.

Mordicus nodded. “Good. Get them moving. Let’s show these motherfuckers that we don’t back down for nothing.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

MADNESS AND CHAOS

There was no red left in the flow. Only green.

Perry was consumed by it. He’d drowned in it, and now it had permeated nearly every part of him. All but a tiny redoubt of sanity, clinging to the vestiges of his mind like a man might cling to a high rock while the floodwaters rise all around him.

This isn’t you! That remnant of himself cried out. This is THEM!

But it was difficult to care about such minor delineations. Difficult to see the truth anymore. Difficult to differentiate between friend and foe. In fact, he was possessed of a growing certainty that he had no friends—only enemies.

All the lies, all the deceit. The way the people he’d known had played him his entire life. Used him. Sneered down their noses at him. Shortstack, they’d called him. Runt. Halfbreed. Only calling him by his name when it suited them into manipulating him into doing what they wanted him to do.

He’d been born surrounded by enemies.

And there was a rush of dark satisfaction that they’d all underestimated him, hadn’t they? Oh yes, they had, but their time was coming to see the truth.

Seething, twitching, spitting through clenched teeth so the saliva slapped wetly against his lips and chin, he glared across the twice-scorched earth that he’d created—scorched once by the gods, and again by him. The dust of centuries now a cracked and frazzled mess of super-heated rock.

The Nine. All standing there watching him. More enemies, just like all the rest. Batu, in particular. Batu, the forebear of Mala and her pack of cronies. How had he ever trusted that cunt? Tricksters, the whole lot of them. Deserving of nothing but his scorn. Deserving nothing but annihilation.

But Batu was the one right in front of him now. And all that rage focused to a pinpoint on that tall figure.

“You!” Perry snarled, breaking into a run, and then finding that too slow, and launching himself head-first at Batu, streaking across the ground. No plan for what to do when he got there, only to smash into him, only to relieve this explosive pressure that was constantly building in him and did not seem to abate, no matter how much he unleashed it.

More. That was all Perry wanted. More release.

Batu shot skyward.

Perry slashed through the dirt like a dog scrabbling to stay on the tail of a rabbit. Sent a wave of it pouring into the other Nine. Then launched himself after Batu, heedless of the ones he was leaving behind. It didn’t matter anyways. None of it mattered. Only madness now.

Up. Up.

Batu’s figure, distant with altitude, tearing through the sky, ripping through the clouds and leaving holes in the vapor behind him. A shockwave slammed through Perry, both painful and harmless—he couldn’t be touched by physical things now. The rumble of thunder as both he and Batu broke the sound barrier, evaporating the clouds around them.

Batu pulled up short, and Perry slammed into him like a meteor. A crash. A tumble. Bones broken that immediately knit back together with the power of Confluence radiating through every cell in his body.

Perry was locked in with him now. Touching that beast for the first time, and there was no room left for fear of it, for awe at the size and strength of the spectacular being. Perry didn’t bother trying to fry him with energy—that was pointless at this juncture.

No, Perry was going to rip him apart.

Growling savagely, Perry speared an iron hand straight into the crack between the reticulated plates of Batu’s chest, and felt an infinite vindication at hearing a grunt of pain. He latched onto the plate and ripped at it, wanted to rip it free, wanted to expose the beating heart inside, if Batu even had one.

He didn’t get the chance.

A massive pulse, like an invisible wall, slammed into Perry, thrusting him back off of Batu, tumbling through the air. He felt his skull, his face, his chest, his ribs—all of them shattered and then healed in an instant.

Perry righted himself in the air, the clouds far below his feet, the curvature of the earth apparent now, the sun blazing hot on his skin—or perhaps that was the Confluence. He roared, tried to launch himself at Batu again, but Batu’s outstretched hands suddenly clenched, and the wall of energy now cinched around him tight, like the coils of a massive snake.

Perry was a fast learner. That was one of his best qualities in a fight. And even as the field of energy threatened to crush him, he brought his own hands together, projecting his own energy onto Batu, trying to crush him in return.

Green light pulsed out of Batu. Perry felt it buffeting against his invisible grip on Batu. Perry’s own vision turned black, and then green, and he realized his own skin was glowing, repulsing Batu’s attempts to crush him.

A stalemate, then.

That tiny background voice, like a gnat in Perry’s ear: Look at your arms…

Slavering like an animal in a trap, Perry glared down at his own limbs. Sections of his shirtsleeves had burned away to scorched tatters. The flesh beneath had cracked into sections. Gray skin that looked more like armor plating. Green light searing from between the cracks.

Look what they’ve done to you!

But it didn’t raise one speck of caution in him. Only made him angrier.

“Look around you!” Batu hissed, the two of them, rotating around each other in midair, as though they were tethered to some central pivoting point. “Look at this pathetic world, Perry!”

Perry.

Because no one ever used his real name unless they wanted something out of him.

“Look at all the people,” Batu raged on. “Weak and untrustworthy! Naggling, manipulative, self-righteous, self-pitying creatures! Do you know what they did to us, Perry? To me and my brothers? Now there’s a tale that’s never been told by all those lying tongues down below. Do you know what they did to us?”

“I don’t fucking care!” Perry strangled out, still fighting against the enormous crushing power, and trying to give it right back.

Batu ignored him. “They tried to use us. They saw us as weapons. All the little peons down below, they could never think of anything but how to kill each other. And they tried to use me and my brothers to do it. Tried to manipulate us into fighting for them, into killing their enemies, into being their tools of destruction! As though we were their slaves. As though they owned us.”

The coils that bound Perry suddenly moved, spun Perry around, seemed to grasp his head in ghostly, steel fingers, forcing his gaze down to the earth below. Down to the scorched wastelands. Down to the little blob of darkness in all that pale dust—Karapalida. A city crammed full of reckless, helpless, conniving, backbiting peons…

“They did to us the very same thing that they’ve done to you, Perry,” Batu said, his voice sounding closer, as though he were creeping up to Perry’s shoulder. And Perry found himself transfixed by the city below. Obsessed with it. With the vision that roiled through his head.

Of wiping it out. Of burning it off the face of the earth.

Look at what you’ve done to me! his thoughts railed at the creatures below that couldn’t hear him.

“They tried to make us fight, just like they tried to make you fight,” Batu went on, his presence so close, his breath like a hot gust against the back of Perry’s neck. “They tried to manipulate us. That’s all they ever do. They don’t understand their own weakness. They don’t understand that they can’t control everything. They don’t understand that some things are beyond their command. But we showed them. Oh, we showed them.”

And Perry saw it all. Like memories being piped directly into his head. Memories that were not his own, but felt like it anyways. Because he knew the pain, the rage, the madness, embedded into those memories…

A great swath of cities. Rich cities. Opulent people. Like the East Ruins, before it had been doomed. Weak people, made weaker by their own lusts, and infighting, and self-centered natures.

Wiped out.

The Nine, hovering high in the sky, burning it all to nothingness. Turning entire populations to ash. Turning entire cities to seas of glass.

“We destroyed the earth,” Batu whispered. “We incinerated the people. We turned the plains into the Wastelands, and the great works of humankind to the Glass Flats. We punished them. For their pride. For their petty natures. For trying to use us.” Closer. Hotter. Quiter. Intimate. Violent. “Just like they used you. Just like they convinced you that you had to come stop us to save them. They don’t care about what happens to you, Perry. They only care about their own pathetic lives, and they’ll use and destroy the very soul of anyone that they think might give them even one more day to keep killing, and fighting, and arguing, and breeding. Oh, Perry. Look at what they’ve done to you.”

And Perry felt himself turning towards Batu. But it wasn’t his own eyes that he was seeing with. He was seeing himself through Batu’s eyes.

Hair burned to the scalp. Features contorted with rage. Flesh turned to reticulated plates. Eyes without pupils, burning green. Burning with hatred. Burning with malice.

“You don’t have to let them use you,” Batu said.

The vision vanished. Perry was looking at Batu’s face with his own eyes now. But it wasn’t all that different, was it?

“You don’t have to be a pawn for the humans. You’re better than them. Stronger than them. You’re just like us now. And it’s their fault.”

Hard to see the truth. Hard to see any difference between friend and foe.

Everyone was an enemy to Perry. They all wanted him dead, or at the very least, had a hand in trying to kill him, overtly, or through their general apathy. Through their unwillingness to work together when he had fucking begged them to do so. Through the systems of oppression that they’d created and maintained and propogated, all the while crying that they were the victims, but they wouldn’t lift a finger to fight back. No, they left that to him. Because they didn’t care if he lived or died. They only cared about themselves.

But he couldn’t be killed. The Confluence wouldn’t let him die. He was stronger than them. What right did they have to live? After all that they’d done?

They all deserved what they got.

