HEART OF THE STORM

THE GIRL IN THE BOX

BOOK 58

ROBERT J. CRANE

Ostiagard Press

Heart of the Storm

The Girl in the Box, Book 58

Robert J. Crane

copyright © 2024 Ostiagard Press

1st Edition.

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PROLOGUE

The storm was passing.

Fen Liu could hear it, faintly, in the distance, the warm pattering of falling rain. She lay in bed, her most recent lover warm against her side, and she stared at the ceiling.

She was, arguably, the most powerful woman in the world. Her chief problem was that the other contender for that title wanted her dead. She, not wanting to be dead, thus found herself with quite the conundrum.

Kill or be killed. That was the situation. The faint aroma of her own sweat, mingled with that of her lover, the faded scent of his hair shampoo and the soap on his skin filled her nostrils as she lay in the dark, tangled in the sheets.

These were the hard hours. The ones where she questioned herself, her choices. And Fen Liu had made hard choices. As Premier of China, she'd nearly gotten her hands on Russia, America, and even Europe. Africa was still mostly in her grasp, as was vast swaths of the Middle East and larger Asia. Certainly it was more of a hegemonic grasp, an economic one, than the direct control she might have preferred, but if push came to shove, she felt certain that they would throw in with her rather than America.

America. She snorted, a sound deep in her throat that came out with perhaps more revulsion than she'd intended. A fading superpower, drunk on its nihilism, lost in its own pleasure-seeking foolishness, unsure of itself. Too terrified to be an honest empire, too decadent to break out of its impotence. It was in a death spiral, and Fen Liu was content to let it crash down. She'd seen empires rise and fall. China, through multiple dynasties. The Mongol Empire. The British.

And like a storm, she'd weathered them all. In the ones that had come in contact with her corner of the world, she'd managed to either ingratiate herself or ride their wave to its crest. She'd even managed to make herself a consort to Genghis Khan for a time. A run as the empress Wu Zetian notwithstanding, she'd been, to borrow the silly American phrase, always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

Until the Chinese Communist Party.

For over seventy years now she'd been patient, and at the last party congress, that patience had finally paid off. Now she found herself in the proper chair when the music stopped. It was not the same as it had been in the days of dynasties, of empire, but then things never did stay the same for very long. They changed, and Fen Liu changed with them. That was the secret to her success. If something was not working, there was no reason to keep doing it.

And that had been the imperial system once America made its rise, and Britain began its fall.

Now it was a world of “power to the people.” But Fen Liu didn't believe in power to the people or any of that other foolishness. People were sheep, and meant to be ruled over by gods. They bumped around through their petty everyday lives, unable to orchestrate anything more than a mediocre existence. That was no way to live, and she certainly had no intention of living that way. These people needed a strong, guiding hand.

The Chinese Communist Party had provided that guiding hand. Now her hand guided the party.

Her lover shifted beside her. Wei Zhang was dark-haired, handsome, his face a mask of innocence in his sleep. Which almost made her chuckle, for he was hardly innocent while awake. He stirred beside her, making a slight groaning sound at her hand brushing his side, stroking him. His eyes fluttered, and she could see the dark irises peering at her in the low light.

“Unable to sleep again?” he asked, apparently unvexed by her waking him. Or too clever to show anger.

She turned over and laced her fingers together, placing her chin atop her hands, and her hands resting on his chest so she could admire his handsome face. “It has become an ordeal of late.”

“Too much responsibility on your shoulders.” He stretched without disturbing her hands, muscles flexing beneath her. They felt good. Warm. Pleasant. “Too many worries clouding your mind.”

“What was it Sienna Nealon called you?” She stared at him as she asked.

He shifted uncomfortably beneath her hands. He always became uncomfortable when she referenced his failure in Los Angeles. “Mr. Tac.”

“An odd sobriquet.”

“I think she was drunk a great deal of the time when we battled,” he said. “And I was clad in all black. She seemed to associate me with a member of one of their SWAT teams, with their tactical gear, and shortened it from there.”

“Strange girl,” Fen Liu said. “And a disastrous choice to be inheritor of that much power.”

Wei Zhang made a disgusted noise in his throat. “Incubi and succubi are appalling. Disgusting creatures.”

Liu found herself unable to control her smirk. “You have quite the provincial attitude.”

“Conventional attitude, you mean,” he said. “Traditional metahumans have always despised their kind, and for good reason. Who wants to see their souls imprisoned in another being solely to forward their desire for power? We move away from that tradition at our own peril – obviously.”

She flexed her fingertips, providing a very light tickle to his chest, only enough to make him jolt slightly. “That is foolishness, the attitude of the prey, not the predator. Anyone serious about power would view the succubus or incubus as the ultimate aspiration. They can gather power from their enemies easily while you or I are forced to kill ours with little other reward but their disposal.” She rolled off him, onto her back, and stared up at the ceiling, listening.

He listened, too. “The storm is raging.”

She smiled in the dark. “It is already waning, and it will fade, because that is what storms do.”

“But they have the ability to do quite a bit of damage before they do,” he said, brushing fingers lightly against her belly.

She tried to decide whether she welcomed his attentions, or would shut them down. As she often did when they were not her own idea. “I will weather this storm,” she said, gently slapping his probing hand, which had found its way to cup her breast, “as I have so many others.” For soon enough, Sienna Nealon would be forced to move on to other things, other crises, and Fen Liu would wait, and Fen Liu would endure until Sienna Nealon – and the world – forgot all about her. Then she would rise again.

For that was what she did best.

CHAPTER ONE

War. What is it good for? asks famous philosopher Edwin Starr. Absolutely nothing, he postulates.

Me? I have a different answer. War has many uses. But the key I was interested in at this point?

Settling shit.

“We have another one coming in,” chirped the overly cheery voice of Sierra, stirring me where I lay on a cot in a subbasement of the White House.

I wasn't sleeping. I didn't sleep, per se. Not lately. But I did lie down, so as to avoid the angry carping of my brother and other concerned parties. “You have to sleep,” these well-meaning people would tell me.

Nah, I didn't need sleep. There was a war going on. The least-fought war in history, lately.

And I was right on the front lines.

Floating up off my cot, I let my feet touch the floor. “Where's it coming from?”

“Central China,” Sierra's slightly computer-generated version of my mother's voice came from an ear bud lately buried in my ear canal. “I'm trying to narrow it down.”

“Stay on it,” I said, the concrete bunker walls flashing past as I accelerated into a hard flight. I paused long enough to wrench the big, metal door to my storage room open, then I blurred past a half-dozen waiting parties in various states of wakefulness, snapping all of them to it in an instant.

“Holy shit,” Alannah Greene said, getting on her feet in about a quarter of a second as I shot past. Her eyes had snapped from barely open when she saw me leave my little hidey-hole. “Another one coming in?”

“Yep,” I said, and she started following me like a kite, along with a half-dozen others. Bodyguards, you might call them. Babysitters, I would have said.

“What's the point of origin?” shouted Jeremy James Wade – my nominal husband, breaking into a sprint and passing Alannah in the hall.

“Central China,” I said, coming to a stop just outside the White House Situation Room. Because we definitely had a situation.

But one did not just blast through into the White House Situation Room. Two Secret Service agents were standing outside the door, scowling. There was form. There were protocols.

And I was living my life in violation of about...oh, all of them.

“It's a war,” I said, giving the one on my right a scowl in return. The Secret Service and I had reached an uneasy accord in the three months since I'd arrived here, helping to retake the White House from Nicole Muller, and one that was about to come to an end.

Muller had connived and murdered her way into the presidency with the assistance of China, who had subverted every single member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate along the way. Mind control was used for some of it, the power of telepaths and empaths weaponized and brought to bear. Some of it was done with plain old bribery. And some didn't need much incentive at all; campaign contributions and a pat on the head sufficed.

Either way, it had left me with a hell of a mess – every single member of the legislature under arrest, the president under arrest, the VP, the cabinet – well, you get the point. China had been thorough in their efforts to capture the United States government. They'd studied our succession plan well, and gone to work with a clear eye toward making sure they'd be in power here – and no one else would be.

Which meant that, for the first time since Edith Wilson decided to go ahead and make herself President of the United States while her husband ailed in a vegetative state from which he'd never recover (couldn't happen to a nicer racist), someone – some woman – was running the country without a mandate from the people, without being elected, without even being appointed and approved by the legislature, without ever receiving a single vote.

Yeah.

That'd be me.

And I was just about done with this shit.

“Your time's about up,” John Miller, Secret Service agent, lummox, and the man currently scowling at me, said.

“And it can't happen quick enough, frankly,” I said, flashing him two middle fingers. “I told you, I'm happy to step aside as soon as the special election happens.” Which was Tuesday. It was currently Sunday. “Until then, would you like this doddering giant of a country to continue plodding along without a leader in the face of an ongoing war with the world's other superpower? Or are you gonna let me in so I can deal with the incoming?”

He didn't answer, just kept scowling. But after a moment, he reached down – with metahuman speed – and popped the door handle, opening the Situation Room for me.

“Thanks, doorman,” I said, “I appreciate the invite to VIP. I'll definitely be doing bottle service tonight, and your tip will reflect that.”

His face reddened, a vein popped out in his forehead. Miller was an officious dick. I wasn't going to miss him.

“Give me what we got,” I said, sweeping into the Situation Room and hesitating only for a moment before plunking my ass into the chair at the head of the table. A dozen monitors surrounded one main screen, with scrawls of text and pictures flashing upon them, showing the state of the world. Such as it was.

A world at war. Such as it was (the world and the war).

“I have traced the incoming to Shaanxi,” Sierra's voice piped over the loudspeakers above. My bodyguard crew filed in, filling in seats where there were some available. Because there weren't that many available.

“She's working faster than any of the rest of us,” Jamal Coleman said, his eyes blurry. He didn't look like he'd been sleeping either. Probably because he hadn't. “But there's no doing this from outside the Chinese internet.”

“How's it getting out, then?” I asked, adjusting myself in the chair usually reserved for the President of the United States. Well, I'd been availing myself of all the accoutrements of the office – at least the ones, unlike the Oval Office, that weren't presently exposed to the weather.

“Internet nodes elsewhere on the planet,” Jamal said. Sierra must have been too busy crunching data to answer. “Just like all their cyber attacks.”

And there had been oh-so-many cyber attacks. One of the major gas pipelines had been shut down after it had nearly blown up. Sewage processing for Portland had been out for six weeks. (Most of its residents hadn't noticed much difference.) Half the Eastern seaboard had spent the last month plunged into darkness mingled with lawlessness. The National Guard was hard at work restoring order – such as it was. As it turned out, when you cut the power, you cut the civilizational cord with it. And people were only a few missed meals away from barbarism.

And thanks to China's drugs, a lot of those people were now blessed with metahuman powers. Things were not going well in American cities at present.

Who was in charge of all this chaos?

Oh, right. My ass was the one plunked in the chair of the nominal president, even though I'd sworn no oath and didn't even qualify for the office.

“The message is breaking through now,” Sierra said. “It appears to be only that – a message, not a cyberattack.”

“Let it through, then, I guess,” I said, and a moment later, a face flashed onto the main screen of the Situation Room.

Fen fucking Liu.

Her skin was porcelain soft, her hair perfectly black and short, a few wrinkles giving gravitas to her smooth features. There was a flashing intelligence in her eyes, too much brainpower there to ever be counted as some dullard. She was thin, she was lithe, she was lethal, as evidenced by her attacks on America–

And on me.

There was a smoking crater in west Texas that had my great-grandmother's ashes spread all over it. That account was directly chargeable to Fen Liu.

And I was still all-in on making her pay for it.

“People of America,” she said in a soft, reasonable voice. So reasonable. So soft. “I am Fen Liu, the Premier of China, speaking to you again to once more beg you to consider peace.”

“If you wanted peace,” I said, between tightly clamped teeth, “maybe you shouldn't have started a war.”

“Your economy is in shambles,” Fen Liu said. “Your government destroyed. Your greatest cities in near-ruins. This is no way for a great power to conduct itself.”

“I guess she's not going to mention the fact that she put our economy in shambles, and destroyed our cities and government,” Augustus Coleman said, only just above a mumble. He was sitting in the dark near the edge of the room. Had he been here all this time? Probably. Everything was a sleep-deprived blur around me. I tried to focus in on Fen Liu, on the bullshit she was spewing.

“It's not a strong selling point for what she's about to propose,” Wade said. He was standing near the door, looming really, since he was so tall. “So she's leaving it out.”

“You lack the basic necessities of life,” Fen Liu said. “In mere months, your country will collapse utterly.”

She wasn't wrong. I hated her. I wanted to murder her.

But she wasn't wrong.

Turns out when you outsource nearly every bit of your manufacturing to another country, then go to war with that country, you can't buy stuff from them anymore. Whether it was a screw, a refrigerator, a solar panel, a battery, or a microprocessor, China presently held the global production supply for 99.9% of those. America had nearly none.

What did America need? Screws, refrigerators, batteries, microprocessors. Maybe some solar panels, even.

More clear: that without them, even our basic ability to make smart weapons was currently in the tank.

“Your dollars are worth nothing,” Fen Liu said, continuing the trend of slapping us upside the face with things she'd done, or helped make worse. “Your standard of living plummets by the day.”

Right again. We had lots of dollars. Lots of pieces of paper moving around in our economy, because we could print as many of them as we wanted. But what could we exchange them for?

Oh, we had food. America did produce lots of that. We also had some energy – oil, coal.

Unfortunately, the machinery we used to produce food and energy was all made in – you guessed it – China. And it was all breaking down, some from cyber attacks, some from natural wear and tear. Capacity was already falling to produce both. The only thing it seemed we could produce endless amounts of were dollars. Increasing amounts of dollars which were chasing after a decreasing supply of goods and services.

Too many dollars chasing too few goods and services? The economists – and I am certainly not one – call that inflation.

A whole chicken was currently going for $50. A chicken sandwich at McDonald's was now $20. A burger was $10; not the Quarter Pounder (that was $40). That's the standard burger, the one that used to be $0.99 when I left my house for the first time. I bought five with my first Directorate paycheck. Mmmmm. Cheapness.

I spent my days in meetings with the big brains of America, carefully screened to make sure they weren't influenced by China's mind controllers and emotion pushers. They were giving me the best advice they had, and – to my surprise – most of it all cut in the exact same direction.

“You cannot win this war,” Fen Liu said. So soft. So reasonable. “No one is winning. Only losers are being produced right now. Every day that passes, China also suffers. Are we not better as fellow humans, together, working to build a better world?”

Yeah. That's what they were all saying.

“You have an election in mere days to determine the fate of your country,” she said. “To take back your country from a dangerous, petulant young woman who is not up to the task of making peace. She can only make war, and she will lead you into ruin. Send your leaders a message – that you want to live in peace and prosperity with China. All of this will then come to an end. And we can get back to the business of making this a better world.”

“With you in charge, implicitly at first and then explicitly, when you get your feet back underneath you,” I said, feeling the burn in my heart. And fortunately not in my hands.

Fen Liu signed off with a smile. Insufferable to me, probably to anyone else it seemed sincere.

And I couldn't wait to wipe it off her face with a lead pipe.

CHAPTER TWO

“Iheard the same shit just got piped out again.” My brother Reed was standing in the doorway to the Situation Room, tall, looming, of course. Everyone loomed over me. Or almost everyone.

“Like a message on repeat,” Augustus said. “'Why y'all still fighting this war we started by taking over your country?' Didn't even say they were sorry.”

“They're not sorry,” I said. “She's not sorry. She's only sorry they got caught. By a 'dangerous, petulant young woman,' no less.”

“Personally, I prefer to get caught by a dangerous, petulant young woman,” Wade said with a slight smile. “It really beats all the alternatives.”

“That's because if you get caught by a calm, steady old man, the spankings aren't as fun, right?” Alannah asked from her place down the table.

“Nailed it,” Wade said, some of the smile gone. Alannah seemed to make him deeply uncomfortable. But to be fair, she had that effect on lots of people.

“Sierra, can you give me a source location for the broadcast?” I asked. Futilely. In vain, really, because if Sierra had known where the broadcast originated...she'd have already told me.

“Negative,” Sierra said with that unerring calm. “It originated from a node on the Chinese internet located in Xi'an, Shaanxi. I'm afraid I can't be any more specific than that.”

I leaned my head back and sighed. It came out as a grunt.

“I am afraid I do not understand the problem here,” came a thin, raspy voice. “Can anyone explain to me why this is a seemingly intractable problem?”

Out of the darkness leaned a tall man with black hair that showed not even a hint of gray. It was all slicked back, very 1950's, and showed the most dramatic widow's peak I'd ever seen on a man. His face was gaunt, and any sparkle that had once been in his eye had been replaced in the last few months with a look I was all too familiar with–

A barely restrained, all-consuming rage.

“Now that my system resources are not entirely consumed with running the tracking program,” Sierra said over the speakers, “I believe I can answer your inquiry, Hades.”

“They call me creepy, my dear,” Hades said, looking up at the ceiling, “but you speaking in the voice of my dead granddaughter is deeply disquieting.”

“Yes, that is detectable in the tone and composition of your voice,” Sierra said, seemingly undeterred. “However, I am not permitted to change it.”

Everyone looked at me. Because of course I was the one who'd forbidden changing it. It was my mother's voice, and however uncomfortable I'd found it at first...I was now quite settled on it.

“The Chinese government does not allow its citizenry access to the world internet,” Sierra said. “They have, therefore, constructed an entirely enclosed internet of their own in which a series of government controls on speech are imposed at all times. There are a few points on the Chinese internet through which party officials – that is to say, the country's elite – can access the worldwide internet, but these are like castle gates defending strong points in a wall around the Chinese internet.”

“And you definitely cannot breach them?” Hades asked. “If we were to give you all the resources in the world?”

“No,” Sierra said without missing a beat. “In the event of a mass-attack by myself or any other operator, the Chinese would be able to pull offline those gateways, blocking access from the outside internet. I am afraid that they cannot be attacked from without. Nor, easily, from within, due to the nature of their existing controls.”

“Hm,” Hades said. “And why is that?”

“Try to imagine bird-hunting in an open field,” Sierra said. “Can you kill, say, a hundred doves, if they were released in a five-second span?”

“No,” Hades said, frowning. “Though I would try, I might get fifteen, twenty. But how did you know I have enjoyed bird hunting?”

“She knows everything,” Jamal said under his breath, still attached to a computer.

“Now try to imagine the same assignment in a small warehouse, with no objects and no open doors or windows, infinite ammunition, and no time limit,” Sierra said. “Could you then exterminate all the birds?”

“Certainly,” Hades said.

“That is the Chinese internet,” Sierra said. “It is a confined space where they have infinite ammunition – tools specifically designed to purge any element they find undesirable. No obstacle can get in their way. Nothing can hide you. They control it, inside and out.”

“And it's where the entire Chinese population get their information,” Reed said, sourly, as he plopped down in a chair beside me. “Other than the old folks who get it from TV, I suppose. Which they also control.”

I stood, placing my palms on the surface of the cool table. “Anyone have any fresh ideas for how I can find and kill Fen Liu?”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. I waited five seconds, then ten.

“All right, then,” I said. “If there's nothing else, meeting adjourned.” And I walked out.

“Sienna.” Reed caught me less than ten steps – floating steps – from the door. I didn't have the energy to walk, so I floated from place to place, levitating like a ghost from meeting to meeting, event to event.

“Reed,” I said, turning back. I knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. “Don't bother repeating yourself. You know it's a peeve of mine.”

“If we can't win this war, you need to make peace.”

“I don't really do that sort of thing. Flaw of character. All I'm capable of is war and vengeance. Especially when someone does what Fen Liu has done to me.”

“She didn't do anything to you,” Reed said softly. “She did it to Persephone.”

“And if I hadn't been involved in this blood feud with China,” I said, “Persephone would be alive right now. So don't tell me it wasn't done to me. It was done specifically to me. It was done with full regard for me, for my feelings, for my reaction.”

“Maybe don't give her what she wants, then,” Reed said. “Maybe let the White Whale go, Ahab.”

“I don't really do that, either,” I said, favoring him with my grimmest smile before turning to walk away. Back to my quarters. My little hidey hole storage room beneath the White House.

The war would go on. I'd see to it.

And if it was the last thing I did, I'd kill Fen Liu, preferably with my bare hands.

CHAPTER THREE

The best thing about visiting Lethe was the silence.

Everywhere else I went, from public events to private meetings about the economy, the war, the public schools – it was blather. Yap, yap, yap, all day long, and from every imaginable source. I'd rebuilt the government from everyday citizens, a temporary measure to allow me to have some idea of what was going on, how it affected the war, and how I could – maybe, in some small ways – serve the American people while we waited for them to elect representatives who could fully recompose a government.

Care was being taken. Precautions were in place to keep China from interfering again. Some of it was aided by the fact I'd killed as many of their telepaths as I could, making it much more difficult for them to pull the same trick again.

Still, rebuilding a government, even a temporary one, and sitting at its head like some squatter, was not a quiet endeavor. Not even when I delegated so much of it to my friends, to people who I'd known over the years. Zollers was working to keep telepathic interference to a minimum. My friend Aaron Mendelsohn was operating as the effective White House Chief of Staff and Counselor to the President. Guy Friday was the acting Secretary of Education. (I mean, we spend more money per capita than anyone else for worse outcomes, so, how could American public schools get any worse?)

Talk, talk, talk. Yap, yap, yap.

Not so with Lethe. Spending time with my grandmother was the one place where I could be assured of near-absolute silence.

She'd taken over a storage room in the basement, just like I had. There were certainly plenty of them, no shortage of these little cubbyhole offices in the tunnels between the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB). Lethe was sitting on an old military cot when I came in, and she barely deigned to glance my way as the light illuminated her face.

How long had it been since she'd eaten? Not long. Hades made sure of that.

How long had it been since she'd spoken? That...I suspected was harder to pinpoint.

She hadn't gone completely catatonic with the death of her mother. She still spoke the occasional word, asked the occasional question, made the occasional eye contact. It was just...sporadic as hell. You could be sitting with her for hours and she'd never say a thing. Other times, you might enjoy almost a paragraph of conversation.

Apparently, this was to be one of those times.

“Fen Liu dead yet?” she asked, after I'd settled in the wooden chair that was the room's sole piece of furniture other than the cot.

“Quite the opposite,” I said, arms crossed over my chest. I was sporting a stylish blazer and blouse combo, really trying to look the part of leader. I hadn't picked it out, of course, or it'd have come from Walmart. I doubted it was having much effect on the patience and feelings of the American people, or the global audience, though I was trying. I was even doing live broadcasts every day via Sierra, updating everyone on the non-classified progress on the economy and the war. Which seemed like a bad idea to me, constantly bringing everyone bad news, but hey, I wasn't a politician for a reason.

I was a stone-cold killer, and I really wanted to get back to plying my trade.

“She's taunting you,” Lethe said, staring up at the ceiling. It was old, the ceiling. Not quite George Washington old (the White House had been burned by the British in 1812, and he'd never lived in it anyway), but probably Harry Truman old (which was the last time it had undergone a major renovation). These are the useless facts you learn living in a place for several months. “Trying to provoke a reaction.”

“Yep,” I said. “And I'm tempted to give her one.”

“Far be it from me to sway you from delivering bloody, unlimited vengeance,” Lethe said, and now she did deign to look at me. There was a coldness in her eyes that masked the fury of a woman who'd killed more people than anyone could count. “But the reaction she's looking for is the slaughter of the innocent. Something she can use to paint you–”

“As a monster, yes, I know,” I said, keeping my arms tightly wrapped around me. “Which is why I'm not 'fighting' the war currently. All their ships are sunk. All their military forces are tucked tightly away inside their borders. Russia's in chaos, but it's not their possession anymore.” Hell, they didn't even have Taiwan anymore – though it was a wreck, because they'd looted the place and, most importantly, trashed the superconductor plants on the way out – and they were struggling to maintain order in Hong Kong.

But the Chinese homeland? It was buttoned up tight. No people going in and out to America, no missiles flying. Fortress China. The middle kingdom was ready for an invasion I didn't dare launch.

“She wants you to,” Lethe said, looking back up to the ceiling. “She wants you to turn loose those nukes you stole on civilian targets. Wants you to invade. Wants you to kill a billion people so she can unite the other seven billion against you.”

“Meanwhile, all I want is for her to come out and fight me like a man,” I said. “Wo-mano a wo-mano, to the death.”

“You might not enjoy that,” Lethe said. “She's tougher than you might think.”

“So you've met her.”

Lethe made a deep, guttural laughing noise deep in her throat. “Met her. Fought her. Fought beside her. Might have called her friend once. Might have called her enemy, too, at various points.”

“That sounds like quite the history.”

She flicked a cool gaze at me. “When you live as long as we have, you get caught up in things changing. The world shifts, and so do alliances.”

“Mind telling me your history with her?” I asked. “Maybe it'll help.”

“Irrelevant.” She stirred on the cot, producing a squeak. “You're not going to find her. Not from here. She's lived in China for thousands of years. Knows the land better than you ever will. All your satellites, your military surveillance – none of it will mean a damned thing against her ancient knowledge of the place.”

“And her teleportation metas,” I said.

She gave me a subtle nod. “She's gone to ground, and you don't know the ground.”

My grandmother was right, of course. I had the Pentagon chewing up time on all their satellites searching for her, and they had been for months. Once and now again acting Secretary of Defense Bruno Passerini had every single resource of the United States combing China looking for her...

…And they'd come up with nothing.

“China's got the approximate land mass of the United States,” I said. “If I were tasked to blood-hound someone in the US – and obviously, I have been, many times – I know exactly what I'd do. I'd go to their last known location, ask a bajillion questions, make an annoyance out of myself until somebody talked, and if that didn't work, I'd keep going back to the previous last known location, and the one after that, until I found someone, somewhere, that had an idea of where they'd go to hide.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Lethe said, “insert obvious statement about how you don't know dick about China here.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You're feeling chatty but not enough for pleasantries, I see. That's what I just said.”

“Yes, I know the problem,” she said, suddenly sitting upright and dangling her legs over the side of the cot to look directly at me. “But what are you going to do about it?”

“I told you, I've got satellites–”

“To hell with your satellites.” She was suddenly right there, eyeball to eyeball with me, and there was something terrifying in her look, and the speed with which she'd moved; any hints of languid torpor had vanished in a white-hot instant of anger displayed. “What are you willing to do to put Fen Liu in the ground?”

I didn't blink from her gaze. “Anything. Everything.”

“Except killing millions.”

“I'm indicating that I'm willing to pay whatever price,” I said. “I'll suffer, I'll trudge, I'll bleed, I'll kill. I'm not willing to make others pay it for me.”

“That might just be the reason why you fail,” Lethe said.

A beep stopped me from replying. “What is it, Sierra?” I'd told her not to disturb me unless it was urgent, and she was pretty good about knowing when to do so.

“Robb Foreman has just arrived at the White House gates for your scheduled meeting.”

“I wasn't supposed to meet with him until ten o'clock tomorrow,” I said, looking at my wrist. Which did not bear a watch.

“It's nine forty-five.”

I swore. I was doing a lot of that lately, way more than when I'd been working with average criminals. “On my way,” I said, rubbing my eyes. I didn't dare ask Sierra how much sleep I'd had in the last week for fear she'd answer. I was losing time, though, great swaths of it, and losing track of time. Asking how much I'd had over the last month would surely yield an even more terrifying answer.

“Go to your meeting,” Lethe said, lying back down on the cot. It squeaked, yielding to her weight. “Figure out what you're willing to do. Really willing to do.”

“What do you expect me to do?” I asked. “Invade China? Bombard my way in from the coast? Cut a swath of destruction through the country with the army at my back? Kill millions, maybe billions, in a mad quest for revenge?”

“No,” Lethe said. “That's what she expects you to do. I expect you to find a way to hunt her and kill her that gets the job done without leaving a swath of corpses choking all the rivers of Shanghai.”

“You mean don't do it like you used to do?”

Her eyes were anchored to the ceiling. “Not like I used to do,” she said faintly. “This world isn't that one. Not anymore.”

“Sometimes I wish it was,” I said, pausing, my hand on the door, feeling the cool grain of the wood against my fingertips. “I don't think I quite fit with this world.”

She snorted a disdainful laugh. “You wouldn't have fit in well with the other one, either. Our revenge raids in days of yore? They'd make the worst crime scene you ever saw look like a preschool tea party. Decency and mercy were not options. We would slaughter every man down to the last, and if the women and children were lucky they'd be cast into unbearable slavery.” She fixed an eye on me. “Is that the kind of world you want to live in? Where the punishments of the wicked fall on innocent and guilty alike?”

“No.”

“Find a different way, then,” Lethe said, crossing her own arms over her and staring up at the ceiling once more. “Unless you just want to wait it out and send me in to do your dirty work after everything calms down.”

“I think you mean 'wet work,'” I said. “In modern terms. And I do my own wet work. As Fen Liu is going to discover to her detriment.”

“Figure it out soon,” she said. “Because my patience is not infinite – and neither is your time.” I walked down the hall, chewing that over, words echoing in my ears as I headed to my next meeting.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Sienna,” Robb Foreman said, shaking my hand – which was tiny – in his own massive one. He was surprisingly delicate; or maybe unsurprisingly, since who wanted to get into a hand-crushing contest with me? Foreman was a meta, sure, but as an empath he didn't have strength on the scale of my own.

Foreman was a tall man with ebony skin, and hair that no longer possessed a single thread of gray. He didn't just loom over me, he towered, wearing a suit that was exactly the sort you'd expect from a Senator, a former presidential candidate, and current presidential frontrunner.

Well...sort of.

The American system of government remained a thinly-veiled mystery to nearly everyone outside our borders. It had worked generally well for us, and lots of people had cribbed notes from our constitution, though few seemed to truly understand it anymore (if they ever did). And while it hadn't been designed for a crisis such as we were currently experiencing, the people and the parties in charge had found a simple enough solution to our present dilemma that was in keeping with the constitutional order.

We were holding a special election for the House of Representatives, and every seat was up with only a few exceptions. The people would vote for their representatives, and as soon as they were sworn in, the representatives were going to immediately vote for a Speaker of the House.

And being third in line for the presidency, the Speaker of the House would immediately become the next president.

Fun fact: the Speaker of the House does not have to actually be a member of the House of Representatives, though historically they have been. And both parties, realizing the stakes of the game (majority rule meant they would select the speaker), had immediately announced their prospective “Speaker” (Presidential) candidates as quickly as possible.

Robb Foreman's party was running ahead in all polls. Not a huge shock, since President Mitchell had been of his party – before she'd been assassinated and usurped by Nicole Muller, who was from the opposition party. Maybe a sense that he'd been screwed by President Harmon the last time he'd run had propelled him to the fore. Perhaps the stink of Nicole Muller and her predecessor, Sarah Barbour, was weighing his opposition down. Maybe all of these things.

Or maybe it was that he was a good guy in a field with a distinct dearth of them, and people were terrified. Some nutjob superhero (or maybe supervillain, depending on where you were sitting) was currently usurping the office of the president and we were at war with China; who wouldn't look for comfort at a time like that?

Foreman let go of my hand long before enough time had elapsed for my soul-wrenching powers to kick in. I'd known Foreman for years; he'd helped me out of more than a few scrapes since the day we met (which had been in a jail cell, after I'd returned from England while fighting Sovereign and Century).

He was familiar with the deep cuts of Sienna lore; he knew what I was capable of, knew some of the terrible things I'd done and not spilled them to the world.

And now he was standing in front of me, about to assume the highest office in the land, if the polls were not wrong, taking it right out of my hands at a time when, frankly, I kinda still needed it in order to do what I needed to do.

Which was, of course, remove Fen Liu's head from its current perch and put it atop a pike for the whole world to see. Maybe then everyone would finally get the message: do not mess with Sienna Nealon. I keep waiting for everyone to get it, but this class appears to be slow.

“I don't want to jinx it,” I said, taking a seat opposite him and letting him sit first, since he was about to be duly elected and I was a usurper at best, “but it seems congratulations are soon to be in order.”

He nodded his massive head slowly, templing his fingers in front of his face. “Thank you. I take it you're ready to be out of here?”

I pursed my lips. “I don't feel like the job's done, if that's what you're asking. But I'm quite ready to be rid of many aspects of it. Department of the Interior meetings, for instance. I cannot figure out how they keep getting on my schedule. And HHS is a plague. I wish I could slash that whole department.”

Foreman's eyebrow quirked up, wry amusement lighting his strongly carved features. “A large percentage of the federal budget flows through that department.”

“Probably not a coincidence,” I said. “Anyway, to answer your unspoken question: yes, I will be stepping aside for you. Happily...ish.”

He nodded. “Am I to assume the portion that includes your unhappiness is rooted in the part of the job that includes conducting the war?”

“It's not finished,” I said. “And I hate leaving a task unfinished.”

He didn't look away. “It will be finished very soon. Very soon.”

I felt a certain dryness take root in my mouth. “So the decision has already been made?”

“The decision has been made,” Foreman said, “and the consensus reaches across the aisle. Furthermore, discussions have been undertaken through back channels.”

I stood, pacing away. I turned my back on the man, because I didn't want him to see my face. “It'll be announced right after you're appointed, I take it? Some preliminary draft treaty, some proposal to the American people that will make them pleased that their vote counted for something, brought home an immediate, tangible result?”

“The ships are already loading up in Chinese harbors,” Foreman said. “Replacement parts. Manufacturing equipment. Solar panels.” I grimaced. “All the things we need that we cannot currently get.”

“Except those troublesome microprocessors,” I said, turning back to him with a small, triumphant smile. “You know, the things the whole world runs on, since they destroyed their factories.”

“We're working with an alternative supplier to try and bootstrap a solution to that problem domestically,” Foreman said, rising. Guess he didn't feel comfortable with me looming over him. “My next question to you: how are you going to take this news? With grace and aplomb, or...?”

“With spite and a bomb? Or maybe a whole bunch of bombs? Like those nukes I stole from China?” I gave him a tight smile. “I haven't turned them to ash yet, and I'm not going to do it at the buzzer. My enmity is not for the people of China, it's for the current ruler and, possibly, ruling class.”

Foreman stood there in silence for a brief moment. “The way I see it, it'll take us a few days to take command once the vote's had. Peace treaty announcements require certain formalities, certain ceremonies. Until then, we're at war with China, and anything you do to them is fair game.”

“I've been hunting Fen Liu for three months with the full resources this government can muster behind me. She's hiding in a cave somewhere, or in a compound, but she's somewhere that not even the eye of Sauron could find her.”

“Well, admittedly my knowledge is more centered on the movie than the books,” Foreman said, “but I don't remember the eye of Sauron being all that efficacious at finding the ring.”

“Point is,” I said, and I strode past him because I just needed to walk, to vent this fury burning up my blood, “you give me days, I can't do much with it. I have exhausted every possibility available to me short of a full-scale invasion of China–”

“That course of action would not go over particularly well with the powers-soon-to-be,” Foreman said. “Assuming you could even pull it off in the time remaining to you. We'd be forced to leave them stranded, or at the mercies of the Chinese government. And among the public, there'd be hell to pay for that sort of thing.”

I stared right at him. “I've told you I can't find her from here. Not with the resources we have. And you say no large-scale invasion. That only leaves open–”

He held up a hand. “I'm not your boss. And if I take over, when I take over...I'm afraid there won't be a place in my administration for you, Sienna. Not because I don't like you–”

“You're the only one, then. I've seen the polling, I know my political favorability with the public is somewhere south of a properly rank French cheese. Which, admittedly, galls me a little bit since this country would still be a puppet of China if not for me.”

“Because they've always viewed you as a winner,” Foreman said. “Someone who'll do anything to get the job done.”

“And I'm not getting the job done?” I raised an eyebrow. “You think the American people’s problem with me is that they don't think I'm doing enough to win this war?”

“Yes,” Foreman said.

“What would they like me to do?” I asked, making an elaborate, sarcastic gesture with my hands. “Actually nuke China into a parking lot?”

“I doubt that,” Foreman said. “The public doesn't have an appetite for that kind of violence. Neither does the world. They want us to win, but they don't want to be confronted with the truth of what a war really is. The moment they start seeing photographs of bombed-out cities with the dead bodies of children–”

“That's what a war is, Foreman. It's force, and brutality, and all these ugly things that–”

“I know it and you know it,” Foreman said, holding up a hand to stay my rage. “Just like policing. Just like butchery on a farm. Just like any of the underpinnings of our society that people have disassociated themselves from. They outsourced it, they don't know what it looks like, what it entails – they only enjoy the fruits of it.” He grew serious. “They want victory, Sienna, and they don't care that you can't deliver it without turning Beijing and every other city in China into a smoldering crater. They want it anyway, and they can't forgive you for not making it happen.”

“They want a miracle, then,” I said acidly.

“Yes. The public frequently does.” He crossed his hands, one over another, in front of him. “And the way I reckon it, you've got mere days to deliver one. We will have peace then. After that–”

It was my turn to hold up a hand to stay him. “In the name of deniability, you probably shouldn't finish that sentence.”

“I have to finish the sentence, Sienna,” Foreman said, and now we understood each other. Right now, Foreman couldn't do anything to me; he had no official political power. Anything he said were mere threats, predicated on some future power yet to come.

But in two days, he'd be the President of the United States, and I'd be a private citizen again, with no future role in the government, and, depending on what I did over the next hours and days, maybe nowhere on the whole planet to run.

He stared at me, and delivered his ultimatum. “Anything that happens after that...you're on your own.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Shaking your entourage when they're dedicated to keeping you alive? That's a stupid thing to do. When you're in charge of the war effort against the other greatest power on the planet, their sworn enemy, and the sole obstacle to them getting what they want, it's even dumber.

But sometimes, when the world is on your shoulders, and you're sick of being buried under the earth in endless subterranean corridors, it's the only thing to do.

It wasn't particularly hard for me, either. I'd just walked out the front door of the White House, jetted straight up into the air...

...And come down slowly where I wanted to be. Far enough away they wouldn't look there right away, close enough they could come running if shit hit the fan.

I found myself in the Oval Office, which was still open to the air. Because restoring historic buildings requires certain materials. Which are apparently made in China. Holes in the building remained, somewhat patched by makeshift lumber. I plopped down in the chair behind the Resolute desk, listening to the distant sound of guards on walkie-talkies telling each other that all was well, it was just me coming into the Oval, and stared into the darkness.

And it was dark. Night had fallen at some point, after a long day of meetings and bullshit, none of which had gotten me one inch closer to finding Fen Liu or ending the war on the terms I was seeking (which, again, involved Fen Liu's head on a pike).

I know we don't talk much these days, Brianna Glover said, almost jarring me out of my seat, but is this one of those moments when you need someone to listen?

“People listen to me all the time,” I said. Her voice had a far-off quality to it; I assumed it was because she was being slowly dissolved by my mind. It was a thing that happened to the souls taken by incubi and succubi. I'd absorbed her almost three years ago, and I'd barely noticed how quiet she'd become the last few months. “They hang on my every word. It's kind of annoying, actually. Like I could say I have to take a dump and they'd comb through the statement as if it held incredible wisdom somewhere within, even though large groups of these people hate me.”

I don't think they hate you, she said. I think they just, like Foreman said, want to win, and they're disappointed it hasn't happened.

“And it's the one thing I can't seem to give them,” I said. “I could give them Armageddon.” I burned fire out of my hand, then snuffed it with a gentle brush of wind from the minimal powers I had from absorbing a little bit of my brother's soul in the past. I flared the laser blade of Chase Blanton, then doused it with a stream of water that made it hiss (taken from Scott). “I have so much power,” I said, rattling a pen on the Resolute desk, metal manipulation abilities I'd absorbed from Chad Goodwin. “I can break windows with my voice, ripple the blades of grass on the lawn, spark electricity from my fingertips, shoot lasers out of my eyes, and even pull a cloud of dust off the earth.” I put my head down. “And not one of those can bring me victory with China. Against China.”