“Punish them!” Batu seethed.

The power bucked inside of Perry, as though trying to get out. Hard to control. He wanted to release it. He wanted to pour it out of him. He wanted to see that city down below turned to a sea of glass.

“Punish them!” Batu roared.

The field of energy gripping Perry released him.

He spun, feeling animated not by himself, but by the rotted form of Confluence now possessing him. The sliver of sanity recoiled, cried out in dismay. But Perry could let it die with the rest. It was only the vestiges of his human weakness. Just the sad, useless little part of him that had always allowed them to manipulate him.

He thrust his hands out, the city of Karapalida between those clawed fingers. A detonation of power inside of him. A shockwave of energy blasting out of the center of him.

Glass, was all he could think. Turn it all to glass!

Green light, pouring out of his fingertips, out of his palms, out of the cracks in his skin. Gathering in the center, hot and violent, starting to blot out the city below.

More! More!

He needed the release. He needed to loose it on them. He needed it.

A tiny speck, almost unseen through the building ball of death between his hands, streaking out of the west end of Karapalida.

Hesitation. A tiny throb of doubt, faltering the outpouring of energy, just long enough to let his eyes focus on that speck below, a wake of dust expanding behind it. The glimmer of sunlight across a streamlined metallic shape.

A skiff, he realized.

“Punish them!” Batu urged again. Something in that growling breath almost…desperate. As desperate as Perry’s own desire for destruction.

But the hesitation had built to a full stop. The weak human in him still held some remnant of sway over his actions. Forcing a spark of curiosity out of him that glowed brightly in the midst of all that dark, consuming power.

Perry’s eyes did a strange thing. He felt it, in the back of his sockets. Like a pressure. Rods and cones and lenses reforming in an instant, causing his vision to blur at the edges, but zoom into an incredible focus in the center, as though someone had held a telescope to his eyes.

A skiff. Filled with people.

Rotten, backstabbing, manipulative, self-serving—

Stuber’s face.

Somehow he saw it, dominating his vision as though he were standing right there with him. Stuber’s eyes were focused westward, squinted against the dust and wind, mouth flattened to a line. An expression that Perry had seen on him before.

The same expression he’d had when he’d watched the Guardians drop on Oksidado.

A deep, desperate concern.

For who?

For me?

The rage sputtered like a fire in a gale of wind. The ball of energy aimed at Karapalida flickered and shrank.

Teran. She was there too, just behind Stuber. Jagged worry all across her features. And Sagum beside her, and Whimsby beside him. And Mala and Lux, standing just behind. All of them huddled at the front of the skiff. All of them staring into the west. All of them looking stricken.

Stricken for what? Stricken for whom?

Why weren’t they running? Why weren’t they hiding? Why weren’t they using Perry to get away? Why were they charging out into danger, when Perry had expressly told them to flee while he held the Nine off?

Those stupid fucking peons! Perry raged, and he wasn’t sure whether that came from the corruption taking over his brain, or from that slice of humanity that was left. Why didn’t they listen to me?! Why aren’t they doing what I told them to do?!

“Punish them!” Batu screamed in his ear. A sound blast like a deep, basal tone issued from loudspeakers in Perry’s brain.

Perry flinched against that wave of sound—eardrums rupturing, then reforming again. His hands twitched. Clenched into fists. The ball of green light between them fizzling out like smoke.

“They’re looking for me,” Perry husked.

Then a wall of energy slammed into him again, sent him spinning on shattered bones and torn ligaments, flopping through the air for a second before everything healed itself again. Sky and earth rolled rapidly in his vision, and the dark shape of Batu amidst the white clouds—eyes seering hot, great plated teeth clenched in fury, one arm outstretched, green light coursing down it.

“NO!” Perry screamed, righting himself in the air.

Too late.

A blast of energy ripped through the clouds, streaked down towards the earth, and Perry could do nothing to stop it, could do nothing but jerk his head and see the terminal point of that blast.

Where there once had been a skiff, the wake of dust that marked its path still settling, there was only a smoking crater.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

TRUTH AND LIES

Perry hit the ground running. Sprinting. Numb all over. The pounding of his legs insensate. The world jumping in his vision. All of it distilled down to one point of focus: the black smoke pouring from a crater the size of a city block.

Debris all around. A hundred tiny meteorites made of bits and pieces of the skiff, scattered in a wide ring. Movement off to his right: Mala and Lux, staggering to their feet, flung a hundred yards from the center of the blast. Shields shimmering around them, but looking shell-shocked just the same. They stared at him as though they didn’t recognize him.

Focus back forward.

A glimmer of blue light in a pile of dust and twisted metal.

He skidded to a stop, staring down in horror, breath searing his throat as dry as the wastelands. He tried to speak but couldn’t. His throat was clamped shut with dust. With terror. With guilt. What had he done? What had he let happen?

Whimsby stared up at him, his body an unspeakable wreck. Just a torso, with its glowing blue core processor, an arm, and Whimsby’s head. The rest of him terminating in shredded wiring and twitching servos and rent steel.

Whimsby’s head came up, a frown crossing over his face—half of the flesh-like substrate ripped from it, so that just his expressive eyes stared up, so human-like, above a jaw avulsed to bare metal.

“Perry,” Whimsby said, his voice containing a weird, feedback-filled warble. “What happened to you?” But then, before Perry could even struggle through finding an answer, Whimsby’s one remaining arm jerked, fingers stripped to metallic bone pointing away. “The others...”

What did you do? The humanity shrieked inside of Perry.

He took off running again, stricken and split down the center of himself. Fearing for Whimsby. But knowing that Whimsby could be put back together again. Human flesh and bone was not so resilient.

What did you do?

Running. Eyes searching desperately through the wreckage for anything that looked like a person. His mind felt like it was shearing apart. Thoughts coming in jumbles of nonsensical chaos.

The ground shuddered beneath his pounding feet. He barely registered it, but knew in the back of his mind that Batu had come back to the earth. The Nine were behind him. And he knew that they were watching. He felt their attentions on him. Felt their hatred. And their sick satisfaction. They would be content to watch for a time. To watch Perry run himself ragged. To watch the effects of what they’d produced. Because they reveled in it. The misery and death. That’s all they were—beings of death.

There never had been a Giver of Strength, or a Giver of Wisdom. There had only ever been one Giver, and he had been the Giver of Confluence. The Giver of Death.

They had become Death themselves, and Death was all they craved.

What did you do?

An arm. Large. Muscular. Nothing attached to it. Skin blackened with char. Blood sprayed bright and shocking across the thirsty ground. Ground so dead that no amount of blood would ever bring it back to life.

“No,” the first word that Perry was able to eke out.

He bent. Grabbed the arm by the wrist. Specks of grit. Bits of burnt flesh. Still warm.

His own hand—gray plates where his skin used to be. No glow of green Confluence shimmering from the cracks anymore. It had all receded from him like a destructive tidal wave going back out to sea, leaving only wreckage in its wake.

He staggered on, still clutching the arm in his grip.

“Perry!” Mala’s voice, close by.

He didn’t bother looking over his shoulder. Knew she and Lux were chasing after him.

“Teran!” Perry shouted back, voice hoarse and cracking. “Sagum! Find them!”

But what could they possibly find but pieces?

A voice like thunder in the distance, chasing at his heels: “What have you done, little god? Have you killed all your little friends?”

But YOU killed them! He thought, but didn’t have the breath or the gumption to say. What point was there in speaking with the deathly beings behind him? All they did was destroy, and tear apart, and lie.

Lies. They’re full of lies.

He registered Mala, out of the corner of his eye, stopping over a pile of something that had once been human. “Teran!” was all that Mala called out. Was she yelling at Teran’s body? Or was she yelling at Perry that she’d found Teran? Did it make a difference?

Death and lies.

Lux, on the other side of Perry, perhaps twenty yards off: “I found Sagum! Primus help me…”

“You’ve killed everyone you’ve ever cared about.” Was that Batu’s voice, or his own mind? Difficult to tell the difference. Just as difficult as it had been to tell friends from enemies, only moments ago. But that was just madness, wasn’t it? That was just the madness of lies and death, death and lies.

He did have friends.

He’d had friends.

Perry found him. Lying face down. Missing the very arm that Perry held in his grip. Face mushed into a pile of dust. Dirt turned to red mud where his arm had been. Torso blown open. Everything that was supposed to be inside of a man, now outside.

“Stuber.” His mouth made the words, but he couldn’t tell if he’d actually managed a sound. He couldn’t hear anymore. His senses had left him. Imploded on him. Gone inwards, so that all he knew was the feeling like his guts were being ripped out.

He thrust Stuber’s arm back where it belonged. Tried to roll the body, but his fingers lacked the sensation to grab. Just slid around. Grit, and sweat, and blood.

He felt nothing when his knees hit the ground. Close enough now to smell Stuber. Smell the burned flesh. The blood. The bowels. The ugliness of death, a thing he’d witnessed so many other times, but never like this.

He kept expecting Stuber to open his eyes, say something brave. Brag about how a missing arm was nothing to him. Say something about how he could just pack his guts back in where they belonged. Just scratches.

Say something, Stuber. Say one of your annoying jokes about how fucking tough you are.

Toughness didn’t matter any more. Toughness has limits.

Death waits in the wings, and you never know when it’s going to descend on you.

Death and lies. Lies and Death.

But who was lying? Niva or Batu? They were as diametrically opposed as life and death. They could not both be lying, just as life had no party with death. And Batu was Death. Death and lies. That much Perry knew…

“Stuber,” he said—actually heard himself say it this time.

And why was Perry thinking all of these things as he stared at his dead friend? He didn’t know. Could only feel the thoughts swirling around him. Could only perceive something there. Something he kept trying to grasp, kept trying to make sense of. Some key that would explain things. Some sense of truth in the madness.

Niva or Batu? Life or Death?

Confluence. The flow of red that lived down inside of him. No longer red, though. Corrupted now. Turned to something different. Gone mad. Something that had once been good, now rotted and foul. Something that had once been true, now turned to lies. Life turned to death. Truth turned to lies. Friends turned to enemies.

I only ever wanted to be your friend. Stuber had said that once to him. When he’d been drunk, of course. Overly-truthful.

He’d come out to find Perry. He’d made a decision, and damned the consequences. Because he was Perry’s friend.

That was true. That was truth.

He grasped it. Like flailing in dark waters, and landing your hand upon a rope. A tether. Something to save you. Like he’d thrashed in the dark waters of the underground river, and felt the oar that Stuber had thrust down at him.

Something to save you. Something to give you life.

Truth and life. Lies and death. Niva and Batu.

Confluence.

Which was neither. It was simply a flow. And that flow could be pushed one way or the other. It could be pushed with truth. Or it could be pushed with lies. It could be used to destroy, to turn cities to ash and landscapes to glass. Or it could knit your broken bones back together.

Because Confluence was just energy. It was not good or bad until you decided what to do with it. Decided with your own free will. Life or death. Truth or lies. Which way would the river flow? Which way would the wheel turn?

Whichever way you choose.

A blast from Batu hit him square in the center of his back. He jolted forward, bracing himself over Stuber’s dead body, his hands on either side of the big man’s torso, staring straight down at his head, face all mushed into dirt, crumbles of it caking his eyelids, dusting his eyelashes.

The energy poured straight into him. The flow of Confluence raged, and begat rage, all going one direction, picking him up again, that little surviving part of his humanity that clung to its redoubt, and sweeping it into the flow.

Perry gagged on his own rage like a gummy chunk of gristle caught in his throat. But all he saw was Stuber’s dead face, and the rage seemed impotent now, not so powerful, just lashing out at nothing. Just purposeless destruction.

Death begetting more death.

Perry groaned under the surge of power. Felt another beam of it strike him from one of the other Nine. And another. Then a third, and fourth, and then all of them, all of the Nine, slamming him with everything they had, all their anger, all their madness, all their torment. Rennok, Halan, Batu, Nur, Vitan, Verus, Annad, Annan, Chak—none of them with an ounce of pity, an ounce of mercy, an ounce of sanity between them all.

He heard Lux’s voice: “Perry!”

He thrust himself up so that he was sitting back on his heels, a monumental effort under the strain of all that dark energy being poured into him. He saw Lux trying to move towards him, saw Mala doing the same. He saw arms raise up in front of him—realized they were his own. He thrust his palms out to them, trying to tell them to stay, but the power jumped, surged, wanted to leap from his hands and destroy them.

NO.

Mala and Lux halted, mortified by what they saw, and Perry knew what they saw: A man become a beast. Perry, become just like the Sons of Primus, armor plated flesh, and rage teeming in the cracks, blazing from his eyes.

NO.

He tried to pull against the power that wanted to pour out of him, wanted to explode out of his chest, consume all, destroy all, immolate all, and leave nothing but ashes and glass. It bucked against his efforts.

CHOOSE

He strained to look down at his friend’s dead body, desperate to feel the grief that he’d felt only moments before because it was his only connection to sanity. It was a connection to the choice that he wanted to make, but it was slipping away, everything good and true blotted out in the blazing desire for destruction.

His eyes drew back to Karapalida.

Burn it down rake them with fire slam their works to glass he couldn’t tell whose thoughts were in his head. They were from him, and they were from the Nine, and they were from Death itself.

Billows of dust. Emerging from the horizon line. From where Karapalida was barely a shimmer in the distance. Watery shapes at the bottoms of those billows of dust. Several of them, all in a line. Black outlines of rollbars. Spinning tires. Men hanging from every handhold.

Enemies all enemies destroy them before they destroy you

NO.

He felt fire burning in his throat like vomit. His jaw urged to open wide, and he somehow knew that if he did, destruction would pour out of his mouth like a geyser and consume them all, all the little people in their pathetic vehicles racing across the wastelands to…

Racing across the wastelands to…

To what?

To me.

Enemies!

No.

Choices.

Perry dragged a leg up from the ground. Confluence filling every fiber of tissue with an inestimable power, and yet they were heavy as boulders, resisting his every move, because the power that filled him wanted one thing, and Perry, in the last little bit of himself, wanted something else.

He got that foot on the ground. Pressed with all his might. Got the other foot up.

Standing now. Standing under the deluge of Confluence from the Nine, like standing beneath a massive waterfall, millions of gallons of hatred pouring over him, willing him to unleash, to smite, to crush, to break, to avenge some offense that wasn’t quite clear.

Turning. Like trying to orient yourself in the face of a storm-surged river, pressing, pushing, tugging, willing you to go one direction while you fought for the other.

He faced them. The Nine. All of them standing there, shoulder to shoulder, all of them with their hands outstretched, all of them beaming their darkness into him in crackling pipelines of green.

Arms. Move them. Up. Up. Hands. Open them. Open your clenched fists.

Limbs that were not his own. Flesh that was not his own. Feelings and thoughts that were not his own.

Fingers opening.

And all of the sudden that flow of energy was caught between his hands, rapidly building, like he’d erected some impenetrable dam in the face of the torrential river. Everything the Nine had within them, pouring into one spot, pouring into one massive ball of energy that threatened to explode, to blot out all life on earth. Balanced precariously on the very tip of a thought.

Life. Truth. Sanity.

Or Death. Lies. Madness.

Two forces smashing into each other in a headlong collision. But it’s never been a battle between good and evil. It’s never been a battle between life and death. It’s never been about forces beyond your control.

It’s only ever been about a choice. Not which way the wheel would turn. But which way would you spin it? Which do you choose? That is, after all, the power of free will. And it’s the only fucking thing you’ve ever got.

I choose to believe Niva. I choose truth over lies. I choose life over death.

Perry opened his mouth and drew in a breath. The growing ball of destruction between his hands, now burning white-hot, began to flicker, to dim. Trails of it like steam, leaking out of the orb, and into his mouth. He sucked it all back in. He took what was given to him, and made it something different. He made a choice.

One river meeting another. Two flows, crashing into each other.

Confluence.

Which would win? Which would overpower the other?

Well. Perry had made his decision. And that’s all it ever comes down to.

Everything reversed. The outward became the inward. The press became a pull. The explosion became an implosion.

The flow of Confluence, that red tide that had turned green in his mind—green with madness and insanity—that had only ever flowed one direction for his entire life, because it was always the direction of anger and destruction…it stopped. And for the first time in Perry’s life, it began to flow the other way.

Not green anymore. Not red, either.

Sky blue.

And everything changed.

CHAPTER FOURTY

LIFE AND DEATH

Here? There? Everywhere? Otherwhere?

Underwear.

And where the hell was he?

None of the above, and all of the above, all at once.

He’d gone someplace. A place without borders. A place between realities. A place that he understood, but still couldn’t quite articulate in any logical way. There really wasn’t anything here. It was no place in particular, and all places at once. It held the infinite potential to be any place imaginable.

He was in the Otherwhere.

Hard to understand the infinite. But, like his sense of Confluence, his mind perceived it, and created an image to go along with it. So it seemed to simply be a blank canvas. Just whiteness. Nothing and everything all at once. It was anything that you thought it could be.

He wasn’t actually there. But he perceived himself as there. And in that perception, his body took a form in the Otherwhere. He looked down and found feet. So he used them to walk.

He was not really sure how long he walked. It didn’t really seem to matter. Time was only a perception of entropy, after all. Entropy being death. From which is spawned life. The never ending cycle of evolution, somersaulting its way through the universe. Couldn’t have life without death. But that was the key—life always won. It always adapted. Always turned the death of one thing into the creation of something new.