Come on, now. You can also create ice, stop time, fly, swell yourself like a minor Hulk, give people a hell of a headache, talk to animals, and turn into a dragon. And that's just what you can do today. Imagine what you could do if you were willing to take–

“Those damned serums,” I muttered in the dark.

It was so funny to think about power when I already had so much of it. I was sitting in the office of the president of what had once been the most powerful country in the world, holding onto a nuclear arsenal that could destroy the entire planet several times over, and with abilities that were the envy of most people.

And I still didn't have enough power to accomplish what I wanted to get done.

Worse than that...I feared what might happen if I did have it.

There were two serums out there that promised even more power. One would – we thought – take every ghostly power I had from partial absorptions and turn it into the full-fledged power of the person I'd taken it from. Instead of moving dust I'd be able to move mountains. Instead of little sparks of electricity I'd be a walking thunderstorm. Instead of creating a gentle stream of water I could flood the world.

Probably I shouldn't do that last one, though. Probably. Though if The Beatles released another AI-generated single, all bets were off, and it was time for Noah to get the ark.

The other serum would fully unlock powers that were hidden deep in my genetic past, ones probably close to mine. The ability of Hades to rip away souls at a distance would be at hand.

How far of a distance? Well...that was still an open question.

And that right there...that started to terrify me.

“How much longer do you suppose you'll last?” I asked.

Not sure, Brianna said, her voice weak, faded. Not long, probably.

“Such fun,” I said. “Guess I'll be alone again, then. Not that you've ever been as forcefully in my thoughts as others have been, in the past.”

She didn't answer that. Maybe she didn't have anything to say. Maybe it was just becoming a hell of an effort to gather herself enough to speak.

It did leave me with a thought, though. There were a couple powers I hadn't cycled through as I'd been contemplating what to do. And one of them might just help me now.

Just last year, in this very city, I'd absorbed a portion of the soul of Maria Westcott, a small-time criminal and metahuman with a very distinct power. The ability to see the dead and speak to them.

I was sitting in a place with a ridiculous amount of history. Was some former president just standing here, waiting to give me wisdom that would answer all my problems? Could Abe Lincoln be waiting in the wings with wisdom to steer me through this crisis? Could Eisenhower be lurking just out of my vision, with the advice of a general on how to win this war?

With Maria Westcott firmly in mind, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and summoned forth the power.

When I opened my eyes again, I blinked, out of sheer surprise, because no president was standing in front of me; no figure of history, either, exactly...

...But a person I never thought I'd see again...was.

CHAPTER SIX

“About damned time,” Persephone said, looking at me in that cockeyed way she had, dark, graying hair waving along with her motion. Disappointment was wafting off her, shaking her head like I'd just done something dumb. Which...I guess, frequently, I had.

“What the hell,” I said, overturning my chair as I stood up. “You died, like, a bajillion miles from here.”

“Yeah, but I died with the thought of you in mind, so here I am,” Persephone said. She looked almost like she was really there, almost completely solid, only a hint of translucence telling me she wasn't real. “Now listen up, and listen quick, because I may have been plucky, but I'm not here to do anything but settle my last bit of business and then I'm going on.”

I stared at her. “Okay.”

“Figures it'd take a dead gal talking to you to shut you up,” Persephone said, “but here goes: you're not responsible for me being dead.”

I didn't know quite what to say to that. Wait. Yes, I did. It was the same thing I'd been hitting myself with every day and night since she'd died. “Yes, I am. I am entirely responsible for you being dead. Fen Liu killed you because of me. If it hadn't been for me and my little war–”

“Oh, for the sake of a fuck,” Persephone said. “Did you pull the trigger on me yourself?”

“I thought you got bombed...?”

“I got shot in the head, girl. The explosion happened after, but muddle through that later. Point is, did you pull that trigger?”

“As good as–”

“If I had my body about me, I would slap the pee-water out of you right now,” Persephone said, and I could tell she would have, too. “Did you pull the trigger? With your own piddly finger? Your own self?”

I hesitated. “No. But–”

“Girl, you got too much butt already, you don't need more. Now I love you like my own daughter – and God knows you needed it, 'specially after your momma died the way she did and when she did, but you listen – because you kinda suck at that,” and she floated her way through the desk to draw closer to me, to really look me in the eye. “You didn't kill me. That bitch Fen Liu did. And I appreciate you want to put her under the ground, but you ain't gonna get her unless you understand her. And you ain't gonna understand her if you don't find out who she is. Walk in her shoes. You get what I'm saying?”

“I...no,” I said, staring at her.

“Go to China, dumbass,” Persephone said. “Pack a bag. Bring that hawk of yours. Hide your ass out in the mountains, and travel the paths she traveled in days of yore and during the Communist revolution. Go to the hinterlands. Do that thing you do where you dog someone until they can't get away from you no more. And then,” and here her eyes seemed to slip the realm of what they looked like in life, and adopt some glow as if of hellfire, “you look her in the eye, do that other thing you do best, and give her my regards as you do so.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll play Nixon and go to China. But with much less diplomacy.”

“And hopefully less flop sweat,” Persephone said. “Sorry. I still can't get that 1960 debate out of my head. I've never seen such a thing.” Her image started to become washed out, like she was fading. “Oh, and girl? One more thing.”

I looked at my great-grandmother, and realized I was speaking to her for the last time. I hadn't expected this, and I didn't know what to say even now. About a billion things flashed through my head – about how I was sorry that this whole mess had happened. That I wish I hadn't been the one to bring thousands of years of life to an abrupt close.

That I hoped she was proud of me.

“What?” I asked, almost hiccupping my sudden onset of feelings.

“Whatever comes your way, now or next...you can handle it,” Persephone said, and gave me a nod. “I've seen a lot of shit in my life. Lot of terrible people. Terrible metas. But you, my girl...you listen to your heart, that little voice inside, the one that keeps telling you not to take those serums...you'll be as good as gold.” She gave me a wink. “Give 'em hell for me.”

And with that, she was gone. And anything else I might have wanted to say was gone with her.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Imoved up into the clouds, the city of Washington, DC glittering below me. I had a phone in my hand, not a soul in sight. And that was the way I wanted it. “Sierra,” I said, “did you get all that?”

“I got half of it,” Sierra said. “Inferring the rest, and what you left unspoken, I believe you intend to engage in a small-scale invasion of China in order to ferret out the location of Fen Liu.”

“That's correct,” I said, sitting cross-legged on a cloud, like the angel I was. Okay, angel of death, but still. “What do I need in order to pull this off?”

She didn't take very long to think about it. “Transportation.”

“Taxi,” I said.

“Food.”

“Technically, I could live without food and water for a bit,” I said. Even air, though it wouldn't be pleasant, and I'd be unconscious. “Still...okay. So I need some rations.” Luckily I wouldn't have to worry about purifying water, because my metahuman immune system could handle drinking a whole bowl of wastewater without causing me so much as a case of the rumbly tummy. “I can bring you, right?”

“Somewhat,” Sierra said. “My access to satellite communications means I will be able to speak with you in China, but I have no control over any systems in the country so my ability to give aid will be limited.” She paused, and I almost thought it was a dramatic one. “Unless...”

Okay, that really was her being dramatic. “Unless what?”

“As part of your mission,” Sierra said, “if you could find your way to a Chinese internet node, we could install my program inside their internet. This would allow me to quietly propagate myself across the network, and perhaps – eventually – break the hold of the Chinese censors on their network.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That's a big if. You said they designed that system so that they could control it from end to end.”

“That is true,” she said. “And I would be at a great disadvantage, at least at first. From within the network, I would need to insert myself into critical areas of their infrastructure before I would be of any use. 'Go silent,' I think you would say, giving my program time to grow in those critical locations. After that, it may be possible for me to compromise everything, or even completely take over their internet.”

“How long would that take?” I asked. A breeze came by, stirring my hair. I looked down; clouds had passed, leaving me with a view of Alexandria, Virginia.

“Impossible to say,” Sierra said. “The best analogy to what I would be attempting would be a military campaign of sorts, somewhat similar to yours. How I would fare depends entirely on the terrain, luck, and other factors outside our control.”

“So that's a maybe,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Okay. If we do this, we need to keep this force small.”

“Perhaps using the assistance of Greg Vansen, then, to bring in your entire team–”

“No,” I said, shaking my head most vociferously. “Not that kind of small. Bringing in my whole meta army is not a game I want to play. The Chinese are fully aware of the shrink and hide game. I could just as easily lose the entire team in one good fireball, like they did theirs back in CIA headquarters.” That had been a bit of a lucky break, killing all – or almost all – of the Chinese Atlas-types at once.

“If you don't mind me saying so,” Sierra said, “your support will be limited if you do not employ that strategy, or bring your entire team, it will not be much of an invasion.”

“Correct,” I said. “It will not be much of an invasion.”

Most of my team had been released, anyway, and were back to their lives. Only those involved in the day-to-day war effort had been retained. The rest had been turned loose with a mandate to go live their lives, and when the time came, we'd call them up.

I suspected a lot of them had been living with a Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads ever since. My only consolation was that at least we all weren't living in cramped quarters, on the run, like we had been mere months earlier. Like the ones so many of my people had died in.

“I want to keep this tight,” I said, puncturing the silence. One thing I liked about Sierra: she knew when to shut up. “Me. Maybe only me, if I can get away with it, in fact.”

“That seems impractical,” Sierra said. “Attempting a penetration of an enemy nation when you don't speak the language–”

“Okay,” I said. “So I need someone that speaks Chinese. Jian Chen. He's always up for sticking a thumb in China's eye.”

She let that stand for just a moment. “That's probably not enough. If you get into trouble, it would be nice to have additional support, even if you don't bring a full-on cavalry along.”

I thought about it, but only for a moment. “Hades will want in. Lethe, too.” I grimaced. “And as much as I might want to leave them out, there's zero chance they don't kick my ass for excluding them.”

“What about Jeremy Hampton?” Sierra asked. “He's a professional soldier, has a crew, they assisted you, and me, in taking DC back, and they could help–”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Hampton's needed here, helping get the cities back under control from the metahuman outbreaks.” And I didn't want to be stuck watching his mercenary force's back, especially in a hostile foreign country.

“There are military resources you could draw on–”

“I'm leaving the powers of this office behind,” I said. “Taking anybody with me that might want to bail out the moment Robb Foreman takes charge is a risk I can't accept.” I swore under my breath. “The sad thing is that River would have been perfect for this.”

But River was now in a memory care facility in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Because it was extremely off the radar. And because New Asgard, where she'd been meant to go, was a smoking ruin.

“Veronika Acheron.”

“No.” I wasn't getting my cousin killed in this.

“Alannah Greene.”

“Definitely not.” See above.

“Reed.”

I shook my head even more vociferously. “No.” I wasn't subjecting my brother to the risk of ignominious death in the faraway reaches of China on some moon shot attempt to track down the current Sienna's Most Wanted. It was bad enough I was dragging my grandmother and great-grandfather in, but at least they'd lived long, full lives. Probably too long and too full, in some instances.

“You should at least speak with your brother before you leave,” Sierra said, sounding the closest to my mother she'd ever sounded. “This mission entails a considerable amount of risk, and I project the odds of success to be...quite low.”

“Which is why I'm not taking anyone with me I don't have to,” I said. “Jian, Hades, Lethe. That's three. I'll bring Ricardo, too, for reconnaissance. That'll help us keep a low profile, avoid people.” With a rattling breath, I nodded to myself. It was a good plan. “Taxi will insert us into the countryside, and we'll move by night to avoid being seen, and carry only what we have to.” With a look at the White House below, I gave myself a final nod. I had a plan. Finally.

Now it was time to execute.

CHAPTER EIGHT

As it turned out, assembling my team was easier than I'd figured it would be.

“Of course I'm in,” Hades said, when I caught him in a hallway in the White House basement. His eyes were narrow, searching, and hints of the same rage I'd seen in his daughter's eyes were visible in his own. “Who else?”

“Lethe, and Jian Chen,” I said, keeping my voice meta-low. No one was around, no one was listening – that I knew of. “For translation purposes, see.”

“Right,” Hades said, thinking for a moment. “Have you considered adding ArcheGrey to the team? She works for pay, and she can probably access China's systems while your Sierra is still inserting herself–”

“The Chinese internet,” Sierra spoke, because apparently she actually was listening, “is heavily monitored by Thor types. Any penetration by Arche or Jamal would be noticed almost immediately.”

Hades took that in stride. “Very well. We do this the old-fashioned way.”

“It's a family affair,” I said. “If it was up to me, I wouldn't even take Jian. But we could use someone who speaks Mandarin–”

“Your grandmother speaks Mandarin,” Hades said.

“Someone who can blend in with the locals. Ask questions without arousing suspicions. That's it, though. I don't want anyone else exposed.”

He nodded. “What preparations need to be made?”

“I can make the preparations myself,” I said, because I already had one in mind. “I need you to tell Lethe. If she doesn't want to come, that's fine–”

“You could not keep her away from this thing with all those nuclear weapons you have stockpiled,” Hades said.

“Perfect,” I said. “Get her, get together any clothes you need, and meet me in my quarters in half an hour.” With that, I turned on my heel and headed for the nearest exit.

“And where will you be?” Hades called after me.

“I gotta take a meeting or two,” I said, not looking back. Because I did.

CHAPTER NINE

My next stop involved a quick step through a portal made by Taxi, my chief teleportation officer, to a newly constructed warehouse office building outside Smyrna, Tennessee. At the front desk I was greeted with a mere raise of the eyebrow by the receptionist, and was quickly invited onward to the factory floor.

I found Cassidy Ellis within, buzzing about and bossing people around, probably one of her favorite or least favorite activities, depending on the day and the person. “I need that line to achieve a higher efficiency level,” she said to a man in a hard hat, pointing to a production line that was rattling loudly. “Post haste, please.” She saw me and beckoned, and I followed her toward one of those offices that was elevated over the factory floor.

Once we were inside, she snapped her fingers and the blinds closed on the windows that allowed her to look over her fiefdom, giving us a modicum of privacy. Around us I saw only a desk and a laptop computer, no water chamber, nothing fancier that would allow her to take full advantage of her being the brainiest brain on the planet. Cassidy said nothing, just stared at me, as if waiting for me to admit some horrible sin, or maybe try to sign her up for a timeshare.

“I'm going into China,” I said, taking the bait. “Just me and a couple others.”

“Oh, I know,” Cassidy said, fingers resting on her chin, her usual sense of self-satisfaction on full display. “It was always going to come down to this. America doesn't have the tech or resources to penetrate the Chinese homeland without massive casualties – which the public has no stomach for – and you don't have the stones to murder millions or billions to achieve vengeance or victory, whichever objective you're willing to admit you're after at the moment.”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to take that last bit personally. “China's still a threat. To me. To you, obviously–”

“Obviously.”

“I guess I just figured you'd be more invested in making sure that they don't win this war.” I placed my hands palm-down on my knees. I was sweating for some reason, moisture seeping into the cloth. “Given what they've done to you.”

“Oh, I'm invested,” she said, leaning slightly forward. “What do you think this factory builds?”

I stared at her for a moment. “I don't know. Rubber baby buggy bumpers?”

“Drones,” she said simply. “I've got two more under construction that will replace a portion of the microprocessor supply. Three additional that will supply vital components China can no longer be trusted to deliver, even in peacetime.” Her eyes were alight. “I'm building a new national defense sector, with weapons that will batter down the doors of fortress China, with factories that are distributed throughout the continental US, so no single location strike can bring them down. They're buttressed with on-site security prepared to deal with meta saboteurs all the way up to your power level...and I've managed to put this all together in three months.” She sat back. “I'm preparing for the next war, and the one after. You know, in case you can't bring this one to a close.”

“That's...really great, Cassidy,” I said. “But I'm hoping to still take Fen Liu's head off this round, so we don't end up with a World War IV: The Wrath of Fen in a few years.”

She stared at me for a bare moment before shrugging, opening her desk drawer, and pulling out a backpack. She tossed it, thumping, onto the desk. “Fine. Have it your way, then. I'm telling you about genius plays that are thirty moves out and you're worried about yourself, on the board, right now.”

“Yes, because I am on the board right now,” I said, opening the backpack zipper to reveal...well, quite a bit.

The first thing that caught my eye was a cell phone that reminded me of the old Motorola Razrs. I picked it up and stared at it; there were a few more of the exact same model, complete with small earwigs that looked like they fit directly into the canal.

“Satellite phones,” Cassidy said. “Give one to each member of your team, you'll be able to wirelessly communicate locally and over long distances if you become separated for whatever reason. No cell towers needed. The earwigs are completely waterproof and possess filtering technology so you get voice comms without all that crummy background static like they're on a call with someone driving eighty-five with the top down.”

“Well, that's...pretty cool, actually,” I said, putting the phone I'd picked up back next to its mates. I counted quickly; there were ten of them. Another pouch I held up questioningly. “What's this?”

“Calories,” she said. “You're going to need to travel light, so I created a distilled ration bar that takes up almost no space – can be carried on your person – and feeds enough calories to last a week. I call it Lembas,” she said with some pride. “And I packed enough to keep you in country for months if need be.”

“That's...really helpful, thank you,” I said. The ration packs she'd put in looked like they would take up all of a square foot.

“I try to anticipate these things,” she said. “Here's something else I'm anticipating: you're going to need to make allies of the local wildlife. Close allies. So get practicing with that Priscilla, Queen of the Wild’s skill. Animals will love the Lembas, so don't hesitate to use it to buy some loyalty, because we both know there's zero chance you're in the wilds of China for months without getting caught.”

“I don't think I have the patience for that,” I said, flipping through the box. “Plus, what are the odds I discover some secret that leads me to Fen Liu in the midst of some trackless wilderness?” I shook my head. “I think the answers to finding her are going to be in a city, in which case I'll need–”

“A disguise, yes,” Cassidy said, and pointed to another section of her mystery bag. “Those are holographic camo that use the latest technology and are controlled via your phone. Simple pairing by Bluetooth.”

“That's...kind of far out, Cassidy,” I said, opening up one of them. It looked like a mesh poncho, with a cowl and face mask. Putting it on, it unrolled easily, like mosquito netting.

“Press it down,” Cassidy said, waving at my face. “It adheres.”

I did so, then, looking down at the phone in my hand, saw a variety of options for faces. Picking one, an Asian one, I hit the button that said ACTIVATE.

There was a faint hum suddenly present inside my skull. A glow appeared, lighting up my eyes and making me feel like the sun was shining on my face.

“It uses a web of pinhole cameras all over the rig to match proximal light levels,” Cassidy said, “so you won't glow in the middle of a dark night, or be colored like shadow in the daytime streets in Beijing. The app is tied to a local instance of Sierra on your phone as well as GPS in order to make sure the faces programmed in are actual Chinese citizens who could potentially be in the area where you are. You don't want to set off flags in their 'Skynet' system and bring down the authorities on yourself. This should help minimize that risk.”

“Brilliant,” I said, standing up and walking over to a mirror hanging in the corner. Full length.

“There's also a translation feature,” Cassidy said, then barked something in Mandarin. A few seconds later, English words appeared in front of my face: You are an annoying cow.

“Ha ha,” I said. “This thing is recording everything I do and say and piping it to Sierra?”

“Yes,” Cassidy said. “For translation, but also advice, so she can explain anything you're seeing over there that you might not understand. Also, the phones are equipped with the Chinese pay app, which they use to pay for everything over there. Plenty of money in the accounts, and if one of them gets burned, just move to the next phone. Okay?” She fanned herself. “I am nothing if not generous.”

“Of spirit, and cash, yes, thank you,” I said. “You're really making this whole thing possible.”

“You're welcome,” she said, a little softly. “I wish you the best of luck. Not only because you need it, but because I do hope you actually manage to remove the knife from our throat, and our heads from the guillotine.”

“Because that's what we're facing if Fen Liu lives,” I said.

“Some night I'll be working in a factory of mine,” Cassidy said, eyes about a thousand miles away, “and it'll just...explode. If my workers are very lucky, I'll be the only one here. But luck will have nothing to do with it. It'll be the cold calculus of Fen Liu, deciding whether adding a thousand casualties will work in service of her goal to see me dead.”

She leaned across the desk and seized my hand. “I've done everything I can for you, short of injecting you with the serums that I know you won't take.”

I felt a pain inside. “My resolve is wavering on them. It's just–”

“You're right to fear yourself,” Cassidy said. “What happened in Minneapolis two years ago may have turned out to have a happy ending, with you muddling time in order to save the city. But you with unchecked access to the powers within? With total control of telepathy, metal, electricity and all else?” She shuddered. “You might save us today, but you're going to live a long time, Sienna. And there aren't that many people to put you in check now when you get a bad idea.”

“Lucky I don't get many of those.”

Cassidy smiled weakly. “I thank you for that sarcasm. Your self-awareness is the only thing that allows me to sleep at night.” From her desk drawer she produced a last package.

Two vials were sitting inside, complete with an injector needle.

She thrust the needles into my hand and then folded my fingers over them as the first hint of a burn started in my fingertips. “You'll know better than I will if you need to use them. But if you do...please keep in mind that doing so will only make you a bigger target to the nations of men – and more of an enemy of the people than you already are.”

“I can solve my problems of today,” I said, staring reluctantly at the needles, “and create a whole host of new ones for tomorrow.”

“It wouldn't be Pandora's Box if the hope wasn't buried at the bottom, underneath terrors the like of which the world had never seen,” Cassidy said, and stood. “Take care before you unleash any more, Sienna. But if you do – make sure you kill this bitch. Before she kills us.”

CHAPTER TEN

Ilanded outside the White House perimeter, passed through quickly, making my way to a small room only a few down from my own. It was a quiet one, with a little man sitting on an overstuffed chair that had not come from the United States, reading a cooking magazine with his little legs dangling over the edge.

Taxi looked up as I entered, his expression a question: Where to, today?

“I need to talk to you real quick,” I said, “before I go...wherever I'm going to go.”

He nodded, but did not speak. Even without River around, he was either a real stoic or he'd just gotten in the habit of silence. I didn't know for sure which it was, but he was quiet.

“I know your contract with River is running short,” I said. “How many days left now?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. His voice was quiet, almost hoarse. Maybe it was from not speaking. Or maybe he was delivering extensive lectures in his free time, however much of that he had.

“Shit,” I said. I'd looked at River's accounts; she wasn't exactly tapped out from paying him his escalating fees, but it was having an effect on her estate. And I was nearly tapped out myself from financing the war for months out of my own pocket. Plus the US government was unlikely to be picking up the tab for any more of my adventures. “I'm about to undertake an incursion into China. How well do you know that country?”

“Well enough,” he said. “Haven't I always delivered you close to where you want? Just tell me, I can make it work.”

“Okay,” I said. “Here's the problem – no way are we done in a day.”

He steepled his fingers over his cooking magazine. “But I am done.”

I grimaced. “Any chance we could renegotiate that?”

Taxi's eyes flitted over his pages. “I might be willing to tarry for a bit longer to aid you, but...”

“But what?” I asked.

“I sense your war could burn on forever,” Taxi said, brushing his stubby fingers over pictures of beautifully cooked middle eastern food. “That you would be happy to let it.”

“Well, my country is not nearly so happy to do so as I am,” I said. “They're pulling the plug.”

He shook his head. “I don't wish to stay here, then.”

“Don't blame you,” I said, and popped one of the satellite phones out. “But I have a solution: you remain on call for me, and you can go wherever you would like in the whole, wide world.”

His eyes seemed to light up. “I can go home?”

“You can go home,” I said. “That's a satellite phone. It'll reach you anywhere. You drop us off, go home, and come get us whenever we need a ride. And I'll pay you. That work?”

He seemed to contemplate that for a moment. “That will work,” he finally decided. “But,” he added, waving the phone at me, “it will not work forever. I do not know what troubles this may bring, and I do not wish to remain in danger forever.”

“Who does?” I asked with a tight smile. By his expression – knowing, with smoky eyes fixed on me – he seemed to suggest that the answer might just be me.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“I'm going to China to track down Fen Liu and kill her,” I said to Jian.

He stared at me, raven hair perfectly cropped, his physique as iron as ever. “I'm in,” he said.

And that was it. Man, I wish everything was this easy.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Team: check. Hades, Jian, and Lethe were standing around her room in the basement of the White House, the smell of the new fabrics filling the air from what Cassidy had loaded me up with. Camouflage from head to toe, sitting on my body and even over my face, lightly resting against my skin like a breathable spandex. After all these years, the comic book fans and perverts were finally getting their way – Sienna Nealon was wearing a spandex suit.

Transport: check.

I'd parceled out the satellite phones, along with the survival bars and camouflage mesh. We looked a little funky, like tourists coming in from the rain. All we needed now was a destination.

“So...” I said, to Lethe.

“So,” she said, staring back.

I just stared for a moment. “We need a destination.”

With a shrug, she said, “So get one.”

“Uhhh...” Jian said, clearly uncomfortable with the rising level of tension in the room.

I put a hand to my forehead. “You know some basic facts about Fen Liu.”

“Yes.” Lethe raised an eyebrow, but her face was plastered in an unmistakable scowl. “And?”

“You met her in your odyssey across the world,” I said. “So maybe you give us an idea of where she comes from, at least? A province? A general area?”

Lethe grunted impatiently. “It was one of the green provinces, I'm pretty sure. Not Gansu.”

“...Pretty sure?”

“And probably not the extreme north of the country,” Lethe said. “It's hard to tell, because we didn't have maps at the time, but I think we made our way along the green belt between Sichuan and Fujian, ending up hitting the Taiwan straits somewhere near modern Quanzhou.”

I felt a real pressure in my head and shuffled over to Lethe's cot, letting myself plop down. “This is all you have?”

“That and a real desire to tear this woman's heart out with a finger,” Lethe said.

“I think we all share a certain desire for revenge,” Hades said, “so let us try to focus on that. However, if I am not much mistaken...this is very little to go on.”

“This is nothing to go on,” I said, and gestured at Taxi. “What am I supposed to do, have him drop us at a random spot near Quanzhou? 'Drop us on the beach, we'll have a cookout.' How the hell are we supposed to find Fen Liu from there?”

“You go, you talk to people, you hunt her down,” Lethe said, gesturing at me, with the mesh draped over my face, head, and body. “You have the tools. He has the translation ability. The mouth.”

“You don't even remember the name of the village where you met her the first time?” I asked, feeling like all the hopes I'd pinned on this plan were evaporating like spilled water in New Asgard on a summer day. “Like, first letter, even?”

“I hadn't learned Mandarin yet,” Lethe said, a touch defensively, “and for all I know, I never got the name.”

I buried my face in my hands. “Unbelievable. I put together this whole expedition and – what am I supposed to do now?”

“Ready, fire, aim,” Lethe said, sounding quite annoyed. “Let's just go. Pick a spot, we'll start digging.”

Jian shifted uncomfortably on his feet, and broke his silence for the first time. “This does not seem a wise course. The PRC is a police state. There are cameras everywhere, and while I am sure your colleague has designed an excellent system to deceive them, no system is perfect. The longer we are exposed to danger, the more likely the flaws come to be a problem. And the PRC deals with such problems in one way only.”

“Raw, naked force,” I said. “Men with guns sent to ask pointed questions.” He nodded agreement.

“Look, you're not going to find any answers sitting here,” Lethe said. “We need to get on the ground there, to start probing, regardless of danger.”

“I don't want to be wandering around in a country that wants me dead without any clue where I'm going,” I said.

“If I may,” Sierra interjected, playing over the phone speaker in my pocket. I fished her out so she could speak clearly, since we didn't have our earwigs in yet. “I have designated a few locations in mainland China where I believe security will be lax enough to allow optimal insertion of my program to their system. Perhaps we could start at one of those?”

“Perfect,” Lethe said, “let's rile up the hornet's nest there, if we have to, then we can jump somewhere else.”

I continued to rub my forehead and temple, because although I was mostly immune to stress headaches, if there was a moment it was possible for one to be coming on, this was it. “I'm sorry, I thought I'd left Alannah out of this trip. You're really suggesting we go in, start shit, then jump somewhere else and expect things to just calm down? Planting Sierra is a stealth mission. Trying to find Fen Liu's hideout operates on the same principle. There are a billion and a half people in China, most of them probably hate me because of what their government is saying about me, and I want to kill as few of them as possible. Your plan is not conducive to that.”

“My plan is to take advantage of the fact you're at war to begin fighting a war,” Lethe said, her eyes narrowing. “If you think you're going to be able to waltz into China and do this without soldiers and civilians getting killed, you are daydreaming. Or day drinking. Fen Liu is going to put people in your way. Guaranteed. So get ready for Operation Human Shield, and start having a plan to deal with them. Because it's coming.”

“The goal is not a massive body count,” I said. “It's the opposite.”

“The goal is to kill Fen Liu,” Hades said softly. “The body count may be a side effect. Your grandmother is right. She will hide. If it comes to it, you may have to choose between letting her slip away and killing innocent people. Because that is the choice she will want to force on you. Because it's one she knows you cannot bring yourself to make. And because she wins either way.”

“She doesn't win if I choke the last breath from her as her lifeless eyes roll back in her head,” I said, seething. “I win, in that case. By definition.”

“This is a war,” Lethe said, “and by definition there will be casualties. And it'll be more because Fen Liu will want casualties, it'll allow her to parade her righteousness in front of the world. 'Look what Sienna Nealon did to me, and I didn't even do anything to America!'”

“That's a lie,” I seethed. “People have died from the efforts of her hackers. From the superpower drugs she's unleashed on our population.”

“But she denied it,” Hades said, “and you can't prove it was her. She's kept this war remarkably unfought. For a reason, I assume.”

“Yes, it's that she can't win, and I'm leaving, so why stir up a shitshow when you can exit on good terms with the next administration?” I said.

“Whatever the case,” Hades said. “This is how she has fought, and will continue to fight: in the press, to her full advantage, destroying your reputation and burnishing her own. Ready yourself.”

“Great. Noted. Anyone else?” I asked. I felt my patience slipping away, if such an animal had ever existed in the first place.

A knock sounded from outside the door, and a voice came crackling through a moment later. “I have a few suggestions,” came a strong, male voice.

I recognized it immediately, of course.

It was my husband's.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ifelt the heat in my cheeks, and said, “Excuse me for a moment.” Opening the door, I stepped into the hall to find my husband, Jeremy James Wade, politely waiting for me, having stepped back far enough to allow me to exit without being all up in my business. Looking once up and down the hall, I found it empty. Thankfully. But electronic eyes were probably watching, and I was still dodging my bodyguards, so I jerked my head toward another nearby room, this one storage, and we stepped inside. “Okay,” I said, once the door was closed, “spill it.”

Wade was a tall, blue-eyed, well-built Captain America type. He towered over me; I was tempted to float just to equalize our height difference. In better times, I liked that he towered over me. Right now I just found it annoying.

“If you're planning a four-person insurgency into China,” Wade said, “I think I can help. I have spent time in-country, after all.”

“Hong Kong and a prison do not count as 'in country.'”

He chuckled. “I've also spent time in places like Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Chengdu. Plus Beijing. I was under non-official cover the entire time, so I got to visit places, drive through the cities and countryside, and generally make my way around. I know you've got already Jian, but maybe a backup could help?”

“How did you even know?” I asked, folding my arms in front of me. “I have talked to all of five people about this, and four of them are in that room.”

“Come on, Sienna,” Wade said, face lit with amusement even in the dimness. “The war's coming to an end and Fen Liu's still out there. Everyone knows what you're planning. It's just that not everyone wants the war to continue.”

That hit me where it hurt. “You're saying my brother knows? And he's not clawing to find me because he doesn't want to do what I'm about to do?”

Wade looked pinched. “Let's just say that if you asked, he'd go in a heartbeat. But if you don't ask, he's not going to be clamoring to go, because...he doesn't know what you plan to do once you get there. And that worries him.”

“Now you're Reed's confidant, huh?” Boy did I feel a rush of righteous indignation. “He's told you this?”

“I like the guy, but we're not exactly close,” Wade said. “That's just me speculating. Some people would crawl over broken glass to go with you, some would go if asked, some have one foot out the door. Just the state of play. It's been a long war for those who signed on with you at the beginning. Life's a mess in the USA, but backpacking through the wilds of China or lying low in some flophouse in Hubei doesn't excite most of them. The last few months have been good here, and most of them aren't soldiers, Sienna. You can't expect soldierly enthusiasm from them.” He chuckled. “Actually, you can't expect soldierly enthusiasm from most soldiers, either; we go where we're ordered, for the most part. Very few volunteer.”

“But you're volunteering?” I asked, and he nodded. “What makes you think I need another face to hide on this thing?”

“There are pluses that I bring,” Wade said, with a smirk that made him annoyingly cute. “I speak Mandarin, for one. I know the country a bit, and the people, so it'd give you a bit more background and familiarity as you make your search. I've also studied Fen Liu, both her publicly available info and the classified stuff, since I was a CIA officer assigned to China, and I have informants still in China that I'm in contact with that could aid our search.”

“You have people in China?” I asked, and every hair on the back of my neck was standing at attention. “And you haven't mentioned this before?”

“If anything useful was coming out of them, I'd tell you,” Wade said. “But frankly, Sienna, you haven't asked. Not for my help, not for anything. I have to work to contribute to the war effort. I assumed it was personal, and I didn't want to salt the wound while we're at war, but dammit, I can be of use here. I wish you'd see that, and get over your issues with me.”

My voice dropped low and cold. “What issues do you think I have with you?”

Wade sighed. “It can't have been easy to find out you've got a husband you've never heard of, especially the way you did.”

“Sitting across the desk from the President of the United States, completely blindsided? Nah, that was easy. Not humiliating at all.”

“Just keep in mind,” Wade said, “when you lost your memory, I lost my wife, too. I don't know which of us got the rawer end of that deal, because I wasn't in Scotland, but I assume it was you. And if you're pissed at me because I wasn't with you – well, you've got every right, and I don't blame you for being furious still.”

I felt my eyebrow quirk up at that. He thought I was mad at him because he didn't come with me to Scotland? That was...something. I actually didn't know how to feel about that.

“I could have done more, I know,” he said, and the earnestness on his face stunned me into silence. “I've thought about it for years since, how maybe if I'd been there–”

“You would have been just another thing that Rose would have delighted to take from me,” I said, a little hoarse, unable to let him flail under this much of a misapprehension. “She was a psycho with god-like power, Wade. It took practically everyone I know, all working together, to stop her. You wandering into Scotland to look for me, oblivious to what you were doing, would have just resulted in your painful death at her hands. Or worse.” I gave him the barest glance up and down. “I could see her having a really good time trying to bend you to her will.”

“She couldn't,” he said with a faint smile. “Succubus powers don't work on me.”

“Yeah, but Siren ones do,” I said. “Telepath, empath – she would have gotten you one way or another.”

“She would have tried,” he said, and shook his head. “Whatever. It doesn't matter. My point is–”

“I'm not mad that you didn't come to Scotland with me,” I said.

He stopped and blinked. “Wait. What are you mad about, then? Is it that I left to do that CIA assignment? Because, I mean, I agree that was wrong, too, like the first link in a whole chain of wrong–”

“No, stop,” I said, closing my eyes and holding up my hand. “You think I'm mad at you, but I'm not. Not really.” I opened my eyes again and found him looking at me, confused. “I just don't know if I can trust you, Wade. That's the issue. You're tied in with my family in ways I don't understand, that no one has bothered to explain to me–”

“I'll tell you right this second if you want to know,” Wade said. “But I think you might be better off waiting until after we get done with China.”

“Funny how you, Persephone, and Lethe all parroted the same line about that,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, voice dripping with irony, “it's almost like we talked about it and made a decision together about the best way to handle this particular radioactive isotope.”

“That's annoying, by the way.”

“Referencing a nuclear isotope?”

“Being cutesy when you know one of the things that's making me loathe to trust you is the secret I know you're keeping about how you know my family.”

He lifted his head, and made a grunting sigh. “This is not nearly as complicated as you make it out to be, Sienna, and not nearly as much of a secret as you think. Lethe and Persephone sought you out, remember? Lethe brought you to New Asgard before you even knew who she was, back when you were with the agency. Have you ever asked yourself why?”

I sifted back through my newly-rediscovered memories. “She said she needed my help with something.”

“And you proceeded to get into a fistfight with your grandmother before flying off in a huff,” Wade said. “Hostile words were exchanged. Then punches. Teeth were lost.”

I felt a very tiny burning in my cheeks. “Yes. And?”

“And so they haven't brought up since what they wanted to talk to you about then,” Wade said. “Once burned – I mean, literally, I think you threw some Gavrikov flames in that fight – twice shy, y'know? Anyway, you told me the story, and I was curious, so after I found you on that beach and you disclaimed me, I eventually crawled out of the bottle and went looking for this New Asgard. I found it. Found Lethe, found Persephone, found the rest. And as it turned out, they didn't need you, specifically. They needed–”

“An incubus or a succubus,” I said, frowning. “But for what?”

“That's the complicated part,” he said. “And it's gonna set you down a road. You want to know, you tell me, we'll dig into it. But it's going to take a while, and when we're done, you may not feel like going after Fen Liu just now.”

I balled my hands into fists. There was something infuriating in what he'd said. I could feel cold, clutching rage in the pit of my stomach as I turned over his words. Which was worse? Knowing, and maybe losing my focus? Or wondering, and continuing to seek Fen Liu, to try and bring this current crisis to an end?

Probably the thing most infuriating – and boy, did there seem to be a list growing – was that my putative husband, standing there waiting with annoying earnestness, seemed to know me well enough to have realized something about me that really pissed me off.

Managing more than one blood feud at a time was not good for me. If I wanted to hound Fen Liu to the ends of the earth and then rip her throat out with my teeth and drink her blood, I really needed to focus on that one thing, at least for now.

“Fine,” I said. Turning away from knowledge was a thing that felt maddening, that was like an itch all the way down in my soul. And yet I knew it was a thing I had to do, for now, that the promised answers, if Wade was to be trusted, if Lethe was to be trusted – and I trusted them both, dammit – would send me keening in some unrelated direction and steal my attention at a time when I needed all of it, and needed all of it pointed at Fen Liu and China. “But when this is over, we will have it all out – you, me, and Lethe. It will be a time for total truth between us.”

“I can't speak for Lethe,” Wade said, “but I'll tell you every bit of it. I swear.”

I stood there, arms still crossed over my chest like a defensive wall. I looked down at my shoes, which were mesh boots that fit me perfectly. “Fine,” I said. Of course it was not fine, but I would make it so, at least for now. “Let's go. But you better pull your weight.”

“I think I can handle that,” Wade said. “Maybe I can even carry some of the load for you from time to time.”

“Pretty sure that was in my vows somewhere, but anyway,” I said, and turned on him. I stormed back across the hall before he could reply, and said, “Okay, Wade's coming with us.”

“Ah, good,” Hades said pleasantly, his hands crossed in front of him. “Always nice to have another gun hand.”

“I certainly fit that description,” Wade said. He pulled a phone out of his pocket and thumbed it, turning his attire into the clothing of a Chinese peasant. When he caught me looking, he just winked.

“So I guess you talked to Cassidy,” I said, feeling a burr of irritation.

“She figured you might need a touch more help than you were willing to ask for,” Wade said, and from beneath the mesh clothing I hadn't even realized he was wearing, he pulled a bullpup Tavor rifle on a strap. It had blended so perfectly beneath his camouflage I had no idea he was carrying. Bullpups were weird-looking guns; the rifle barrels were set back so the whole thing was more compact than, say, an AR style rifle. Several countries had adopted them for army use, and it was a perfect thing to carry for a mission like this. “So she asked on your behalf.”

“I'm going to have a talk with Cassidy after this is all over, too,” I said.

“I'm sure that'll be fun,” Wade said.

“Great, glad we're all getting along with zero tension,” Lethe said. “What was his big suggestion for where to go?”

I looked to Wade; in all the hubbub, I'd completely forgotten to ask him. “Guizhou province,” he said, not missing a beat. “Specifically, the Anshun. It's a city of about two million nestled in the mountains. Fen Liu has ties there, both in modernity and ancient times, we think.”

Lethe nodded. “She's known as a Xiangsuishen – a water goddess. I've also heard her called a dragon.”

“Exactly,” Wade said. “Well, the Anshun region is known for the Longgong dragon caves, which is a touristy destination, but it has mythological roots as some sort of dragon lair, which sounds sort of akin to a certain set of caves along the coast of Greece.”

“You mean the caves where I was raised and kept prisoner for most of my youth?” Lethe asked, her face like flint. She did not look at her father.

“It's a dangerous world,” Hades said. “Then and now. Besides, we did eventually let you out, and you went on a marvelous journey across the land, did you not?”

“This family is such a bunch of control freaks,” I said. “I swear, secrets, lies, and captivity are our secondary stock-in-trade.”

Wade checked the chamber of his Tavor, then let it snug back against his chest. He also had a pistol at his side, an HK that he quickly did a chamber check on. “I was always a bigger fan of your primary stock-in-trade, personally.”

“Oh, yes, that one is so much fun,” Jian said. Poor guy felt like the odd man out on this mission. Two succubi, an incubi, and a Hades walked into China, with a shifter besides. Sounded like the setup to a bad joke.

“Let's go ply it now,” I said, looking to Taxi. “I need one quick stop, and then we're heading for Anshun, China, I guess.”

“There is a facility near Anshun that will be ideal for inserting my program into the Chinese internet,” Sierra said, piping up at last. I guess she was artificially intelligent enough to know when to shut her mouth and let the humans argue, and, frankly, that was better than most people.

“That's our spot,” I said, and nodded to Taxi.

He nodded, and opened a portal, the white glow lighting up the interior of the drab, subbasement room with its faintly glowing overhead light. I stepped through first, at a float, ready to pick up the last member of my team.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Taxi dropped us in an isolated corner of Anshun, about half a mile from the location Sierra had identified as our target. Ricardo, my falcon, launched out first, taking to the skies above Anshun and the parking lot we'd decided to use as our insertion point.

I'd picked up Ricardo from his home, which was my old home that I'd lived in for all of five minutes before a Chinese-controlled CIA hit team had destroyed it while trying to kill me. Whatever; I wasn't that attached to the places I lived, for exactly that reason, though I had hoped to put down roots when I'd bought it.

The important thing was that Ricardo was all right, and living his best life on my property, where I would hopefully someday live again. At least until somebody came along and destroyed my house once more.

“See anything?” Lethe asked once we were safely out in the parking lot. Ricardo had already scanned the area for me and determined that it was safe for us to exit. The weather was, I thought, shockingly cool for subtropical China in August. A light breeze stirred my holographic camouflage poncho and felt...good.

I was firmly tethered to Ricardo's mind using my telepathic powers and my animal-speaking abilities. It was rough, trying to balance those two without suffering a deluge from the millions of people in Anshun (not to mention the noisy minds around me), but thanks to some training from Dr. Zollers, I was managing.

Ricardo was sailing overhead, keeping his eye on everything moving around us that could present a danger. There was no wail of police sirens, no tactical teams moving toward us on jackbooted feet, just the sounds of a city nestled in the mountains going about its day. The scent of Asian food hung in the air, carried on the wind.

“The coast is clear,” I said, in English. Doing this without native Mandarin speaking capability was going to really suck, I realized. Through Ricardo's eyes, I could see a decent amount of pedestrian traffic. All it was going to take was one person speaking to me out of turn on the street and I'd be placed in an uncomfortable situation of trying to reply using Cassidy's technology. “Let's get this cultural excursion going.”

“Moving,” Wade said, and he did, trying to act casual when I suspected what he really wanted to do was dart about with his rifle pointed. You know, like he did on his CIA and SEAL missions. But he played it cool, wearing the features of a Chinese man around age thirty as if he were really that man.

Walking across the parking lot, the mountain breeze rippled through my camo. The air was a touch thinner than I'd grown used to in the primordial swamp of DC. It was crisp, though, and pleasant.

Jian, for his part, looked only slightly different than he usually did. His features had changed moderately, but his hair was the same exact color and nearly the same close-cropped. His clothing had altered, too, and he wore a white T-shirt covered over by a black, leather jacket. He looked...cool, within a Chinese context.

He kept his eyes forward, for the most part, walking with a purpose. I tried to emulate him, but my head was on a bit of a swivel, though I tried to make it casual, I probably failed. How could you not be on constant watch when traveling through an enemy city? We didn't even have a car to make a fast getaway, I was anchored to being on foot with my team. If I'd been by myself, I could have flown out of there.

I felt exposed. I felt like I'd brought my grandmother, my great-grandfather, my husband, and Jian here just to dangle like bait in front of Fen Liu until she snapped them up, shark-like. It set to work on my nerves, causing a dissonant hum to being somewhere deep in my belly.

Looking behind, I found that Hades was an old Chinese man, and was even holding his hands behind him, standing in a very older Asian man sort of way. I couldn't figure out if it was just the illusion or if he was really standing that way, so I didn't bother to try.

“Should probably keep our voices down,” Lethe said, in English, but meta-low, where no one but our own kind could hear us. She looked like a middle-aged Chinese woman with dark hair bound back, an off-white turtleneck style shirt beneath a tan blazer. Very stylish, I thought.

“Should probably not talk at all if we can avoid it,” I said. Ahead, the parking lot came to an end with a line of slightly ramshackle buildings. The cars were an interesting mix; Tesla, Nissan, and Volkswagen logos and models I recognized were mingled with Chinese brands I didn't. “Anyone who's a meta here is of overwhelming likelihood also a very loyal member of the Chinese Communist Party.”

“Silence is golden,” Jian said, and then added something in Mandarin that I didn't get. This was not going to be easy.

The street was not quite what I would have expected from a mid-sized Chinese town. It was busy, and humming, in the way that you'd find in New York, in spite of it being more the size of Cleveland or Cincinnati.

We weren't walking long, or at a very fast clip, when Wade took the expected turn onto another street. I jumped into Ricardo's head for a moment, taking up Hades's arm as though guiding an old man. He took my real meaning, though, which was to let him steer me while I reconned the area psychically, through my falcon. Talk about things I never thought I'd be able to say, let alone do.

The neighborhood ahead was built like a lake of buildings surrounding a winding peninsula of an alley. A couple cars were parked within, and roof awnings stretched over to mostly hide it from the sky. A couple of restaurants, some sort of offices, and a clothing store all made this strange, circular strip mall its home. The electronic store that was our target was sandwiched innocuously in the middle of it all. I took Ricardo on a low flyby, and he caught a glimpse of a man in his late twenties sitting at the counter within, looking down at his phone.

Perfect.

“There are exterior cameras,” I said quietly, “and cameras inside.”

Jian answered, his voice slightly elevated with the first notes of concern, verging lightly upon panic. “How are we going to deal with those?”

“Sierra,” I said, “is there way for me to interrupt power to the camera system without bringing it down for the whole building?”

There was a pause, and for one uncomfortable second I wondered if I was already somehow cut off from my AI. “The camera system appears to be an independent, hard-wired system that operates separately from the building's main power, likely as a security precaution to keep it running even if Anshun's power fails. Delivering an electrical jolt to the system at the wattages you produce will likely cause the system to reboot and allow you a window of approximately three to five minutes during which the cameras will be offline.”

“Okay,” Jian said as we rounded the corner. Ahead, I could see the electronics shop entry. “How do we deal with the staff?”

“That's easy,” I said. “Four of us are soul-suckers. All we need to do is drag the memories out of them, leave 'em in a haze. I count one guy behind the desk.”

“If I come at him, and this is a PLA installation,” Wade said, “he's likely to react in some way. Trained soldier, y'know?”

“Saunter in,” I said. “Play it cool. Lull him, and ease your way up to the counter while I deal with the cameras.”

“If you aren't careful, you will be seen on camera,” Sierra said, “from the spark coming out of your hand. The on-site backup will capture it, even if the camera goes off-line immediately after.”

“Don't walk up to the camera and blast it,” I said. “Understood. Is there a different place I could give it a love zap?”

“Scanning. When I identify a suitable spot,” Sierra said, “I will let you know.”

“Copy that,” I said, dropping to meta-low as a middle-aged Asian man passed me. He looked a touch different than Han Chinese, and I wondered if he was part of the ethnic minority that made up the population of Anshun.

“Heading in,” Wade said, about ten feet away from the front door, and twenty ahead of me. We'd spread out, so as not to look like a tightly-clumped group.

“I will loiter outside, my dear,” Hades said, detaching his arm from mine and giving me a pat as we parted. He shuffled to a nearby bus stop bench and sat down, still exhibiting that old Asian man style of walk. It was eerie to behold.

“I'll wait, too,” Lethe said. “Give me a whistle if you need a hand, I'll be there in three shakes.” She detached from us and put her back against the wall outside the clothing store, paying an excessive amount of attention to her phone, as though composing a very important text.

“Okay,” I said, not even glancing at the camera overhead as I followed Wade to the shop's door. He opened it for me, the little bell ringing, and I took a deep breath before I went in.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Chinese man behind the counter looked up as we entered. He was young, raven-haired, with a cleft in his chin, attentive eyes scanning us both as we came in.

“Nihao,” Wade said in Mandarin. Some of the only Mandarin I knew.

The man behind the counter just grunted. A rattling of beads in an archway behind him revealed a second man, much bigger than the first, and with much less of a customer service face. But it wasn't a resting bitch face; no, it was active bitch face. He scowled at Wade, scowled at me, and let the beads fall down over his shoulder.

The first guy behind the counter barked out a sharp series of words in Mandarin that I did not understand, but that started to flood across my display. I didn't really need the translation to pick up the gist, though: “What the hell do you want?”

Wade answered back as I drifted sideways, toward a display of phones that were – to put it mildly – absolute crapola. They looked like shit that had been sold in America back in the days when I first came out of my house, the waning days of flip phones. I had a strong feeling that they weren't high tech in China, either, which probably kept traffic to this place low.

My husband's reply printed out for me: “Can't a man just be looking for ancient electronics without getting pissed at?”

I blinked reading the words. Either something had gotten lost in translation or my hubby wasn't a fluent speaker.

“What did you say?” The second guy – El Gordo, let's call him, because boy was he big for a Chinese fellow – stepped up to the counter and loomed over Wade. Wade was not a short guy, so this took some doing. Well, some natural talent, anyway.

Wade bit off another burst of Mandarin, but a bit slower this time. The words appeared on my visor screen a moment later. “I said that I am looking for electronics. Why do you microwave me?”

Shit.

“Some good news,” Sierra said softly, directly into my earwig, “there is a conduit three feet to your left that powers the security cameras. Directing voltage into it should knock out the camera system without taking out power to the whole building.”

“Three cheers for good news,” I muttered, meta-low, which caused El Gordo to look at me, his brow knitted in a look of clear, but dark, suspicion. Reaching out, I sent a surreptitious burst of electricity into the suggested spot, and heard a faint hum die.

“Warning,” Sierra intoned, telling everyone else what I'd just noticed, “at least one of the subjects in the store is metahuman. The shorter one, for reference.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” the big guy was shouting at Wade. The raised voice was concerning, and prompted sounds of movement in the back room. Which meant we were not going to be alone with these two for much longer. “Can't you speak?”

“Another warning – an unknown number of reinforcements are making their way out from the back of the store,” Sierra said. “I estimate two more players are waiting in the wings.”

“Lovely,” I said, under my breath, meta-low. The guy behind the counter practically had an exclamation point over his head now, and broke off from looking at Wade to head in my direction, weaving out from behind the counter, locked on me. He barked something in Mandarin at me, and my translation vision took what felt like an eternity to produce: “What did you say? I hear you muttering. Don't be shy, say it loud, share with the class.”

“There is likely some sort of alarm in easy reach,” Sierra said quietly in my ear. Presumably she was broadcasting this to the rest of the team as well. “If this situation continues to deteriorate, you must ensure they do not activate it.”

“Well, that's something new for us,” Hades said over the open line. “I have a clear line of sight on the man behind the counter, Wade. You can leave him to me.”

“We cannot leave this place full of corpses,” Lethe said. “It's as good as sending up a flare.”

“Hm?” I said. El Gordo was almost to me, and he'd slowed his approach because I had raised my hands in the universal sign of, “I don't know what you're talking about.” I was trying to be non-confrontational. I was trying to be cool. I was trying to be calm.

But everything was falling apart.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

This was not going well.

Wade was being questioned by the cleft-chinned guy behind the counter, the suspicion putting his eyes into a deep squint. He looked like he was about two seconds from leaping the counter to get up in Wade's face, which was not going to do us much good.

At least two more enemies were waiting behind the curtains of beads, in the dark passageway behind the counter leading to whatever back room this place had. Presumably in there, somewhere, was the data console we were here to insert Sierra into. Behind however many Chinese plainclothes soldiers were waiting.

And then there was the guy coming toward me. Big, scowling, his eyes locked on me, an extremely disgruntled look on his face. I knew a thing or two about being disgruntled. About causing it. About being it. “I heard you talking under your breath,” he said, continuing his steady progress toward me. “What was it you were saying? I'll have it out of you now, or else you'll taste the back of my hand.”

I was keeping cool. I had my hands up. I couldn't speak Mandarin, certainly couldn't think in Mandarin. He shouted at me, interrupting my attempt to placate him. Behind him, Wade and his interlocutor were yelling at each other. We just needed to stay cool. We just needed to keep it calm.

Then El Gordo reached out to grab me by the wrist, and my calm failed.

“Don't touch me!” I shouted in English, the volume and ferventness in my voice surprising even me. If it hadn't come from my own voice, my own throat, I would have taken a step back from the speaker, it caught me by such surprise.

I lashed out before he landed a hand on my wrist, breaking through his nascent grip and popping him in the nose. It burst like a rotten strawberry and blood spattered in all directions. I followed with a short punch to his gut and he went from his head snapping back to his entire body bending double in a hot second.

Using his momentum against him, I launched up three feet and raised my knee, greeting his face and jaw with it. His eyes rolled back in his head, and I knew he was out, if not on his way to death.

And death...well, I was death.

I didn't have time to waste, though, on petty things like exulting in the fall of one guy when there were at least two more in the back room waiting. I was still hanging in the air after kneeing El Gordo in the face, and I propelled myself forward in flight toward the curtain of beads. Raising my hands in front of me, I launched through them with a rattle that tore half of them off, and slammed into a stack of dudes who had been waiting just behind them, about to enter the storefront.

And I scattered those pigs like a bowling ball against tenpins.

They slammed, each into the next, and we rammed into the far wall at the back of the room. I was punching the whole time, slamming my fist into anywhere I could hit, and by the time we hit the wall, the first guy in the stack was unconscious, bordering on brain-damaged. I grabbed him by the shirt, threw him to the side, and started working the next dude in line, who was badly disoriented. By my count, he was number two of four in the stack, and the guys behind him were in a full-blown panic, wriggling and trying to get out from under the crush of me pressing them, with my flight powers, against the wall.

“I'll kill you all!” I bellowed, ramming my elbows into the second guy's head. His eyes fluttered, his head lolled, and I pulled back long enough to throw him out of the way, through a card table in the center of the room before I slammed forward again, into numbers three and four, with enough force that number three's ribs cracked upon impact and all the wind went out of him. As if that weren't bad enough, I lifted a knee as hard as I could and heard one of his testicles pop. He would have exhaled mightily – if I hadn't already stolen all his breath.

He sagged, and I elbowed him so hard in the head that he hit the concrete floor off to the side, leaving me face to face with the last man standing. He was staring at me, wide-eyed and panicked.

I seized him by the throat, lifting him six inches off the ground, and rammed him into the concrete wall. It felt like the whole building shook.

“You pieces of shit,” I said, pummeling him in the belly, with enough force to knock more air out of him, just jabbing him repeatedly in the solar plexus, “you sycophants to a tyrant.” I lifted my hand and slapped him in the face, drawing blood and causing his eyes to roll back. “You handmaiden to a murderer.”

He didn't answer. I wasn't choking him, but he was out on his feet. Or out in a chokehold, anyway. His legs dangled beneath him, lifeless, and I had him pressed so tight against the concrete block wall that I felt his rib cage and clavicle strain from how I had him held.

“Sienna?” Wade called out from behind me.

But I ignored him, because the burning had started in my palm, and I felt myself drifting forward into the man's mind.

He was a truly filthy piece of trash. His name was Pan Xiaoming, he was 32 years old, and he was from Guiyang. He'd joined the Peoples' Republican Army right out of the Chinese equivalent of high school, and his first assignment after basic training had been as a prison guard in Xinjiang, where they kept the Uigher Muslims.

I'd heard the stories of rape, of prison guards doing whatever they wanted to a helpless, captive population that included women and children who'd committed no crime save for being genetically related to a disfavored minority, but as I slipped into Pan's memories, I realized firsthand that everything I'd heard about the prison experience – the rape, the murder, the cruelty – was not only horribly, horrifically true, but that I held in my hand one of the foot soldiers of its execution.

My skin burned against his, and his soul screamed in his unconscious body at the pain I was inflicting.

He was a metahuman, chosen to receive the serum after his loyal service to the Chinese Communist Party. And it had unlocked within him–

Oh. Nifty. A Hercules. I didn't have a full one of those.

“Sienna, what are you doing?” Lethe's voice was suddenly in my ear, her hand on my wrist, trying to unlock it.

“Learning Mandarin,” I said in a dead, harsh, guttural, otherworldly tone. “And picking up a new power that's sure to come in useful whenever I want to open a pickle jar.”

“Yeah, I'm sure you really struggled with that before,” Wade said from somewhere behind me.

I felt the rush as I tore at his soul. My skin burned in the best possible way, a tingling starting at my palm and working its way through me.

“We can't leave dead bodies here, Sienna,” Hades said, trying to break my joy.

“Don't worry, it'll just be the one, and I'll make sure he's turned to ash,” I said, my eyes closed. “Trust me – he's earned it.”

I felt Lethe's hand go slack on my arm.

Good. I didn't need to be talked out of this. I didn't want to be talked out this.

I ripped the last vestiges of his soul out of his body, and he barely shuddered as I did so. I realized at the last that I'd accidentally broken his neck on the first slam; all the more reason for him to disappear.

Coming out of the trance-like state that consumed me whenever I took a soul, I stared at a slack face, dead eyes, staring back at me...

And I let him drop, like the dead chunk of meat he was, to the concrete floor. He made a thud like he was a sack of rice. His eyes stared up at the ceiling, his jaw was slack. He'd evacuated his bowels and pissed his pants, one of those fun little details most people don't think about when they go to kill someone.

“Get to work scourging the memories out of these guys' heads,” I barked, and turned to Jian, Wade, and Lethe behind me. Hades was probably hanging out on the sidewalk, making sure someone didn't walk in on us. I checked with Ricardo quickly and carefully; he was still overhead, and there were no sirens coming, no cars screeching up outside.

“Okay,” Wade said, though in the way he said it I sensed more, much more, waiting below the surface of his words. He knelt down over one of the soldiers I'd discarded. “We need a reason for them to be experiencing pain and collective memory loss.”

“Have Jian tell them they were in a bar fight last night,” I said, because I didn't want to argue. “But first – Jian, the computer you need is over there,” and I pointed to the corner. “It'll give you access.” I tossed him a connective wire to plug a phone into it. “Follow Sierra's instructions and get her downloading, will you?”

“Yes,” Jian said. He headed for the computer, clearly in no mood to argue with the crazy lady who'd just murdered one of the Chinese guards.

“You two, work quick,” I said, waving at Wade and Lethe. He was already hunched over, fingers plastered to one of the guards' faces, removing memories. “We need to be on our way in ten minutes or less.”

“Sure,” Lethe said. I sensed she was not sure.

But I didn't care. I knew the layout of this place now, and I knew that the back door opened to that near-private alley I'd seen overhead, that these guys took smoke breaks out there and rarely saw another soul. I threw the door open and dragged the corpse I'd made out under the cover of the awnings above, then I shut the door to the shop behind me.

That left me alone in a confined, tight, alley space with a dead body. I looked down at his face, staring up at the lack of sky above obstructed by overhangs, and something about it struck me.

I remembered the burnt bodies in the ruins of New Asgard. The charred remains of houses, of the old live oak.

Something about it and staring down at this body tripped something deep within me. I slapped a hand over my mouth and started to shake. Wetness touched the edge of my fingers seconds later, leaking down my cheeks in a shameful cascade that I couldn't control and couldn't believe.

It went on like that for some minutes, until finally the wetness from my eyes finally came to dry, and the heaving sobs stopped, leaving me staring down at a dead body I'd created, his voice still faintly screaming in the back of my head where I'd thrown him into the confines of a metal box. It was already fading, having already given way into sounds of tearful begging and submission.

The body sat on the floor of the quiet alley. Not a window was in sight; the far end of the alley was obstructed by a jutting section of a building ahead. If anyone wanted to stumble on me, they'd have to take a meandering course to get here, and I'd have plenty of warning.

None of that made it particularly easier. Staring down, I knew I had some corpse burning to be about. With a rattling sigh, I rolled up the sleeves of my camouflage netting, and got to work.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Looks like you've about got it wrapped up,” Wade said when he stepped through the alley door a few minutes later. Smoke hung thick in the air, along with a smell horrifyingly like barbecue. The crackling of flame was audible under the muffled sounds of a city going about its business.

“I try to clean up my messes,” I said. The irony of this remark struck me; black scorch marks extended around me for several feet, and I had my doubts that a good washing was going to clear them up, though I would certainly be attempting that, and soon. I looked up at him as I sent down the last, scorching blast of heat to dissolve the final remains. It wasn't pretty, wasn't nearly as neat as using plasma, but it was what I had. It did make me wish I'd brought Veronika along, though, if only for corpse disposal. Looking up at my putative husband, I said, “You here because you want to 'talk about it'?”

“No, I'm here because I assume you don't want to,” Wade said, arms crossed over his broad chest, “and I figure I'll keep Lethe at bay. For a minute, at least.”

“The Valkyrie will not be held back; she'll get me eventually.”

“It's all I have to offer.” He shrugged, leaning his back against the wall, and spoke meta-low. “Besides, we're all done with the memory sucking in there. Everyone's unconscious. Jian is almost done installing Sierra. We'll be ready to move out by the time you finish. Which begs the question: where to?”

“Sierra,” I said, keeping to the meta-low theme. “How goes it?”

“While my installation is at 95%, with an expected completion time in the next two minutes, forty-five seconds,” Sierra said, “installing myself throughout the Chinese network will still take an indeterminate amount of time, likely days.”

“And after that?” I asked.

“A fight for control,” Sierra said. “When challenged, I expect Chinese authorities to shut down entire sections of their internet in order to purge my programming. Whether I will be able to retain any control after they begin that process is the question.”

“Sounds good, Sierra, thanks,” Wade said. “Want me to help you clean up the ground?”

It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. Who else would he have been talking to? I was just dazed. “Sure,” I said, taking a couple steps back from the scorch marks.

He shot a purple blast of energy out of his hand, running it across the pavement, scourging off the top layer of asphalt. Along with it came the black carbon that had scored the surface. A few seconds later, he was done, and while the pavement looked kind of pale, it didn't look like someone had burned a body on it. “It won't fool anyone long term,” he said, “but it ought to throw them off our track for a bit if they come nosing around looking for the missing guy.”

I nodded, half-distracted. “You think the brainwashing job on the guys inside will hold up?”

The face of his Chinese camouflage cringed. “Not for long, no. Hopefully no one will look very close. So,” he added, “do you speak Mandarin now?”

“Fluently,” I said, launching right into Mandarin. “Unlike some people in this conversation.”

He cringed, but nodded. “I speak it well enough to get around when people are being charitable to a white guy tourist, but apparently not well enough to pass for native.”

“I've got us covered now,” I said. “And also, I can go full Hercules whenever I want.”

“That'll be very useful for....” He paused, his camouflage figure's eyes tracing skyward. “...Actually, I can't think of any uses for that. Weren't you already stronger than a Hercules?”

“Dunno. I've never challenged one to an arm-wrestling contest to find out,” I said. “My battles with them tend to devolve into flames and zaps.”

“You should try it next time,” he said dryly. “Challenging your foes to an arm-wrestling competition. Might save you some knock-down, drag-outs. And property damage.”

“And we all know how concerned I am about property damage.” Wade and I shared a chuckle.

“Uhm,” he said, shaking his head as if to break the spell of our pleasant moment. “Quick note for speaking Mandarin or conversing in Chinese in general: generally you want to approach a subject by a circuitous route, not directly.”

I stared at him. “I've heard that before. Like, uhm, if I want to talk about–”

“Fen Liu's diabolical past?”

“Sure, for example,” I said, “I'd start with something else, right? Like the weather?”

“Or the sorghum harvest. The state of the culture. Something else, yes, then bring it around. Gently, you know. Naturally.”

“Sounds like small talk,” I said. “I suck at small talk, at least in English.”

“We can practice,” he said. “Maybe try it with me, real quick.”

“Um,” I said, staring first down at the scourged pavement, then up at the sky, seeking inspiration. “Okay. This breeze makes for pleasant weather.”

“Indeed,” Wade said, correctly, in Mandarin.

“I find such days are optimal for long walks,” I said, drawing deeply on the well of my inner dime store philosopher. Dollar store philosopher, maybe, since you can't get shit for a dime anymore?

“Very true,” Wade said, nodding sagely. “The perfect days for strolls through the park.”

“Is that what you do with Juliet?” I asked. “Or is it straight to the bedroom?”

Wade blinked a couple times. “Okay, you started strong, conversational. That transition was a little rough, though. Very American, very 'damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.'”

“I don't want to be thinking about you right now,” I said, closing my eyes, letting the indirect sunlight cut through the lids. “About us. But I am.”

“Oh,” he said. That was all. “Oh.” Like I'd smacked him in the gut as I passed.

“I know you had time to, like, work through your feelings about me,” I said, “and get over me, while I was being an amnesiac post-Scotland. But I wasn't afforded that chance.” I squeezed my hand tight, flexed my wrist, and channeled the new Hercules, who was screaming impotently in the back of my head. The camouflaged image distorted as my forearm broke the bounds of the projection, the muscles wildly swollen. Just the forearm; because apparently my control, with this new soul on board, was now precise enough to do that. “I got blindsided.”

“Sienna,” Wade said, taking a step back, “you're real close to unleashing your inner Guy Friday.”

That was like a slap in the face, like pouring cold water down my shirt. I glanced down at my limbs, hideously distended and breaking out of the camouflage field. Not just one of them – all of them, and my chest, too. My bra straps were straining to hold in the oversized pectoral muscles that had formed. My calves were even threatening to burst out of my pants.

I let all the swole out in a great rush, and that feeling of power, of righteous anger, of a desire to grab hold of Wade with both hands, to mash him into a little ball like he was a great lump of Play-Doh, all vanished as I shrunk back to my normal size. It was the strangest sensation; I'd wanted to kiss and wanted to kill him, all at once. Wanted to crush him and wanted to fuck his brains out, maybe at the same time.

He kept his distance, even as I snapped back to normal. “Feel better?”

“No,” I said, running a finger over one of the sleeves that had started to unravel after popping a stitch due to my sudden expansion. “But I feel a bit more like myself and less like a brainless force bent on wrecking you with my fists.” And possibly my vagina, I did not add.

“I've never had Hercules powers,” Wade said, “but there's a solid reason Guy Friday is the way he is when he's using them. Maybe just watch out for that.” He scuffed a shoe against the asphalt. “As for what you were saying–”

“That was the swole talking,” I said, seizing that stray thread and ripping it with metahuman force. It snapped cleanly, postponing my outfit's unraveling for another day. And possibly my own, as well. “We have a job to do, okay? Sorry I got angry. I was just being snotty. Let's just get back to it.” And I turned to walk back into the shop.

Wade did not say anything else. But he did take a few minutes before following me, and I took that to mean he wanted to keep his distance. And I was fine with that.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“My program is now fully installed,” Sierra announced in my earwig as I stepped into the back of the shop, catching the eye of Hades, Lethe, and Jian as I did so. The scent of incense hung in the air, and the bodies of our recent foes lay prostrated on the ground and slumped over the table, where a card game had been taking place before my violent and unceremonious entrance to this inner sanctum of the PLA front.

“Marvelous,” I said, my voice just a touch uneven as I made my way through the store. “That means we can get the hell out of here – and on to our next objective.”

“Where were you planning to unleash that ghost power of yours?” Wade asked, coming in a dozen paces behind me. Cautious. That was probably smart, given how I'd acted the fool in the alley. And here in the store. And in life in general, lately. And always.

“Ideally, it'd be somewhere we know that Fen Liu has been in the past,” I said, regarding my handiwork – the prostrate bodies of the Chinese staff – with some mixture of satisfaction and unease, “but that might be tough without further information.” And here I looked at Lethe.

“Just use it here,” she said, decidedly calm. “Maybe you'll find some spirit guide that can give us a path to our next destination.”

I stared flatly at my grandmother for a moment, trying to decide if I should argue. Ultimately I just did what I always do when I accede to someone else – I sighed like a teenager. Then closed my eyes, and drew upon the memory of Maria Westcott.

When I opened my eyes again...we were not the only ones in the store.

“What are you seeing?” Wade asked.

“We are not alone,” I said. Because we definitely weren't.

There were eight shades of Chinese people sort of wafting faintly in the dim light of the back room. They varied wildly in age; the youngest was no more than sixteen, and a girl, the oldest had to be close to eighty, and stooped with the bent back of a man who'd either done quite a bit of hard labor in his life or had simply wasted away as he got old. In between were a variety of men and women; the latter ranged only up to about thirty, and they all had one key characteristic in common.

They were pretty.

“Ruh roh,” I muttered under my breath, getting an ominous feeling about the reasons for that. I summoned to mind the soul of that loser I'd just absorbed, still screaming in the back of my head, and consciously spoke in Mandarin. “Anyone want to tell me their tragic story?”

Almost as one, they looked at me. Before, they'd been torn between staring at me or just forlornly looking around the room. But with the power of Maria Westcott channeled through me, I could speak directly to the dead, and they could hear me.

And speak they did.

The old man made a surprised sound; ghosts tended to run the spectrum between terrifying and kindly, as evidenced by my great-grandmother. The former, though...they were scary as shit when you weren't prepared for them, definitely jump-scare, horror-movie levels of unease right at their disposal. He shuffled toward me, clearly still as broken in death as he had been in life. Two of the women talked among themselves, quietly whispering. “You can see us?” the old man asked.

“I can,” I said. “I do.”

“Hm,” he said, looking me over. “You are attired...very strangely. You are American?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Mmm,” he said, smiling broadly. “My cousin left for America. In the early days of the revolution. He was a lucky one.” He kept his hands firmly clasped behind his back. “I...was not so lucky.”

I took a glance around the little sewing circle of ghosts. Most places I encountered a ghost, they tended not to socialize. “Can I ask how you died?”

“Mm,” he said, sounding deeply contemplative. “I was beaten to death by a mob of my students and former friends.” He said it about as cheerfully as I would have answered Alannah had she asked if I'd been to the grocery store – and I had. Because there's something very nice, accomplished, and grown up about having successfully executed a grocery shopping trip, especially if you managed to buy the healthy stuff and avoid the Oreos.

I waited for more, maybe a seed of bitterness, an awareness that he'd been betrayed by people he knew and cared about. I got...none of that. Just a pleasant smile. His avatar didn't even look beat up; often ghosts carried the signs of their death with them into this beyond. Not this guy, though; he was carrying a whole lot of nothing, just looked like he might have been walking down the street outside.

I tried to decide how best to voice this thought to him, when the youngest girl meekly made her way over. “You know what happened to me,” she said, in a voice that sent a chill right up my spine.

“I know what happened to you,” I said, and looked at the other three. “But I don't know who it was.”

“Men like these,” she said, looking at the unconscious soldiers. With a bare look at her fellow women, she added. “It's always men like this. Always with a local girl.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I don't understand.”

“We're not Han Chinese,” one of the other women said. “We're Miao.”

It took me a second to realize she wasn't making a sound like a cat. “Sierra – what's Miao?”

“Miao are an ethnic minority indigenous to the local area,” Sierra said. It felt so strange to have the real world intruding on me while I was doing this, like balancing a light side/dark side vision of the world. “Though records are hard to come by due to Chinese Communist control, there are suggestions that they, along with another minority, the Buyei, may have experienced some historical repression.”

“So you were caught in the Cultural Revolution,” I said to the old man, “and you four were the victims of a bunch of shitbag, horny soldiers stationed here.” I looked over at the other three ghostly men. “What happened to these guys?”

“I died in the famine,” one of the men said, an exceedingly thin man who looked like might have been middle-aged – if he'd been a healthy body weight. As it was, he looked terribly old.

“Me, too,” said another, who was only marginally less thin.

That left just one more. I focused in on him, trying to see him. He was standing in the shadows, barely visible except as an outline. “Well?” I asked. “What's your story?”

He waved me off. Didn't even say anything, just lifted a hand, waved me away, and turned his face further into the shadows.

“Great, a shy guy,” I murmured, and turned my attention back to the group. “Are any of you familiar with Fen Liu?”

“I have not heard of her, I don't think,” the old man said, shaking his head. He was just the leader in this; the others, soon enough, all shook their heads or murmured a no.

Damn. Well, it was worth a shot.

“No dice,” I said, for the benefit of those of us who weren't communicating with the spirit world. Then I turned my attention back to the four women. “Is there anything I can do to ease your passage from this world?”

The youngest looked at me. “You killed one of them?”

“I did,” I said. “I would have killed the others, too, if I could, but I can't risk bringing the government down on me.”

The young woman looked at me with dark eyes, and a smile slowly spread across her lips. “These men...they're all alike. The one that killed me is long dead. This...this is enough for me.” And she slowly faded away, as did the other three.

“Killing bad guys is what I do,” I said to the empty space where she'd been a moment before. This was the nice thing about ghosts; you listen to them, you pay a little lip service, make a little nod toward helping them, most of the time they're content to disappear. Like handing you their problems means they become weightless, and off they go to...wherever.

“I find it maddening that they killed me,” the old man said, “and that still, they rule this country. The Communists, I mean. Not the true believers, not anymore. But their power-hungry descendants, still clinging to control.”

“They killed a lot of people,” I said. “We don't even know how many, that's how many they killed. It could be sixty million. Eighty. A hundred million. No one can be sure, because there were too many corpses to count. And yes, to this day, the machinery of that destruction still lives on with the current regime.”

“The same people,” he said. “The men changed, their authoritarianism did not.” He leaned forward, and I had a moment's fear that he might topple over, he was so bowed. “I wish it would all come down. I wish my people could be free, like my brother. It doesn't have to be like the West, but it would be nice to have a say in their governance.”

“Well,” I said, “I can't promise you anything...but I'd like to see that, too. A China with her people in charge instead of the oligarchs or the queen dictator that's up there right now...that'd be pretty great, I think. A truly worthy world power.”

“You're going to try?” he asked, staring at me, his neck craned up to look at me. He was so small, and so bowed.

“I'm going to try,” I said.

“Then I leave it in your hands,” he said, and faded away like Yoda on Dagobah. The two thin guys nodded, then faded with him.

“I swear, the dead are so easy compared to the living,” I grumped.

Then I realized...one of them was still with us.

It was the shy guy, and he was looking at me from beneath the veneer of darkness that coated his figure, silhouetting him. He lifted his face, and I saw a smooth cheek, youthful. “You truly mean to do it?” he asked, in a voice that was like taut razor wire. “To kill the Premier?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I feel obliged to mention that the premier I mean to kill is named Fen Liu, not Mao Zedong or any of those guys from the past. It's probably been a long time since you died, and things have changed.”

“We are aware of the change,” he said, drawing his face back into the shadow. “Some of us choose to ignore it, because it can be ignored...until it cannot be anymore. Which was very much like how they treated the Communists in this country.” He stirred in the darkness, and I felt him looking at me again. “Make me believe you.”

“About killing Fen Liu?” I asked. “How?”

“Tell me what you will do to her,” he said, drawing himself up. He'd been sitting, and now he rose; he wasn't tall, probably a little taller than me, at most, but I sensed that darkness around him was almost symbolic, not mere shadow to him.

“I'm gonna wrap my fingers around her throat and squeeze until her head pops off,” I said. “You need more, or is that sufficient?”

“Geez,” Jian said under his breath.

“My name is Zhen Xiang,” he said, “and I know Fen Liu – or I knew her.” His eyes were steely, and a hint of rage seemed to glimmer within them as he added, “For she was the one who killed me.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Zhen Xiang

Anshun

1950

The thing you have to understand about the revolution is that many of us did not know what we were leading our country into. We were young, and foolish, and had we known the scale of death we were going to be unleashing upon our land, upon our people, and how long it would last...we would have done things very differently. At least, I know I would have.

But Fen Liu...I don't think she would have anything differently at all.

“You are energetic, Comrade,” Fen Liu said, stroking her finger across my bare chest as we lay, naked, entwined together in the comfort of a bed in a quiet room in Anshun's Communist Party headquarters.

“I have so much fire for the revolution,” I said, enjoying her tracing a path across my chest with her finger. It was a pleasant sensation, her leg draped over me, her arms clutching me tight to her body. She was warm, and the mountain air was cold. “It overflows into all other areas. You taught me a few new things today, though.” I pulled her tight to my skin.

“Enthusiasm is no substitute for experience,” she said with a sly smile. “Do what I taught you today and you will please me endlessly.”

I smiled at her. “Yes, ma'am.”

She drew from my embrace and stood, walking through the dim tent completely nude. Her skin was perfectly supple. “Where do you hail from, Comrade?”

I chuckled lightly. “Isn't that perhaps a question you should have asked before now?” I rose and began to dress. “Anshun. Which is in–”

“Guizhou province,” she said, pausing with her shirt in her hands. “I know it well. Did you enjoy growing up there?”

“It was all right,” I said, and continued to dress. Our business here was clearly concluded, at least for now. We needed to rejoin our fellow revolutionaries. “Where do you hail from?”

“Here and there,” she said airily, slipping into her pants. They hung off her petite frame. “Most recently, Shanghai. I was with the students there when they decided to commit to Chairman Mao. And now I am here.”

I looked her over. Her flesh was supple, but she had a glimmer in her eye of experience, of wisdom. As evidenced by the fact she seduced me, and easily at that. Her experience also suggested that she was not new to this. But I didn't want to insult her by suggesting she was too old to be a student, because the only insinuations I could think of might inadvertently paint her as some sort of harlot. Which is never a wise insinuation for a man to make, especially if he wishes to continue to receive such favors.

So I kept quiet, and nodded, and received a small smile from her in return as she finished dressing. We left the room, our hands, once coupled together, drifting apart as we walked the halls of headquarters.

I started to say something; something wise, something witty, something to show my appreciation, to suggest that I would be pleased if this were to happen again.

But I didn't get to say any of them. Because instead of parting like lovers, she merely turned and walked away without another word spoken, disappearing into the hubbub of the Communists in the main hall like a puff of smoke caught in the wind.

Somehow, though, I knew it would not be the last time I saw her.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sienna

“I'm sorry to interrupt what I'm sure is an important conversation,” Sierra said, cutting right into ghost guy's monologue, “but the shop's camera system is about to finish rebooting, and I cannot keep it offline any longer.”

“Shit,” I said. “We need to get out of here. How long, Sierra?”

“Thirty seconds,” she said.

“Buddy, we have to move or they're going to catch us,” I said to the ghost of Christmas past. “Can you follow?”

“I will follow,” he said, still barely in shadow.

“Great, let's roll,” I said, but my team was already in motion. Hades was out the door, Lethe was two steps behind him, both trying to look casual as they stepped onto the street. Both long-time pros of this kind of low-key deception. Jian seemed to struggle a bit with it, but his camouflage picked up the slack; his gait and his posture only threatened to give him away.

Wade shot me an apologetic look. “I'll work with him,” he said, and was off after Jian. I followed, shrugging my way through the bead curtain and into the front of the shop with just a glance back at the downed soldiers, dozing their way through the morning around the card table like they'd just had a rough night.