Anyways, all of that was neither here nor there, nor anywhere.

Nor was he really moving, because you can’t move in a place that isn’t physical.

Nevertheless, he found something that he hadn’t perceived before. Maybe he came upon it, or maybe it came upon him. Maybe it had been there the whole time and now he was just conscious of it.

Didn’t really matter.

And what was the thing? Hard to tell. There’s not a lot of context in a place of infinite potential. Or perhaps there’s just too much context to do anything with.

It was a little pinprick. A hole in the blank canvass of infinite potential. Or perhaps a shadow. Something from which the infiniteness of the potential had been filtered, in order to create something actual. A subtraction of the infinite, to create the finite. Like how a screen filters the light from a projector in order to make an image.

He knew that little pinprick. So he went into it.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

Perry blinked eyes that weren’t really there, and saw more. Here, inside the pinprick, there was darkness. Tangible darkness, though. So it didn’t seem entirely black. It had a texture. It had a certain reality to it. A seething, clenching, grasping, clawing reality.

“I’m not really sure,” Perry answered, though he didn’t have a mouth to speak, or ears to hear a voice, but he imagined them, so there they were. More subtraction. More finite from infinite.

The darkness surged against him. He pushed it away. Massive waves upon a massive cliff. They could only break and wash around him. It made the darkness angry. Or angrier. It was already angry. Furious, really. Enraged. Completely illogical. Vengeful. Spiteful. Prideful.

But, in the end, just a pinprick.

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

“Which are you?” Perry felt like he was frowning, a tad confused, but he didn’t have a forehead, so he made one up. Felt it wrinkle.

I AM VITAN, SON OF PRIMUS, AND I AM A GOD, AND YOU CANNOT—

“No more.”

And Perry pushed back against the flow of that darkness. It swept over him, and consumed him, and took tiny pieces of him, and put them to death. But Perry still flowed in the direction that he’d chosen—the direction of life. And from the death that the darkness brought to him, he made more life. Just like evolution. Because life always wins in the end.

It could have been decades. It could have been eons. Could have also taken no time at all. But the process went on and on, until the darkness was too weak to flow against him, and then it gave up, and Perry pushed it with his own flow, reversed its direction, and made it flow in the direction of life.

And the pinprick went away.

Well. Not exactly. There was still a pinprick. But it was a different pinprick this time. Perry had jumped to another one. Because here is there is everywhere.

YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE

Anger and rage. Getting a little boring, if Perry were being honest.

“And who are you?”

I AM CHAK AND YOU CANNOT BE INSIDE OF ME

“No more.”

A push. A flow. Life against death. And death took its toll, but life eventually won.

And the pinprick dissipated, and Perry was in another.

HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS

“This could take a while,” Perry muttered. It had already taken hundreds of lifetimes, he thought. He dreamed up a hand to scratch his imaginary temple with. Why did he have to go into one pinprick at a time? Why not all of them at once? They were all connected, after all, all a part of the big, blank, infinite potential. And here was there was everywhere. So why not be in all of them at once?

So then, he was in all of them at once. And they were in him, as well. All mixed together like a poorly-thought out soup. Lots of clashing flavors. Lots of confusing concepts. Lots of butting heads.

They crashed into him all at once. But there was no power in any of it. They pelted him like flying bugs. But not even the bad kind of bugs, with stingers and mandibles. Just clumsy old beetles, tumbling into him, ineffective.

They changed him, it was true. They were death, after all, and death always changes things. When they pelted him with themselves, they moved through him, carved out little paths through him. Bored holes, one might say. Kind of like you had to let the fear bore holes in you. But on the other side, they didn’t come out the same.

They raged on. Always flowing one way. But Perry was always flowing the other way. He’d made his decision, and his decision was final. That’s the special thing that humanity had. Free will. Choice. The power to make decisions.

Perry had chosen to flow a different way, and while they pummeled him and tried to continue their flow in one direction, he flowed in the other, and he could not be stopped, because his flow was the flow of life, and life always wins.

Really not all that complicated when you get right down to it.

He was in them, those Sons of Primus, and he pushed his flow against theirs, and they took many pieces of him, but ultimately, they could not withstand him. Maybe, if they had been more human, they could’ve made a choice and saved themselves. But they’d given themselves over to Death. They’d embodied it so purely, that when Perry finally managed to push their flow in the other direction, there just wasn’t enough left of them to exist.

Just little balls of ash, he imagined. Nine little balls of ash, and he took a big breath of imaginary air and blew them into puffs of dull gray powder that wafted off into the great big whiteness of infinite potential.

***

The whole thing took several million years. Perry was pretty certain of that. But then, he wasn’t sure if he could live that long. So maybe it hadn’t been that long at all. It felt like he’d grown old though. Ancient. Beyond ancient. And then died. And was reborn. Gone through the whole process again. Over and over. Conscious of each and every transition from death to life, and back again to death.

Then again, maybe it only took a fraction of a second.

Because when he opened his eyes again—his physical eyes—he was standing in the same place, a torn up piece of wasteland. He blinked to make sure this was real, because he’d spent so long in the Otherwhere, it was hard to realize that he was back here in this place, right back where he’d start. And for a brief moment, he thought that this moment could be any time in his life. That he might look down and see that he was a young boy, or an old man, or perhaps someone else entirely, somewhere else in a strange timeline of human events, looking out across a desert.

But then he smelled smoke.

Looked behind him and saw a crater in the dust, and the smoking ruins of a skiff scattered into pieces. Two tall figures, one man, one woman, standing there, staring at him, and he realized that he knew them. He remembered them from that life so long ago.

Mala and Lux.

Rapidly, the sensation of so much time having passed, all the memories of all the transitions, all the death, all the lives, faded. Fuzzy dreams born of a certainty that would grow hazy and then gradually slough off of you like so many dead skin cells.

A moment of alarm, as he remember who he was, and what he was, and what he was doing, and who was trying to kill him—or twist him into insanity. His well-tuned animal brain sparked a medly of fresh stress hormones through his otherwise calm mental state, and cemented him firmly to this reality.

His eyes shot forward again as his spine tingled and his hands twitched as though wanting for a weapon. He scanned the horizon. He scanned the sky. But the Nine weren’t there.

For a moment, he thought he perceived a slightly darker bit of dust, like ash, wafting in the air where the Nine had stood. But then he realized that it was just smoke from the wreck.

Back to his left. Mala and Lux coming towards him, but not very purposefully, he had to say. Kind of drifting. Like they couldn’t quite figure out how to make their legs walk. Had they been injured? Brain-addled by the explosions?

Perry pointed into the empty wastelands where the Nine had stood. “Are they…?”

Mala simply shook her head at him. Her eyes looked like they hadn’t blinked in a while.

Then they did blink, and looked down. Somewhere around Perry’s feet. And Mala stopped walking towards him. Lux did too.

A hissing sound reached his ears, right about that same time, and he jerked his eyes towards the wreck, hoping something wasn’t leaking or about to explode and catch them all on fire. But then the hissing sound took shape in his ears.

“Fffffffffffffffuck.”

He jerked backwards, as shocked as Mala and Lux to see Stuber rolling onto his back, a fine cake of dust clinging to the left side of his face. Stuber puffed some out of his mouth, coughed, spat. He blinked a few times against some crumbs of it clinging to his eyes, then his vision swam into focus. Spotted Perry’s boots. Traveled up his legs and body and rested on his face. Squinting against the morning sun. Brow crinkling up.

“Stuber,” Perry managed, wholly confused, fairly certain he was back in the Otherwhere, experiencing some other reality.

Stuber twisted his body, groaning an affirmative sound as though to confirm that he was present, but not all there. He looked at the wreckage of the skiff. Eyes seemed to wander a bit, tracking the steady progress of a ribbon of black smoke. Skipped off of Mala and Lux.

Slowly back to Perry. “Did I really fucking survive that?”

“Stuber.” Perry’s eyes slipped down to Stuber’s belly. The shirt was still shredded and bloodsoaked. But all his innards were back where they belonged. All the rest of him clung with charred and tattered remnants of clothes, but the body they contained looked untouched. Like he was some actor that had simply donned the costume of a hard-fought warrior.

“It’s the whiskey,” Stuber grunted, rolling onto his side, straggling himself up. “Makes the bones strong. Now. Where’d those fuckers go? We were just…” he stopped in the midst of brushing his knees off. Head snapped to the wreck. “Sagum and Teran.” Over to Mala and Lux. “You assholes had shields—but where the fuck is Sagum and Teran? Their frail bodies couldn’t handle that impact! Have you looked for them?”

“Stuber.”