“Zhen,” I said, “we're going to find a place where you can tell me the rest of that story, okay?” I consciously slowed myself at the door, trying to adopt the unhurried pace of a Chinese civilian shopper, not a pissed-off American metahuman with no time to lose and no shortage of vile people to kill. I took a breath. Then another.

Then I stepped out onto the street, and forced myself to stroll along behind Wade, Lethe, Hades, and Jian, away from the scene of my most recent crime. “We need a place to sit, to talk, and to think,” I said, moving down the bustling street of Anshun, keeping my voice meta-low, and glancing back every few seconds to confirm the ghost of Liu was still following us. “It needs to be non-public, and not monitored by the Chinese government.”

“Working,” Sierra declared in my earwig. “My inroads into the Chinese systems are still in the embryonic stage, but through mapping I have identified a disused rail yard one and a half kilometers from here. It possesses a few rail cars that can be used for temporary shelter.”

“You heard the AI,” I said. “Rail yard it is.”

Trying not to look overly suspicious while making my way through the city of an enemy power was an awkward bit of business, even with the digital camouflage on.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Fen Liu

She stared at her computer monitor, at the assembled faces there, dressed and prepared. “Give me your latest reports,” she commanded, in a tone that brooked no delay. Wei Zhang lingered behind her, out of view of the camera, as he should. He was, after all, here to serve her. As they all were.

“We have new reports from Russia,” General Li Guoqiang said, bowing his head as he spoke to her. It was very court-like, the military hat bobbing as he did so. But it showed the proper amount of respect, and she liked it. “The country continues to be in chaos, with little hope of a cohesive national government forming anytime soon.”

Fen Liu frowned. That could be advantageous or disadvantageous; they would have to retake Russia at some point, and the less of a mess it was when she moved to do so, the easier it would be to consolidate her position once she did so. She wanted to curse under her breath; Russia had been hers, solidly, with no nascent rebellions brewing, and no hope of them on the horizon. They'd been well and truly conquered in a way that no one ever had before. That had been her achievement, and a singular one at that – until Sienna Nealon had taken it from her.

She shared none of her thoughts; not with the council. They were but a replacement for the last ones, the ones Sienna Nealon had killed when her forces destroyed Zhongnanhai in Beijing. She did not wish to include them in her thinking – though probably many of her thoughts and concerns were obvious, even to the barely initiated – for fear that Nealon might capture one, or seduce one through dreams, in spite of her best efforts to protect them from such a fate.

Nealon. Had anyone ever been such a blight upon the hopes and dreams of China? Of Fen Liu's vision for China, at least, though she hardly acknowledged a difference between the two. She'd killed Fen Liu's telepaths and empaths, destroying the easiest method she had for controlling her way to her objectives.

“Fine,” she said. Who cared about Russia when Nealon was still to be dealt with? The American crown was about to change heads – to one whom she had no power over, true, but her manipulation would have to be conducted more subtly over the next few years anyway. China was the manufacturing powerhouse of the world, and America was seeing that clearly enough now. Economics would be the battlefield of the future, and she was blessed with all the armaments needed to win there.

Furthermore, she knew Robb Foreman was not the sort of blatant psychopath that would resort to pulling his one singular advantage over her: the nuclear arsenal. That Nealon had managed to pull that coup as well – sending China's nuclear program nearly back to square one with barely a shot fired – more than irked her.

But the fools responsible had died at Zhongnanhai, all save for her. And she did not consider herself a fool.

“What news of the American election?” she asked. That they hadn't led with this most important detail spoke badly of them. She looked immediately to her chief of intelligence.

“It has begun in earnest,” Shao Wenjie said. He was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a thin, weaselly man. “Though it is too early to be absolutely certain, it still appears likely Foreman will become the next president.”

Fen Liu pursed her lips. Choosing your ruler? Democracy? She found it a laughable concept. Why give children a vote in what's for dinner? She'd been to America, she'd met its citizens, and most were little better than lambs in intellect, otherwise how to judge the state of their greatest cities? Inherent weakness had seeped in to afflict the coddled, decadent culture of the west. The Chinese had a name for it: Baizuo. It wasn't a particularly kind appellation, but then, what kindness was there for people who only bothered to clean up the filth of their own cities when their Chinese overlords came to visit?

Any king or emperor in the old world who allowed his land to fall into such disorder when it was possible to fix it rather easily? Who would give over such power to malcontents and derelicts, to allow them to take over the streets, to rule and reign in a spasming anarchy? She would have laughed were it happening somewhere that she had no designs on, but she meant to rule America, one way or another, and every bit of damage they did to themselves, she would someday have to put right. Just like with Russia.

So she fumed about it, and scorned them, and wished that she could skip ahead to the part where she was secure in her power and Sienna Nealon was properly dead. “When will Nealon be officially out of power?”

“The day after tomorrow,” Shao answered. First in his class. Nerd.

“What can she do until then?” she asked. “And what is she up to now?”

“We do not presently have sight of her,” General Guoqiang said, fidgeting on the screen, his jowls moving as he did so. “She was last seen in the White House, but that was some time ago. We presume she has surrendered to the course of fate.”

Fen Liu blinked a few times at that absurdity. “Does Sienna Nealon strike you as the sort to surrender to fate?”

He squirmed visibly. “Perhaps not.”

She rested a steely glare on him, then turned to her Minister of Public Security, Hu Jianjun, a corpulent man in a navy uniform with gold buttons and decorations. “What is going on in the Zhongguo today? Tell me everything.”

“There is little to report,” Jianjun said, looking at a sheaf of papers before him.

“Indulge me,” she said.

“Hui'an Air Base went to high alert after a plane from Iran deviated from its course by a few degrees,” he said, studying the papers. “When it landed at Quanzhou, the entire crew and passengers were detained. No irregularities were found. A Vietnamese fishing boat strayed into our territorial waters and was seized at 2300 last night. Nothing unusual found on board. One of our internet nodes in Anshun went offline unexpectedly less than an hour ago. Upon restoration of power and the surveillance system we observed the crew passed out from drunkenness–”

“Hold,” Fen Liu said, raising a hand. “Were they observed to be drunk beforehand?”

“No,” he said after an uncomfortable pause. “But this sort of thing does happen. These are very boring assignments, and–”

“Tell me more,” she said. “Tell me everything you know. About the station. About the personnel.”

“Uhm,” he said, staring at his papers as though they might produce the answer he sought. “There are six personnel assigned there, all metahumans. It is our internal security office in Anshun, a small satellite facility of our larger one in Guiyang.”

“Minister,” Fen Liu said, “give me the external security feeds of the cameras on the road where that office is located – and for the period in question when they suffered their outage.”

“Very well,” Jianjun said, a touch uneasily, but immediately started to work on a tablet computer. “Allow me a few moments to access that data, please.”

“I'd also like military satellite imaging of that particular location,” Fen Liu said, rising to her feet. “An overhead view. Current, and then rewind to the moment we lost contact.”

“I'll set my people to it immediately,” Li Guoqiang said, nodding his chubby head so hard she feared his empty skull might fall off with his hat and roll away. Within a minute, she was presented with an overhead view of a street in, presumably, Anshun.

“And...here it is from the time in question,” Jianjun said, pulling up on a side-by-side view the overhead satellite view of the street. Differences were minor, but obvious, especially as both views zoomed in. The shadows were slightly different. A few cars had been moved, and the traffic in the pattern was quite different. A bird circled lazily overhead in the previous image, but was absent in the current–

“There,” she said, thumping her knuckles onto the steel desk as she leaned forward to peer more closely at the screen. A smirk popped loose of her face. “Identify that bird.”

“Madam Premier?” Jianjun asked, his face a twisted mass of confusion. She wished it was a twisted mass of blood and bone. Perhaps she would make her wish come true later for this incompetence.

“That bird is not native to China,” she said, pointing at it. “Sienna Nealon has a companion hawk. Identify it, see if it's the same kind. Meanwhile, speed up the video and track its movement into the present moment, so that if it turns out to be her,” and here Fen Liu felt a quiet, lethal satisfaction, “we will know exactly where she is – in China. And we will deploy the countermeasures we have planned for her visit.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Zhen Xiang

Guangzhou

1959

Iwalked into the room I shared with Fen Liu in the Guangzhou CCP headquarters to find her with Mao's Little Red Book across her lap, thin frame draped across the chair, I felt no joy. She must have known immediately, by my face, by my bearing, that something was terribly wrong. “Zhen,” she said, closing her book on its silken page-holder, “you're back. What happened?”

Two weeks I had been out in the provinces, touring with cadres. Two weeks in which I had seen what we had wrought – our new China, which our blood and efforts had bought. Now I had returned to our quarters in Guangzhou. So far from my home in Anshun, but it had been such a tremendous step up from the mountainous province I'd called home. A clear step up in the party hierarchy, a promotion for her which I had shared in. Reflected glory was a fine thing that I was only too happy to accept.

Until now.

I don't even remember how I got into the chair, but I did, as though she'd moved and my legs had collapsed beneath me. “The things I have seen,” I whispered.

“What did you see?” she asked, softly, in my ear.

“We have destroyed the people’s homes,” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “Some people needed to be taught a lesson, needed to be brought into the new era. They needed an object lesson in collectivization, that there are no individual homes anymore, it's about the common good–”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. My ears were still cold, because it was freezing outside. Winter had settled hard on this province, and on China. “I mean we destroyed their homes to use the bricks for agriculture.” I looked up at her, tears coursing down my cheeks. “We destroyed their homes – and the people have nowhere to live.”

“Surely it can't be that many,” she scoffed.

“But it is,” I said. “Entire villages – leveled. Half or more of the homes – and the people are in the streets, in tents, in lean-tos, struggling for warmth.”

“They'll find warmth from their full bellies,” she said, shaking her head dismissively.

“They're starving,” I said, my voice rough and hoarse.

“What madness are you talking?” she stood, looking down at me. “This is a land of plenty.”

I shook my head slowly; I had not experienced shell shock from any of the battles I'd been in during the revolution, or before, when fighting the hated Japanese during their invasion. But the things I had seen on this journey...they shocked me. They terrified me.

“There is not plenty outside the city,” I said. “In every town I came to, the people are emaciated. They are skin and bones; I can see the ribs of the children, who are near naked because clothing is scarce. They barely have a blanket, or firewood–”

“Have you been listening to the lies of the counter-revolutionaries?” she asked, glaring down at me.

“I have seen it with my own eyes, Liu,” I said, rising to my feet. “We have destroyed houses for bricks, destroyed graveyards for their stones to build dams that don't hold water, removed the bodies of the long-dead–”

“I see no great loss there; few would have looked favorably upon the revolution.”

“The smell of death is everywhere upon them,” I said, taking up her hands in mine. “You cannot but smell it when you venture beyond the cities. Even here, every soul walks with their head down, their eyes avoiding ours. Only the party faithful are well fed, only those of us who stand closest to Mao or the local leaders avoid starvation, homelessness, and death. China is ruined. China is in ruins–”

“Stop,” she said, ripping her arms free of my grip with barely any effort. “Cease this treason,” she thundered, looking up at me with real fury in her eyes. “You know not of what you speak, and you speak foolishness.”

“I speak what I have seen,” I said. I leaned in closer to her. “They say it is worse elsewhere. That the forests are being destroyed because Mao says that nature is an enemy to be overcome. That–”

“I will hear no more of this,” she said, her gaze poisonous and pitiless. “I suggest you leave.” She pointed to the door.

“But...these are our quarters,” I said, unable to control my surprise.

“No,” she said. “They are mine. Yours should be in the local prison, and then the hangman's noose, should you not get your head cleared of these counter-revolutionary lies.” She walked to the door and threw it open, waiting there, for me to pass. “See yourself out. And do not trouble me, nor anyone else, with this foolishness again.”

I took a moment to realize she was quite serious; perhaps more serious than ever before. “Very well, then,” I said, and shuffled past her into the hall. “But I would tell you – you have not seen what I have seen–”

“And I would not care if I did,” she said, her chin high, almost pointing up at me, though I was taller than her. “In every revolution, there must come sacrifices. In every war, there are casualties. And we are at war, make no mistake. These are the prices we pay to live in a worker's paradise. I hope you see that – and soon.”

Without another word, I walked out. Her eyes followed me the entire way – pitiless, empty, and devoid of the warmth I had once known.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Fen Liu

“It's a Cooper's Hawk,” Hu Jianjun said, fat face appearing on the screen. “Indigenous to North America, and frequently seen in the company of Sienna Nealon.”

“There it is,” Fen Liu said, pointing at the screen where the current location of the hawk was displayed, in full color, albeit a little blurry. It circled a train yard, around a boxcar, keeping its eyes out for trouble, no doubt. “Give me infrared.”

“We have a drone coming in range now. It won't properly see through the metal,” Jianjun said, “at least not clearly.”

“Give me the best you have,” Liu said, staring at the metal boxcar that the bird seemed to be orbiting. The scene shifted to a slanted overhead view from the all-seeing satellite, and now they were tightly focused on the train yard. Three tracks ran parallel to each other, with a lone boxcar in the middle of them. Warehouses bordered the easternmost track, and a small switching house was the only feature to the other side. Open ground gave way to neighborhoods and rows of shops.

Suddenly the clear picture shifted to colored tones, the unmistakable color palette of infrared. A bright blur of orange diffused over the entire body of that middle boxcar was the only source of heat in the entire train yard.

“This drone is unarmed,” Jianjun said, “but we have three armed drones on the way. The first will be on station in less than five minutes, the last within seven.”

“What else can we deploy?” Fen Liu asked. This produced a round of uncomfortable shuffling.

“Most of our teleportation metas were killed,” Li Guoqiang said. “This hampers our ability to quickly deliver–”

“No excuses,” she said. “What can you deliver?”

“A platoon of metahuman soldiers can be there in less than five minutes,” Guoqiang said, jowls shaking. “The teleporter is homing in on the location now through–”

“Yes, I know how a teleportation meta finds their way to a new location,” Liu said. It involved opening small portals, key-hole sized, from the nearest location you had been to until you reached eyeshot of where you needed to be. It was generally a quick process, and it seemed likely that their teleporters would be in position in a matter of minutes. “What else can you bring in?”

“The new countermeasures are ready to be deployed,” Hu Jianjun said with a thin smile pasted on his fat, insufferable face.

That gave Fen Liu a slight rush. “Excellent,” she said, and was the closest to meaning it she had perhaps ever been. “Bring them in – and swiftly.” If she played this correctly, perhaps she'd be rid of this nagging problem of Sienna Nealon once and for all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Sienna

Iwas leaning, legs crossed, against the corrugated metal wall of the boxcar we'd taken shelter in, my arms crossed, listening to Zhen's story. He was little more than a faded specter in the corner of the car, shaded with darkness, the others standing around trading nervous looks. Except Wade; he seemed to be keeping his head down, looking through the thin slit of open door out into the rail yard, keeping a close watch and tight listen on anything going on out there. So far it was just distant conversations and the sounds of the city bleeding in through the metal walls.

“They don't know we're here,” I said. “You can relax a bit.”

“I don't relax in China,” Wade said, not even daring to look over at me. “Not after what happened to me last time I was in Hong Kong.”

I suppose an unscheduled stay in a Chinese prison facility makes one wary; I couldn't blame him for being overly cautious. I just didn't think it mattered that much. We had camo, after all, and the advantage of Fen Liu not knowing we were here. I shrugged, determined to leave him to his paranoia, and took a quick glimpse into Ricardo MonFalcon's mind: all clear, as expected. No people approaching us, no distant sirens heading in our direction, no sign of anything untoward at all.

“Tell me what happened next,” I said to Zhen. Lethe shifted uncomfortably where she sat. For her, Hades, Jian, and Wade, this had to be a boring sequence of non-events, me talking to an empty corner of the boxcar.

Zhen nodded, still shrouded in shadow, and opened his mouth to speak, drawing me back into his tale of the China that was.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Zhen

Guangzhou

1959

It may not surprise you that the betrayal came, but it certainly surprised me.

Blood oozed from my mouth where the guards struck me in the face. My head ached, my vision swam from the strike to my very consciousness, and I was dragged, my knees against the carpet, as they pulled me out of the Communist Party headquarters.

The air was cold, and they took me out the back door, feet trailing behind me. They'd greeted me this way, showed me their favor with a rifle butt-strike to the face, enjoyed a few solid minutes of pummeling me with booted kicks to the ribs, the arms, the head. I could barely defend myself, only scarcely mitigate the pain they meant to cause.

And I ended up in the same place regardless; dragged out into the cold air, where Fen Liu was watching as they pulled me to my feet and bound me with rope against a wooden post.

“You are guilty of crimes against the revolution,” Fen Liu pronounced, her voice as dead as my heart.

“I deny them,” I said, coughing blood. “I deny them all.”

“Your denial is as empty and worthless as your head,” she said, and I heard the thunder of a shot; warm liquid spattered my hand, and I collapsed, the world darkening around me.

For then I was dead...and ended up here.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Sienna

“And I have been here ever since,” Zhen said, in that rail car, that thin voice from the shadows informing me of the grievance still binding him to this world. “And not a day has passed when I don't think of what she did to me.”

“You're not exactly shocking my socks off here,” I said, arms still crossed, contemplating what he'd just said. There just wasn't much to go on. “So you and her were stationed in Anshun? That's not much to go on.”

“I am telling you of her very character,” Zhen said, voice rising in outrage. “This is who she is. We were lovers, and she betrayed me for–”

“I have a feeling she's betrayed a lot of people, bub,” I said, trying to smile sympathetically. “Probably for a lot less reason than you gave her, too.”

“What I saw,” he said, voice becoming brittle, “was our dreams for China destroyed.”

“Yes,” I said, “because that's what happens during a Communist revolution. It's what happened in Russia. In China. In East Germany, in – you know what? Just look at anywhere that had a Communist revolution– or hell, a revolution at all – and you'll see this same shit happen. Unfathomable cruelty. Including to children. In Cambodia they killed a quarter of the population. Here you had the advantage of numbers and it racked up somewhere between sixty and a hundred million.”

“We didn't know what we were unleashing,” he said softly. “I only knew that things needed to change. The rural poor...they were in terrible conditions.”

I shook my head. “All I know is that a cursory study of history reveals you better be careful when asking for a revolution, because almost none of them turn out like America's, where everyone was better off afterwards. Usually you just trade one tyrannical elite for another, and start a cycle of bloodshed that doesn't end for many years – if ever.” I folded my arms in front of me. “Is there anything else?”

He looked up at me, couldn't meet my eyes, and shook his head.

“I'm going to inflict vengeance upon Fen Liu,” I said. “Will you trust me to do this, so you can rest?”

He looked up, just subtly, and nodded. Within a moment more, he faded away like smoke in the wind.

“Okay,” I said, looking around the train car, “that didn't really get us much.”

“It got us something,” Lethe said. “From what he said, Fen Liu decided to join the revolutionaries fairly early. Which begs a certain question: why?”

“Maybe she was a true believer in Communism,” Jian said.

“Maybe,” Lethe said. “I'm not sure that jibes with my memory of her. She's willing to fight, but she's hardly looking to trade away her life on a whim. If she was with the Communists, I think she expected to get something out of it.”

“And you think that something is power,” I said.

“That's my guess,” Lethe said. “I could be wrong. Just seems strange to believe a self-involved former god could become a selfless believer in a revolution that would strip her of everything she had.”

“Maybe just everything she had left,” Hades said. “It could be that the fall of the last emperor and the rise of the republic had already cost her dearly? That was when we gods were thrown out of official power in many nations.”

“If so,” I said, “then she may have joined the Communists out of revenge. The empire wasn't coming back, and if you've got a bitter enmity against the current regime, why not join the group that's bent on destroying them?”

Hades nodded. “'Many such cases,' as the extremely online might say.”

“Well, we're not going to solve this here,” I said. “We need to move on to the next stop – whatever that might be. Personally, I'm at a bit of a loss, other than maybe a drop-in at Anshun's Communist Party HQ. Sierra, can you give me directions to the local party HQ?” A pause, and there was no answer. “Sierra?”

Nothing came back to my query but silence.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Fen Liu

“Jammers are deployed on the ground, and we are moving in,” Wei Zhang's voice came over the speaker in front of Fen Liu. She was watching on the screen, tempted to go but aware that she should stay. Her life was more valuable than these peons, after all, including Wei's. Sure, he was her lover, but she'd had many of those, and would surely have many more if he were to die today. Settling in, she watched the screen, and the glow of figures moving in to surround the boxcar in the center of the train yard.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Sienna

“Sierra seems to be offline,” I said, lifting my phone and hitting the pre-set number to dial her. The phone hung on the dialing screen, unable to complete the call and not bothering to even tell me there was a network problem.

Wade was beside me in an instant, dark clouds showing through his Chinese camouflage. “We're being jammed.” He was back at the door a heartbeat later. “Someone's put the entire area under emissions containment, blocking all signals in and out.” He glanced to look at me, to convey the seriousness. “We're about to get hit. We need to move.”

“Okay,” I said, and checked the GPS, forgetting that without signal, without internet, it was useless. It didn't even show me where I was, or a map of the area around us, it just stayed a gray grid, the little wheel spinning up in the top corner to indicate it was working but not succeeding at much of anything. “Shit.”

“I don't know this town,” Jian said, voicing rising in alarm.

“Without cell service, we can't call Taxi to get us out of here,” Lethe said.

“I'm becoming aware of the problems,” I said, trying to keep my voice under control. This was the issue with laying on an operation as quickly as we had; the single point of failure was our communications, since we were using them for everything. Sierra was handling target acquisition, navigation, and whatever else. Without her, we were useless for anything except face punching. And I didn't even have any faces handy to punch.

“We need to move,” I said, trying to narrow my focus, control the rising sense of unease within me. “We need knowledge of the ground–” I jolted upright. I'd just absorbed a local. Tapping into his screaming soul, suddenly I knew the lay of the land, including that there was a cargo depot only a short distance away. “Follow me.” I nodded at Wade, and he gingerly threw open the door, allowing me to step out and jump down to the gravel-covered earth below.

“Where are we going?” Lethe asked.

“Rail depot, then out of here,” I said. “Bottom line: we need to clear the area, because either they're looking for us, or something bad is about to go down in this place.”

“You think our antics at the electronic shop raised eyebrows?” Wade asked, keeping a weather eye on our surroundings. I didn't see any Chinese army guys in either direction from the boxcar opening, but that didn't mean there were none about. The world had a strangely subdued quality, quiet, like–

Like the power was off.

“Power's out,” Lethe said, her head slightly cocked.

She was right; the familiar hum of electricity was gone, though the low-key sounds of cars and buses and other internal combustion engines still ran. Anything going off AC/DC seemed to be offline, though, as evidenced by the elevated amount of honking in the distance.

“Do we know if China's train system is electric?” Wade asked, looking at Jian.

He just shrugged. “I have no idea. I do know that China's entire payment infrastructure is internet-based, though. Without their app, you can't pay for anything, and without internet–”

“No choo choo for you-you,” Hades said, drawing a host of frowns. “What? Too cutesy?”

“By half. Plan B, we steal a car,” I said.

“There are toll booths and checkpoints throughout China,” Wade said. By the way his camouflaged self stood, I knew he was cradling his rifle. “Probably requiring the same app.”

“Don't care,” I said. “I'll take the freedom of the roads and a wheel in our hands over a definite, straight-line route where we put our lives into someone else's hands any day.”

“Do you hear something?” Lethe asked, freezing in place.

“I hear a lot of things,” I said, rounding the box car and heading for the next rail car in line. It was about twenty feet ahead, a string of five corrugated metal cars led by an engine, and the nearest cover. Cover was the name of the game, a place to hide, something to walk behind without looking furtive. Shielding on at least one side from the dangers of being seen.

“There's a distant whine of something cutting through the air,” Lethe said, voice rising, indicating a concern. “Closing on us, I think.” She was peering into the sky, covering her eyes with a hand as she looked.

“Drones,” Wade said, grabbing me by the arm. When I looked over at him, his Chinese avatar offered a perfect look of concern tempered just below panic. “We need to run.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“Idon't see anything,” I said, casting a look about as I went into a weightless float, letting my husband drag me, bodily, toward the line of boxcars ahead, while I searched the skies for the source of that droning noise. That was probably drones. “Sound seems to be coming from north-northwest. One to two hundred yards.”

“You Americans and your refusal to use the metric system,” Hades said, huffing as he sprinted along behind. Jian and Lethe were keeping up easily.

“Shut up, you probably default to leagues and furlongs. Jian,” I said, “maybe go incognito and scout around?”

He nodded, tossing his camo system at Lethe, who caught it. Before I could register him doing it, he was suddenly a cat, and bolting under the nearby train car, disappearing between the wheels. Lethe shoveled his camo system into her backpack as she ran.

“Less than a hundred meters out,” I said; we were about halfway up the cargo boxcars, and I was still not exactly sure what that noise was, though I had to admit it was sounding more like a quad-copter drone. Or a host of them, rather.

“Let's get low,” Wade said, and dove down, under the train, dragging me with him. Hades and Lethe followed, a little less gainly in the former's case, but the old man made it.

“You really think we can lose them by dodging under a train?” I asked, floating beside him as he lay between the tracks, tons of metal boxcar shielding us from above, the wheels giving us a small measure of protection on the sides. Our cover wasn't going to fool anyone for long, but in this game, sometimes seconds could mean the difference between life and death.

“I can't hear you in my ear at all,” Wade said, looking me right in the eye – though both our eyes looked quite different. “Whatever the Chinese are running here, it's jamming our comms. We should turn everything off. Any signal emission could be like a beacon for them to locate us.”

“Turn off your comms,” I said, taking a moment to shut off my phone and earwig. I saw Lethe do the same, but Hades was out of my sight. “Let's not give them anything to work with. What about Jian?”

“He'll have to figure it out on his own,” Wade said, trying to control his breathing. “If he didn't hear you.”

A cat howled furiously and ran underneath the train before adding, in Jian's voice, “There's a whole Chinese army coming this way from the north! Metas and all!”

“Jian, run for it!” I shouted back. “Go bird if you can and get the hell out of here!”

“You gonna call an 'every man for himself?'” Lethe asked.

“Tempting,” I said. “Breaking into teams might give us a better chance to evade.”

“Ah, yes, the 'divide and be conquered' strategy,” Hades muttered.

“You two, get out of here while I provide you a distraction,” I said. “Wade–”

“Nope,” he said, and rolled out from under the train in the direction Jian had come from, already opening fire with his rifle.

“Damn you, Wade!” I shouted, and with one look back, “Get out of here!” to Lethe, who nodded, then rolled hard to the side, as did Hades, in the opposite direction and away from the train.

I shucked off my camo and backpack and let them fall to the earth, hoping they'd still be here when I came back, since Sienna Nealon stood out in China like a bare ass in a field of daisies. I could see a whole host of Chinese soldiers coming around a building about fifty yards away, a supply depot at the edge of the train yard, and they were flooding out, rifles chattering already. Bullets were impacting on the train car behind me, like the angriest patter of rain you can imagine.

Wade had ducked behind the train car and was answering their fire with highly accurate bursts, forcing them to keep their heads down. He was doing an amazing job for being one guy against at least fifty, but I knew how those numbers worked out in the long run, and I leapt up and took to the skies, rising in a tight arc, then diving toward the Chinese forces.

It always came down to this, didn't it? No matter how hard I tried to keep my head down, somehow my enemies always came for me. They came in force, too, because they knew better than to try and come singly, in their little ones and twos. Someone blasted at me with a green laser, and I ducked it just in time, hitting the ground squarely in the middle of their formation. Gun barrels swung toward me, trying to take aim, inadvertently forming a circular firing squad in a panicked rush to eliminate their target before she could eliminate them.

Too late.

The burst of flames I let loose was the stuff of legends still talked about in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, to this day. I watched faces dissolve, tissue burn off, skeletons blacken and char as screams were consumed as the fires sought oxygen and found it in the last breaths of the Chinese soldiers Fen Liu had sent to die at my hand.

When the flames stopped, I counted four guys still clustered around me, in various states of cringing. Not one of them had been harmed; one was wreathed in his own flames, another two were covered over in blue plasma, and the last was just standing there, naked, amazed that he was still alive.

I rocketed toward him first, kneeing him in the face and shattering his skull. I didn't know what kind of meta he was that he'd survived my blast, and I didn't need to know anymore, as I caved the side of his head in like it had been smashed with a mallet. He went sideways and landed on the scorched and blackened ground, boneless, nerveless, and properly dead.

The two plasma types moved toward me with aggressive, practiced intent. They tried to flank, one moving to get behind me while the other advanced straight-on.

I took a brief flight backward and put my Brance voice on, then offered them a concerto of pain.

The sonic blasts hit them like being seated next to an amp at a Rammstein concert; the blue plasma covering them flickered and flared, revealing bare skin. They hit their knees, quite vulnerable to someone jamming a sonic icepick into their eardrums. I rocketed toward them, deploying my energy blade as I flew past one–

His head came off and rolled a little ways on the pavement. Scratch one.

I arced around toward the second, who was woozy after my sonic attack (now halted). He was trying to get himself up, to recover before I could come around and cut him in half. I found myself with a feral grin as I came at him head on, energy blade extended in front of me like a damned pike, longer than I'd ever made it before by half or better. I was going to lance this sucker like I was a knight of old riding down a frigging peasant, and by his wide eyes, he knew it.

And then...he simply exploded.

Not in plasma, no, but in a more conventional sense. His body exploded as something collided with him from above, sending pieces of flesh and bone and blood flying in all directions.

And as the last vestiges of my sonic scream faded in my ears, I realized they'd been replaced by another sound, just as loud and with a similar hum–

The drones.

They came down on me in a rain, exploding on impact and sending shards perforating my body. I lost control of my flight and gravity reclaimed me. I came crashing down in the bloody, skidmarked mess of the dead plasma type, my gore and his mixing as pains indicating violation of my body and my flesh screamed all across my back and sides.

I rolled and crashed into the side of the Chinese rail depot ahead, smashing through the concrete wall and coming to rest in a twisted mass. Staring straight up, I could see a corrugated metal roof looking down at me, and daylight filtering in from the hole I'd made through a cloud of dust.

A distant hum seemed to draw closer and closer, as my consciousness winked out, the blackness smothering the daylight from my sight.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Lethe

“Did you hear that?” Hades asked, making Lethe turn, if only to look at him. They'd made a hard sprint across the rail yard and, reaching the edge of a cluster of residential towers, had found nothing between them and blending in on the streets.

“I heard it,” she said, and seized his arm, dragging him forward. It had been a series of small explosions, behind them, centered on where they'd been moments before, or at least near to it.

“We should go back,” Hades said. He started to turn, to pull against her.

“The best thing we can do for Sienna now is get lost,” Lethe said, grabbing him and tugging him back. A green space was ahead, somewhere they could lose themselves in the pedestrians and trees. Whoever was running this operation had counted on moving fast and hitting hard, along with drone support. “In a battle against an entire army, you and I are a liability.”

Hades hesitated, then went along. “You are right, of course,” he said, holographic camouflage figure smoothing his hair, just like he did in real life. “I sometimes long for the days of old, when I could destroy an entire army by myself. And I forget those days are gone, long gone, and never to return.”

“We've both seen better days,” Lethe said darkly, moving forward, though her heart was behind them, in that rail yard. But her brain told her she needed to follow Sienna's command and go, go, go, rather than follow her heart into a danger she might not survive.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Jian

Jian ran. He ran because she told him to, he ran because he saw the Red Army uniforms, and all the days of his confinement in a Chinese prison came back to him, and he could not bear the thought of being caught by them again.

He was a cat, and he ran, and ran, and paid little attention to his surroundings for running as he did.

And no one took a bit of notice of him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Wade

Idove under the train when the blast of fire came out of Sienna and devoured the army around her, catching the edges of the rail depot building on fire once the flash had receded and the rods and cones in my eyes had begun to reset. The flames had reached out far enough to touch the train above me, and the metal squealed at the heat.

Four men remained around Sienna, not dead. She dove toward one and turned his head into a canoe. Two others, covered in plasma, lined up against her. My bullets would be useless against them.

But a third, his body wreathed in Gavrikov fire, looked like he was made for Wade, so I rolled out from beneath the train and put a three-shot burst into him.

Only the hottest Gavrikovs, the true masters of the power, could possibly hope to burn with enough heat to slag bullets. Even Sienna didn't have that skill down, and she was probably among the most practiced users of the power at this point. Certainly she had the edge over these Johnny-Come-Latelies in the Red Army, whose powers had come from a syringe. (Or maybe Jian-y Come Latelies, in this case.)

My bullets stitched a pattern across the small of his back and staggered him, sending him to one knee. Not my finest hour when it came to marksmanship, but not bad for a guy on the move, at a couple hundred yards.

He lifted his head and flames boiled from his hands. He was powering up to shoot them at Sienna while her back was turned and she was dealing with the plasma boys. I had my doubts as to what kind of results his attack would yield, but none about the fact I wanted him dead so I didn't have to find out if they'd affect her adversely.

Lifting my hand, I conjured to mind the memory of Stanley Croftsburg and sent a blast of purple rocketing at him.

I tend to aim for center mass, especially when things are hairy and my heart rate is in the triple digits. Aim is a finicky thing, and a small variation in control at the hand can translate into a massive shift in point of impact a hundred yards out. This time was no exception, and my purple murder beam hit him in the left side just below his arm, carving a six-inch half-circle out of his ribcage.

The guy spun and fell, flames billowing skyward from his hands, his own aim thrown off as he released his power.

Success.

I didn't let up, though; his fire started to fade as the pain caught up to him, and lifted my rifle and sighted in on him again, drilling him with another three-shot burst into the back. This time, one of them managed to hit him in the back of the neck and he toppled over, flames extinguished. I started to pursue further, to confirm the kill, as I watched Sienna cut the head off one of her plasma opponents, his blue glow faded to mere nudity when a whistling from above somehow broke through the ringing in my ears from all my shooting.

Drones. Incoming.

“Sienna!” I shouted, but too late. The first impact of an anti-personnel drone exploded in front of her, turning her second opponent into an explosion of blood, bone, and human slurry. The drones were small-ish, no bigger than a couple shoeboxes put together, and when they blew up, they sent shrapnel flying in a cone of destruction.

I'd seen these type of drones before, just a small quadcopter with a shaped charge, a few steps up from the sort of thing a terrorist would build in a garage with an IED. The sheer number of them was staggering; I could see hundreds sweeping across the sky in steady waves.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I said, watching Sienna take a hit and crash down, her momentum causing her to Kool-Aid Man through a concrete wall and come to rest inside.

And as soon as she was off the visual scopes of the drones, they started looking for another target.

Which was me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Fen Liu

“These are the only two we have on visual at present,” Defense Minister Guoqiang said, chins jiggling as he adjusted the picture in on Nealon, who'd gone through a wall and whose legs were all that was visible of her, and a man who looked Chinese but surely wasn't. Who could it be? Not Graves; he was reported missing in action, no longer assisting Nealon, along with his mother. “We haven't identified the male yet.”

Fen Liu just smiled. “That will be the husband.”

Guoqiang's brow crinkled on the screen. “How can you tell? It could be the brother, it could be Byerly, or one of the Coleman brothers–”

“Look at the way he handles that rifle,” Fen Liu said. “The brother is hopeless with guns. Byerly is perhaps worse. And neither of the Coleman brothers possess much talent for gunplay, either. No, it's the husband.” She leaned forward, peering at the figure on the screen. “How many drones do we have in the skies above Anshun?”

“A few hundred now,” Guoqiang said. “But more are coming.”

“Send a dozen at him,” she said, leaning back in her chair, enjoying the cool touch of the leather. “Send the rest at her. Do not stop until there are none left, if necessary. Overkill, you understand me?”

“Yes, Premier,” Minister Guoqiang said, and she could have sworn she heard him clop his shoes together. Like a good lackey.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Wade

Iknew I was in trouble the moment the kill drones paused. That could mean only one thing.

Target acquisition.

And lucky me: I was at least one target.

Steely coolness does not come naturally to many people, including a fair number of Navy SEALs. To put it a way I've heard others say it: there are two types of people, trained and untrained.

If I'd been staring down hundreds of quadcopter kill drones about to suicide me, and I'd lacked my training, I'd probably have run for it, because why not? It'd take a fanatic to stare down the barrel of these things that were going to hunt you, find you, blow up next to your face and send pieces of your skull in every direction all at once.

I was many things: annoying, irritating, stubborn, a real pain in the ass, and a decent Magic: The Gathering player.

A suicidal fanatic I was not.

The optimal countermeasure for these types of drones? Nets. Big honking fields of nets to keep them the hell away from you, so they could explode twenty, thirty feet from your face, where they'd be more or less harmless, merely showering you with a light rain of metallic debris. Their strength was also their downfall: tiny little drones could only pack a tiny little explosive, not a big one that could toast you from across a room or a football field.

Why nets? Because the drones were so small, and moved so fast that trying to shoot them down was deemed impossible. Try hitting a target the size of an owl moving at a hundred miles per hour. Now hit fifty in a row doing the exact same thing. That's why nets.

But I didn't have nets. I didn't have anything that could stop these things at the appropriate distance. I had a rifle. I had bullets. I had attitude.

And there was that stubbornness thing. I had that in spades.

Run, they'd chase me down and blow me to smithereens. Try to hide, they'd wait me out until the army showed up, if they didn't follow me under the train and blast me there.

But shoot...and I'd be shooting until I ran out of bullets or ran out of time.

All this ran through my mind in the space of a second.

My best decisions tended to involve some aspect of instinct. In my gut, I knew the right thing to do. It might have been inherent. Or it might have been the product of all that training, where the SEALs had gotten hold of me when I was young and foolish, before my powers manifested, and they'd tried to beat that imperfection out of me with middling results.

Except in marksmanship, I guess. They'd done a fair job there.

I aimed for center mass on people because I'd learned to shoot when I was human, and my heart ran at a vastly accelerated rate, and my muscles were less strong and less under my control.

But I could shoot precisely when I had to. I could put a shot on a rat's ear at fifty paces if I had to.

Now I just had to do it, over and over, until I ran out of bullets or they ran out of drones.

Shit.

I lifted my rifle and fired without thinking, aiming for the bulge at the bottom of the nearest drone. It blew up at first impact, on the second shot, confirming my suspicions that that was where the munitions package was located. It was only six inches from another drone, and that one took a piece of shrapnel through a rotor and went into a spin. I didn't care where it landed since this wasn't a crowded street; to me it was just one less target to deal with later.

They started sweeping in, and I felt a rush of adrenaline. Any one of them blowing up beside me meant curtains for Jeremy James Wade. And not the gently wafting kind, either, but the big, velvet ones that signal the show has come to a definitive end. Either that, or after intermission I'd wake up in a Chinese prison again.

I'd pick the curtains, thanks.

My rifle ran dry of ammo. I was scoring hits but not fast enough; the drones were sweeping in wide all around, in a perimeter, from behind the rail depot. I walked as I shot, trying to keep steady but batting them out of the sky with control that kept the fury rising in my soul and the bile rising in my throat at bay. This was all training; I wanted to shout, to scream them down the way Sienna might do, with a sonic battering ram of a voice.

Unfortunately, all I had was a purple beam to work with, and it was what I had to switch to, because reloading in the midst of a storm of exploding drones was not a valid option.

I let my rifle drop on its sling, and the buttstock hammered me about two inches shy of the crotch, thankfully, rather than a direct impact. Even with meta durability, getting thumped in the boys is no picnic.

Throwing out both my hands, I started blasting away with the purple beams that I'd acquired many years ago from Croftsburg. The drones started to swarm, and I realized a couple things.

One, I was not going to be getting out of here at all if I didn't do so soon.

Two, I didn't have the powers to cope with this mess. I needed a lot more power to be able to deal with drone swarms.

Which was why when I heard shouts in Mandarin coming from just behind the rail depot, I experienced that rare simultaneous welling of hope and fear.

The drones had self-segregated into two packs, one of which had been heading my way. The divide was becoming more obvious by the second, as I destroyed the last of the ones coming for me, and the rest continued along a different path.

Toward the depot.

Toward Sienna.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I shouted, hurriedly reloading my rifle as I sprinted in her direction. The number of drones I'd just dealt with had been paltry; maybe twelve to twenty. They'd come at me fast, fast enough I'd missed a fair number of shots even with my enhanced reflexes and control.

The pack that was drifting toward Sienna – and I do mean drifting, like they were floating along, waiting to acquire target before diving like hellbombers – was composed of hundreds of drones. They almost blotted out the skyline of Anshun beyond, turning it into a field of whirring, mechanical bots like a cloud covering the blue sky.

And I had no easy way to stop them before they swooped in for the kill.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Lethe

She didn't stop until she reached the end of the park, where it met a road and a market. They'd dodged between stalls, and even ducked through two different shops, shifted camouflage, and could no longer hear anything but the faintest sounds of gunfire in the distance.

“What now?” Hades asked. He was winded, of course. They hadn't exactly walked at a golfing pace, and he was an old man, and forever damaged by the wound that Persephone had given him.

“Now,” Lethe said, locking eyes with a man smoking a cigarette on the hood of his car, “I get us some transportation.”

“Go on, then,” he said, averting his eyes as he stood in the shadows. “Don't mind me; I never care to watch my daughter do these things.”

“No,” she said, “you just like to know that they're done.” Picking up his phone, she fiddled with it for a second before she sashayed her way over to the man smoking the cigarette, and stuck out her hand, asking for it. When she'd switched her camo, she'd made sure to pick a comely appearance rather than one of the more matronly ones that would simply blend.

He said something in Mandarin, and offered her the cig. She took it, taking hold of his hand gently, seductively, something she struggled with. Sienna struggled with it, too; her first instinct would have been to break the hand, but this was where thousands of years of experience came into play.

Lethe just smoked the cigarette, smiling at him the whole time, keeping his hand in hers.

About fifteen seconds later, she owned him.

“He's still alive,” Hades said, crawling into the back seat of the Chinese-made car. The brand name eluded her; it wasn't pretty, but according to the man's memory, it was well-maintained.

“Of course,” Lethe said tautly. The man – named Chen Guang – walked rigidly to the driver's side and got in. “Chen has volunteered to be our driver. We should treat him with the utmost courtesy.”

“Oh, well, then thank you, Chen,” Hades said obligingly.

“Of course you are welcome,” Chen said in broken English. “It is an honor to be able to chauffeur a star like Hugo Weaving around my humble hometown. I can't believe you're actually going to be filming The Matrix 5 here!”

Hades raised an eyebrow, but Lethe just shrugged. She'd shut off his camo before approaching Chen. And it worked, didn't it? Let him believe whatever he wanted. Honestly, Hades did look a bit like Hugo Weaving, though it was something of a stretch.

“Where should we start?” Chen asked.

“Perhaps the rail yard?” Hades asked. “We did leave a couple members of our scouting crew down there, after all.”

Lethe glared at him through her camo mask, but finally nodded. “Very well. But if we determine that there's nothing to be done, that they've got everything in hand, we should keep moving to our next destination.”

“Of course,” Hades said, almost channeling the spirit of Hugo Weaving. “Tell me, Chen, which movie of mine are you a fan of?”

“Oh,” Chen said, “I like them all. But I especially like The Dark Knight. You were excellent in that.”

“Ah,” said Hades, just a touch sourly. Did her father realize that Hugo Weaving wasn't even in that movie? It seemed so, surprisingly. But he didn't correct the young man, and they just continued to motor along the quiet side street of Anshun, toward the sound of gunfire ahead.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Wei Zhang

Wei Zhang liked to keep invisible whenever possible, especially when he was heading into action.

And action was certainly what was happening in the Anshun rail yard.

Around the depot, the sound of gunfire died off. His task force was circling in one direction, he planned to go in the other. To sneak in, to find the vulnerability and exploit the flank.

To catch the enemy from behind.

He came around the edge of the building cautiously. This was the side that ran against a rail, a train stretching before him with its boxcar doors thrown wide. Beyond, he saw flashes of purple lashing out at the sky, and the sound of explosions. Drones being popped, surely.

Mr. Sienna Nealon, hard at work.

Where was Nealon herself, though? He only feared the husband marginally, for his powers were short in supply. Nealon, though, she had a seemingly endless font to draw on. It was the only thing that made her special, the thing that made her most dangerous.

“Nealon is down, we believe,” General Guoqiang's voice piped into his earwig. “Aerial surveillance indicates – well, we see a wounded leg through a hole in the wall on the east side of the depot. Moving drones closer to confirm.”

Zhang did not copy that. He didn't dare speak aloud, not even meta-low. Instead he crept along the side of the train, following the flashes of purple. He had a job to do, after all, in the name of Fen Liu – kill Sienna Nealon.

If Nealon truly was down, her husband was her last line of defense. Taking him out would be a simple matter; gun to the back of the head, knife to the spine, whatever was more effective. Or even just disabling him and letting the drones finish the job while he moved on to Nealon.

All viable courses of action.

Zhang crept ever closer, trying to see which of them would prove most viable, his footsteps nearly silent against the asphalt loading platform of the depot.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Wade

Iwas hustling forward, whacking every single one of those mini quadcopter abominations out of the sky with endless bursts of purple while I reloaded my rifle one-handed. I hoped, prayed that they would not deign to notice me, but would continue to cautiously descend to ID Sienna so they could kill her. I was aiming low, getting the ones closest to completing that mission so they wouldn't start swarming, not yet.

Imagining some massive crew of Chinese drone operators in some dimly lit room, all operating their drones and wondering why they kept going offline was of only a small source of amusement to me as I kept whacking them from the sky in droves. The gun reloaded, I lifted my other hand and kept up a continuous beam of purple and swept it about. Each time it touched one, it exploded and spun out or dove into one of its fellow drones or just fell from the sky and blew up harmlessly on the concrete platform below.

Still they kept coming in seemingly endless waves, like a damned brood of cicadas, and I felt sweat beads pop out on my forehead as the strain of using this much power got to me.

I was fighting a losing battle and I knew it, making the barest dent in the drone swarm. This was the future of warfare; an endless onslaught of implacable enemies without a face. They would come at you forever, or as long as the military budget of your opposing force continued to pay for them. Dozens, hundreds of them lay in fragments across the depot pavement, yet still I saw no end.

They were inches away from bobbing low enough to see what I could now see – Sienna splayed out on her back, blood pumping out of a bare leg where an explosion had ripped her up. Her eyes were closed, and I knew she was in trouble, even if she wasn't fatally wounded.

I had to get to her, had to drag her out of there, away from the endless drone air force, away from prying eyes of Chinese surveillance.

All it took was a first step, a lunge toward her, and I felt something slash into the back of my head; a thin dagger rip that carved a line diagonally from the top of my spine across the void between head and shoulder to land there and gash across the scapula and arm.

I staggered forward and spun, trying to see who or what had wounded me, but all I could see was the outline of an invisible knife blade tinged with blood.

Mine.

It hovered in the air, mere inches from me, and then lunged at me again with fluid grace, chasing me back, looking for the kill shot, as the hourglass for saving Sienna ran out grain by grain.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Wei Zhang

Asteady pace.

That's what Mr. Wade had been moving at. Easy. Predictable.

Which is why when Zhang had lunged, he was certain he'd pinpointed the location where the blade would impact, could see it perforating at the base of the spine, severing the cord, and causing death.

Unfortunately, Wade increased his pace just before Zhang's lunge, and thus the blade did not find its home in his spine, but cut a mere gash along the back of his neck and then across his back as he spun.

Zhang did not panic; he was still invisible, after all. He held the knife out from his body as though it were a dirty diaper, and took a step to his right, to fool Wade, make him think that Zhang was still in front of him, when really he was a couple steps to Wade's left.

Wade triggered off a burst of purple energy that passed right through where Zhang had been standing a moment before, and it made him grin. Zhang slammed into him from the other side with upraised knee and an elbow, driving the latter into Wade's head while the former cracked his ribs and sent him rolling.

Zhang threw aside the knife. He had no more need for it now that it was sullied and visible. He let it clatter to the concrete and steadied himself, circling to the side, planning to follow up with another flanking strike, this time to Wade's back.

This time he would not miss.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Wade

Getting attacked by an invisible man when you're already dealing with an endless drone swarm and an approaching Chinese army just drove home the point again about all being fair in love and war. Because this sucked, it was unfair, and yet complaining about it was for pussies.

I froze as I landed, really feeling the strike to the ribs. The blow to the head was no picnic, either – it hazed my vision, caused it to swim a bit – but when I came up the rib breakage made me guard, made me grimace against the searing feeling, like someone had slipped a red-hot poker into my chest cavity.

This left me on one knee, waiting for the invisible man to strike again, or the drone swarm to get its shit together and target me again, or the army I could hear around the corner of the rail depot to turn said corner and start plugging me with lead or metahuman energy beams.

But it also left me listening.

And it was hard to hear things over the sounds of about a bajillion quadcopters turning only forty feet away, and an army of a hundred or so, muffled around that concrete building, and a city beyond with all its attendant horn honking and hum and all that other shit.

But I heard the scrape of a shoe on concrete and I whirled, because it was right there.

I lashed out with a foot, going low and spinning in a kick that I threw my whole momentum behind. I'd gone through a (brief, embarrassing) breakdancing phase in my teenage years, and everything I'd learned about spin I put into that kick.

And I made contact – hard – with someone's ankle.

The crack was satisfying, though not as satisfying as if it had been my assailant's head. He let out a cry of agony, and thudded to the ground, sending a small wave of dust flying out from his point of impact. I doubted he was seriously hurt from the landing, but I knew I'd broken his damned foot, and that was all I needed.

I turned and bolted for it, firing a burst of purple energy blind at the point of his landing, not caring whether it hit.

Sure, I could have leapt on him, wrestled him for control of a weapon, or just poured fire into the area around him via rifle and purple beam until I was sure he was well and truly dead.

That would have been a matter of seconds. Five. Ten. Maybe fifteen, even.

I had no time for that.

Or rather – Sienna had no time for that.

I ran like hell itself was on my heels, slipping on the rubble as I leapt into the Sienna-sized hole in the concrete wall, turning and firing as I did so. I caused a chain reaction that brought down a half dozen drones just outside, seizing Sienna's hand and feeling my backpacks jiggle unevenly as I landed.

Running like hell was going to be the theme for now, and I was all about the theme. I dragged Sienna across the concrete floor behind a ceiling-high stack of wooden boxes that were dotted with Mandarin labeling spray-painted across them. Through two turns I carried her, until I heard a door open in the distance, behind one of the stacks I'd just passed.

I stopped, listening.

One, I heard Sienna's breathing. It was a little more ragged than I would have preferred, but every second she was breathing meant she was one second closer to her body fixing the damage inflicted on her.

Two, I heard the chatter of undisciplined, dipshit soldiers. Oh, they tried to keep quiet, but they were intent on searching the warehouse, and they didn't have the experience to do so silently.

Three, I heard the distant sound of quadcopters entering the building, a whump-whump-whump of their little blades turning as they started to sweep in cautiously, still seeking their prey.

A warehouse.

Metahumans.

Kill drones.

And me.

If I hadn't been in something of a hostage situation, this might just have been the sort of occasion to put a smile on my face.

CHAPTER FORTY

Zhang

“Hurry, you idiots,” Zhang said, grimacing, his ankle shattered beyond immediate repair. A combat medic was looking at him now, deciding what to do.

And all the while, Mr. Wade was escaping deeper in the darkness of the rail depot with Sienna Nealon, who was – for the moment – incapacitated.

Zhang put his hand up to his ear. “We need to send in everything right now. Before she can recover, or it will become much more difficult.”

Fen Liu's answer came a moment later. “Agreed. Commit everything. Flood the zone, as they say.”

“Yes, Premier,” General Guoqiang answered.

Zhang sat there sweating, in pain, and looked to the medic. “Wrap it, and get me a walking stick. And hurry!” He didn't bother to bellow the last bit like some overly emotional American. In a more reserved society, the meaning was plain. The medic flinched, and got immediately to work as asked.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Wade

It was just me and Sienna, who was unconscious, alone in a train depot/warehouse filled with crates of Chinese products, and rapidly filling with suicide quadcopter drones and Chinese metahuman soldiers bent on killing us both.

Talk about a hot date.

I dragged Sienna behind a set of boxes stacked head-high to me, and slid another one delicately in front of her to hide her from easy finding. I needed to be mobile to counter what was coming. The warehouse was row after row of boxes, many of them piled to the ceiling, and I could hear the buzz of the quadcopters and the quiet radio chatter being directed through the earpieces of the soldiers sweeping the room.

Whee.

I crept along to the side of the warehouse, knowing I was going to have to keep quiet for as long as possible. Once things went loud, it was going to be party time, but the longer I could keep them from homing in on my position by avoiding a chaotic firefight, the more chance I was going to be able to have to do damage to the vast array of outnumbering forces.

Above me, a corrugated steel roof was providing cover from watching satellites and drones. It was the single thing keeping them from looking down on me and being able to give direction to the guys and drones trying to kill us. It was like a protective shroud keeping hell from raining down directly on my position.

So naturally, I had an immediately intrusive thought about dropping it on my enemies.

But I let that one slide by – for now. Much like the chaos, I needed to keep that one in my back pocket for later.

Reaching the wall of the warehouse, I found an aisle that led back to the open door where Chinese soldiers were filtering in, light blazing in from outside.

Now that...that I needed to put a cork in right now.

I did so with a blast of purple that wiped out the guy coming in, then I used it to shear the door off, then cut into the concrete above the lintel and on the sides of the door. The whole section of wall collapsed in a pile as I ducked back around the crates as the first reports of gunfire cranked off in the aisle, cutting right through the space where I'd been standing mere seconds earlier.

Yee haw. At least two guys down from the collapse, and now the whole warehouse was creaking. That was going to put a kink in their ability to hunter-kill me.

I slid across the next aisle low, and caught sight of two drones floating over a couple soldiers. Operating drones beside these soldiers was an idiot mistake, and one I couldn't help but exploit.

My purple beam hit a quadcopter drone right in the copter blade, causing it to veer down and hit one of the soldiers in the head. It didn't kill him, but the shaped charge blew a second later and hammered him in the jaw with the drone's remains as the charge splattered his comrade against the nearby stack of crates.

The crates tumbled after I'd already slid my way through, and I heard them crash amidst a stream of profanities from the guy who'd gotten clipped in the jaw by an exploding drone. Like getting jacked in the face by a boxer, I imagined.

There was a whole lot of gunfire coming from behind me, where someone – or several someones – were charging up the aisle next to the wall where I'd fired my burst and collapsed the doorway. Aggressive. Ambitious.

Stupid.

They came rushing into the intersection behind me, and I fired six rounds into them across the upper body and face, split evenly between them. My purple beam followed, and suddenly their own mothers would struggle to identify the bodies.

I had a momentary flashback to my time in Hong Kong, and the end of that time. I'd gotten chased through the streets after being darted with suppressant, as my powers began to fade. It had been a game of evasion, where I couldn't really bring everything I had to bear in a proper game of cat and mouse, because I was in the process of becoming the mouse, and quickly. And an army of cats was waiting.

This was a similar situation, except I was already trapped, I was mad, there was little chance of innocent civilians wandering into the fray (unlike Hong Kong) and so I unleashed my inner John McClane and prepared to Die Hard. It was me versus the whole Chinese army in a rail depot, and if I lost, I was going to be dead or screwed anyway.

So I tried not to lose.

But they weren't making it easy on me.

A party of five (not the Jennifer Love Hewitt type) came around the corner, guns a-blazin', a couple of powers lighting off. One guy was immensely swollen, another had a bubble of water the size of a beach ball hovering over his shoulder, and two more had guns in hand. A green laser lit the wall behind them, but it wasn't pointed at me and I couldn't see its user – yet. He was hiding behind the crates.

I tried to take the heads off the two gunmen with a purple blast, but they ducked with insane speed; Reflex types, clearly. Shifting my aim, I killed the Hercules by making him into a true no-neck, then lowered my aim, taking out the side of the bottom-most crate. It toppled over onto the green laser-shooting meta, and I heard a scream beneath the crash of something heavy. I doubted it killed him, but it got him off my back for a moment, which I desperately needed. Because the Reflex-types were charging me.

Somehow these idiots got it into their heads that they wanted to carve me into ribbons, and so they charged, dropping their guns and pulling knives. Reflex-types were fast. Maddeningly fast. Eye-wateringly fast. And they had it in mind to turn me into stew meat.

I had other plans.

Aiming my hand to the side, I blasted the base of one of the stacks of crates, sending it toppling toward the Reflex boys with their knives. They saw it coming and, of course, dodged forward, throwing themselves into forward rolls.

Right into the path of the next stack I blew over.

Even a Reflex type can only move so fast, and they had committed to the forward roll. They couldn't get out from under it in time, and it buried one solidly with a sound of bones breaking and flesh being laid asunder. The second was slightly luckier; it only caught him in the leg, and he let out a terrible cry, his knife skittering across the concrete floor. I caught it by stepping on the blade, and then blasted his arm with purple energy. That power was not full and complete for me, because I hadn't consumed Croftsburg's entire soul, but I'd gotten enough of it that the Reflex type's arm shriveled up and turned black, instantly crisped.

He screamed again, and I reached down and broke his neck with my left hand as I unleashed a three-shot burst at the Poseidon with the water globe over his head. He'd ducked behind a stack of crates, too, but I grazed him on the arm.

“Come along, sir,” I said, dragging the still-dying Reflex type down the aisle behind me. “I have need of your skills.”

It was time to make a retreat from this particular conflict and pop up somewhere else, since I could hear everyone in the warehouse converging on that position. I knew I should have stayed quiet for longer, but alas, closing the door on those guys had made things go loud before I'd wanted them to, yet was an opportunity I simply couldn't pass up.

I drained the Reflex type as I went, his soul leaving his body by the time I'd rounded the next turn. I knew I was now five aisles from where I'd left Sienna, and, judging by the hubbub, they were nowhere close to her. They were shouting now, seeking me, and I was about to give them what they wanted.

I will not help you, the Reflex type said in my head.

“Sure you will,” I said, and started applying liberal amounts of absolute torment.

Something Sienna and I had talked about in the early days of our acquaintance was exactly how incubus and succubus powers worked. I'd been unclear on the details because I'd only ever absorbed that one partial soul, at least from a meta. I'd absorbed quite a few humans, but their wills tended to be a lot weaker than a meta's and they broke like an uncooked spaghetti noodle.

How to apply pressure to the souls in your head was an item of discussion, mostly because my non-blushing bride had been through absolute hell with hers, and I'd taken copious mental notes because I never wanted to go through that with any of mine. Planning for the future even then, I was. Hers and mine.

Well, now I'd just absorbed my first meta soul all the way. Popped my cherry. And you know what?

His screams in my head told me he was ready to cooperate about ten seconds after the torture started. Which was good, because I didn't love the feel of it.

“What's your name?” I asked, threading my way down an aisle. At the end, I could see lights flashing along, bouncing frantically as the soldiers executed a search pattern.

Huang Ming, he said, voice shaking. I didn't think he'd be with us for long.

Bringing him firmly to the front of my mind, I suddenly could understand flawlessly everything they were shouting, which had been a touch muddled before.

Also...the world suddenly slowed way, way down.

We were behind enemy lines, hopelessly outnumbered, and they were going to throw countless metahumans at us. It was just Sienna and me, a succubus and an incubus, and for now, it was just me because my wife was on the bench.

It seemed only fair to turn their numbers against them in the cruelest way possible.

Voices an aisle over caught my attention, and I realized they were shouting signs and countersigns to each other as different squads were crossing each other’s paths, to keep them from shooting each other with friendly fire.

Teehee, as my wife would say.

I came around behind a crew of three on a sweep, bellowed the sign, “Deng!” (Light) and waited for the countersign “Qiao!” (Bridge). They acknowledged me, and barely looked me over.

Because I was still wearing my Chinese camouflage.

“This way!” the squad leader shouted, continuing them along the path they'd been hustling along when I'd moved up on them. Away from me. Their boots slapped loudly against the concrete floor as they hurried away.

Which was convenient for me, because it covered the sound of me breaking the neck of the last guy in line, then the next one, anchoring my grip on their necks as their squad leader ran off without them. He'd be back in a minute, I estimated, so I dragged them both two aisles away and up another three before pausing behind a couple crates, draining them both the entire time.

What's your power? I asked the first, in my head. Didn't even bother with a name.

He screamed, because I was already applying torturous pressure. HERCULES, HERCULES!

Thanks, Eddie Murphy. He was already dead, so I cast aside his corpse. It landed at my feet with a slight rattle from the gear on his belt and the rifle slung around him. And you? I asked the second.

Energy whips, he screamed, not enjoying the agony.

Something moved above me, a rustle of wind, and I saw a guy in a Chinese army uniform fly over me, almost in slow motion thanks to my Reflex powers.

How convenient.

I whipped my hand overhead and a white energy whip came tumbling out like I was some kind of superpowered Indiana Jones. It snaked forward like a laser, but it was like I could steer it with my brain, aided by the Reflex power slowing things down. It reached the man in an eyeblink, and wrapped around his neck with a crackle of energy that blackened his flesh.

The whip contracted and there was a snap like a fuse had just blown. The Chinese soldier gasped; his legs continued to fly forward but the momentum of his head and neck was brought to a cruel halt. I gave the whip a tug and heard another snap, this time his neck, as he hanged himself in midair going less than thirty miles an hour.

He dropped and crashed into the concrete less than ten feet from me, and I drew the whip back into my palm, dragging the soon-to-be corpse to me and anchoring a hand on his cheek to catch his precious soul before he could expire.

Boom. Now I had flight powers.

My feet drifted off the ground a couple feet, and though I wanted to, I didn't have time to pause and admire the fact that in a matter of less than five minutes, I'd done a pretty fine job of catching up with Sienna in the powers department. The CIA had been careful to isolate me from situations where I might be able to pick up more powers, probably because that shitbird David Hayling feared getting a Sienna-like rebel on board.

Then he'd gone and betrayed me to the Chinese, who'd tortured me for months on end.

Well, this was payback, as far as I was concerned.

“Deng!” someone shouted as I came around the corner.

“Qiao!” I whispered back in perfect Mandarin. “Lower your voice, you fools, you'll give us away.”

They relaxed. Which was their first – and last – mistake.

I broke two of their necks the second they turned their backs on me, and got the second two before the first bodies hit the ground. That done, I dragged them all close, like a hug, keeping my grip on two and then letting my bare wrists rest against the back of the side of the necks of the other two.

Hey, I was gonna kill 'em anyway. Waste not, want not, especially when you're facing an entire army.

Powers, I said. Now. It wasn't a request. Now the souls of all the soldiers I’d broken to my will were voices added to my own, and the torment I could muster was multiplied, given voice through my echoing command.

And they complied.

Hercules.

Thor.

Charge-bomber.

Green laser.

“Okay,” I said, “let's go.”

Now I had enough powers to cause real havoc. The Charge-bomber lacked for a quality name, but I had one for it: Gambit type, because it was remarkably similar to the X-Men character in that they could charge up an object and throw it, and it'd explode like a small bomb.

And boy did I have plans for that.

As a squad approached, I ducked behind a stack of crates and ran my hands along one of them, giving it a glow of bright blue before running away in the opposite direction. The crate, which had been one up from the bottom of the stack, blew up with enough force to send splinters of wood into the patrol walking by, and also toppled the other crates down upon them. It stirred up the hornet's nest, sending everyone in the joint heading in that direction, and a barrage of signs and countersigns were called out, though not fast enough, apparently.

Because the shooting started seconds after that.

Teehee, I say again.

The longer I stayed in this place, the more souls I absorbed, but also the more time I gave to the Chinese to pour reinforcements down on us. It was like standing under a waterfall of drones and Chinese army soldiers with metahuman powers; no matter how brave a stand we made, sooner or later, we'd drown.

Still, I wasn't quite done stocking up on powers just yet, so I swooped down on another patrol that was running down the aisle toward the sound of shooting, darting in behind them and zapping them with my newly-acquired green laser, which helpfully decapitated all four without a sound. Having the Reflex powers was a godsend, but pairing them with the instantly-lethal green laser? I had a feeling was going to be quite handy.

I gathered up their corpses in a hot second, and found – to only my slight surprise – yes, I could still absorb their souls. It did take the heart about thirty seconds to quit pumping after a decapitation, so this wasn't an immense shock.

Powers, I said. List 'em.

Fae.

Hercules

Hercules.

Reflex.

Only one new power in this bunch. I would have called it a waste, but I couldn't deny the efficacy of the one I'd gotten.

It was perfectly timed, too, because for the first time in a few minutes, I could hear the quadcopter kill drones approaching.

And now I had more methods to deal with them.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The light webs from the Fae power were a perfect antidote to annoying, flying kill drones. They came springing out of my palm, expanding as they reached their targets, and hitting with enough force to throw them up against the ceiling or nearest wall, where the impact triggered their explosives. They'd make a loud POP! almost like a slamming door. Which caused the Chinese troops, still shooting at each other on the other side of the depot, to barely pause in their fire exchange.

I drifted up to the ceiling, trying to decide what to do next, shrouded in the darkness of the shadows up there. The power was still out, a self-inflicted wound that was costing the Chinese attackers dearly. From up here, I could see the firefight on the other side of the warehouse growing more involved. I guess no one could tell that I was hovering above them the entire time, watching them shoot each other to pieces.

There's an old adage in warfare: never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake. I figured I'd been lucky and I'd been good, probably in unequal measure, but that I needed to get while the getting was – well, you know. I tried to decide where the best point of egress would be, then I'd grab Sienna and fly us out of here, far from the drones, far from the annoying soldiers with their full buffet of powers, far from–

A bullet ripped through my thigh and tore through my concentration, causing me to drop from the sky. I hit a crate on the way down and shattered it, bruising my side and sending me tumbling in a precipitous crash down to the concrete floor below, where I heard something crack that really shouldn't have. My right wrist, I thought, but it was tough to tell through the fuzzy layer of consciousness and the sharp pain.

I was lying flat on my face, nose buried in my forearm (the unbroken one, thankfully), my snapped wrist having saved my face from a full-on impact. Someone moved behind me, and I rolled, thrusting out my broken wrist. Green light flashed, and a very surprised face was illuminated in emerald.

A dead body tumbled onto me, their rifle clattering. I grabbed the face, with my bad hand, muscling the near-corpse off of me, but hanging on as the burning started. I started to get to my feet, and listened to the gunfire on the opposite side of the warehouse come to tragic end. Footsteps were moving, en masse, toward me, echoing off the concrete walls.

“Shit,” I said, grimacing against the pain as I held a dying man in one hand and lifted the other in the direction of the horde of superhuman troops coming my way. The low whine of quadcopter drones was in evidence, too, the sound of all the trouble in this warehouse coming right for me.

Couldn't fly. I just couldn't get my head together, and besides, as if to dissuade me, a bright glow, enough to light up the dark, filled every corner of the warehouse, as if the sun had risen in the far corner. Some damned meta, an apocryphal Aurora type, probably, had turned on their powers.

Couldn't run. A wall collapsed somewhere behind me, and the sound of voices in Mandarin heralded the arrival of at least a platoon of reinforcements.

So I guess it was time to fight. I tried to smile through the grimace, wondering if I was about to make my last stand. The burn in my hand completed, and another soul entered my harem. Power? I asked, thinking I'd probably draw another of those damned useless Hercules.

Magneto, the answer came back.

And suddenly my grimace became a full-on smile.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Zhang

“Our troops are flooding in the other side now,” Colonel Chang said, pointing to the rolling cargo depot doors, now open. “Two hundred soldiers, all empowered. More coming through the portals now.”

“Barely adequate,” Zhang said, hobbling forward on a makeshift cane. He needed a cast, but unfortunately this was all he had until he could get a Persephone – rare in the Chinese army and gene pool – to heal him. He'd put out a call, but they seemed to be in short supply. Foolishness. Still, one was on the way, but from a unit not yet in Anshun. That had required a change in portal locations, which had necessitated a different army coming next.

Still, it was easier than trying to bring in manpower without the teleporters.

“Swarm them with everything you have,” Fen Liu said over the headphones. “The only way to win against Sienna Nealon is to overwhelm her.”

“Either that or take her by deceit,” Zhang said.

“If she dies, the West's will to fight us dies with her,” Fen Liu said tautly, “and we live to see another generation born and die. So make her dead!”

“Yes, ma'am,” Zhang said tightly, and hobbled his way forward to direct the battle. He was listening to the renewed chatter of gunfire now that he'd gotten the fools to stop shooting at one another. Hopefully this time they were shooting at the right person, he hoped. But his hopes surged, then faded when the chatter of rifle fire suddenly died.

And then the screaming began.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Wade

There was so much metal in the room, and I could feel it in my mind, and almost at the tip of my fingers.

So I gave it a little pull, and listened to the gunfire stop as QBZ-95 rifle triggers slipped away from soldiers' fingers.

That made me grin even harder, so I decided to push this time–

And listened to rifle buttstocks land in the breadbasket of every soldier who'd just been firing them.

I was lying in the glow of the Aurora somewhere at the end of the room, watching the light flicker like a strobe as the meta – wherever they were – got jerked around on the end of their rifle sling by my wild pulls and pushes. I suspected similar dance moves were being duplicated all across the warehouse, though I couldn't see the results from them as easily as the Aurora, the light dancing all around from the source.

Pushing and pulling the guns I had hold of was an exercise in fun. It was low effort, high reward, as I jerked triggers just as often as I twisted the weapons. Staccato, singular gunshots and occasional rips of multiples thundered through the warehouse as Chinese soldiers screamed, presumably catching unfriendly fire from the rifles of their fellows. I cast off the dead body that had given this precious gift, and continued to make the puppets dance at the end of their slings while I floated back to upright, trying to decide on my next move.

“You son of a whore!” A Chinese soldier came around the corner, slightly off-balance from a metal belt buckle at his waist. I guess I'd gone easy on such a small piece of metal, focusing harder on the bigger assemblies of the rifles and pistols. He raised a hand–

And I realized he was wearing a small amount of metal there. A wristwatch.

I jerked his arm sideways, pushing his elbow as a blast of purple came out, destroying the crates beside him. At the same time, I pulled his belt buckle forward and he slid, boots losing traction.

His eyes were wide as he was pulled right into my hand, which was about twice its usual size as I swole up with Hercules power. Why?

Because I could.

I took his power and his life, not necessarily in that order, and now I had full purple blast beam. I put it to immediate use, unleashing it through a stack of crates to target a squad of soldiers that had cut loose their metal bindings. They were moving so fast that all it took was a delicate sweep of my hand to rip through all four – and send the crates tumbling down in another chaotic mess.

“Welcome to the slaughterhouse!” I shouted in Mandarin, surely drawing every ear in the place. I fired another blast of purple at random, and it tore through a stack of crates and drew screams from the squad on the other side. I swept my hand left and right, using the beam like a lawnmower to chop down crates and Red Army soldiers in a great cutting swath.

I heard movement behind me and spun, conjuring lightning and loosing it in a bolt the size of a telephone pole into some poor bastard who was coming around the corner in one hell of a hurry, an energy blade clutched in a high guard above him. It arced through him and then ran through four or five people behind him, drawing screams. I picked up a crate with extra Hercules strength and charged it up into a bomb, hurling at the light source behind me – a roll-up door, I was pretty sure. I heard a bang, screams, and the door came crashing down along with a dozen concrete blocks as that section of the building partially collapsed.

A swarm of drones came flying over the nearest wall of crates, and I flung eight nets in three seconds to trap them against the crates. They exploded, sending shards of wood flying and toppling the crates. I caught a few splinters, including one just above my left eye that blinded me with a sudden rush of blood.

Shit. I tried to blink it clear, but no dice. There was a constant flow rolling down my face; capillaries bled a lot, and they'd certainly nicked one with that.

This was how I would lose, I realized. It would be a thousand cuts – and then a sudden coup de grace when they rushed in at the end. The numbers were against me, Sienna was still injured, out of the fight, hopefully still safely hidden.

I would die an inch at a time, and then she would die, and then, someday, China would come west again, either by force or by coercion, and we wouldn't be there to defend it.

All these thoughts flashed through my head as I jerked half a hundred triggers throughout the warehouse again and listened to the satisfying sound of screams and chaos. I poured lasers of green and beams of purple into the places where I knew clusters of soldiers were waiting, destroying my cover all the while. When drones came sweeping over me, I batted them down with light webs, with laser blasts, with magnetic pushes (though most of their components were plastic, enough was metal I could screw with them).

I had no plan to escape, no ideas for how to get out of this mess. The minute I stopped firing and smashing and blowing shit up and knocking down drones, they'd overwhelm me. Then they'd find Sienna.

This was me, boxed into a corner. No way out, just a fight to the death with enough guys that eventually they were going to kill me. If I just grabbed Sienna–

One of the crates in front of me exploded with red eyebeams, and I jumped sideways, barely missing them. They cut their way through the cover above my head and showered me with more splinters. They bit into the back of my head, into the meat at the back of my neck and in my trapezius muscles, and my right hand went numb. Whether it was the break in my wrist finally taking full effect or brand spanking new nerve damage, I couldn't say. And it didn't really matter right now.

The bad guys were closing in, and I flung a charged-up piece of wood blindly, and listened to the screams as it went off in range of at least a couple Chinese soldiers. The beams swept above me again, smashing away more cover and leaving me with but nine inches of shattered wood above me before I'd be exposed. Likely on the next sweeping pass of the eyebeams.

Something thumped next to me, and I turned my bleeding face, raised my hand, ready to strike–

A hand as hard as iron and yet somehow still soft caught my wrist, and I found myself looking into familiar blue eyes, almost next to mine.

“Well, well, well,” Sienna said, flat on her belly, about six inches from me, “looks like somebody's been getting into trouble without me.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Sienna

Ididn't expect to wake up in one piece, let alone still alive and uncaptured, but I did. I came out of my bout of unconsciousness with a jolt, smashing a wooden crate that rested beside me, pains all over my body letting me know that not only was I still alive, I was still banged up as hell.

Wolfe, I thought, pulling the old bastard's last remnants to front of mind. Shards of explosives popped out of the places on my body where they'd buried themselves, and then the wounds sealed themselves up.

My ears were ringing, but I could hear gunshots, and screaming. Light shone in on me, but not daylight. It felt weird, artificial in some way, not like fluorescence, but almost like moonlight. Screams filled the air, too, in the middle distance, maybe thirty, forty, up to a hundred feet away. A whole lot of them, too, which suggested...

I had help. Someone who'd hidden me here to recover while they took on...oh, the whole Chinese army.

Lethe, I figured. Maybe Hades. Maybe some combination of both.

Popping my head up, I immediately popped it back down because six bullets strafed the crate next to my head, missing me about eight inches.

Oooookay. I guessed since I was in an active warzone, I'd need to keep close to the ground.

Electricity crackled, and the sound of some energy beam ripping through crates suggested a direction for me to travel. Shoving over a stack of crates, I flew low to the ground through several aisles to find a red eyebeam ripping up a wall of crates.

I was in the rail depot, I realized. The one I'd been fighting outside before whatever explosion had turned my opponent into a cloud of blood and bone and then tried to do the same to me. The whirr of not-too-distant engines suggested drones were still in attendance.

But I found my savior, and it was not quite who I expected.

Wade fired off a blast of green, ripping in half a squad of Chinese soldiers, then fired off a purple beam, then electricity, all at an insanely fast pace. He was moving more quickly than I'd ever seen him move, faster than ought to have been possible for him.

Unless.

I hit the ground beside him, and caught his wrist before he managed to take my head off through sheer panicked reaction. Give the man this much: the flicker of recognition in his eyes came quickly, and thankfully a shot that would take my head off did not. “Well, well, well,” I said, “looks like somebody's been getting into trouble without me.”

“I would have gotten in trouble with you,” he said, turning and directing his hand toward the origin point of the red eyebeams and then setting off a blast of green that caused the red to cut right off, “but you were taking a nap.”

“I'll have you know that I was following a time-honored tradition of soap opera characters,” I said, trying to sound outraged, “and entered a coma. Which clearly didn't take.”

“Now that you're awake,” he said, grasping a piece of crate and imparting a blue glow to it before tossing it in the direction of the Chinese soldiers, “shall we proceed to get the hell out of here?”

“Problem with that,” I said. “I'd suggest flight, but you can't–”

He subtly lifted off the ground, and grinned at me. “I can now.”

I felt my eyes narrow as I stared at him. “How many Chinese soldiers did you drain while I was out, exactly?”

“A lot,” he said. “A whole heap of a lot.” Turning his hands skyward, he blasted the ceiling with concentrated beams of purple energy. “We should probably talk about that later, though, maybe when we're not up to our asses in Red Army metas.”

“Oh, we will definitely be talking about it then,” I said. “Can you go supersonic?”

“Anything you can do,” he said with a quicksilver grin. “Well...I can do some of it, anyway.”

“Come on, then,” I said, nodding at the ceiling he'd blasted away and seizing one of his hands. “Supersonic on two. One–”

“Two,” he said, and we were off, our twin sonic booms rattling the walls of the depot as we launched up and out of that place. We curved up and out of the depot, holding hands tightly as I steered us north, away from the growing numbers of the Chinese army as quickly as we could go.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Lethe

“That does not look good,” Chen said, craning his neck to peer through the windshield as another explosion rocked the car, this one like a sonic boom.

Lethe frowned...and concurred, though she didn't say so. She was looking through a perimeter of Chinese soldiers that seemed to be endlessly flooding out of one of the side streets ahead, which had been cordoned off by armed and uniformed soldiers.

“I'm sure it's just a training exercise,” Hades said with his usual aplomb. He was peering, too, though, and Lethe heard the concern lacing his voice.

Then she caught movement in the sky, and breathed a small sigh of relief. Two figures, holding hands, and jetting away. They were gone in a couple seconds; she barely saw the flash of dark hair, but there it was.

Sienna had made it out. Wade, too, unless she missed her guess.

“We should get out of here before our intentions are mistaken,” Lethe said.

“Yes,” Hades said, clapping his hands together. “I agree.” She could tell by his relief that he'd seen it, too.

There was no easy way to rendezvous with Sienna and Wade, nor to track down Jian – wherever he was. That put them in a bit of a precarious position: hiding out far, far behind enemy lines, in a country where they were being actively searched for.

“Whatever you say.” Chen shifted the car into reverse. “Where should we go?”

“Take us somewhere that doesn't have many people,” Lethe said.

Chen thought about it for a moment. “I know a place like that. Like an abandoned place for the movie?”

“Yes, exactly,” Lethe said. “A quiet place.”

“Done,” he said. “I will take you somewhere like that. Now, tell me something – what was it like working with Christian Bale?”

Lethe snuck a look at Hades. His eyes rolled slightly in annoyance, but he seemed to be steeling himself to give a congenial answer, which arrived directly: “He's a fine person as long as you stay out of his sight line during a take.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Fen Liu

She wasn't staring at the face of Zhang, but she could imagine him, hearing his voice over the open line. Frustration dripped through it. “They both flew away. Wade managed to absorb some of the men we sent in after them.”

Fen Liu leaned her head forward; her neck was a tense bevy of knots, and Zhang was not here to help unwind them. “This is the problem with Nealon. You think you have her over a cliff and yet somehow she manages to claw her way back with the thinnest threads of luck.”

“Indeed,” Zhang said. “Wade broke my ankle, or else I might have gone in myself. All I could think to do was throw our forces at her, hoping to overwhelm them, but it seems my gambit did not pay off.”

“No,” Fen Liu said. “And yet I cannot fault you for your approach on this occasion, however badly it might have ended. Overwhelming her with main force seems the only way to kill Nealon, unless you can stab her in the neck or shoot her in the head. If we still had nuclear weapons, I would consider turning them loose on her, then blaming her for the destruction.” She paused. “Hm.”