But Stuber was already charging back towards the wreck, then angling to a form lying in the dust. “Shit-fuck!” Stuber snapped, as Perry finally got his feet moving and followed. Stuber slid to his knees at Sagum’s side, hands already crabbing across the body to try to find the wound. “Ah, shit, he looks dead.”

Perry staggered to a stop over Stuber’s shoulder, staring down into Sagum’s wide-open eyes. They were looking up at the sky, unblinking, mouth parted, slack and unfeeling.

“But…” Perry stammered, now doubly confused.

“Not dead,” Sagum muttered. Still hadn’t blinked.

Stuber stopped moving. Hunched there. “Can you move? Are you paralyzed?”

“No. I’m just not supposed to be here.”

“Here, like…”

“I should be dead.”

“It’s fine. I get that feeling all the time. It’ll pass. Can you move your legs?”

Sagum lifted his head so that he could look down at his legs. One rose up off the ground, hale and hearty, though missing its pant leg and boot.

“Oh, good,” Stuber noted. “You’re not paralyzed.” Started to prod and poke at Sagum’s limbs. “Any broken bones? No? Well, that’s a fucking miracle. You look like you might have early osteoporosis. You should have Petra check that out.”

“He won’t have any broken bones,” Perry said, his words a little fumbly, like his mouth was numb. “Or osteoporosis.”

“You a fuckin’ doctor now, too? That another one of the gifts your All-Kind gave you?” Stuber snapped to his feet. “Where’s Teran?”

Perry knew where she was. Looked over to where her body had lain, doubtlessly in pieces like the rest. Except that it wasn’t. She was lying there on her side, looking at him through a curtain of frazzled hair, looking like she couldn’t decide whether to scream or puke.

She decided to scream. “WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?”

Perry shook his head. “I don’t know what the fuck happened.” He turned and looked at Mala and Lux, who had soundlessly floated their way back up to him, and were standing somewhat creepily by his shoulder when he turned. “What the fuck happened, Mala?”

She raised a finger. Pointed it at Sagum. “His head was gone. Not the whole thing.” She grabbed the upper right of her own head. “Just this part.” Then she motioned at everything below the waist. “And all of that. Gone too.” She looked up at Perry, expression briefly haunted. “I swear it. I remember seeing the inside of his nose. It’s very distinct in my mind.”

Sagum, somewhat stricken by this account, began to feel his face to make sure it was still there.

“They were all shooting you,” Lux said, his voice surprisingly deadpan. As though reciting a written Inquisitor’s report. “All nine of them, firing on you at once. Then you gathered it into a ball. I don’t know what happened after that. I thought the ball consumed you. But then you exploded. Except for…you didn’t.” A flash of a crease between his brows the only note of emotion. “But you did explode. In blue.” A finger tracing an arc overhead. “Big, blue bubble. Almost like a shield. Perhaps a few hundred yards in diameter.” Then he stopped and looked very troubled as though the next part didn’t make any sense at all. As though he’d gotton his chronologies mixed up, just like Whimsby. “And then you were not exploded anymore. I feel like something happened in between, but for the life of me I can’t remember what.” He raised his eyebrows to Perry, almost pleading with him to fill in the blank spots. “You don’t remember either?”

Perry opened his mouth, confident that the memory would be there, but it wasn’t. Hell, it had only been a few moments ago. And it had seemed so clear and real at the time. He remembered being in a place. Couldn’t remember what it was. Just that it was neither here nor there nor anywhere. It was Otherwhere.

Then some things had happened. And some stuff.

And that was about all he could remember.

Perry frowned. “I don’t think there’s anything else. I think you covered it.”

Teran let out a little noise that caught Perry’s attention again. She was standing there, looking down at herself, as though shocked she’d found legs attached to her hips. “I don’t think anything’s broken!” her eyes came up to Perry’s, and she began walking, as though fearing her ankles were made of glass and might shatter at any step. “How is nothing broken? And where did the Nine go?”

Lux, who had been the one to find Teran’s body, looked a tad queasy. “Oh, it was broken,” he muttered.

Teran, more confident in her limbs, began to walk normal, began to look around, first out to where the Nine had been, with a cautious frown across her features. “Where did they go?” she repeated.

Perry found himself rubbing the back of his neck. “You know? I’m not really sure. All I can say is that they’re not here anymore. Not on this earth. Maybe not in this universe.”

Teran stopped in front of him, face blank, like she couldn’t decide on an emotion. “So you killed them?”

“That…” Perry shook his head. “It’s…uh…maybe.”

“Maybe?” Teran raised her brows.

Perry took her face in his hands. Felt her skin against his fingertips. Marvelled at the fact that it was whole, and alive. “You ask too many questions, Teran. I don’t have answers. I’m just glad you’re alive.”

She seemed a little taken aback by his hands on her face, but not displeased. An awkward second passed, where neither of them quite knew what to do next. Teran glanced over his shoulder. “That’s quite the audience,” she said, a little gruffly.

Perry let go of her face, wondering why it felt so suddenly melancholy to do so. He turned and followed her gaze back towards Karapalida. Back towards the line of people, all along one section of the horizon. Mordicus and his legionnaires, standing as though in reserve for a battle. Standing witness.

Perry swallowed, feeling a whole mix of things that he didn’t really want to feel at that moment. Would have preferred just to feel triumphant and awesome. And he did…but there were other things mixed in it too. Some of them bitter, some of them sweet. Still, that lingering sense of so much having passed by in a dream. The grief of losing his friends still present, for some reason, still fresh, even as he felt elated at having them alive. A measure of surrealism to the whole thing. A very logical doubt that any of this could be real, and a fear that he might wake up from it at any moment.

But…mostly it was good.

And seeing all those people that had made a decision to come out here, rather than leave him to die alone…

Not as many enemies as he’d supposed. A lot of assholes, it was true. But still friends.

Perry grunted. Looked skyward. Swished his eyes about to spread the wateriness and keep it from spilling over. “That’s…uh…nice.”

“Pardon, friends,” A polite, but very amplified voice called out.

Perry and the others spun to the sound of Whimsby, saw him lying there, just a head, a torso, and an arm. The arm, up in the air, like a kid wanting to ask a question. “I’d drag myself to you, but it seems rather undignified for the circumstances. Perhaps one of you could give me a hand?”

“Whimsby!” Sagum was on his feet and running like a worried mother hen. “Oh shit! What did they do to you!” Worry turned to anger as he stopped, his hands clawing his hair, staring down at Whimsby. “Shit! I just put you back together!”

“Not to worry, Master Sagum,” Whimsby soothed. “It’s easy enough to fix. In fact, if you can reattach my other arm, I might could do the rest myself.”

Perry realized he was still standing in the same spot, while the others had all jogged after Sagum to check on Whimsby. Stuber, Teran, Mala, Lux. All of them whole. All of them alive. All of it impossible. And yet it was.

“What did happen?” he murmured to himself.

“Well, it looks like you finally figured out Dispersion.”

He jerked, looked up in the direction of the wrecked skiff, and spotted her gliding out of the smoke as though she’d been hiding in the particles the whole time. Hell, maybe she had. Perry had no idea what was what anymore. But he was starting to get used to the sensation.

“Niva,” he said, cocking his head to one side, trying to figure how angry he should be with her, replaying all that had happened, sussing out whether he had any legitimate grievances. He raised a finger and wagged it at her, but couldn’t really come up with a reason to be pissed. “You…I feel like you fucked me over. But I’m coming up blank.”

“Maybe that’s because I didn’t fuck you over.” She strode towards him casually, her hands in the pocket of her light canvas jacket, red hair pulled back, as though she were about to start working.

Perry muddled that over. “Now, I understand you never expressly said certain things, and maybe I did jump to some conclusions. But you certainly implied a lot…”

He trailed off, realizing she was laughing at him.

“I’m sorry, is this fucking funny?” Perry asked, but lost the heat halfway through the question and found himself wheezing out an ill-restrained chuckle. “Oh, it’s all funny in hindsight because everything worked out. But you didn’t know how it was gonna work out. So stop fucking laughing and be serious, and think about what would’ve happened if we all died. Then you’d feel real bad about all your mind games and riddles and obtuse instructions.”

Niva made as though wiping a tear from her eye. “Oh, settle yourself. Of course I knew it was going to work out.” She poked him in the chest. “See, I’m not the one with the faith problem. That’s you. You didn’t have faith in me. But I had complete faith in you.”

Perry narrowed his eyes. “So there is such a thing as Dispersion?”

Niva looked at him blankly. “What? Did you think I just laid my hands on you for the pleasure of your touch? Of course I gave you Dispersion. How the hell do you think all your friends are alive right now?”

“So they have Confluence?”