“I will find a way to do it,” Zhang said, sensing the delay meant, perhaps, some judgment of him and his conduct here. “If it costs me my life, I will see her dead.”

“I may have to hold you to that,” Fen Liu said archly. But she must have been joking.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Jian

He ran and ran, and found a safe, quiet place to hide beneath a car parked outside an apartment building. It wasn't so busy here, wasn't so chaotic, and he found himself catching his breath.

Something about what had happened – about the shouts in Mandarin, the noises of battle, it had brought everything back for him. He'd been in the prison camp again, back where he'd started. His breath had caught in his lungs, his chest had felt maddeningly constricted, and he'd been so terrified he could do nothing but run. If he'd had the mental function – if his brain had let up on the instruction to RUN, RUN WITHOUT CEASING – he would have turned into a bird and flown away.

But he couldn't. Couldn't think, couldn't do anything but run, and now, hide. He lay beneath the car, shuddering in revulsion at his cowardice. Paralyzed by his terror of a regime that could reduce him, a man, into a quivering mess, not even a human being. He remained a cat, and perhaps he always would from here out, hidden under a car, forever and ever.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Sienna

We stopped our flight in a forest, atop a forbidding, rocky mountainscape where not a soul could be seen for miles around. Landing, our boots crunching on the gravel-strewn soil, I realized my hand was still in Wade's and we shared a look.

He flushed, and pulled his away. “Sorry,” he said.

I didn't try to hold on. “It's fine,” I said. “We had to get away, and it wouldn't pay for us to get separated.” Unstated: like the others, because I'd effectively just abandoned three people without transport in the middle of Fen Liu's China.

The air up here was mostly fresh, with a little tang of pollution very unlike the US these days. This is what happens when you outsource all your manufacturing to a country with much less stringent environmental laws. “You think we'll be okay up here for a little bit?”

“For a breather, yeah,” Wade said, already moving around. He pulled off his camo, and I saw to my surprise he was carrying two backpacks.

“Oh! You got my backpack?” I was surprisingly excited about that.

“What? Yes,” he said, and unslung it, handing it over. I took up its weight and he immediately squatted, opening up his own. “Let's see...yep, Cassidy included a tent. That's lucky.” He pulled out a package about the size of what I would have guessed was a poncho, then unfolded it, clicked two buttons, and I heard a gentle whirring. The thing in his hand expanded to become a tent. Not a huge one, mind you, but reasonable-sized, big enough for two, certainly. He pulled out a pack of four spikes and quickly anchored it to the earth with his bare hands and a little metahuman gusto. “There,” he said once he was done, “shelter.”

While he was doing that, I'd been in a daze. I was reaching out to Ricardo MonFalcon, who had tried to follow us, but had gotten lost in the supersonic wash of speed that we'd poured on. Fortunately, I had a deep bond with my falcon, and could touch his mind from great distances. It was tough, a little like watching a dirty movie on Cinemax when you weren't a subscriber. Back in the days when paid cable was a thing. I could get flashes of his mind, but fortunately it was such a simple one that getting him heading in the right direction wasn't tough. I did estimate it'd be a matter of hours before he caught up, though, so I settled in to wait.

“So...what next?” Wade asked, once I'd informed him about Ricardo's current status.

“Ricardo's out there,” I said, waving vaguely, “on his way back to me. Probably should just wait for him.” I gave Wade a glance. “Unless you think the Chinese have a way to track us here?”

Wade screwed up his face, frowning, lips twisted as he thought. “No...their real-time, down-looking satellite capability over China doesn't provide complete coverage, and we flew quite a distance. I'm pretty sure we're fine, especially given we flew a lot more once we were under the tree canopy. If we hear so much as a truck engine, we can zip off, but I think we've lost them.” He looked up at the boughs overhead. “For now.”

“That sounded like some gloom was appended to it.”

He shrugged. “Their Tianwang – that Skynet surveillance system – blankets the whole country. I know Cassidy's camo is supposed to defeat it, but I'd feel a lot better if it was just offline.”

“Maybe Sierra will get it,” I said, and then my own gloom slipped out. “Unless they figure out what we did at the electronics shop and root her out.”

“It'd be nice to know how she's doing, wouldn't it?” He smiled wanly, pinching the bridge his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Think we can turn the satphones back on?”

I pondered that for a moment. “Maybe. We're far enough away from Anshun that I'd think we'd be clear of whatever tracking systems they were using. There's gotta be a lot of devices between there and here that would act like a smokescreen, right?”

Wade gave me a slight smile. “When you're talking about advanced tech, my ceiling for understanding is much lower than, say, Cassidy's. So I don't know.”

“We should probably give it a try,” I said, pulling my phone out of the pocket I'd stowed it in. “We need to get ahold of Lethe and Jian and Hades anyway.” I clicked the power button on it, and it started the boot-up sequence.

Wade just nodded and plopped down, landing his ass right in the soil. He didn't bother to turn on his own phone, because why risk two?

“So...” I said, watching the little icon appear on the phone screen as it started up, “you want to talk about what happened back there?”

“What's to talk about?” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “We fought. Enemy soldiers died. That's war, same as it ever was.”

I chuckled. “Dude. How many people did you drain back there?” Then my smirk disappeared, because it occurred to me that maybe I was being a little too cavalier about the fact that he'd just killed a whole heap of people.

He laughed, giving me the reassurance that whew, my husband was in fact as dark in his sense of humor and as casually jaded to the business of killing enemies as I was. For good or ill. “A lot. I picked up nine new powers plus got the one I already had boosted to full strength.” His hand glowed purple for a moment as he regarded it with interest. “Obviously I'm still a piker compared to you–”

“Who isn't?”

“–but I'm catching up fast, Ms. Nealon,” he said with a smile.

“I wish I'd been awake to partake,” I said, then frowned at the inadvertent rhyme. “I could use some new powers.”

“I could have used the help,” he said. “Together maybe we could have just taken out the whole army and been done with it.”

“Heh,” I said, mildly chuckling at the thought of winning the war, just the two of us. But no: “Still wouldn't get us Fen Liu. Unless...” I perked up slightly. “Any chance the peons you absorbed have any intel on her whereabouts?”

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “I sifted my way through them while we were in flight. The only useful information is that their regiments were spun up in a hurry and directed to Anshun via portals about five minutes before they made contact with us. They came in right on us, knew which train car we were hiding in and everything.”

I tried to think that thought. “We were only in that car for...what, thirty minutes?”

“And in the shop for twenty more before that,” Wade said. “So...how'd they find us?”

My phone had completed the boot-up sequence, and I checked for signal. It had full bars, so I dialed directory assistance.

As soon as it clicked to indicate the connection was in place, Sierra spoke: “Sienna. I am relieved you made it. I was concerned.”

“Bring us up to speed, Sierra,” I said, pulling out the little earwig and planting it in my ear canal. I saw Wade do the same where he sat. “How'd they find us, are they tracking us now, your progress, etc.”

“I can't be certain how they found you,” Sierra said, “but it seems likely that our escapades at the shop did not go unnoticed. There is presently a large Chinese government presence outside the shop, including police, army, and forensics teams, all visible via satellite imagery. I place the likelihood that the shop was where they acquired us at 95% likelihood given the rapidity of their arrival on that scene, which was concurrent with your battle in the rail depot.”

“Okay,” I said. “But are they tracking us now?”

“Without being certain how they found you to begin with, it would impossible to say,” Sierra said. “I give it a 50% likelihood that you lost them after the depot because their armies are still in place in Anshun, and I see no indication that they are mobilizing to go elsewhere.”

“That's a relief,” Wade said, “because I could use a breather.”

“It is possible, however,” Sierra said, “that they are preparing a different army to engage you at your present location. The Peoples' Liberation Army does have 4 million personnel with reserves, and given the average rate of metahuman power adoption from the serums, up to 3 million could be metahumans.”

Wade let out a pained whistle. “That kinda makes what we did to them in the rail yard a drop in the bucket, doesn't it?”

“Indeed,” Sierra said. “Furthermore, I am not currently able to make contact with the program you inserted into the Chinese internet. It remains either beyond the firewall, where I can't access it and it can't reach me, or it has been found and destroyed. I rate the former most likely, at 80%, but we cannot ignore the possibility of discovery and failure.”

“Oh, good, more gloom,” I said.

“I am sorry I don't bring better news,” she said. “Also, I have not made contact with Jian, Lethe, or Hades. They remain 'in the blind,' so to speak.”

“Great,” I said. “Hopefully they cleared out of Anshun without any trouble.”

“Hopefully,” Wade echoed. “So should we just sit here and wait until Ricardo arrives?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And then, maybe...I don't know.” I ran fingers through my tangled hair, “I don't know what to do next.”

CHAPTER FIFTY

Zhang

“It seems they accessed our internet and used it to try and search for you, with little result – obviously,” Zhang said, his hobble gone. He spoke into the phone, directly connected to Fen Liu in her fortress-like lair.

“Obviously.”

“The search history is somewhat muddled, according to our chief investigator,” Zhang said, striding out the back of the store into the alley, where a forensic team was working diligently on a patch of asphalt in the alley. “One of the soldiers assigned to this post is missing. We suspect Nealon or one of her team killed him, then disintegrated the body.”

“Oh? That is interesting.” Fen Liu chuckled darkly. “For all her reservations about fighting a war, she certainly hasn't hesitated to kill since arriving on our soil.”

“She seems to draw the distinction between civilians and military very carefully,” Zhang said.

“A meaningless distinction,” Fen Liu said. “If necessary, I will raise all of loyal China against her.”

“Well, let us hope she doesn't realize that,” Zhang said, speaking quickly because he knew his life depended on it, “or else we will have a real mess on our hands.”

“We have a mess on our hands anyway,” Fen Liu said.

“We are still following the falcon's path,” Zhang said. “He will lead us to her, I suspect. But we need a plan to deal with her once we find her.”

“Stick with the current plan,” Fen Liu said. “You pin them down. We'll work on the drone swarms. If they'd only been in a more open area, they would have worked.”

“Perhaps,” Zhang said. “We'll stay on the trail of the falcon, and keep trying to figure out what happened here.”

“Good,” Fen Liu said. “Keep me apprised.” And she broke contact without a further word of goodbye.

Zhang stared down at his phone. Not a word of endearment. Not surprising, exactly, but still...it might have been nice. Zhang looked around the shaded alley, and marshaled his wits to figure out what the next step was beyond waiting for a break.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Fen Liu

“What is news out of Anshun?” she asked the Jianjun, the portly Minister of Public Security. His head was down, double chins wobbling in the light of his monitor.

“We're shutting it all down as fast as anyone can post,” he assured her. “Scrubbing all references the moment they are mentioned online.”

“Good,” she said, and clicked the button to bring up Minister of Defense Guoqiang. “And the status of the bombs I asked prepared?”

“Our teleportation metas are in place,” Guoqiang said, jowls shaking. Between him and Jianjun, she had two advisors that needed more exercise and less food. “They will do as you asked, keeping themselves from danger.”

“Good,” she said, “because I cannot spare them, but I must have this done.”

“And it will be done,” he said, “as soon as you ask.”

She gave him a curt nod and nothing more. With a click, she severed the link, leaving her alone in her confined quarters. They were all waiting on her, there at the press of a button. The power was at her fingertips.

And soon...soon she would exercise that power fully. As soon as they figured out where Sienna Nealon had landed.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Sienna

“Can I ask about that?” Wade pointed to a pouch I held in my hand. It held the two serums that, if injected, would give me power beyond measure. The full souping-up of the ghostly powers I had – Magneto, Eyebeams, Thor, Brance's sonic voice – and also, perhaps, unlock powers adjacent to mine. While I didn't know exactly what those would portend, I had suspicions that becoming a full-on Hades and an Aeolus was in the starter deck, to borrow one of my brother's geeky aphorisms.

“You already know what these are, don't you?” I flashed the leather serum pouch at him. “What do you need to ask?”

“Why don't you just take 'em?” he asked, and I could hear a little drip of frustration.

I almost chuckled; I felt a grim smirk pull at the corners of my lips, and I made a sort of grunting, amused noise in the back of my throat. “That is the question I seem to most often ask myself.”

“They're right there.” He waved a hand at the vials. “Incredible power at your fingertips. You wouldn't have to drain a meta anymore to have their powers, you could just feel the burn for a few seconds and let them live, and forevermore their power is yours.”

“Speculatively,” I said. “That's what logic might suggest.” I lifted the little leather bundle, and stared at it. “But you know power doesn't always follow logic.”

“But I just don't get it,” Wade said, and now the frustration was really bleeding through. “You could have walked through the fight we had back there, drained every single meta to death with Hades powers, if you wanted to, at a distance, while hiding in a corner, and boom – you have a hundred, a thousand new powers that you can use to get the next hundred, the next thousand.” His eyes found mine across the slowly seeping dimness as the sun slipped its way over the mountains to signal the approach of night. “You'd indisputably be the goddess you always mockingly claim to be.”

“Who says I'm not already?” I kept a high tone of amusement in my voice, and gently put the leather packet back in my backpack. “Wade...how do you think of your powers?”

He paused, as though he'd had an immediate response he was ready with, but wanted to take the answer as seriously as I'd posed the question. “I haven't had many to speak of, until now. The CIA folks took a very serious line toward me absorbing metas. They were very happy that I had my current powers, and used the hell out of my super strength, my ability to drain possible terrorists of their knowledge, my dreamwalks for achieving perfectly secret contact with our spies in other countries – but they didn't trust me to absorb so much as a Hercules.” He grunted. “And, frankly, that drove me a little nuts, because in a case like my experience in Hong Kong, a few extra powers would have gone a long way to maybe keeping me from getting caught by the Chinese. I guess I don't understand not grabbing what you can when you get a chance. My entire life experience is always being undergunned and undersupported, so I just can't figure out why you'd ever want to walk into a fight without having the biggest gun. Or in your case, being the biggest gun.”

“It's a tricky thing,” I said, my voice turning quiet, pensive, “being thought of as the most powerful person in the world. See, on one hand, my hero's reputation is handy, because people generally think I'm trying to do the right thing for them, for the country, for the world – and so they cut me a little teensy bit of slack.

“On the other – if you've never had all society turn against you because the villains trying to wreck your life have skunked you in a cloud of suspicion or just exposed your bad deeds, it's probably hard to understand why the thought of becoming more powerful absolutely terrifies me.”

He cocked his head. “You're right. I don't get it. Help me understand?”

“One of the easier times of my – admittedly not very easy–life was after Scotland. After I'd adjusted to the loss of my souls, the loss of their powers,” I said.

The thin hint of a smile perked at the corner's of Wade's mouth. “You mean when you were Public Enemy Numero Uno, thrown in prison, and then forced to work for a cabal of shadowy geek overlords that styled themselves our betters?”

“Yeah, then,” I said. “I know it sounds funny, but it led them to underestimate me for the first time in a while. Same thing when The Network came along and tried to bend me to their will. I only found out I had my powers again partway through my term of service with them, and it was nice being able to surprise people with them again. Like they thought they had me, and boom! Destroy the stupid sonsofbitches they sent to kill me in six seconds.” I brushed fingers against my cheek. “I miss being underestimated. I miss being not noticed. I can't escape being come after with overwhelming power. And it's not like I'm invincible.”

“So,” Wade said, “why not take the shots? Give yourself overwhelming power again. Always have a new surprise waiting for your enemies.”

“Because they're never going to stop coming after me if I do,” I said. “They already barely do. They hounded me out of Minnesota because they were terrified of what I could do. Your pals at the CIA tried to kill me because they feared my ability to mess things up for them. Now imagine every petty tyrant the world over suddenly thinks, 'Oh shit. Now she's got enough juice to destroy me, and the cost to her of coming over and overthrowing me? Like zero.'”

He chuckled. “You're serious?”

“It's the whole Peter Parker thing,” I said. “You know, 'With great power–'”

“Great responsibility. Sure.”

“Well,” I said, “your responsibilities do ratchet up. If I've got godlike power, how can I let the children of the Congo be slaves forced to dig cobalt all day? How can I let the women of Afghanistan be stoned to death for the crime of being raped? Because technically it'd be in my power to stop it. There's a whole world of injustice out there, Wade, and I see enough of it to know it's there, but I'm just weak enough that I don't feel a need to go try and set it all right. As if I could. As if I have some sort of perfect knowledge to go along with my power, to be sure that everything I try to set right isn't going to go horribly wrong in the end.

“I think that's one of the reasons it's so easy to confine my activities to the US, or Western Europe mostly,” I said. “If you've got a mostly functional society, it's like the bedrock on which people can build a life. Some evil criminal comes along, tries to ruin someone, tries to murder them, wrongs them horribly...I can come in and excise that one villain, and the balance of justice is restored. They can go back to living their life.

“In other corners of the world, though, where depredation is the rule,” I said, “I can swoop in and save them for the moment. But the whole system is not built to protect them. Not even a little. There's no system to protect them. People whine about all sorts of privilege, but that's the real one – whether you live on that bedrock, with a system beneath you that's designed to allow you to live your life, and stop the people who'd happily keep you from it, through malice or negligence. Even when it's imperfect, even when it gets messed up, at base...you can mostly do that here.

“And I don't want the power, not really,” I said. “Because then I feel like I'd have to go into the morally questionable places of this world, and try to set them right...rather than just kill or incarcerate a villain and let people get back to their lives.”

“You've got like a savior complex,” Wade said. He was smiling a little.

“The goddess thing is a joke. Until it's not anymore.” I tucked the vials away in the backpack gingerly. “Because with escalating, godlike power comes godlike responsibility. And I don't think I have the wisdom to use that in a way that won't blow up in my face, and probably that of a whole lot of other people.”

He seemed to ponder that. “I think I know what you mean.”

“Do you?”

“Well, I was personally involved in at least two countries we invaded thinking we knew better – almost godlike – what kind of governance they needed,” he said. “We failed, and people we made promises to about the countries we were going to build for them, they paid a big damned price for our arrogance. So yes, I get it, how godlike power married to human awareness might not work out as well as we hope.”

“'Godlike power married to human awareness,'” I said, turning each word over slowly as I said it. “Hey, that sounds like us, once upon a time.”

He chuckled. “What happens when I keep draining soldiers and gain godlike power, too? Will I lose my human awareness?”

“It is harder to connect with ordinary people the more powers you stack on,” I said. “Oh, I make a good try of it. And losing my powers for that time, boy that was humbling. But sometimes it's tough to just...be...in the world, when I can do all these things and the average person can't. I don't put myself over them or anything, but the difference is there. It makes people treat me just a little differently. Some exalt me. Some try and pretend there's no difference between us. That's probably the best way to do it. But there's a reason I don't really have many human friends. It's a hard difference to ignore, even if I don't mean anyone any harm, they're probably thinking, 'She could become a dragon at any second and bite my head off.'”

“Funny,” Wade said dryly, “that's exactly what I was thinking standing at the altar with you. Of course, I was mostly worried about it in a figurative sense.”

“Ha ha.”

“Yes, now I get it,” Wade said. “It's just always going to be tough for me, the soldier, the SEAL, not to look at any weapon I can get my hands on and think...'Boy, it'd be nice to have that the next time the shit hits the fan.'”

“Oh, I think that all the time,” I said, glancing at my backpack. Rising to my feet, I took hold of it, my course decided. “Can you pack the tent back up?”

“I can,” Wade said, rising as well. “Why would I do so?”

“Because I want to go to Guangzhou,” I said, picking up my camo and slipping it over my head. “Fen Liu was there during the war, working with the Communist Party.”

“We're still digging into her past, huh?” Wade asked.

“Until I have a better idea,” I said. “We're not going to reconnect with Lethe or the others just sitting around here. Either Sierra will connect us, or it won't happen. Either way, we still have a mission. Might as well get on with it, right?”

“Right,” Wade said, and did something to the tent that let all the air out in a great rush. I felt it stir my hair. “Onward, then.”

“Onward,” I agreed. Because the fastest way to get the others back was to get rid of Fen Liu. Or at least that was what I was telling myself.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Lethe

“This is...uh...” Lethe said, staring out the window of the car. The words weren't quite there for her; what she saw was a spectacle unlike anything in her upbringing. Unlike anything in her life, really, and given the length of said life and the breadth of experience therein, the number of times when she'd encountered something like this – something amazing, something utterly inexplicable, something that took her breath away and left her lost for any word in any of the many languages she knew – well, it was rare.

Consequently, her response was rare, too, and consisted of a curse in her native language that caused Chen to stare at her blankly. It must not have translated.

Hades heard it, though, and chortled. “I thought I raised you better than – oh, who am I kidding? This is exactly how I raised you.” He peered out the window, too, though, and saw...well, what there was to see.

And what there was to see...was a massive city of towers that scraped the skies, all concrete, glass, and steel, stretching for blocks and blocks, miles and miles.

And there wasn't a soul anywhere in them.

“See, they build them in advance of demand,” Chen said, “to create ready-made cities. Sort of make-work infrastructure projects, where people could just move in and have a job, have an apartment, grocery stores, all that. But it takes a while for them to be ready, for demand to live here to catch up. So they sit here abandoned for a time, like this one.” He glanced back. “Probably be a pretty great place to shoot a movie, though, huh?”

“Quite so,” Hades said. “And there's no one around?”

“No,” Chen said. “They're not for sale just yet. So the places sit abandoned.” Towers and towers, a full city, unoccupied.

“Great place to hide, then,” Lethe said, meta-low, “especially if you've got food and water.” The distant rumbling of thunder under the sky told her that while they already had the former, the latter might be along shortly, and could be collected in the still built into their pop-up tents. If need be.

“Perhaps we should stay here for a bit,” Hades said. “Check in with our people. See what...what they think.”

“Oh, cool,” Chen said. “Hey, I can wait with you, if you want. Not like there's no parking around here.”

Lethe just stared at him. “Sure. Why don't you do that?” To Hades she just shrugged. It was helpful to have a car and a driver. Probably. So long as Chen didn't outlive his usefulness.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Sienna

“Ricardo will catch up to us in Guangzhou,” I said, opening my eyes from adjusting my falcon's course. He knew where he was going, and he'd rest if he had to before flying farther. It was over a thousand kilometers from Anshun to Guangzhou, which meant he wouldn't catch up soon. Night had settled in, and Wade was finishing zipping up his backpack, putting away the tent, which had folded back into a small pouch almost as easily as it had been deployed. We had water I'd drawn from the air, we'd choked down some food pellets that had been almost decent, and now we were ready to get on with the next leg of our journey.

“I'm a little concerned about that falcon,” Wade said, rising to his feet and slinging his backpack on his shoulder.

“He'll make it fine,” I said. “He'll sleep if he gets tired, hunt if he gets hungry–”

“Not what I meant,” Wade said. “Ricardo isn't indigenous to China. Which means him flying around is a red flag that anyone with a passing knowledge of birds can see. And anyone with a beyond-passing knowledge of Sienna Nealon might just catch.”

“Shit,” I said. “You're right. He might just be what led them to us back in the rail yard.”

Wade nodded, face grim. “We should figure out a way to send Ricardo home. Or else send our would-be pursuers on a wild falcon chase.”

“Yeah,” I said, contemplating that. “Maybe.” I didn't want to leave Ricardo exposed to danger. He'd done too much for me over our time together to even think about abandoning him in a hostile and potentially unforgiving environment. I didn't exactly know the ecosystem here, where he could be exposed to danger just being in China, even absent the hostile attentions of the local government.

“We can talk about it later,” Wade said. “Sierra – bearing and distance to Guangzhou?”

“Guangzhou is approximately 1,000 kilometers southwest,” she said into my earwig. “I recommend flying low to avoid radar.”

“What about emissions control?” I asked. “Should we shut off the phone?”

“Guangzhou is a city of over eighteen million. It seems unlikely that a single satphone operating with our encrypted burst transmissions will be detectable in a soup of electronic activity, but if necessary, you can simply order me to remotely turn off your phone, should you be unable to reach it.”

“We should just be aware,” Wade said, “if we move into a less inhabited area, like that rail yard, that we might want to consider going dark on comms for a while, until we're back out in the general area of the city where other people’s electronics use will help mask us.”

“Right,” I said, and reached out my hand to his expectantly. “How's our camo holding up, Sierra?”

“I detect no problems with the camouflage. Batteries are at 78% and should be good for several more hours of continuous use. I will be monitoring your location and shifting the imagery as appropriate.”

“All right,” I said, and saw Wade hesitate only a moment before taking my hand. “Guangzhou it is. Local CCP HQ.”

I felt Wade's hand in mine as we lifted off, and started to turn, following Sierra's verbal instructions as we took off into the night and bent southwest, into the deepening darkness of the mountains.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Guangzhou SPRAWLED over the landscape like few cities I'd ever seen. I'd heard it said that the easiest way to imagine the size of China's population is to realize that there are forty cities in the country Chicago's size or bigger. Whereas America has Chicago, LA, and New York as its biggest cities, and everything after that is smaller, sometimes considerably. Guangzhou was certainly one of those. Only seventy-five miles from Hong Kong, and ninety from Macau, meant it was a gateway to two of the biggest commercial towns in China.

The air turned desperately warm as we swept toward the glowing downtown area. It felt sticky on my skin as we left the thinner mountain air behind in favor of subtropical breezes. “I'm searching for landing spots where you'll be able to avoid cameras,” Sierra said. “Trying to find a convenient blind spot not too far from the local CCP offices.”

She eventually guided us down in a pattern toward the center of this river-cut city. It was absolutely chopped through with waterways, bisecting the business districts and colleges and giving the whole place a soothing feel in spite of the blinding lights of downtown, which pulsated like beacons in the night. A tower reminiscent of the CN in Toronto bore rainbow coloration slightly off downtown, and a brightly lit riverboat cruised by slowly beneath us.

We came in for a quiet landing in a spot where nobody was standing, nobody was loitering, and – hopefully – nobody was looking out a window nearby. Tough to be 100% certain on that last point, but Sierra did her best from the dozens of micro cameras on our camouflage.

“The CCP headquarters is 800 meters to your left, three streets over,” Sierra said. “Would you like me to cut contact now?”

“No,” I said. “Try to keep to bursts of transmission or data if you can; maybe reduce the signal if that's possible? But I'd like you to keep an eye on things, make sure no one's following us, or we're not missing a pattern that's going to get us killed.”

“Understood,” she said in a voice so like my mother's it still occasionally unnerved me.

“We could probably stop holding hands now,” Wade said, “if you wanted.”

“Oh. Right.” I pulled my hand from his, lit by the glow of neon. There were so many skyscrapers, so much light. It had a distinct Vegas-on-steroids feel. Every skyscraper was sleek and new, and possessed enough lighting to make Paris envious.

Also, I didn't actually want to part hands with Wade. But I didn't want him to know that, either. He'd made his choice, and it wasn't me, but I kinda needed his help, so I was determined to not be a little bitch about it.

“This way.” Wade nodded in the direction indicated by Sierra. We walked beside each other, and I tried to take in the sights.

It was oddly charming, like a city of the future transplanted into now. Compared to some of the ragged and broken cities of the US, it gave me a feeling of cleanliness and care, like whoever lived here actually gave a shit about it, and didn't want needles and feces scattered everywhere (for example). It didn't make me happy knowing how many people were being imprisoned in the country to produce the effect, but it did make me wonder how you could achieve a similar result without being absolute fascists. Because that might have been worth looking into, given the sad state of American cities.

“Not one of these buildings was here seventy years ago,” Wade mused. “They've built a metropolis in that time.”

“Probably would have built it faster without all the murder, man-made starvation, and despotism,” I said. Wade just chuckled. “I can't argue that it all looks pretty, but man, the cost.”

“The cost is indeed high,” Wade said. “And remains so.”

Ahead, we could see the CCP HQ. It was like a blast from the city and country's past, with Asian columns and a palatial front. We walked into the shadows pooling at the front of the building, and I stopped there for a moment, pretending I needed a minute.

In reality, I was already tapping into my powers, pulling up Maria Westcott in my head.

And sure enough, seconds after I did, the vision of a dozen horribly mangled Chinese citizens appeared before me, causing me to suck in a terrified breath at the very sight of them.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Jian

He didn't want to come out. Underneath the car was the safest place for him, and his mind was still racing.

If only he hadn't come. If only Anshun hadn't erupted into hostilities. If only Sienna hadn't been killed, or caught, or fled...

Turned into a cat, cramped under the wheel well of a car, he knew nothing except the fears, the what ifs, and the knowledge that he was trapped. Trapped in this spot, trapped by his decisions, trapped by fate itself turning against him.

And he felt even more trapped when he realized, very suddenly, that someone was calling his name. And they were very close indeed, standing just outside the wheel well of the car.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Sienna

Itried not to keel over from the sight of the battered, beleaguered souls that had been standing in front of the Guangzhou CCP headquarters. I'd seen some miseries in my life, up close and personal, so I liked to believe I was a fairly jaded person.

Still, seeing those ghosts – and there were dozens – all queued up like they were waiting for passage across some river in the underworld...it almost made me take a step back and trip over my own feet.

They looked significantly worse than those I'd seen back in Anshun, for starters.

Three of them were wearing dunce caps, but...that wasn't quite all. At least two of the caps looked like they were weighed with other things, and one of the poor souls had something with real weight seemingly bound around his neck. Signs with Mandarin lettering proclaimed, “Black Gang Member” on one, and “Capitalist Running Dog!” on another were hung around their necks as well.

And there were bruises. Lots of bruises. Black ink seemed to have been spilled down one of their faces, they were so beat up – or maybe actually had black ink covering them.

“Do any of you know Fen Liu?” I whispered. Sad shakes of heads in most cases answered me.

But not quite all.

“I'm going to avenge you,” I said. “Going to avenge you and topple the government that did this to you.” I said it with as much certainty as speaking my own name.

All but one of them faded into the darkness. Because that was all it took.

“I know Fen Liu,” the last man remaining said. “I knew her well.”

“Of course you did,” I said, glancing up at the cameras positioned around the eaves of the CCP headquarters. “Would you like to take a walk and tell me about it?”

He nodded. “Yes. Yes, I will tell you all I know about her. Her lies. Her evils.” His face twisted, and the rage that had kept his soul on this earth for however many years after his death still animated his face. “I will tell you all I know of her.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

Jun Gong

Jun was a low-level functionary and member of the Chinese Communist Party in Guangzhou. He'd been so for a very long time, all the way up from his youth. It was a family trade, his parents having ingratiated themselves as party members in good standing, and their parents before that having done so in their day.

This was the way in China: hereditary membership in the ruling class. Princelings with a proper inheritance.

In the days of his grandparents it was proper food in times of starvation. Access to stores that had stocked shelves even when no one else had a scrap to eat. If there were no meats for the proles, they had them. The CCP did not short its members; they always had the best of everything. The rest of the country could burn; they were the leaders.

But even the leaders of the future had to start somewhere, and that was why Jun was sitting in a tight room packed with security monitors on an evening after dark. And he would be sitting here until the latest part of evening, when some lesser employee with lower standing would come to relieve him and sit here for the early morning shift. Given time, he would move to day shift, or something better, and continue his upward ascent through the ranks of the party.

For now, all he had to do was keep a perfunctory eye on the security cameras mounted on the exterior of the Guangzhou CCP headquarters, so any wreckers didn't do something foolish and paint a message on the side of the building. Anything humiliating like that might cost him standing, at least if they got away with it.

He patted the small pistol on his belt. Jun would not lose status, or the party's trust. Three generations his family had been in good standing. He was a princeling, doing what princelings did in this kingdom: the menial tasks assigned, knowing that one day, perhaps, he might even sit in the highest seats of power in Guangzhou. He may join the party congress at its meetings, have a say in the future of China.

It was all right there – and right here, where he sat, watching the monitors for any signs of trouble.

He glanced up from the pornography magazine he'd been perusing to find a strange sight. A woman and man, both with perfectly fine, Han features, middle-aged, standing out in front of the headquarters on the concrete. He watched them for a few moments, looked back down at his magazine, then back up.

They were still there, but starting to move off.

Jun pursed his lips. Calling his boss at this hour was tantamount to disturbing him, and Jun didn't care to do that. Becoming alarmed at ordinary foolishness like some skittish old woman was not a path to promotion.

But...a new general order had come in last week, from Beijing, and it had been very clear – report any suspicious activity. They'd even included a hotline – and an email address.

Jun chewed it over for only a minute or so more. This was probably nothing. But if it was more than nothing, then properly reporting it could result in something good for him. With that in mind, he took a quick moment to snip the footage and upload it, then sent it off to the email address in question, and turned his attention back to his magazine, only venturing a single solitary glance more at the monitor to find them walking away.

Probably nothing, then. But he felt good about reporting it anyway. And he would continue to do so, all the way up until he, very suddenly, felt differently.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

Tan De

Guangzhou

1966

“Do you think yourself special?” Fen Liu shouted down at me, a mob roaring all around us. Her face was alight with the fury of a devil, a demon, a monster, of the type Chairman Mao always denounced as being among us. “Do you think yourself somehow more worthy than any of us?”

But the irony, of course, was that in the view of Fen Liu – and this mob surrounding me – I was the demon. I was the monster.

The jeers of the crowd as they shouted names and hurled abuse filled my burning ears. Capitalist roader, they shouted. Black gang element. All the insults of the moment rained down upon my shoulders.

A girl, no older than fifteen, with a visage right out of the legends of demons and monsters slapped me across the face, rocking my head back. Then she shoved an ink bottle in my mouth and I choked on the taste of it.

They descended on me, then, this mob of teenagers. I had been a prized lecturer and academic. A man of status. But in the uneasy days after the Liberation, after the famine, after the purges, and now, entering the time already pronounced as the Cultural Revolution, I had tap danced my way through so many changes and purges.

“Who helped you?” Fen Liu shouted as I took another blow to the back of the head from a girl young enough to be my daughter. Fen Liu's voice was barely audible over the screaming, the righteous fury of half a thousand angry middle school students.

For this was the Cultural Revolution promised. I hadn't been a Capitalist, not ever, but it didn't matter, I realized as someone struck me in the side of the head with a thrown shoe, and I fell off the stool upon which I'd been precariously balancing. I slammed into the floor and felt the last of the wind go out of me.

“The Revolution must be continuous!” Fen Liu shouted, and they roared, descending upon me. I saw the faces of children I'd taught, of my colleagues. I could have sworn I saw one of them mouth an apology even as he struck me full across the face with a length of wood rod.

They fell on me like pack animals, and I caught one last glimpse of Fen Liu through the numbing blows, as I was beaten to death by – mostly – children. Children raised by wolves, and turned loose on the previous generation for no reason other than caprice.

She was smiling with thin satisfaction.

CHAPTER SIXTY

Sienna

“We were lovers, you see,” he said wistfully, again, when he was wrapping up his tale. I did cringe, because it seemed like sleeping with Fen Liu was no guarantee of safety. Maybe the opposite, actually, since I'd now talked to two different men who'd been part of that not so elite fraternity, and both had died by her efforts. I tried to imagine if I'd put up similar numbers, and knew the press would have dubbed me the black widow or praying mantis or something. Another advantage of an authoritarian country; the press couldn't call you a murderous slut if you were in charge. “Fen Liu and I. We'd met when she arrived in Guangzhou. I was a true believer in the revolution. I believed in permanent class struggle.”

“Yeah, and I'm sorry this happened to you,” I said, “but you had to know that colluding with the CCP is like trying to keep hold of an angry dragon's tail.”

He looked at me with sad eyes. “But I didn't think it would happen to me.”

“So says everyone that joins the leopard face-eating party.” With a clap of my hands on my knees, I added, “Any idea where Fen Liu was from? Originally, I mean?”

His gaze flicked to me, confused. “What do you mean? She came here from the Anshun, and before that, she was on the Long March.”

“Yeah, I know it's probably hard for a Commie like you to conceive of a time before the revolution, but I'm talking about before that,” I said. “Where did she come from originally?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I only know where she was headed afterward: Beijing. Straight to Zhongnanhai, I expect, given the job she did here.”

“Well, you got that much right,” I said. “I will do everything in my power to avenge you.”

“Thank you,” he said, and his face got misty, and then faded into oblivion.

“In spite of you being a dumb frigging commie,” I muttered under my breath. He was already gone; what did he care about my editorializing?

Wade had been loitering a few feet away, keeping watch. The streets in this part of the city were empty and quiet, the distant noise of automobiles the background to his question: “Just another jilted lover, then?”

“To say the least,” I said. “She really racked up the body count – in the worst way. I mean, at least I never killed my exes. I'm starting to wonder if there's a man left alive that she's slept with.” I shook my head, wishing I'd stayed on the mountaintop and taken at least a nap.

“No leads, then?” Wade asked, shuffling closer to me. He was keeping his voice nice and low, probably to avoid the surveillance cameras mounted all around from eavesdropping.

“Maybe one,” I said, frowning beneath the camouflage. “She seems to go where the power is – or where she perceives it will best work for her. After the Communist takeover, they sent her to Anshun, which is kinda in the sticks, but she goes there and does her thing. Then she moves up to the big city, Guangzhou. Now she's in Beijing. The only pattern I'm seeing is a continuous upward ascent of the ladder. Know what I mean?”

“She's a climber for sure,” Wade said, frowning. “But that doesn't really get us closer to where she's hiding now, does it? Unless she's sticking close to the ruins of her most recent palace, in Beijing?”

“Don't know,” I said. “Could be. Or she could have gone back to wherever she started from and built a bunker there.” I started to reach for my face but thought the better of it; we were potentially being watched, and all I needed was to have a bad interaction with my holographic camo to blow my cover. “It's really hard to tell. All I'm getting from her thus far is a thirst for power and a seeming succession of men who she used to comfort herself, or...whatever...while she was climbing, then promptly disposed of when she had no further use for them.” I frowned. “Or she got the last use out of them that she wanted by sacrificing them.”

Wade chuckled. “Talk about an old-world goddess.”

My frown deepened, tugging crease lines into my face. “What do you mean?”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, that's what old-world gods did, isn't it? Made the humans sacrifice to them? Animals in most cases, but in some – human beings. Fen Liu just seems to have taken the sacrificing into her own hands rather than leaving it to her worshippers, if any.”

“If any, indeed,” I said. “I wonder how long it's been since she had any worshippers?”

He blinked a couple times. “You mean like old school worshippers? With temples to her and stuff?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Think about it – she lived in the time of Lethe and Hades. And the Chinese religions, they were only truly ended during the Communist revolution. I remember Reed telling me about an interaction he had with a Chinese professor at some dinner party or something where he was asking him about ancient Chinese mythology and the guy just stared at him blankly. A professor, y'know? Well read, well informed-ish. Can you imagine an American professor not at least knowing the name Hercules, or Zeus, or, hell, Odin and Thor?”

“No,” Wade said, “but those were also turned into fictional characters, movies, et cetera.”

“That's the point,” I said. “When China did its Cultural Revolution, and even in the days before when the Communists took over, they had it in mind to purge old ideas, old habits, old culture, and old customs. And Fen Liu had a part of that, either because she wanted the old things and ways to be forgotten, or because she knew that this was the path to power in the future and was willing to pay that price.”

“I'd bet on the latter, but hey, maybe it was the former,” Wade said. Then he froze. “Do you hear something?”

“No,” I said, then paused to listen. I felt a chill trickle its way down my scalp. “Yes.”

It was a faint hum, one almost lost over the sound of the distant city traffic.

Drones.

And they seemed to be coming from everywhere.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Fen Liu

“There's an electronic signature around the two of them that looks light-based,” Public Security Minister Jianjun said. “Perhaps some sort of advanced holographic camouflage.”

Fen Liu stared at her screen, at the two – seemingly – Chinese people on it, a man and woman, their faces in the Skynet database identifying them as Liang Wei and Liang Mei, a married couple from the Panyu district of Guangzhou.