Niva shrugged. “For the moment that you brought them back to life, they did. You see, Dispersion only works when Confluence is flowing in a certain direction.” Niva smiled at him, then pointed to the ground between them. “Look at that, Perry.”

He looked down. Didn’t see much. Just that light-tan dust, ubiquitous across the wastelands. A series of slightly darker patches, where Sagum’s blood had soaked…

Perry knelt, staring intensely at the ground. Living all his life amongst the wastelands made him something of a connoisseur of dust. He knew what it looked like in its varied states. How it looked when you spit in it, or pissed in it. How it looked when it turned muddy with blood.

That was not how these dark patches of ground looked now.

See, living all his life amongst the wastelands, Perry wasn’t so much a connoisseur of actual dirt. But he’d seen it once before. And touched it. Back in the Crooked Hills, where there was rain, and grass, and dirt, and vegetation to grow in it.

He reached out. Pressed his fingers into it. Felt the sponginess of the texture—not just the sluicy gush of dust moistened by blood.

“That’s actual dirt,” Perry whispered.

“Perry?” Teran’s voice behind him.

He stood and turned, found his friends approaching, somewhat cautiously, eyeballing the newcomer. Whimsby was draped, legless, between Mala and Lux, while Sagum hurried along, fussing over wires while he kept a curious side-eye on Niva.

Teran stopped a few paces from them. Stuber rounded to stand by her shoulder.

None of them looked like they knew where to begin.

Stuber, unable to stand the hesitation, gave Niva a brief flick of the fingers, up and down. “So, you’re…?”

“Your friend calls me Niva,” she said, dryly.

“Right, but…” Stuber arched one brow, buried the other. “Are you…?”

“Yes,” Perry put in. “She’s the one. The woman with the red hair. The magical hobo. And…I guess…one of a mystical race of beings called the All-Kind.”

Stuber’s expression didn’t move. “Right. So what happened with the Dispersion?”

Niva smiled. “I’m sure you have plenty of questions. You’ll get answers eventually. Unfortunately…I’m here for something else, and…” she looked apologetically at Perry. “It needs to be done. The sooner the better. These things, oh how they can begin to run and tangle if you don’t pay them proper attention.”

Stuber grunted, a little hurt. “Thought I was gonna fly and shit. Shoot energy beams.”

Niva gave Stuber a sly wink. “Don’t worry, old boy. You’re dangerous enough without those things.” She looked across them all as her gaze slowly turned, as though taking a tour on its way back to Perry. Teran, still as dubious and hard-nosed as ever, not giving Niva one bit of quarter, even if she had flattered Stuber into compliance. Lux and Mala, perhaps a bit mesmerized, perhaps a bit confused. Maybe even doubtful that she was real. Sagum, looking eager and curious. Whimsby, hanging there, looking like someone who’s got so much to say and so much to ask, but chooses to bide his time.

Finally, her eyes back on Perry. “Your friends have nothing that they need to give back to me.” She held out her hand. “But you do, Perry. You’ve done wonderful work. You’ve done what I knew you could do. And there’s not really enough words to truly encompass what you’ve done.” Her eyes flitted to the others. Then back. A flash of something like remorse. But then she smiled again. “You’ve meant a lot. More than you probably know. And…well, that’s why you have to give it back, Perry.”

Perry was holding his own wrist, as though his hands were something that might be swiped by a pickpocket. “But what if there are other fights?”

“I’m sure there will be.”

“And what if I have to fight them?”

“Perhaps your fighting days are over.”

“People won’t believe me when I tell them what’s happened.”

Niva gestured out at the legion that still stood and watched at a hesitant distance. “You’ve a lot of witnesses.”

Perry’s mouth worked. And what came out next he said quietly, almost like he thought he could keep the others from hearing. “What’ll I be?”

Niva’s smile became sympathetic. She raised her chin. “You’ll be you. Exactly as you are right now, standing here at this moment. Dusty, sweaty, bloody and scarred, with wild eyes that hold a whole universe right in the center of the black. You’ll be just like this forever.”

Perry had no clue what she was talking about, but was running out of reservations to give voice to. So he wasn’t going to have powers. Did it really matter? He hadn’t had them—not really—for the vast majority of his life. Felt weird to lose them after he’d grown so accustomed to them. But…what’re you gonna do?

“Deal’s a deal,” Perry sighed, and stretched out his hand towards Niva’s.

“You understand,” she said quickly, just before his fingertips touched hers. He hesitated. Had been focused on her hand, but now raised his eyes to hers. “That it’s…everything.”

And there stood a long moment where Perry was rendered as immobile as a dead man, and felt his blood running about as cold. What she’d said…well, it could’ve meant anything. But somehow it went right around Perry’s conscious head, and straight into him, into some part of him, maybe the part that had lived and died so many millions of times in so many millions of years that had all gone by like a flash, and it cranked his guts tight.

“Of course,” Niva said, much quieter now. Seeming so close that her lips dominated Perry’s vision, he didn’t seem to be able to look at anything else. “There’s not really a choice. A deal is a deal, as you pointed out. But, I wanted you to know what it meant when you took my hand.”

Perry swallowed but there wasn’t much to go down. He retracted his hand from Niva’s, and she didn’t move to stop him. He mumbled, “One second.” Then he marched over, reached his hands up and took Teran’s face. “Don’t punch me,” he said. “It’s just a kiss.”

She didn’t punch him. Actually seemed to like it. Which was nice.

When he pulled back, he knew the question that was going to be next, and he went ahead and answered it. “Just felt like that should’ve happened before. Didn’t want to have any regrets.” He cleared his throat, and looked at Stuber. Let go of Teran’s face. Put his hand on Stuber’s shoulder. “You’re a good friend. I gave you a lot of grief. Honestly…I was just jealous of how you could just punch and smash your way through the world with a smile on your face. But I’ve come to like it.”

Stuber looked concerned. “Why are you being mushy right now?”

Perry waved him off. “I just want you all to remember me at my best before I…lose it all. Go back to being nobody.”

Mala rolled her eyes. “Self-important prick, it’s always about you.” Then she gave him a smile. “This time I guess it really is. Though I don’t know why we don’t have to give her back our Confluence.” Mala frowned at Niva. “What’s to stop us paladins from using Confluence to ruin everything again?”

Lux jumped in, hissing like he’d been stung. “We won’t. Of course.”

Niva only smiled at them. “No. You won’t.”

Perry nodded to the two demigods, the mechanical man between them, and tinkerer still holding on to one of the wires.

Sagum nodded back. “Don’t be dramatic, Perry. The only thing different will be that you can’t blow us all up, which, honestly, was a background worry of mine most of the time. Frankly I’ll be relieved.” He smirked. “Go on. Get it over with. We’re not going anywhere.”

Perry felt his throat thicken slightly. “Suppose I am being dramatic.”

“You’ve always had a flare for it,” Stuber commented.

“Alright.” Perry took a deep breath, strode back to Niva and held his hand out again, fingers close enough to feel the heat from her palms. “If you only got one road to travel, best to stop bitching and get to stepping.”

And then he touched her hand and

INTERLUDE, AGAIN

That’s it. No more. Off to bed, you rabid monkeys.

Wait. What? You can’t stop there. You didn’t even finish your sentence.

I did finish my sentence. I finished it with “And-that’s-it.” Don’t argue with me, you little fuck, I’ll put you to bed by choking you out.

Primus help us all. What would their mother say to hear you talk like that, Stuber?

CHAPTER FOURTY-ONE

THE STORY OF A LIFE

“That’s why she’s not allowed to be here,” Stuber countered. Then he looked across the dwindling fire at the boy and girl staring at him incredulously. “Look at these soft little piles of mush! They need some toughening up! No better way to toughen someone up than with coarse language. It’s like sandpaper for your brain. Builds calluses. Idn’t that right, little fucks?”

“Fuckin’ right,” the boy said.

Stuber jabbed a finger at him. “Hey, you don’t talk like that. Your mother’d fucking kill me.”

“But what happened?” the girl said. “You said he reached out his hand, and touched hers…and then what?”

“Oh, that,” Stuber said. “Well, he touched her and when the power came out of him, he shit himself. There. End of story. Are you satisfied now, tiny female?”

“You said you were gonna tell us the story,” the girl said, deadpan. “Made a big deal out of it. ‘Oh, hey, you’re ten, you’re old enough now, blah blah.’ But you didn’t end the story, so you haven’t given us the story.”

Stuber made a face like he’d never heard such monumental bullshit in all his life, made a few disgruntled noises, then looked pleadingly to Whimsby.

Whimsby was no help. Simply shook his head slightly. “The girl speaks right. It’s not a story without an ending.”

“Not a story?” Stuber started to bluster, but it turned into a wheezy, racking cough. Brittle and dry sounding. Whimsby stiffened, almost reached out to pat him on the back. Didn’t like the flush at the sides of Stuber’s gray temples, or the way his still-broad, but somewhat withered shoulders seemed to strain so hard at each cough.

Stuber came up for air. “Fuck me.” His voice hoarse and gravelly. “I’ve told you so much of a story I’ve lost my damn voice. And you say it’s not a story. Make yourself useful. Pass me that whiskey.”

“You shouldn’t,” Whimsby said, though he passed him the bottle. Not much left in it now.

“I shouldn’t, he says.” Stuber shook his head as he pulled the cork out. “As though I’m trying to live any longer than I already have.” He drank some. “As though I’m playing for time.” He took a deep breath, looking skyward at a cool, black night. No moon, but quite a few stars. His breath pluming. “No, I’m in a rush, Whimsby. Always have been.” He drank again then corked the bottle. “Funny. Doesn’t seem to be working. I’ve rushed and rushed and everyone else has got there first.”

Whimsby smiled painfully. Sat back.

The two children watched their grandfather keenly. They knew he wasn’t going to refuse them. They’d broken him. Now they were going in for the kill.

Stuber looked at them with eyes a million miles away, not seeing them at all, but the people that they’d come from, and the people that those people had come from. Old friends. Old battles. Old fires to light old hearts, but dimmer every time, it seemed.

He got that way often these days.

Whimsby gently cleared his throat.

Stuber blinked. Seemed to see what was sitting in front of him. “Right.” Thumbs rubbing both sides of the whiskey bottle. Slowly up. Slowly down. The cuticles pressed white as bone. “Well. He reached out and touched her hand, and the power flowed out of him. We were all expecting something dramatic but it…it wasn’t dramatic at all. In fact, my dubious descendants, it’s not all that dramatic from then on out, which is maybe why I tried to stop the story there. It’s done with the action parts, you know? But…I suppose you need the…what is it?”

“Closure,” Whimsby said, looking wistfully at the fire.

“Right. That. Closure.” Stuber sighed long and heavy. “Well, there were more wars, as there always is. Buncha assholes trying to fill the power vacuum. But that gradually settled down after people got tired of fighting and killing eachother. And then we all grew up, and lived happily ever after. Everyone got what they wanted. Everyone was free, and the world was at peace for the first time in centuries, and the sections of it that had been destroyed by the Nine started to slowly, slowly come back to life.” Stuber glowered at the fire. “Then we all got old and lame and never did anything fun or exciting ever again. And that, rabid monkeys, is truly the end of the story. And I am tired. And it is time for me to drink what remains of this bottle, and then to lay my bones next to this fire.”

“Shouldn’t sleep outside,” Whimsby said.

“Shouldn’t sleep outside, he says.” Stuber rose and uncorked the bottle, used it as a prod to get the two children grumbling to their feet. “Onwards. We march to the indoors, because our nanny Whimsby has told us so. Can you see the light ahead?”

“We can see,” the boy replied.

“Good, continue heading towards it until you walk into your house. I’ll…be along.”

“What about wild dogs?” the girl worried.

“They wouldn’t dare. They know I’ll stomp their fucking brains out. Now go.”

The children headed out, murmuring amongst themselves. Stuber trailed behind them, and Whimsby easily caught up. Stuber was a slow walker these days. Even slower when he’d been drinking so much.

“When are you going to start telling the truth?” Whimsby asked.

“The truth?” Stuber scoffed. “My version is better. The ending is not the point of the story. The point of the story is all the other shit that came before the ending.”

“Oh, I don’t know. The truth does have a certain charm to it.”

Stuber shook his head, slowing to a stop. Bottle swishing slowly, gently. Was he doing that on purpose or was it palsy? “To distill a man—all the things he’s done in his life—down to that one second? The one second when he dies? That’s…” his eyes had grown watery. He smiled through it. “Well, frankly, Whimsby, it terrifies me.”

Whimsby opened his mouth, but then shut it again. Decided to stay silent. He just had never decided what to say to Stuber about Perry. Didn’t know if it made any difference at all. Didn’t know if telling Stuber what his mechanical eyes had recorded would help or hurt.

Best not to say anything at all, then.

Whimsby started walking again, because if he didn’t, Stuber would forget to and wind up passing out in the dirt.

Stuber grunted a single, bitter laugh and took a sip from the whiskey. But a measured one this time. Almost like he put the bottle to his lips more out of habit than any real desire.

Whimsby stopped again, realizing that Stuber wasn’t going to follow. It looked like it was going to be a long night. Not that it mattered to Whimsby. He didn’t need sleep, and he only had one friend left.

Stuber opened his arms, as though addressing the night. “How am I the last fucking one?”

Whimsby sauntered back to Stuber’s side. “Good genetics, I suppose.”

“I miss them,” Stuber said. “Petra most of all. But really, I’d even take Sagum at this point, that old, skinny fuck.”

“They were hard years for all,” Whimsby observed. “But you’ve survived. And, like you said, things have settled down. Which is why it’s more important than ever for you to tell the story. Accurately and publicly.”

Stuber scoffed. “What? So someone can twist the truth again? Prop Perry up as a deity like they did with Primus and his chaps?”

“That is true,” Whimsby admitted. “So true that people are already doing it. Perhaps the best antidote for twisted truths would be the straight truth. From someone that was there.”

Stuber made a disgusted face. “They’ll all want to know how he died. That’s all they’ll get out of it.”

Whimsby sighed. It was a poor night for old arguments. Best to leave it be.

“What if they do that to me?” Stuber’s voice creaked a bit.

“It’s a legitimate concern,” Whimsby stated. “Your vital signs are abysmal. Frankly, I’m not sure how you’re still alive.”

Stuber grunted, drank the last of the bottle. “What if all they remember is me shitting my pants? Mumbling to myself? No longer able to crack a good joke or to curse with such beautiful fluency?” Stuber shook his head at the darkness. “I think I’ll just go. Not, you know, right now. But when I think I’m just right there at the edge—when I have just enough left in me to walk a good ways, then that’s what I’m gonna do.”

Whimsby favored Stuber with a longsuffering look. He hated when Stuber talked like this. But time and grief and loss wear all men down to nubs eventually. They could be hard as rocks, but life cuts like diamonds.

Stuber didn’t seem to notice Whimsby’s expression. He had a small smirk on his face, still staring off into the night at nothing. “Wasteland survival,” he chuckled. “No one’s coming, so pick a direction and start walking.” He looked at Whimsby, his face becoming resolute. “That’s what I’m going to do, Whimsby. One of these days, I’m gonna pick a direction and I’m gonna start walking. Just disappear into the sunset. You won’t even know that I’m gone.”

“Of course I would know,” Whimsby said, wrapping an arm around Stuber’s shoulder. “Now come on. You just need to sleep it off. You’ll feel better in the morning. And various other things you tell drunk people.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“Of course you’re not.” Whimsby gently pulled Stuber along, and to further motivate him, he gestured at the house and told him a hopeful lie: “Maybe there’s another bottle inside.”

***

It wasn’t long after that.

And Stuber was true to his word.

Whimsby went to go find his one remaining friend at the edges of the farming freehold, and instead found a mudbrick house with an unlocked door and open windows, letting the warm spring air in. The place was small, but tidy. Stuber’s single bed, neatly made. No plate left uncleaned from the night before. No mess at all.

Like he wanted the place to look like no one had ever lived in it. Like he’d wanted to just vanish without a trace. Leave the world like he’d never been in it. Which was silly, Whimsby thought, because he was Stuber.

Who was going to forget him?

Certainly not Whimsby. Whimsby remembered everything.

Everything…

The sound of a unified gasp from a hundred throats, as the blade of a longstaff cut Mala down, the sneering face at the other end just another one of the many demigods-turned-warlords. Mala had finally met a better fighter, in the form of Paladin Articus.

The look of rage written on Lux’s face, all smeared with green light so that his teeth seemed to glow, just before he took his revenge on Paladin Articus by destroying them both.

The taste of bitter shock, like electrical arcs on his tongue, as he learned of Teran, shot in the back of the head by an assassin from some rival sect, as she was walking out of her house.

The sweaty grasp of Sagum’s hand as the cancer in his chest squeezed the last bit of life out of him, and his eyes turned as empty as marbles.

The scent of burning sage, bundles of it stacked up around Petra’s pyre, as Stuber stood, much too close to the flames, sweat and ethanol steaming from his skin, the night after she’d simply fallen down face first in the dust and didn’t wake up again.

And now this. Another thing he would never forget: The sound of complete silence, in a home that should have been filled with Stuber’s gruff, grumbling banter.

Whimsby stood by Stuber’s small kitchen table for a long time, mulling these things over. Found his fingers brushing along the wood that’d scuffed to an almost waxy sheen over so many years of use. Wondered if he might feel his old friend in it. But there was nothing there. Just wood.