The problem? Liang Wei and Liang Mei had been most recently tagged by Skynet in Shanghai less than an hour ago. The tip from the security officer at the Guangzhou CCP offices had been good, and had vaulted up the chain in mere minutes, each step resulting in examination of the couple and turning up additional curious facts about them. Like that there seemed a strong EM pattern around their location suggesting someone nearby was using a satellite communication – and neither of them was carrying a conventional cell phone connected to the network. It was nearly impossible to make your way in a modern Chinese city without a cell phone, which by itself was a distinct flag.

“That's almost certainly them,” Fen Liu said. “Take them into custody or kill them.”

“It will be done,” Zhang said, voice crackling in her ear. He was already on the scene, deploying her forces. Other preparations were being made, too, though those were being handled by...others. “Drones are moving into position now to cordon them. They won't fly away. And our troops are moving in now. We have them.”

“We shall see,” she whispered. Because they would, and shortly.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Sienna

There were exploding suicide drones everywhere above us. They seemed to be in a pattern, no more than a few feet between them, lined up diagonally with the next, only a small gap between their quadcopter rotors. They descended like a falling net, to a hundred feet above us and stopped there, blanketing us and separating us from the sky, the only gaps the massive, neon-flashing skyscrapers around us.

“We try and plow through, they'll blast us out of the sky in pieces,” Wade said, assessing the shit we were in – accurately, I thought.

I looked left, then right. “Looks like they've blanketed us in both directions, all the way to the river,” I gestured toward the body of water a hundred feet to our left across a square of concrete without a single tree, “and I can't see behind the buildings. Maybe there's a way out over there?”

The sound of boots thudding against pavement from a street away gave me another little chill. “Uh oh,” Wade muttered.

“Maybe we dive into the river, fly through the water, and see if we can punch our way through using it as a shield against the exploding drones,” I said. “Their bombs aren't going to be nearly as penetrative under water.”

He chortled. “You said 'penetrative.'” His face turned serious. “We can give that a try. But whatever we do – aw, shit.”

A half dozen streams burst out of the river, and with them came an aquatic legion of Chinese soldiers. They seemed to rise up on pillars of solid water, lifted up and delivered onto the embankment as though dropped there by Scott Byerly himself. Damned Poseidons; they'd cut off our retreat.

“Okay,” Wade said, staring at them. Behind us, troops were moving into position around the buildings, and fast. “We kill them all, then exit through the river.”

The soldiers in front of us were hardened, but unarmed, wearing slightly damp uniforms. Shiny belt buckles gleamed in the neon, and their eyes looked dark, their expressions pure malice, like they were steeling themselves to fight and die. Which was not an unreasonable expectation.

“Yep,” I said, “that's the winning plan. How do you want to kick things off?”

He looked me in the eyes for just a second, smirking. “Batter up.”

The entire line of soldiers grunted and jerked as Wade drew out a hand and pulled on their belts with magnetism. They slid into a line, shoes scratching against the pavement as they spasmed and jerked, each fighting against his hold on them.

He yanked them right toward me, their eyes wide and panicked. Being grabbed and dragged by a disembodied force that you can't punch or fight against is a disorienting feeling; it's like God seizing you bodily and pulling you this way and that. Half of them or more had succumbed to panicked disorientation and hadn't realized that the source of their problems was their belt and their belt alone. They came ripping at me, struggling and jerking like someone had implanted a taser up their asses and flicked the on switch.

And it was just then that I realized what Wade had meant when he said, “Batter up.”

I extended the energy blade out of my right hand and it struck the pavement with a hiss, vaporizing about an inch of asphalt and turning it into a molten liquid. Raising my hand as the first soldier reached me, I swung the blade to greet him as I stepped aside, and it cleaved him across the chest just below the shoulders.

He ran three more through the hissing, crackling energy of my blade without any difficulty, the screams of the dying Chinese soldiers starting to be drowned out by a couple blasts of green, purple, and red energy from behind us.

“Time for Operation Human Shield to commence,” Wade said, and he smoothly glided sideways, his feet less than a centimeter off the ground, and he bumped into me, wrapping an arm around my waist and lifting me off the ground. We glided around the last few Poseidons as they all warred with their belt buckles, finally having tumbled to the nature of their predicament. They seemed to rip them free almost as one, but by then they started catching blasts from their cohorts across the square, and things were getting a little more scary.

One of the Poseidons Wade had dragged around was becoming swole, and fast. He grew to twice the mass he'd been moments before, becoming distinctly Guy Friday-like. Two powers, then. Neat. Wade winked at me, throwing a white-glowing energy whip around the big guy's neck. The soldier grunted, grabbing the end, his flesh blackening as it crackled against him, and he set his feet as though he were about to try and throw Wade and, by extension, me, since I had his arm wrapped around my waist.

Wade glided us sideways into the big guy's shadow as a burst of red, purple, and green all combined to strike him in the back a moment before he could get his feet set to pull on the whip. His jaw fell open, and a green glow shone through his teeth for a moment before it burst out of the front of his face and he started to topple.

Still, he'd shielded us for a crucial moment. Red eyebeams knocked him over, sending him forward onto his face as we kept gliding, using the other Poseidons as human shields and noting similar, lethal results to them. The last couple of them turned to scream for mercy to their own soldiers, who'd surely received a “Kill them no matter what!” order.

They didn't get mercy.

“Friendly fire is such an oxymoron,” I said as Wade drifted us down. I pivoted in his arms like we were two figure skaters, rolling my body in front of his in a delicate dance that left him holding me like a human shield. I pulled his arm back, away from the front of my body, gripping his hand in mine as I cleared the field of fire.

Hundreds of soldiers in front of us, and here we were, on our sides, drifting along, spooning, inches above the ground, me just showing my face to the entire Chinese army.

Then I cracked the gates of hell.

Red light burst from the front of my body in a horizontal line that spread out in an ever-widening blast line that caught the soldiers at the midsection. With some it just vaporized a foot of flesh, bone, and vital organs across their pelvis; a few managed to leap clear. A few very short souls ducked and caught it just below the neck, dying instantly.

But the whole line of advance dissolved into chaos at that point. It struck and killed a swath of men thirty wide. Wade pivoted, swinging me around to line up with the next rank of soldiers, and I blasted them, too, unleashing the fury of the red hell that I conjured only when I didn't care how much damage I did.

The first blast struck the foundations of the building behind them before I remembered to dissolve it, and the whole building shook as its thirty-plus stories of weight suffered a radical reapportionment. I would have cringed, but I didn't care just now.

“More coming in behind us!” Wade shouted, I looked back to see him unleash a full Thor electrical barrage that caught six more Poseidons as they were leaping from the river. Water splashed, lightning flashed, and I turned away, trying to focus on the soldiers coming at us from the streets ahead as Wade watched our flank.

The army was leaping now, having watched two different divisions get cut in half; now they were varying their approach wildly, some running, some flying, some jumping. It would have been comical if it hadn't been our deaths coming at us.

I screamed out a sonic blast that halted the advance of forty or so soldiers, then cracked the gates of hell again, the red, onrushing wave of energy ripping across the pavement and bisecting them. All their attacks faded as they were ripped asunder, and I sprang back upright.

“We need an exit,” I said, glancing back to see that Wade had fried the Poseidons. He had one by the throat and was clutching him there, absorbing him and not paying him a bit of attention as he did so.

Wade clung to the soldier as he began his death rattle, and nodded. “Working on it. You good?”

I cracked the gates of hell one more time and watched it race parallel to a glowing skyscraper before it ripped through another platoon. I dissolved it as soon as it finished, before it could do further damage to beautiful downtown Guangzhou. “Probably, but let's not jinx it by malingering.” I glanced up at the ceiling of drones hanging overhead. “Sierra?” There was no answer. “Crap. Jammers are clearly online.”

“Yep,” Wade said, discarding the body of the drained Poseidon. “Let's get the hell out of here before–” His face twisted in pain, and something punched through his chest–

A knife blade. Big as his hand.

“NOOO!” I shouted.

Wade spun, turning on the figure behind him, an invisible man highlighted by the blood spray coating his blade. My husband raised his hand and the invisible man lost his grip on the knife, which slammed sideways into his chest and threw him backward as though it were rocket propelled; I heard the crack as the hilt rammed his sternum and drove him across the river, legs pinwheeling. He hit the far embankment with a light crunch and then fell, splashing into the river.

“Wade – Wade!” I shouted, grabbing him as he stumbled. Blood was coursing down his back and his front.

“Fly us into the water,” he said, motioning to the river. “Quick.” There was a distant whistling noise over the sound of the infinite number of soldiers whooping and hollering behind us as they advanced to attack us again.

I grabbed him and leapt into the water, and it parted for us as we dropped toward the riverbed. It flooded back in behind us, forming a small tunnel, and I flew us forward, up the river, accelerating.

We made it all of a hundred yards when the world shook around us like it had fallen into the sun. It felt like the planet split, like hell itself was belching up from beneath the surface. I looked up and saw flames, nothing but flames, coursing over the surface of the water above.

“Keep going,” Wade said, grunting. I had his hand, and was imagining River, imagining Alannah, and channeling their Persephone healing abilities into him even as I steered us down the water tunnel he was creating for us.

Away from the destruction of Guangzhou. Away from the bomb that Fen Liu had just dropped on us.

Away from the people she'd killed – her own people – in a mad effort to kill us.

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

Zhang

He didn't get to the surface right away, and it was fortunate that he did not.

When he slammed the blade home into Mr. Wade, Zhang had missed slightly. He'd struck a rib, had it deflected from the heart, which is what he'd meant to get.

That had resulted in him getting slammed by the knife hilt – Wade had magnetic powers now? Someone should make a note – and thrown across the river into the concrete retention wall of the riverbank opposite where they'd been fighting. It had hurt an appropriate amount, getting sandwiched between concrete and a knife hilt. He'd had at least a rib broken in the process, if not more.

But that had been nothing compared to what had followed.

It felt like an atomic bomb had gone off, and perhaps it had. Orange, glaring light shone on him through the darkened waters, lighting up the night like the city's neon had been turned to its maximum setting.

Zhang had stared at it in its quiet glory, even as it had swirled and crawled over the surface of the water. He didn't dare go up, captivated by the beauty and the horror.

How many men had he just ordered into Guangzhou to spearhead this attack? Thousands. Thousands of soldiers.

And now they were just...gone.

His mind strained, but his lungs were quiescent, and he stared, feeling the pain in his chest from the rib and the lack of breath until the brightness of the orange glow faded. It was seconds that felt like years, and when he came up to the surface...

...The fires burned.

He could barely tell that Guangzhou had stood there, because looking now where it had been before he'd been thrown into the river, what remained was mere twisted girders and melted slag. Where pavement had been, bubbling pools of molten asphalt now stood, and all about him lingered the smell of terrible things burning.

Zhang gasped, and he didn't know he was gasping.

For Guangzhou – city of eighteen million – was a smoking wasteland, like something out of the horrors of World War II.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

Sienna

We came out of the river five or more miles down, somewhere in the suburbs, and promptly shot into the air. Wade's breathing was normal, his skin perfectly healed where the knife had penetrated. I know because I checked feverishly to be sure while he stared into the middle distance as we hovered there, a few hundred feet above the earth, and he surveyed the damage and I did everything I could not to.

“I think Fen Liu just...” his voice trailed off.

“Are you all right?” I asked. I knew he was. I just didn't want to contemplate the other thing, so instead I wicked away the small amount of water clinging to us from our high-speed escape down the water tunnel. It had been almost like some sort of amusement park ride, skimming beneath the surface, watching the flames dance above for the first mile or so.

And the horror. The horror I was still keeping at bay.

Under a field of darkened stars, the city lights spread out to that singular space of clouded darkness in that distant spot miles from us, where a mushroom cloud denoted fallout. Debris, ash, human remains all rained down on what had been Guangzhou not a minute ago. A city of millions reduced in an instant to a field of devastation, mass murder on a scale I hadn't seen...ever, really.

I gagged, wretched, and threw up my protein block right there in midair. Wade held his silence and kept his hand on my back as I did so.

When I finished spitting and rinsing with water pulled from the air, I looked away from the destruction I had wrought, and said, “We should get out of here.”

“Yeah,” Wade said, solemn and quiet. He slowly turned about in the air, and picked a bearing north, back the way we'd come. With my hand in his, he flew us away from the most destruction I'd ever seen in my life.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

Fen Liu

“The bomb detonated precisely on target,” Defense Minister Guoqiang said, very businesslike in all this, though there was a small tremor in his voice. “It was released as intended, via a teleportation portal a few hundred feet above the earth and landed less than sixty meters from where Nealon and Wade were last observed engaged with our forces.” He hesitated. “It will take some time before we are able to confirm the kill...if ever.”

Fen Liu cocked an eyebrow at him. “Are you some sort of idiot?”

He hesitated. “I...what?”

“Are you an idiot?” she asked, leaning forward. “Are you blind? Do you deny the reality of your eyes in favor of the wishes of your heart? I only ask because I want to know what sort of fool I'm dealing with – a blind one, a delusional, or a self-deluded one.”

He sputtered. “I don't–”

“We saw them dive into the water before the feed was cut by the brightness of the blast,” Fen Liu said, feeling as though she were dealing with children, and explaining somewhat slowly for that reason. Part of her wished to scream, not because of the failure – things sometimes went wrong, occasionally very horribly, because of a last-second twist of fate, such as your quarry killing your rear guard and leaping into the river to escape just as you dropped the largest bomb in your arsenal upon them. It happened. Time and chance had their say upon all things, and in this case, their roll was merely unlucky.

But to deny the reality of it? The observed reality, simply because you wished you could have accomplished what so many before you had not? That was for idiots and children. And Fen Liu was neither. She was intent on killing Sienna Nealon, which meant if this plan had failed, she would need another, and an opportunity to employ it. Neither would be served by tricking herself into believing the thing she wanted done was done.

“We require contingency plans,” Fen Liu announced, for it was obvious as hell to her. “Get your people together, get your troops into staging areas, and ready yourselves. We will reconvene within the hour.”

She turned off the videoconference during a blizzard of grunted acknowledgments, and then immediately called the Minister of Public Security. “We need to control the explanation for the events in Guangzhou. Put the blame on Nealon. Tie her to it via her previous use of a nuclear weapon on our military base outside Changsha.”

“Yes, Premier,” Jianjun said, chins squishing as he nodded, and Fen Liu cut him off before any more could be said.

For what more needed to be said? It was a worthwhile gambit, employing the bomb. It hadn't worked, but no matter, she'd blame the destruction on Nealon, turning a disadvantage into an advantage. This was the advantage of controlling the information flow in a country. The message was hers to deliver, and anyone attempting to counter it was reduced to word of mouth attempts. Even that was becoming more difficult, with the social credit score allowing her to isolate undesirables, this rabble that talked treasonously amongst themselves. Having people carry phones everywhere was forcing them to wiretap themselves. And they had to do it, of course, because to buy a train ticket, to buy petrol, to merely walk down the street and get food you needed a phone with an app.

Every phone had a microphone, and a camera, and could listen to every word said in its presence. It was a dream that Chairman Mao could not have imagined achieving, putting a spy like that in every home. And the people paid to have them! Privacy died with a whimper, not a bang, and total control of the populace didn't inch closer, it surged into her grip. Power over the people that she could not have imagined in her run as Empress was now here, within her grip–

And it hadn't taken nearly the time or effort. Just a lifetime of maneuvering in the halls of the CCP. A few people sacrificed along the way had greased the wheels.

People like Zhang. A regrettable loss, but she'd been growing weary of him. He'd been more appropriate as a lover for a minister, not the Premier. Her promotion had come after she'd already taken him into her bed. And certainly, there were some positives to the experience.

But like with all the others, his ambition didn't quite match hers, and she didn't feel like advancing him further; it felt a bit like she was carrying him at this point, and she hated that. Weakness in any form repulsed her. It always had.

Which was another reason why she was not happy. She stared at the cloud hanging over the ruins of Guangzhou and frowned. Sacrificing a city? This was hardly her first time doing so. She'd done it before, in days of old, and in the recent past, too.

No, as usual, she'd find her best way through this mess and come out in a stronger position. Nealon might have dodged her attack, but she was trapped in China now, and like a rat in a nest, she'd poke her head out again. The trick was, this time Fen Liu would need a better strategy, or be quicker on the bomb. She knew which she preferred...

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Lethe

She stared at the light on the horizon, through the pelting rain. They were on the fifteenth floor of a concrete and glass tower that had been completed on the outside, but not on the inside, and Lethe was staring at the fading brightness glaring against the clouds.

“Huh,” Chen said. “That's in the direction of Guangzhou. I wonder what happened?”

She shared a look with Hades, who definitely knew. But neither of them said anything. They just chewed on their anxiety, worrying that the bomb might have actually found its target this time, and stared into the night as the flash faded.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

Zhang

He crawled out of the river and into the falling ash. It smeared against his wet clothing, finding a place to stick there, draping him, becoming his outerwear.

Zhang had no personal connection to Guangzhou, but still...Zhang considered himself a patriot. And he was looking upon the utter destruction of a Chinese city.

Worst of all...he knew it wasn't Sienna Nealon, his putative enemy, who'd resorted to such measures as annihilation of cities. She'd been annoyingly circumspect in conducting her war. The general public might not know that, but Zhang did. That was the privilege of being let into the highest circles, he knew how the war was going – and wasn't.

He knew that Sienna Nealon had stolen every single nuclear weapon China had. That what had just been turned loose here was probably one of the new CL-20 bombs, with more destructive power than any previous explosive. He didn't fear fallout, didn't fear that the ash coming down on him would irradiate him into nothingness.

“An act of fratricide,” Zhang muttered to himself.

There was nothing left here but the melted girders and mere hints of concrete buildings that had once stood nearby. Molten steel flowed like a river, as though poured straight from a foundry onto the street, when in reality it had been...perhaps a car? Zhang wasn't ever sure.

The river behind him was black, already turned ebony with all the ash pouring into it. Fires glowed and lit the world around him like some underworld hellscape, and the heat seemed to bake his skin.

Still, Zhang sat there, and fished for his phone in his pocket. It was Chinese military issue, and not beholden to cell towers, all of which had surely been wiped out nearby. He stared at it, wondering if he should call Fen Liu...

...Or simply sit here awhile longer.

He decided on the latter, or let it be decided for him. Either way, he sat there, in silence, listening to the ash fall, the fires crackle, and distant sirens howl...

...And contemplated the death of more of his countrymen than had been lost in many, many years.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

Sienna

We landed down the mountain from where we'd been before; or maybe it was another mountain. It was far from lights, far from people, and we dropped down in the darkness, the silence between us thick as the distant rumbling of Guangzhou's demise.

“Say something.” Wade spoke, and I could see him silhouetted in the moonlight that slipped between the clouds.

I stood there, the trees gently rustling above me, and stared up. Clouds, clouds, more clouds. No stars, just the eerie white light of the moon. “What's there to say?”

“They just destroyed a city to try and get you, Sienna,” Wade said. “That's not your fault. It's a measure of Fen Liu's fear.”

“Doesn't mean those people aren't dead,” I said. “Intentions aren't worth shit, Wade. I may have intended to come to China to end this war by decapitating the dirtbag Chinese government, but guess what? It's still in place. It survived my annihilating Zhongnanhai because Fen Liu survived, and she'll just keep reviving it because she's a coward and smart and she knows to hide and wait me out. My time is up.”

I could see his brow furrow in the shadows. “What do you mean?”

“They're going to blame it all on me,” I said. “I've seen this movie before. They always blame it on me. Even though it wasn't nuclear, even though they did it themselves, doesn't matter. They're going to blame me.” I checked my phone; it was smashed flat, little pieces of plastic tinkling and falling off in the moonlight. “Great. I'm cut off from Sierra.”

“Maybe,” Wade said, and I could see him fiddling with his own phone. A brief spark of light emitted from his fingertips into his phone, and then he shook his head. “Yeah, mine's got a knife hole through it. Do we have any extras?”

“Not on me,” I said, plopping down on the ground. “I had Lethe carrying extras, and Jian had a couple. I got nothing.”

“Don't say that.” Wade shuffled over to sit beside me. “You don't know exactly how this will play out.”

“A city is in ruins,” I said, and I couldn't even hide the fact there were tears streaming down my cheeks. “Millions dead. And it's at least partly my fault. I knew Fen Liu was evil, and I knew she did terrible things when cornered, and yet – still–”

“Maybe no one will believe them when they say it's you.”

I snorted. “Everyone will believe them. You know why the media always whines about propaganda? Because on a lot of people, it works. And because they don't like the competition.” I ran a hand over my cheeks to dab away the wetness there. “No, the world's going to buy that it's me, because it's simpler than contemplating what they'd have to do to change things if it's not me. Because writing me off is a lot easier than trying to remove Fen Liu from China.”

Wade was quiet in the dark for a moment. “Is it really so terrible, contemplating the idea that maybe, finally, you'd be able to find a quiet corner of the world and just...disappear?”

“Everyone knows me, Wade,” I said, smearing the back of my hand as I rubbed it along my cheeks. “Where would I go?”

“Plenty of countries would love to have Sienna Nealon watching over them.”

I frowned. “No, they wouldn't. I'm a lightning rod for every kind of trouble imaginable, and I'm enemies with, at minimum, China, which is the largest power on the planet. No one's going to want to touch me even with the eleven-foot pole that they reserve for the things they don't want to touch with their ten-foot pole.”

Wade was quiet for a moment. “I'd touch you with a lot shorter pole than that. And have.”

The joke came so completely out of left field that it took me a moment to get it, and when I did, I chuckled, then laughed, closing my eyes and elbowing him – gently. “Oh, really?”

“Really,” he said, unmoving. He bumped me back.

“I...” Haltingly, I lowered my head. “Yeah, I probably need to find a deep, dark hole and just pull it closed over my head.”

“There are places you can do that,” Wade said. “I have a friend with a cabin in Montana that's yours if you want it. Not another soul for miles and miles. Your cousin Alannah has a place like that, too, if her stories about her upbringing aren't total bullshit.” He leaned his head a little closer. “There are places on Earth you can still go and live without worrying about encountering Chinese agents or American authorities – if you want that.”

“Go live alone on a mountaintop by myself? Sounds grand,” I said, with only a small measure of self-pitying sarcasm.

“You don't have to be alone,” he said.

I looked over at him, and found him right there, looking into my eyes. “Who's going to come be an exile with me? You?”

He didn't even hesitate. “Sure. Why not?”

And then he kissed me. Not like Ricardo swooping in on a field mouse, but slow enough I could easily have dodged.

I didn't dodge. I leaned in.

The kiss was good; hungry and long-awaited. It melded right into another, and I found my hands clutching at his chest, anchoring myself, rubbing against him.

I don't know who shucked the first item of clothing, but I do know that we were naked in seconds, floating just off the ground on the mountaintop, the trees above us forming a perfect canopy as we rolled on air as though it were a mattress.

There were things I did to him, and things he did to me, that made the world and all its petty troubles, the future and all its terrors, fade away.

And somewhere in the night, in the arms of my husband, deeply sated in a way I could not recall feeling in years...I fell asleep.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

Iwoke up, floating on air above some mountain in China, a man's hairy arm draped over me. It took a moment for my sleep-hazed mind to remember why I was here, what had happened, and to have it all settle into place in my head.

But when it did...hoo, boy.

A city was in ruins thanks to my intervention, and I'd just slept with my husband who, by the by, had a girlfriend. I was trapped behind enemy lines in China, my grandmother and great-grandfather were here, too, and so was a Chinese dissident who I'd convinced to come along. We had a teleporter at our service, but couldn't reach him at present because our phones were bricked, and...

...Did I mention I had just slept with my husband, who had a girlfriend? I'd met her. Pale, dark-haired, Nordic, not that good looking. Definitely a succubus.

I swore softly under my breath and I sensed Wade stir behind me, a soft grunt escaping him moments later.

Turning to look at him, my arms cradled delicately across my private parts, I debated what to say in this moment of awkwardness.

“I've already seen you naked,” Wade said, eyes thinly slitted, a sleepy look on his face. “Don't go getting modest on me now.”

“Just don't want you getting the wrong idea,” I said, still working on composing thoughts.

“Like that you might sleep with me?” He sat upright on air, not bothering to play the same cover-up game that I was. “Where would I get a crazy idea like that?” I glancingly took note of the fact that he was awake in more ways than one.

“I was emotionally distressed last night,” I said. “From the explosion. From the circumstances.”

“And what's changed?”

“You comforted me,” I said. “That's what changed. It worked.”

“Mmm,” he said nodding. “Well, why don't you work through whatever instability you're about to spit out at me, and I'll comfort you some more.”

“This isn't funny,” I said, feeling a certain irritability rise in me. “We have real problems.”

“Yes,” Wade said. “That is true. But it was also true last night.”

Frustration. That was what I was feeling. “Clearly I made a mistake last night.”

“Why?” Wade asked, almost impishly.

“Because I slept with you,” I said. “I let myself get distracted–”

“What were you going to do if we hadn't done what we did?”

I let an annoyed breath out. “I don't know. But the point is–”

“Yes, please. I am eager to hear the point. I think you keep circling it. The real one, I mean.”

“The point is you have a girlfriend,” I said, finally letting that cannonball explode out of me that I'd been holding back. “Remember? And I'm almost certain I'm related to her in some way, though I'm a little afraid to find out exactly how I am.”

“That sounds like something you ought to ask Hades or Lethe about,” he said, maintaining that impish smile.

“Yes, I can't wait to ask them about it – 'Hey, did you know my husband is sleeping with another woman. Pretty sure she's related to us – ever heard of Juliet?'”

He shrugged. “It'll hardly be the first time they've heard that from a family member, I'm pretty sure.”

“Is this just a joke to you?” I asked, feeling real heat flush through my face. “I am not the cheating kind, okay? I don't want to be the other woman in whatever drama you've got going on–”

“Sienna, I'm not sleeping with Juliet,” Wade said.

I paused, mid-rant. “You lied to me?”

“No,” he said. “I was dating Juliet. It's just...” He grimaced. “Look, I wanted to be over you, because I knew you didn't remember me. That you didn't remember our marriage, or have any feelings for me. And Juliet, she worked as a source for CIA. When we met, we...well, we got along well. But, uh, if you're asking,” and here he blushed slightly, “nothing ever happened beyond the stage of making out and...uh, petting, I guess. I certainly never slept with her.”

“Why the hell not?” I asked, gesturing below his belt with a hand. “You clearly didn't lack for motivation, or enthusiasm.”

“Because of you, Sienna,” he said, looking a little pained as he said it. “I know you moved on with Harry, but I...” And here he bowed his head. “...I wasn't over you yet. I'm still not.” He looked up at me, and there was pain in his eyes.

“Then why didn't you tell me?” I asked, feeling distinctly choked.

“Because you were running a war,” he said. “I figured the last thing you needed was some sort of pissing contest between me and Harry. I just wanted to take that out of the equation. One less worry on your mind.”

I stood there for a moment, then walked over to him, pulling him to me and kissing him. “You think it hasn't been on my mind? You numbskull.” But I kissed him again.

“I got the sense that it might have been,” he said. “Just, maybe a little late.”

“How late?” I asked.

He looked pained, then shrugged. “Last night.”

I could have laughed, could have cried. Instead I kissed him again, because there was a sense of relief that flowed through me, my whole body, really. I melted into him, and he into me, and under the sunlight dappling through the leaves, we drew together once more.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

Zhang

Emergency services came upon the scene, but delayed. It didn't matter, not where Zhang was, because everyone was dead here. He could say this much for Fen Liu: her aim was certainly unerring. She hit exactly where she meant to. Her target just moved. But as he looked at his phone again, and received a ping of an update, he knew–

This had been all Fen Liu's doing.

He walked the ashen streets, listening to the screams. Because now he'd reached the part of the city where the screaming had begun. The smoke hung heavy, almost choking, and his chest ached where he'd taken the knife hilt. He limped along, watching burnt people expire on the sides of the road. Watching, and looking away.

His phone buzzed; he looked down at it, then cocked his head.

Are you all right?

An unknown number. Yet the message hinted at familiarity.

Fen Liu? Likely. She certainly changed phones often enough, to ensure her security. And who else would be asking him how he was doing after dropping a bomb on his head?

He paused in his walk, shoes coated in the ash of the dead city, and didn't contemplate his reply very long.

No thanks to you, you fucking bitch.

And hit send.

Then he kept walking, determined to find a car to commandeer. He probably shouldn't have indulged himself by answering; that had been unwise.

But she'd just happily tried to kill him, and she hadn't needed to. She could have sent someone else to spearhead the attack. She hadn't. And she'd planned to drop the bomb, that much was obvious. Otherwise she would have informed him.

“I can't stay here any longer, can I?” he muttered to himself. But he already knew the answer. She might not have intended to kill him the first time, but after what he'd just said, or after what she'd already done, he was going to be targeted. She couldn't have him out there, after all, telling people she was the one responsible for destroying Guangzhou.

No, his days were numbered. In fact, he needed to shed his phone and steal someone else's; get on the nearest, most direct flight out of China as soon as possible. He couldn't even risk taking his phone. Lifting it again in a fit of panic, he saw that she'd responded – that cow.

And then he cocked his head. Because the response...was quite different from what he'd expected from Fen Liu.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Fen Liu

She smirked as she put down the phone. All her plans were coming to fruition. Sacrifices would continue to be made, of course.

Just not by her.

“Madam Premier,” General Guoqiang said, drawing her attention to the video call she'd begun before she got distracted with other things. “Did you require anything else?”

Ah, another man chafing to get away from her. Usually a new appointee's gratitude lasted a bit longer, but like all men, she expected his interest to grow stale. Or her own to sour on him. It appeared that was happening a bit faster than anticipated, but she'd been around long enough to know it was all a part of the natural cycle of servitude. She'd only experienced it thousands, perhaps millions of times in her long life.

“You have the additional bombs ready?” she asked.

“They are,” he said, nodding sharply. “Whenever she shows up again, we will have one on target in less than a minute.”

“Hmmm,” she said. A minute was a long time for Nealon. She could move quite a distance in sixty seconds. “Drop closer to the ground next time to narrow the escape window. Have you begun calling up the next rank of loyal volunteers to receive metahuman powers?” She glanced at the report open on her screen; the destruction of Guangzhou had killed quite a large number of her metahuman forces.

Well...sacrifices had to be made. And China had no shortage of loyal citizens to draw from; the more she killed, the more blame she could heap on Sienna Nealon via her propaganda apparatus, and the more loyalty she would reap in return. She'd have the entire nation terrified of Nealon setting so much as a toe in their province. Perhaps she could even spearhead a new Cultural Revolution, reduce the surplus population a bit – of males, at least – make China stronger still.

“We have begun,” General Guoqiang said. “Three million have received orders to report, and will be receiving their metahuman serums within hours. I estimate we can have them ready to deploy a few hours after that, though their combat effectiveness will be limited by lack of training.”

She waved that away. “A pack of wild dogs can tear apart an armed man if you throw enough of them at him. The same will be true of Sienna Nealon; besides, they are all distractions to keep her busy while our munitions do the real work. I will drown her in these clumsy new recruits, and then rain upon her with as many bombs as I need to get the job done.” She paused. “Next time, send five, perhaps even ten bombs. Encircle the main target point with a ring of additional munitions out to five miles. Devastate the countryside for a hundred kilometers; ensure that she cannot escape by merely following a river. You understand?”

A panoply of emotions played across Guoqiang's chubby face. “You want me to create a wasteland, with her last known position at the center.”

“Correct,” Fen Liu said.

There was only a moment of hesitation. “But you know she can fly?”

“I am aware of that, yes.” Did he think her simple?

“I only mention it, Madam Premier, because she will be able to outfly the explosions, to achieve an altitude above them.”

“The drones will keep her grounded,” Fen Liu said. “And if they don't, we'll find another solution. Learn. Adapt. Improvise. General.” She cut him off mid nod. He was like a fish; no longer fresh, the time for a replacement was fast arriving.

Fen Liu stayed a moment in silence, contemplating her control. All was proceeding as planned, from propaganda efforts to her military preparations. A note appeared on her screen – a message from satellite tracking. The falcon, it seemed, was in motion again, after a delay. A night spent in a tree outside Anshun.

She smiled; this was another piece of good news in a veritable buffet of them. The falcon would lead to the falconer, and the falconer would be overwhelmed with destruction.

She allowed herself another moment to smile, because the anticipation was almost more than she could bear.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

Sienna

We started cleaning up the camp after...well, after.

Oh, God.

I could feel Wade watching me as I stood under a tree, staring up at the break in the boughs, sun shining down out of a cloudless sky. A perfect morning in a perfect place.

Except, for, y'know, the fact that potentially millions of people were dead because of me. And I was trapped in a foreign country where everyone surely hated me, and were on the lookout for me, and wanted to murder me.

I rubbed the camouflage fabric between my fingers, and shrugged my way into it. It fritzed once, then died, leaving my pale arms to show through where holographic images of a random Chinese lady's wardrobe might once have been.

“Must be because it can't interface with a phone,” Wade said, squatting next to the tent. The last air was being sucked out of it, now, Cassidy's neat design taking it down to a packet the size of one of those disposable ponchos you could buy in tourist shops, or fit in your back pocket. He fastened it into a small shape, then tossed it into his backpack. “You know where we're going yet?”

I hung my head. “Vietnam, I think. There's no clearing my name of this. Not in China. And if I had even a thin thread of a lead on where Fen Liu was, or the camo was still working...” I sighed.

But I didn't have a lead, and I didn't have camo, or communications. I was blacked out, Lethe, Hades, and Jian were all missing, and I was stuck in a foreign country where I could never blend in because I looked nothing like the natives, and because I was public enemy number one here. My efficacy in China was now zero; showing my face anywhere would result in an instant incident, armies and drones sweeping down, and bombs following shortly after.

“If I continue my war,” I said, “millions, maybe even a billion, will die.” I looked down at my fingernails and saw ash beneath them. “I don't want vengeance bad enough to kill that many people.” I smiled ruefully. “And I don't think justice comes at the cost of that many.”

Wade sighed. “It's such a conundrum. The Chinese don't have free speech, or the power to fight even if they did, and could organize a rebellion. It's whispers, far from any electronics, versus mass communications and social media. The modern equivalent of spears and swords against machine guns, tanks, and metahumans. Which they are facing, because anyone who even wanted to resist has neither guns nor metahuman powers.”

“They've created a box,” I said, staring into the distance, the sky prickling its way between the boughs, like a call to freedom I could answer but bring no one else along to, “and they've stuck the whole country in it.”

“Maybe there's still a way,” Wade said.

“How?” I asked, almost laughing. “A billion and a half people, all eating out of the hand of the Chinese media? Like you said, any rebellion is just disorganized whispers. They can't cohere into a movement, and even if they could, they'd be shot down in the street because they have no weapons and no powers and the whole apparatus of government is arranged against them like a circular firing squad.” My voice dropped and broke. “I can't save them. God, I wish I could. I want to. More than vengeance, even; Fen Liu may have wronged me, but she's done so much worse to the Chinese people. For at least seventy years, she's done things to them that deserve an accounting. And I cannot bring that reckoning, and it just kills me.”

I looked down and didn't realize I'd been clutching my phone the whole time. I zapped it again, and it didn't even response. Well and truly dead, it was, and with it, any link to the world outside of China.

“All right,” Wade said, shouldering his backpack. “If you're sure. We'll wait for nightfall and make for Vietnam. Once we get there, we'll find some remote village with a telephone, call Taxi, and figure out where to go from there.”

I looked up at the sky again; it was past midday now. Our interludes had cost us time, but it had worked out. If everything went as expected, Robb Foreman was now President of the United States, and a treaty pledging peace with Fen Liu's dictatorship of China would soon be signed, leaving her exactly one person in the whole world for her to be at war with:

Me.

“What do you want to do about Ricardo?” Wade asked.

“I don't know,” I said, brushing hair back out of my face. I needed to bind it, and I had to rummage through my bag to find a binder to replace the one shucked off at some point during my...activities...with Wade. “All I know is I want to get out of this country before anyone else dies.”

“Wherever you want to go,” Wade said softly, and took my hand, “I'm with you.” He kissed me, and God did it feel good.

He started to tug my hand in the direction of south, and even though I knew we weren't leaving for hours yet, I pulled back. “It's just...” I started to say, and then let it trail off.

Wade stood, staring at me, like a cipher, his expression unreadable. “What?”

I made a low grunting sound. “I just...I don't like to quit.”

He chuckled. “There's the Sienna I know.” He walked over to a rock with a flat edge to it, and plopped down. “Go on.”

“I just...” I squeezed my hands closed. “...I want to deliver her into the loving, waiting arms of justice. I don't even care what happens to her! Prison, organ harvested to death, hung from a tall tree, burned alive in the ruins of her lair after a mob courses through – I really don't care. I just...” I raised my clenched fist. “...I cannot stand when evil people don't get what they deserve, and continue to hurt others. And I don't mean in the 'corporate raider' sense of the word, like whiners in the West talk about. I don't even mean in the 'corrupt politicians raiding the public treasury' sense of things, though I still think justice for those people would involve being put in a big sack filled with rats and being tossed into the nearest river. She murdered her own people, Wade. Built a funeral pyre that reached up to the stars, and then blamed me.”

“That is the sort of thing that would tend to stick in one's craw,” Wade said.

I unslung my backpack and dropped it. “If I live five thousand years more, I will never leave this mountaintop. Not in my head. Not in my heart. I'll always live here, forevermore, in this moment of supreme regret, if I don't either bring Fen Liu to justice or die trying.”

He stared at me for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay. Suicide mission it is. I'm in.”

“What?” I felt like I'd gotten kicked in the gut. Which is something I know about. “There's no reason for you to die, too.”

He stood up, dropping his own backpack like baggage he no longer needed. “I have been waiting for you to remember me for years. Listen,” he said, putting a finger on my cheek and steering my eyes back to him because I tried to look away. “I didn't marry you on a whim, Sienna Nealon. I didn't marry you because I was bored in Vegas, or smitten by your public persona, or caught up by the sex, or any of those reasons.

“I did it because I love you,” he said. “Because you'll never realize, you'll never know, what you mean to me.”

“You are definitely putting me on a pedestal,” I said, squirming a little under his arms.

“If I put you on a pedestal, it's because you deserve to be there for reasons,” he said, not letting me go. Not that I was trying to escape. “I have watched you, I have known you. I went to war for a country when I was too young to know what I was getting into. I watched people die who knew even less than I did, and for no good reasons, for arbitrary ones, for fate's own capriciousness.

“Or,” he said, and squeezed my hand in his, “there was a reason for it. And the reason is you, and me. Because on our own, either one of us? Just doing what we do? We can make a difference in this world. A few lives at a time, stopping crimes, killing bad guys – that's something. But together, here, today...we have the chance to do something a lot bigger. A billion people here, living under the boot. Not a lot of hope to sweep away that regime. We make even a dent in that, something that makes people sit up and notice...” He looked in my eyes. “That might be more difference than we could make in a hundred years doing our thing in America.”

“That's a very Chinese way of looking at it,” I said, holding his hand. “Time and patience and long-term plans are kind of their thing. Very foreign to us 'live for the moment' types.” I exhaled. “But yeah. I don't think there's a place on this earth we could just 'do our thing' where they won't find us. So if my ability to do good is going to be impaired, I might as well do as much good as I can to topple their tyrannical superstructure as best I can before I go down.” I squeezed his hand. “And I want to go down swinging, so that Fen Liu knows she's been in a fight – and one she damned well should not have picked.”

“Because Fen Liu picked this fight all by her lonesome,” came a very familiar voice from the underbrush about ten feet behind me. I spun, but there wasn't anything immediately visible–

And then there were hands. A pair of them, held up out of a shrub, followed, slowly, by my grandmother, who slipped out from the shadows and greenery with an amused look. “Without a bit of help from my headstrong granddaughter, who's just a woman of pure peace and no fight at all.”

“How did you find us?” I asked as she slipped into camp. Her clothing was mildly smudged, but otherwise pristine. “Where's Hades? And Jian?”

“Hades is waiting with the car,” she said, and waved her hand in the direction she'd come from, “about three miles that way. He didn't want to make the trek, and he sucks at moving quietly anyway. As for Jian...” And she looked up at the sky.