Stuber was right. These petty little deaths didn’t do justice to the great people they were attached to.

“You know,” Whimsby said, feeling a slow, dull ache that made no anatomical sense. It was right there, in the top of his chest, in the bottom of his neck. Tethered to something else that was down deeper. They seemed to be trying to pull away from each other. But there was nothing in his diagnostics that said anything of the sort was happening. “I was going to tell you today that I think you’re wrong. But I suppose you escaped me. You old bastard. Couldn’t let me be right a single time.”

Whimsby smiled around the room. Remembering things with that perfect memory of his. A bottomless pit of human experience, never to be filled, never to die, only ever to watch, and watch, and watch, and every once in a while, come across a person you might call a friend, and have someone to care about for a little while. “A little while” being relative to the years Whimsby himself had left to live. Which would be forever if they kept maintaining him so nicely.

“You see, all of you frail, organic, sacks of meat were dead after the skiff got blown up. Me, being the only one made of hearty alloys, was still alive, still watching, still recording everything.” Whimsby tapped the side of his head. “I saw what happened to Perry when he exploded with that blue light. Which is to say, he never actually exploded. The blue light came out of him and he kind of…I don’t know. Shrunk into a tiny spot.” Whimsby held up his fingers, a miniscule distance apart. “Like a little pinprick in the fabric of reality. And then boom, he zoomed back full size again, just as quick.”

He looked up from his fingers, half expecting Stuber to be sitting there at the table. But the table was abandoned. And it felt so damned lonely that Whimsby decided to project Stuber’s image there, constructed from his flawless memory of a million moments.

The humans had their imaginations. This was Whimsby’s version.

“See,” Whimsby pointed to his mechanical eyes. “You need incredibly high resolution imaging systems to see that. Which I have.”

“Right.” The Stuber at the table rolled his eyes. “But that’s not what happened when he touched that mad bitch’s hand.”

“Oh, come now,” Whimsby chided. “That’s a harsh judgement of Niva. And besides, it has everything to do with it. And that’s what I’m trying to say, Stuber. I don’t think Perry died. Because, you see, when he touched her hand, he didn’t just disappear. He shrunk into that tiny spot again.” The fingers again. “And the woman named Niva went with him.”

The Stuber at the table frowned at him. “So…she killed him after shrinking him to a tiny bug?”

Whimsby laughed. “No. I don’t think she killed him at all, Stuber. I think he went away. Both of them. Into wherever it was that he went to when he exploded in blue.”

He waited for a further challenge from Stuber, then remembered that it wasn’t the real Stuber. Decided to let the projected image whiff away.

Silence again. An empty table. An empty house.

Whimsby walked to the back door. Opened it, but didn’t exit. Just stood there, looking out. Fields of grain, stretching out. Not just millet anymore. Wheat, and barley, and oats. And trees too, young and scrappy. Growing now where they hadn’t grown in centuries.

Through the green wheat, Whimsby’s high resolution imaging systems could make out the tiniest vestiges of a path where someone had cut through the field, heading west, as though chasing a setting sun. Maybe a day ago, Whimsby guessed.

He thought about following that path. Tracking Stuber down. His daughter and his grandchildren would probably like to cremate his body. Put his ashes in an urn where they would sit uselessly on a mantelpiece. And if any piece of Stuber’s soul was left in those ashes, it would be pissed at Whimsby for all eternity.

No, this is the way Stuber wanted to go. Whimsby couldn’t take that from him.

He left the door open and turned back to the table, his feet moving slow. How strange his body was in the presence of loss. He was as strong as he ever was, and yet his feet felt heavy and slow. He became overwhelmed with the nonsensical desire to rest. So he sat in a chair with a heavy sigh, one arm propped up on the table, staring out that open back door.

“I guess you’re the only one left,” she said from behind him.

Whimsby was surprised, but didn’t bother spinning. Surprised because she hadn’t made a sound—just appeared out of nowhere, as she was prone to do. But he had her voice pegged by the third syllable, so there was no need to react.

He did turn towards her, but just so that he wasn’t being rude. “I suppose I am.”

Niva stepped towards him, moving slow. “I can see you’re saddened by it.”

Whimsby nodded. “They were all good friends. I felt this way when all of them went.” He lapsed into a long silence. “Being human is hard. If I’d have known…” he trailed off, a careworn smile on his lips. Eventually shook his head. “Well, no. I would have still done it. I would have still chosen to be human. It’s been more good than bad, I think. It’s just…” He looked up at Niva. “I’m afraid I’ll never meet people like them again. People worth knowing.”

Niva sighed heavily, took a few more slow strides into the room until she stood at the table next to Whimsby, her hands resting on the back of a chair. “You will.”

“And then I’ll love them for a time,” Whimsby said. “And watch them die. And experience this all over again. And again. And again. I don’t know if I can keep doing that forever.”

“You can.” Niva pulled the chair out and sat down. Rested one of her hands on Whimsby’s. “And it’s becoming increasingly important that you do.”

Whimsby took a page from Stuber’s book and scoffed. “Why does it have to be me, then?”

Niva smiled gently at him. “You’re their memory, Whimsby. Perfect and impartial. You can’t be twisted into telling lies. You can only tell the truth. That is what they need now, Whimsby. That is what humanity needs. They’re on the cusp of evolution, of finally becoming something better. It’s been a long and arduous journey—I know; I’ve watched it the whole time—but the work is not yet done. You must tell them the truth, every new generation, so that they know where they came from, and where they’re going.”

Whimsby frowned. “Are you commissioning me?”

“I am giving you purpose.”

“Couldn’t someone else do it?”

She shook her head. “No one else was there, Whimsby. No one else that’s alive, anyways.”

Whimsby stared at her for a long moment, but, as ever, found her difficult to read. All the same facial expressions as a human being, and yet he still could not determine her motives. They seemed to be good, but the machinations of the plan took some dark turns, as history had proven. It was difficult to appreciate the totality of the plan when it came at the cost of so much grief.

“Is he alive?” Whimsby finally asked.

He was sure Niva knew who he was talking about, but she still raised her eyebrows. “Whoever do you mean?”

“He went somewhere. With you. And you’re still alive, so…”

“Somewhere,” Niva echoed, thoughtfully. “Anywhere. Otherwhere.”

Whimsby leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “So he is?”

Niva looked out the open back door for a long time. Long enough that Whimsby knew she wasn’t going to answer him. Though he couldn’t imagine why.

“Just teach them,” she eventually said. “Tell the story. The true story. Tell them what you saw. That will be enough. Extrapolation isn’t necessary. Just the truth. That is what they need to remember. That is what will help them grow into what they’re meant to become. After all, it’s not where he went that matters, is it?” Eyes back to Whimsby. “It’s the choices that he made when he was here.”

Whimsby sighed, shaking his head. “Evolution takes a long time.”

She smiled at him, eyes twinkling. “A long time is relative, Whimsby. For you? It’ll just be a little while.”

***

He was their memory, and this is what he did:

He sat down with them, some of them eager, some of them bored. Some of them thinking they already knew the whole story. Others barely able to contain themselves, because they knew you’ve never got the story until you’ve heard it from the source.

He sat down with them, every new generation. The faces changed, but the people were always the same. And in that way, it was almost like they would live forever, just like Whimsby. Always a new batch of young faces, so that they never seemed to grow old and die. Or, at least, Whimsby didn’t have to watch it happen. And for that time when he sat down with them, they became his friends.

He was their memory, and this is what he did: He told them a story.

And it always began the same way—the way that Stuber had told it.

“He sit’s in prison and his sentence is death.” A serious look at those gathered. “He does not know who he is, or what he is capable of.”  A hand, traveling across an imaginary horizon line. “And yet, destiny hurtles towards him whether he knows it or not.”

Then he would lean back. Scratch his chin. Look towards a window.

“Before we see who this condemned man is, let us look back to who he was, just a few days before. Let us go back to a battlefield, and a scavenging crew, and a series of events that will place this young man on a path from which he can never come back. A path to discovering who—and what—he really is.”

Then, with a sly glance in their direction. “If, of course, he manages to survive that long.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

D.J. Molles is the New York Times bestselling author of The Remaining series, which was originally self-published in 2012 and quickly became an internet bestseller, and is the basis for his hit Lee Harden series, which will release its third title in late 2019. He is also the author of Wolves, a 2016 winner in the Horror category for the Foreword INDIES Book Awards. His other works include the Grower's War series, and the Audible original, Johnny. When he's not writing, he's taking care of his property in North Carolina, and training to be at least half as hard to kill as Lee Harden. He also enjoys playing his guitar and drums, drawing, painting, and lots of other artsy fartsy stuff

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