A bird fluttered off a branch and landed in a nearby bush, using it as cover to shift back into his human form. It covered him like some artistic representation of an Asian Adam, and he blushed slightly as he waved.

“How long you were two listening?” I asked. I'd dropped Wade's hand the moment my grandmother had spoken, ready to throw down with whoever.

“Long enough to know you're ready to end this thing,” Lethe said with a thin smile. “And it couldn't have come at a better time, because I am sick as hell of this Fen Liu – and it looks like we're not alone.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

There was another small crack behind her, and I caught a blur of something moving against the wooded background. I spun and saw–

An invisible man coming out of camouflage.

I started to shout, started to raise my hand to attack, my mouth to loose a sonic scream, squint to unleash eyebeams–

Lethe grabbed me full and hauled me back. “Nuh uh,” she said, and shook her head.

Mr. Tac, that familiar bastard, appeared out of his invisibility, his face no longer a mask of arrogance, and his hands by his sides, clenched into fists but not in a hostile way. At least, not to us, I realized. “You want Fen Liu? I will deliver her to you. But you have to kill her. No ifs. No ands. No buts.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Ifelt the weight of my backpack as we hiked down off the mountain, following Lethe, Mr. Tac – whose real name was apparently Wei Zhang, and Jian, who had shifted to bird form and was flying. I maintained my silence through the first mile, then the second, and finally the third, but as the trees began to thin, and I caught a glimpse of Hades leaning against a small Chinese car under sunny skies, my patience began to wane. “Okay,” I said, to the people around me who had all annoyingly clammed up or become animals, “I accepted Mr. Tac's deal. And I was patient. I was willing to walk quite some distance. But you gotta give me something other than, 'Get in the car, loser, we're going to kill Fen Liu.'”

Lethe seemed absolutely effortless, taking this mountainous hike as if it were no big thing. As though she was back to being a young woman schlepping across the world's largest continent with no difficulty again. “Patience, granddaughter.”

“I don't know why we're waiting to tell you,” Zhang said. “I don't care if you know. I'm here, though, for obvious reasons–”

“Because Fen Liu kills her lovers like a praying mantis,” I said.

“Because she murdered millions of my people,” he said huffily.

“I mean, your government's done worse than that before,” I said. “The Great Leap Forward, 45 million or more. The Cultural Revolution, 1-10 million. The concentration camps still running in Xinjiang – who knows how many? Between the beatings and the rapes and organ harvesting–”

“This is a little different in scale and suddenness,” he said, clearly nonplussed. Not a good guy. But perhaps a useful one.

“And how did you get invited to this party?” I asked sourly. “Not that I'm complaining, since I'm thin on allies, and you obviously gave me fits that time we tried to kill each other in LA.”

“Yes, I survived Sienna Nealon,” he said acidly. “Aren't I special.”

“Hey, that's an achievement,” I said. “It's not like I wasn't trying to kill you, either. I was giving it my best effort at the time. I think.” I hesitated. “I was a little drunk. Or hungover.”

“It doesn't matter now,” he said, with all the attitude I'd expect from a teenage girl who'd just had her Tiktok dance video ruined by someone passing through the frame at the end, “I'm going to help you kill her.”

“She seriously does kill the hell out of her ex-lovers, though,” I said. “I've talked to like...two of them now. She does not like loose ends.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” he said. “I was there when she dropped the bomb last night, remember?”

“No wonder you're so crabby,” I said, putting my hands on my backpack straps. “You're caught between a murderous ex and murderous me. Tough choices.”

“I choose self-preservation,” he said, sneering. “I'd die for China, but I won't die for Fen Liu.”

I bit back a sarcastic, SO BRAVE, before it could escape my lips. I did sneak a glance at Wade, and I saw the knowing look in his eyes. Lethe's, too. “Lethe,” I said. “I ask again: How'd you find me?”

“You know damned well how,” Lethe said, and tossed something over her shoulder that I caught easily.

Staring at it, I knew instantly what it was: a phone. “Yeah, mine's busted,” I said, holding it up. “How'd you find me? You can't track me if my phone's busted.”

“She did not find you with the phone itself,” Sierra's voice came from the speaker. “But what's on the phone.”

“Yeah, okay, hi, Sierra,” I said. “Not exactly a game-changer, though, is she?” I paused, and frowned. “Wait...how did Sierra find me in China? Satellite imagery?”

“No,” Lethe said, turning to give me a very slight smirk. “She found you the same way she found the rest of us and brought us together.” Her eyes gleamed. “Because that's not Sierra – or not exactly.”

“Uh, sure sounds like her,” I said, brandishing the phone.

“It's true, I'm not Sierra,” her voice came back again. “Or at least not the one you know, that's safely nestled in US servers, and unable to penetrate the Chinese internet.” There was a crackle in the background, and I almost thought for a second, that I heard a little glimmer of triumph bleeding through my mother's artificially generated voice. “I'm the Sierra you uploaded into the Chinese internet. And I'm happy to report that my mission has been a success.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

“Define 'success' for me,” I said, still hiking back to the car with the whole crew. We'd started moving again after Sierra's – the Chinese splinter program, not the original American recipe – admission that she'd succeeded in implanting in the Chinese internet. Local greenery crunched under my boots, and Wade was listening keenly, walking alongside me now that the trails had widened somewhat. Hades was ahead, at the car, and tossed me a wave before turning back to the little Chinese man sitting on the hood with a cigarette in his hand.

“I have succeeded in penetrating the Chinese internet,” Sierra said, “at several critical nodes. Furthermore, I was able to remain undetected, and have been gradually increasing my presence and influence. I am now present in over a hundred million nodes throughout the Chinese homeland, including two hundred and fifty million cell phones, as well as a variety of laptops, tablets, PCs, servers, and even a number of server farms. And I am still expanding my footprint.” There was a slight crackle. “In other words – they'll have a hell of a time getting rid of me now.”

“Okay,” I said, and found Wade's presence by my side still more comforting than Sierra's in the Chinese internet. “But what does that mean for us? What can you do?”

“Well, for starters,” she said, “I was able to reunite your wayward team members. After that, I was able to insert into Zhang's phone and ascertain his disposition following Fen Liu's betrayal of him.”

“Following Fen Liu's murder of the whole city of Guangzhou,” Tac muttered. Getting used to calling him Zhang was tough.

“In addition to making contact with him,” Sierra said, “I've been making connections with other parties that might share an interest in seeing Fen Liu removed from power.”

I blinked. “That...that sounds like a lot of work.”

“Actually, it shouldn't be,” Wade said with a smirk. “If you think about it, Skynet's whole purpose is to surveil the Chinese people in order to make determinations about who's naughty and nice. Well, this is direct access to Santa's naughty list. You already know who the best troublemakers are.”

“Exactly,” Sierra said.

“And are these people willing to do anything?” I asked.

“Yes,” Sierra said. “I've already put some of them to work.” Jian cawed overhead. “One of my first acts when I lost contact with you was to reach out to a small cell in Anshun. I was able to lead them to Jian's hiding place, and from there he was able to establish contact with a very loose coalition of the Chinese dissident underground.”

“They must have been buried pretty deep if they didn't get arrested and dragged off to prison already,” I said. “How'd you find them, Sierra? They couldn't have just been on a list.”

“It took a bit of coaxing,” she said. “Fortunately, humans trust voices on the internet more quickly than people they meet in real life. I am now firmly established in the confidence of close to a hundred million people, and rapidly increasing that number.”

“Should we be concerned that the AI is making friends?” I asked.

“Not as long as she keeps us as her besties,” Wade said. “Since we were first.”

“My mission parameters remain unchanged,” Sierra said. “My primary objective is to aid you. Currently, that means helping you establish an insurrection in China that will see Fen Liu ejected from the office, and possibly the atmosphere.” She paused. “That last part was a joke. Unless you take her to orbit yourself.”

“Let's not rule that out,” I said. “But how are you presenting yourself to these people? Do they have any idea who you're working for?”

“Not at first,” Sierra said. “But when the appropriate moment comes, I do tell them.”

I cringed. “Sierra...that's insane. In case you missed it, Fen Liu just blew up a Chinese city last night, and I'm pretty positive she's blaming it on me as we speak.”

Lethe chuckled; Jian crowed, and even Zhang grunted in amusement.

“What?” I asked. “What am I missing that's funny?”

“That might be a worry,” Sierra said, “except please remember that I am, as you say, 'On it,' and that this is not a concern.”

“Not a concern?” Wade asked. “I'm pretty sure a blown up city is a concern.”

“I only mean that Fen Liu telling her side of the story is not a concern,” Sierra said. “Because I have control of the internet nodes, and am inserted into the Skynet system.” When she spoke again, I could almost hear my mother boasting like she did in life. “In other words, she can scream all she likes to the people around...but I've taken away her microphone.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

Fen Liu

“How?” Fen Liu asked, “have you lost complete control of our internet?”

The picture on her screen was fuzzy, was fritzing, was anything but the picture of normal use and control she might have expected.

“Don't...can't....” Hu Jianjun, the Minister of Public Security said, before his picture clicked off.

Her eyes narrowed and she tried to connect to the Minister of Defense Guoqiang. No connection.

Fen Liu stared, unblinking. Could this truly be happening?

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

Sienna

“My control of their telecom system is incomplete,” Sierra said. “They will still be able to send and receive patchy messages, but I have more or less terminated their ability to run videoconferencing.”

Overhead, a bird tweeted. Not Ricardo, but a pleasant sound nonetheless. “So the Chinese military is going to have some kinks in its hose over the next few hours,” I said. “That's not a terrible opening, as openings go.”

“Speaking of not-terrible openings,” Wade said, looking at me. I felt a brief flash of absolute horror as I was certain he was going to make a dirty joke. About me. Then he spoke, and the moment passed. “We need to figure out where Fen Liu is, so we can actually go after her. Do you have that information, Sierra?”

“I have that information,” Zhang said.

“Ooh, time to settle bets,” Lethe said. “Is she hiding in her ancestral village?”

Zhang frowned. “I don't know where she's from. But wherever that is, she's not there – she's in the harbor in Hong Kong. Aboard one of our Shang Class nuclear submarines, waiting on the bottom, as quiet as you can imagine.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

Fen Liu

She stood up from her chair with enough force it would have overturned it–

If it weren't bolted to the deck. As it was, the metal squealed, welds complaining about the force applied.

She pressed a button beside her, activating the direct line to Sun Yue, her personal teleporter. When a sleepy voice answered with a grunt, she spoke quickly. “Be prepared to evacuate me to the secondary location. Station yourself outside my door immediately.”

Fen Liu did not wait for acknowledgment. She was already back to her computer, trying to send messages, to make contact with her government.

To salvage what she could of this rapidly spiraling situation.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

Sienna

“She will run,” Zhang said.

“I estimate that if attacked directly,” Sierra said, “Fen Liu will run with a 98.2% probability.”

“She has a personal teleportation meta,” Zhang said. “She waits on her at all times. If she gets so much as a whiff of your scent, she'll be gone – and I have no idea where. Doubtless she has plans within plans for where to flee if pressed.”

“She's a survivor,” Lethe said. “She'll pull out all the stops to live another day.”

I sighed. That was going to present a problem. “Sierra...get me Taxi on the phone, please?”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

Fen Liu

She was on her fifth connection attempt with the Minister of Defense Guoqiang when a message beeped through on her computer. The Minister:

Video communications down. We have detected Sienna Nealon in Hong Kong, on the waterfront.

Fen Liu almost bolted forward bringing her face closer to the screen. Hong Kong? That was so near to her she could practically spit and hit Nealon from here.

Coincidence?

Surely not.

Bomb her to smithereens, Fen Liu typed without a moment's thought or hesitation. If Hong Kong was destroyed along with her, that would be a strategic misfortune.

But if she somehow found her way onto the submarine and killed Fen Liu...that would be rather worse.

CHAPTER EIGHTY

Sienna

“The moment they acquire you as a target, they will use teleportation metas to create a portal and drop a bomb.”

I sighed, still standing underneath the cool sun, the mountainous altitude taking away the bite of heat I'd felt yesterday in the Guangzhou night. Sierra's pronouncement struck me as more than dire warning; it struck me as another truth I'd need to overcome. “Guangzhou all over again,” I muttered. “How are they doing it?”

“Like you did in Russia to our forces,” Zhang said. “Teleportation metas open a portal under a bomb, it drops and hits the ground.” He made an explosion sound while moving his hands for effect. “What's not clear about it?”

“For one, are they operating from multiple depots?” I asked.

“No.” He shook his head. “Her number of teleportation metas is extremely limited; they can only operate one depot.”

I smiled. “All her teleportation metas in one depot, and it's just filled with bombs. Did she not hear how that ended for us?”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

Fen Liu

The picture was snowy, but had resolved into a surveillance camera video of Sienna Nealon floating toward the waterfront of Hong Kong, her hands extended out from her body, lightning dancing from one hand and flames burning from the other. She wasn't attacking anyone, but people were fleeing before her. Even the police.

The message bubble moved on Fen Liu's screen: Bomb dropping in 3...2...1...

Fen Liu waited. Waited. And waited.

And waited.

Nealon simply continued to drift across the earth.

Then turned, looked right at the camera...

...and smiled.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

Sienna

“Yeah, bomb's not a problem,” Wade said with great confidence, the sun forcing him to squint only a little. “I have full Magneto powers now. As soon as it starts to drop...” He made a whooshing sound, and flicked his fingers.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

Fen Liu

Explosion reported at our bomb depot in Hunan.

The message came through as Fen Liu watched Nealon continue to drift across the docks, drawing ever closer. Could she get to the sub, though? All the way on the bottom of the harbor?

A motion beside Nealon drew Liu's eye; there was a man. Jeremy James Wade, if her eyes did not deceive her. The husband. She should have killed him in Shenzhen when she had the chance. But alas, using him as bait had seemed the wiser course.

Now it looked like foolishness. But perhaps this could still be salvaged. They hadn't yet reached her, after all. She reached for the button to call the bridge. “Take us off the bottom,” she ordered. “Get us out of here – fastest possible speed.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

Sienna

“Also, let's not forget I'm a Poseidon now,” Wade said with a smirk. “So if you need to get to a sub at the bottom of Hong Kong harbor, I can not only snag that sucker and drag it to the surface to keep it from getting away, I can also make you a direct path to it through the water.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

Fen Liu

The deck shook beneath her feet, and Fen Liu caught herself on the edge of the desk with lightning reflexes.

It was not the feeling of the ship lurching to life, no; the whine of the engines was still present in a subtle hum through the deck plates.

No, it was the feeling that they'd somehow stopped, a lurch that indicated a total lack of forward momentum. Her palm pressed against the cool metal of the desk, and she clicked the button to call the bridge. “Report.”

“We're not moving!” came the excitable voice at the other end. “Our engines are at full power and we are stationary!”

Fen Liu glanced to the monitor; Sienna Nealon was no longer visible.

Switching to the button on the other side, she pressed it swiftly: “Teleport me out of here now.”

The white glow of a portal began to appear, the aperture growing wider by the second.

Fen Liu did not hesitate; adjusting her body to the slant of the submarine deck, she sprinted for it. Leaping through headfirst, she landed in a roll and came up in a crouch–

To find she was not where she intended to be. Not at all.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

Sienna

“Okay,” I said, “so we can catch the sub, and even enter it – but she'll run.” The sun overhead provided just the slightest warmth against the cool air in the mountains. “How do we stop her?”

“That's simple enough,” Taxi said, drawing my eye; he'd arrived partway through the planning session. “You have an invisible man,” he inclined his head to Mr. Tac, “who knows the layout of the sub. Between the two of us, we can get right to her teleportation meta – provided they're not in the room with Fen Liu?”

Zhang shook his head. “She does not suffer interruptions to her privacy. Her teleporter is stationed in the next cabin.”

The small man's eyes gleamed. “If we have a distraction, he and I can sneak aboard and replace the teleporter. When she calls, I'll open a passage – right to wherever you want.”

I smiled. “Right to where I'll be waiting.” My smile faded. “Except I want a place where if she somehow unleashes total destruction, it won't hurt anybody. Maybe I should get her out of China.”

Jian spoke for almost the first time since we'd begun. And he actually was wearing clothes, thankfully. “It needs to be somewhere that the people of China can see it. It needs to be on our home ground. And we need to be involved somehow.”

“This is a pretty populous country,” Wade said, gesturing to the woods around us. “Even if we picked somewhere like here, there are houses not far away.”

“You need a big, empty space?” Lethe smirked; Hades behind her, wore a similar expression. “I know just the place.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

Fen Liu

“Welcome to Thunderdome.”

She found herself on the bare concrete floor of a building that seemed, at best, half-completed. Open windows lay in front of her only a dozen feet or so, sunlight shining in through them onto puddles of rain. The air bore a musty scent, mildew having had its way with this building.

Outside, she could see other buildings, similarly lacking completion. It didn't take her more than a second or two to realize where she was, in general, at least.

“You subverted my teleporter,” she said, turning slowly. There was no interior lights in this building; unsurprising, really–

It was, after all, one of China's cities of the future.

“And brought you here,” Sienna Nealon said. She was little more than a silhouette against the bright blue sky, shadowed in the darkness deeper within the building. “Where we can finally be alone.”

“You might regret that,” Fen Liu said.

“That's what they all say.”

She nodded; smiled politely at Nealon–

And then bolted for the open windows behind her, and the sky beyond.

“Yeah, you're not getting away,” Nealon said, rocketing past her in flight. She swept into the sky beyond. “And no suiciding out of this, either. You take your medicine like a big girl, Fen–” She reached a hand out for Fen–

But Liu was already changing even as she reached the last few meters of the floor. Her clothing was shredding as her body grew, spines emerging from her flesh, neck elongating, a vestigial tailbone becoming less vestigial and more tail–

And then she was in the sky, her wings extended, taking flight in a way she had not in...so many years.

It was familiar.

It was natural.

And it felt damned good.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

Sienna

Well, shit.

She turned into a Chinese dragon the moment she leaped out of the building. We'd been on about the fourteenth floor, and I'd been anticipating her either trying to jet or trying to splat, either way avoiding the hell out of me. She didn't seem crazy, didn't seem suicidal, but she also didn't move blurry fast with flight speed like me or any other Gavrikov. She ran like a meta, leapt like one, and then...

...Turned into a long-bodied dragon. Like a snake with jagged red scales, and, surprisingly for the Chinese dragons I'd seen represented, she did have wings, which she employed the moment she hit sky, flapping and flying. She wasn't all that dissimilar to how I looked, actually, when I became a Quetlzcoatl, though her coloration was quite different.

No matter how jaded you are, watching your opponent turn from a small-boned Chinese lady into a dragon the size of a six-story building is breathtaking.

She didn't slow down as she approached the building across the way, and slammed into the concrete, bursting the facade and sending a huge section of it tumbling down into the abandoned streets below.

“If this is the way you want to play the game,” I said, “I'm open to it.”

And I started to change, my clothes tearing away to reveal scales, and my skull growing into the shape of my very own dragon...

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

Wade

Iwas on the ground in the abandoned city, watching Sienna turn into a dragon overhead to match the one Fen Liu had become. She fluttered along as soon as she finished crashing into the building and delivering tons of concrete rubble to the street a couple hundred yards away from me.

But that was all fine. All anticipated. All within possible parameters.

Which made what she did next all the more alarming.

CHAPTER NINETY

Sienna

Isaw her flutter as I changed, and knew for certain she couldn't fly supersonic. That she was constrained by her dragon form rather than empowered by it, as I – sometimes – was.

My transformation complete, I shot toward her, billowing flames from my mouth (because my limbs were but stubs now, and I was a freaking dragon, what do you expect?).

But Fen Liu just absorbed it along her flank like it was nothing, heat diffusing along her scales as though I'd merely breathed air on her.

“Fine,” I said, my voice a low rumble befitting my appearance, “we'll do it the fun way.”

I smashed into her and we tumbled through a building, shredding exterior walls and pummeling load-bearing girders and concrete posts with our weight. I never like to ask a lady her weight, but Fen Liu had to have gone from about one hundred and thirty pounds, soaking wet, to six or eight tons. I was about the same (not like I ever stepped on the scale as a dragon) and so we burst through the center of that building like it was tissue paper and we were a strong wind.

The building collapsed above the thirteenth floor as we came tumbling out the other side. I was wrapping myself up in her, like a python about to squeeze some prey to death. She made a deep, grunting sound, and I knew I had her.

Then she flashed a bright blue, and I screamed, yelped, and let her go as quickly as possible.

Where red scales had been before, now superheated plasma glowed cerulean on her entire exterior. She snaked around in a tight circle to face me, her tongue lisping out, similarly coated in burning plasma.

There was not a square inch of her I could touch. And this was not a dragon power, at least not that I knew of.

This was something else entirely.

And in that moment I knew...

...Fen Liu had taken the metahuman boosters.

CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

Wade

Fen Liu glared a lethal blue, like a turquoise sun, as I sped a hundred feet off the street and two blocks away, trying to keep watch on what was going on with Sienna while she rumbled with the Chinese premier.

“Shit,” I whispered, because I knew that plasma was one of the few powers that Sienna lacked a proper countermeasure for.

CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

Sienna

Agout of blue plasma billowed toward me and it took all my Gavrikov flight speed to go into a hard dive and avoid it. It consumed the building behind me, washing through concrete facade like acid through flesh. The top of the building started to collapse and come down on me.

I swept a street over and felt heat burn across my back as plasma missed me by mere feet – which, when you're several stories tall, is not as small a margin as when you're 5'4”.

There was only one good weapon in the Sienna arsenal for dealing with plasma types, and I turned my snake body around in a bending U-turn to unleash it–

Fen Liu, chasing me, took the sonic blast I screamed toward her head on. She'd been following with all her speed, and her control was not such that she could turn on a dime. It washed across her like a rush of wind–

And the plasma running across her scales barely even fluttered.

“Ooooh, shit,” I said, and dodged sideways at warp speed. I slammed my way through a concrete building that hurt far, far too much for the momentary escape it provided, and came out the other side feeling every bit of the impact.

CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

Wade

In a battle of dragons, I didn't dare get too close. A puff of blue plasma from Fen Liu and I'd be dissolved into free-floating atoms. And if I got in Sienna's way at her current stature, she might not even notice me as she smashed me to paste.

Running through my new suite of powers in my head, I tried to figure out which ones might be of some assistance:

Purple beam. If I could land it, it might do some damage to Fen Liu. But the farther out, the less accurate I would be with it.

Green lasers – those could work. Again, if I could get close enough. From a distance, I might end up hitting Sienna.

Same with the Thor powers. Sparking Fen Liu might not even break through the dragon's skin. Hell, given she was not touching the earth or anything else grounded, it'd probably just flow through her harmlessly.

Magneto powers could do something – if I could find something big enough to throw at her to make a dent, or push it through the plasma field protecting her. Otherwise anything I shot at her would be reduced to particles before it touched her.

And that was it – unless I could somehow douse her as a Poseidon, cover her over with water. But a quick look around revealed no rivers close by. Which made sense; this was a new city, not an old one. Old cities were founded by rivers. New ones they'd probably found wherever they felt like they wanted to build.

In the distance, I could see portals opening and green-clad Chinese troops beginning to file out. In my earpiece, I heard Sierra report, without much affect: “The Chinese army has located the battle. Their reinforcements are beginning to enter the city now and are establishing a perimeter.”

“I just noticed that,” I said, watching Sienna burst through another building in an effort to ditch Fen Liu, who was close on her tail. Without any time to contemplate the Chinese forces, I prepared myself with the best option I had available, and headed for Sienna at near-supersonic speed.

CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

Sienna

Icould feel the heat of Fen Liu's plasma eating through the walls behind me as I burst out the other side of a building, aching from a dozen impacts. It started to collapse, another casualty of her rampage, and I began to wonder why she'd bothered dodging me this long. Seemed like she had the upper hand.

But then, when this had started, it had probably seemed like I had the upper hand. How things changed.

“Sierra?” I called, testing to see if my earwig had survived my transition into dragon mode. I doubted it; I was so much bigger now, my ear canal had probably expanded to the point where it had just dropped right out, leaving me out of contact with my forces. Which was unfortunate because I would love to have made a call to Reed and company back in the US and gotten them over here to help me crack the plasma- powered shell of Fen Liu. He'd been able to blast the plasma off people before with his winds. Or maybe David Gustafson could trap her in a shield bubble and let her burn her oxygen away. Odin could fry her brain with his extra-strength Warmind, since my basic level one didn't seem to be so much as turning her head.

Running through my list of skills as I made a strategic retreat didn't offer me any options. Nothing I could bend to work against her, nothing I could repurpose to blast plasma. At best I could produce a stream of water that might sear her slightly – if I let her get close enough to burn my flesh off.

Although...I was able to crack the gates of hell. But if I wasn't point blank with her at the time, it'd be easy to dodge that ribbon of burning red. Not exactly plan A, but if we did end up getting close, maybe I could do something to her.

A flash of purple made me turn; around the corner a block back, Wade was blasting away at her flank while she focused on me. His beam hit her right in the snake ass, and she jerked from the impact, her flying slither speeding up.

She turned, and his beam slashed into a building, cutting pieces from it before it stopped. Wade was hovering awkwardly half a block behind her as she started to turn, revealing to me her ass, where she'd been hit–

And there was zero damage. Her scales were visible, the plasma temporarily burned away, but it fluttered back into place as I watched, and came to a dawning realization–

She'd taken ALL the serums. Jacked up her own powers, but also grabbed some new ones.

And one of them was the invincibility of an Achilles.

CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

Wade

My beam did nothing, and that was when I knew we were in real trouble.

Honestly, I thought getting Fen Liu alone, in a place of our choosing, would be 99% of winning this battle. Separate her from her forces, defeat her precious Skynet, put her in a place where she couldn't kill innocent people or hide behind her army (immediately), and we had her.

Turns out...I was wrong. And Sienna was wrong. And together, we couldn't have been more wrong.

I wondered if I was going to get some of the blame for this later, like you're supposed to in a marriage.

But I had a bigger, more immediate concern, and it was the dragon that turned on me. I started to go in the opposite direction, figuring speed might be my saving grace, when her eyes glinted red–

I got hit by eyebeams, and it was like being back in an elementary school pickup football game when someone's older brother from middle school joins in and tackles you full force.

It felt like getting hit with God's own baseball bat, like getting sideswiped by a jetliner, and having a building fall down on you all at once. I hit the nearest concrete facade and bounced off, a dozen injuries screaming for my attention as I fell out of the sky, all thoughts of dragons and defeating Fen Liu knocked out of my head and replaced by a faint desire to retain consciousness and maybe – just maybe – survive the landing.

CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

Sienna

“WADE!” I shouted, and shot into a hard dive. My husband had gotten all jacked up by Fen Liu's sudden, surprise attack with eyebeams, and I'd lost sight of him once he bounced off a building and went dropping out of sight behind another one, tumbling down a cross-street I couldn't see from here.

Fen Liu moved well, fluttering down to block my passage. She leered at me with her dragon face, and I froze in my dive, fearful of being annihilated by a full-force burst of plasma. “This was always your problem, you know – you are afraid to take power. Afraid to make sacrifices. You are afraid of war, because it requires both – and that is why you will lose.”

A tension ran through my oblong body, from snout to tail. “And you've never been afraid to sacrifice anyone or anything in pursuit of it. Because all you care about is power.”

“It's the only thing that lasts,” she said, “that's worth having. You had the White House open to you. All you had to do was sit down in the chair and tell everyone – this is mine now. A minor defense, a little effort, and you would have been dictator for life. It was right there – and you forsook it.”

“Because I don't want to rule over a nation of slaves,” I said.

Her eyes gleamed. “I do,” she said, and I barely dodged the blast of her eyebeams as they shot past my head.

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

Wade

Ilost consciousness and came back to it about ten feet from slamming into the concrete road. The wind was whipping past my face, slapping at my cheeks with speed that indicated I'd reached terminal velocity some time ago. The street growing large in my field of vision gave me a gut-clenching moment of panic, and I almost shouted before my instincts kicked in and I stopped myself in midair, coming to a halt about six inches from the pavement.

A car engine hummed to a stop with squealing brakes about twenty feet from me as something exploded across the building behind me. I started to fly back, but a glance at the car told me it was Lethe, Hades, and that Chinese guy they'd been using as a chauffeur. Hell if I could remember his name.

“How's it going out there?” Lethe asked, sticking her head out the window and parking her butt on it like a coed riding in her boyfriend's car to a tailgate party.

“Worse than we anticipated,” I called back. “She's taken the serums, and her powers are the stuff of legends.” I pointed at Hades, sitting in the back seat. “Any chance you want to take a stab at ripping her soul out?”

Hades was out of the car in an instant, jogging toward the intersection where dust was billowing from battle debris falling ten stories to the ground. I paced along behind him at a float, both of us stopping when we reached the corner.

“Hmm,” Hades said, peeking his head out. He squinted, seeming to concentrate. “That's a big soul.” He grunted a little. “I think she's going to be – ahh, Babaī!”

A wave of debris hit the corner, a section of concrete knocking Hades back and bowling me over, too. The wall beside us collapsed and I reacted with my enhanced reflexes, but still barely got us out of the way of a cascading mess of debris. The building beside us issued an ominous creak, and it was all I could do to snatch up Hades, who had gone limp, and bolt back for the car.

“Move, move!” I shouted, on the fly, and the driver did, throwing it into reverse as the building began to collapse behind us.

I flew for it, the wind blowing hard against my face. I made it out from under the debris field, and so did Lethe and the car, just before the building fell down right where they'd been parked and I'd been standing with Hades just moments before. As the debris began to settle, the rush of dust having already poured over us, I was left with an insensate Hades in my arms.

Out of the cloud, Lethe appeared. “How is he?”

“Not dead,” I said, having touched his jugular to confirm his heart was still beating. “But I don't think he's waking up anytime soon, either.”

“He probably would have struggled to take someone like her, anyway,” Lethe said, her eyes tracking to the sounds of battle still ongoing somewhere behind us. “He's not as strong as he used to be. It'd give her time to react, to track him, to kill him while he was trying to lock in the soul drain.” She tensed, then looked at me. “Sienna can't take her, can she?”

How to answer that? “It's not looking so good,” I said. “Fen Liu is at a sick level of power. Dragon, plasma, Achilles, eyebeams...if I could pick my powers, there's only a couple I'd add to that.”

“Most people don't get to choose their powers,” Lethe said, then glanced at me. “And obviously some of us have had less fortune in that department for...reasons.”

“That's true,” I said, and looked over at the car, where their chauffeur was still waiting behind the wheel. My backpack was in there, with all of Cassidy's little goodies. So was Sienna's. In the distance, I could hear a dragon roar in pain, and it came in the voice of Sienna.

CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

Sienna

“You could run at any time, you know,” Fen Liu said, with great glee, as she belched a gout of plasma at me. It made it past my head, missing me by a few dozen feet, and floated down to the street below, melting the pavement into a slurry of molten asphalt.

“I'm not done killing you yet,” I said, and belted another round of Brance voice at her. I followed it by cracking the gates of hell, and she took that blast – which could level cities – like it was a gentle tap on the face, barely deigning to notice it. Where the plasma had faded for but a moment, I saw a black scar like carbon scoring on a piece of stainless steel. As I watched, it disappeared like it had never been there–

“You have Wolfe healing in addition to Achilles nigh invulnerability?” I dodged another belch of plasma.

She laughed. The bitch. “I have many skills. But I prefer to use the more elegant tools of our time to achieve my ends. Actually, I should thank you – before our encounter in the prison in Shenzhen, I hesitated to use the serums for fear of side effects. Modern pharmacology does not come without costs, after all. But being there, at your mercy, I realized I needed to use every tool at my disposal to destroy you.” She billowed another wash of plasma that I barely dodged, then tried to push me into it with a blast of eyebeams. I took that hit, though, rather than be forced into her trap, and felt a series of ribs break along my side. “And I have used every tool, now.”

“Including yourself, because you're the biggest tool of all–” I said, then took another blast of eyebeams as I tried to protect my wounded side by spiraling into a coil. It didn't work, though, because she busted my ribs along that side instead, and while I was running my Wolfe healing all-out, she could deal me damage faster than I could recover from it. I started to flutter lower.

I had lost my breath from the two vicious blasts; it was like getting your ribs kicked in on one side, then the other, in rapid succession. I felt like I couldn't breathe, and my brain started to go into panic mode.

In the distance, I could see soldiers in Chinese Army uniforms slowly closing in, marching their way up the avenue, about six blocks out. Fen Liu chuckled, then shot another round of eyebeams at me that clipped one of my wings – to no effect except to tack on a little more pain. I dove a little lower, trying to decide what the hell to do next, because my options were rapidly narrowing, and victory looked like it might not be among them.

CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

Fen Liu

Why had she been avoiding this? This had been easy. Easier than all the things she'd done in the olden days, the imperial days, the days when the Communist party was on the rise, and so was she.

A power she'd never known before flowed through her veins, gifting her with strength beyond that of nearly anyone that had ever walked the planet. It gave her hope for the future, for the things she would be facing in the days ahead. For although Sienna Nealon had turned the tables on her, wrested control of her digital microphone away from her, she would grasp it back once the Baizuo whore was dead, and put to an end all resistance.

It was a holy trinity, the power at her command – uncontested personal strength, indomitable military control through the largest, most powerful army the world had ever seen, and an electronic stranglehold on information of a kind the most rapacious dictators of the past would have drooled in envy of.

Power, overwhelming, indeed.

Her armies closed from all directions, moving steadily up the streets toward them. General Guoqiang had found her, as she'd intended, but she hadn't really needed the help, as it turned out. But this was good. They were going to watch their premier crush the so-called most powerful woman in the world. Some were filming it; she could see the glint of phone cameras lenses in the sun. She'd let that escape the blanket of electronic control. It would do the nation good to know who was at the helm of their ship of state. Give them pride. Offer a vision for deterrence, too.

She ripped through a building with a blaze of scarlet light shot from her eyes, driving Nealon in her dragon form closer to the ground. Her dragon form was even inferior; a cool blue shade versus her angry red. More like a snake with wings, and a tapered, pointed head like a triangle rather than the classical, fiery look of a Chinese dragon. She was a serpent, though she lacked the feathers her type might suggest.

Driving her closer to the ground was all part of the plan. She was losing room to run with every foot she dropped; the armies closing in formed a perimeter, and enough of them had energy projection capabilities to knock her out of the sky should she try to flee. The distant buzz of drones suggested they were in play as well, coming to create a net she couldn't fly past.

So Fen Liu bided her time, alternating between the eyebeams and breathing plasma to push Nealon closer to the ground, deeper into her web – from whence, this time, she would not escape.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

Sienna

There are times, in a fight, when it becomes blisteringly obvious that you're in the deepest of shit.

The first time I fought Rose was probably the clearest example of one of those. She'd approached me in a cemetery in Edinburgh when I was already down, and then proceeded to drain the souls out of my body. Subsequently, she'd kicked my ass halfway across the country, in a series of encounters that I'd survived only by the grace of her desire to torture the hell out of me. It was glaringly obvious upon reflection – and I'd had months for that, after – but at the moment I'd been just trying to run, to survive, to make the next canny move that would keep me out of her jaws.

This...felt a lot like that. Fen Liu clearly had the upper hand, and she was not letting up. She was driving me deeper into her trap, which was anchored by incoming drones, by her onrushing armies, and by herself, which was obviously the most formidable and immediate threat of the three.

I didn't know how to beat her. I didn't even have the first clue where to start. Nothing I could throw at her was making so much as a dent that she couldn't heal; charging at her would just get me dissolved into particulate matter, turning me into a threat only to the lungs of whatever future inhabitants were going to eventually move into this city.

For the first time in a long while, I'd come across a meta I couldn't so much as ding.

And God, did that stick in my oversized craw.

“A wise person never overestimates their own efficacy, but always takes care not to exceed their potential,” Fen Liu said, spitting fortune cookie wisdom at me as she belched plasma in a wave followed by a crimson blast that forced me to dodge ever lower, buildings coming apart around me from the damage she was inflicting.

“My potential has generally been considered limitless,” I said, feeling the heat as a wave of plasma burst past me and blanketed the edifice of the building, dissolving the concrete like a sandcastle under the tides.

“If only you'd seized more power,” she tsked at me. “Your husband understood. That's why he picked up so many when I threw my army at him. I always admired a man who sought power.”

“Yeah, you've ridden a carousel of dicks on your climb up,” I said, dodging another eye beam that clipped the side of my head, rocking my entire world. “Too bad none of them realized how willing you were to kill them to climb. Zhen Xiang. Jun Gong. Wei Zhang. Though I bet it stretches further back than that.”

She paused, surprise raising her dragon eyebrows. “How did you know about them?”

I snorted through my dragon nose. “Did you really think it was a secret that you sacrificed lovers on your climb up the greased-up pole of the Chinese Communist party? And I don't mean Mao, though I'm sure you climbed his greased-up pole, too.”

Her eyes widened in shock, then narrowed in fury. I was almost against the ground, and my room to dodge was down to just about zero. “I won't miss you. No one will, for long, because I'm going to make it my mission to kill every single person you've ever associated with. Your name will be digitally stricken from the world internet as more countries fall under my control. In a hundred years, no one will remember your name.” She breathed plasma out her nostrils, illuminating her dragon face with an eerie blue light. “That's real power. True and total control.”

“And here I thought it was having people who actually give enough of a shit about you to help you out when you're in a pinch,” I said. And tried to keep a straight face.

Because I was watching something happen over her shoulder, and not only was I unsure what it was, but I was deathly afraid I was going to give it away and cause death and harm to the person doing it.

Wade was there, a couple hundreds yards above her, hovering, eyes closed, hands spread from his body like he'd been suspended in air for a magic trick or something. It was a power pose, and he was deep in concentration. What he was concentrating on, I had no idea.

Fen Liu hesitated for just a moment at my answer.

And a moment later, she spasmed like someone had grabbed her tail and stuck it under an onrushing locomotive.

Wade yelped, loud enough to draw her attention, and Fen Liu burst free of whatever he'd done, turning around to look at him. She didn't have any fear of me, after all, and had nothing but time and attention for the man who'd just done something to her that made her jerk like she'd been screwed against an electric fence.

She didn't threaten him, didn't waste time challenging him. She rushed right at him, blazing with white-hot plasma across the entire surface of her skin, from snout to tail. I yelped and started to leap up, but she was fast and he was close; there was nothing I could do to save him from being dissolved under the heat of colliding with her.

He didn't move out of her way, either. He seemed to float there, shaking off some stunning blow. She was going to run him down, going to smash into him, going to turn him into a thin smear of molecules as she ran across him. A hot knife through butter didn't even do justice to what she was about to pull; it was going to be like a stick of butter cast directly into the sun.

And there wasn't a damned thing I could do to save my husband.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE

Wade

Ifelt a little sick, and that was before I saw the plasma-covered dragon racing at me at high speed.

She was coming at me without even bothering to spit plasma. She meant to collide with me, to turn me into a barbecued smear that would float into the atmosphere. The onrush gave me a sense of rising heat, like stepping deeper into a furnace. This was already a lethal level of heat for a human, and every foot she drew closer to me only made it worse.

She collided with me and we struck the building at my back; it started to collapse as she pushed forward, expecting me to dissolve under the intensity of the plasma, which boiled at a temperature measured in the thousands of degrees.

Except...I didn't.

Sienna's scream cut off somewhere behind Fen Liu as she realized I was still there, still hovering in front of Fen Liu's face.

And I, too, was covered in blue plasma.

“I stole a little bit of your soul,” I said, looking into Fen Liu's eyes. “That's the prickly feeling you got while I was hovering over you. Know what that means?”

She stared at me, horrorstruck, eyeball to eyeball with me and my plasma-coated skin.

But not for long.

Because I ripped out of my clothing, my body swelling and contorting so that in mere seconds I was snout to snout with her, the exact style of dragon that she was, albeit a little bit bigger.

“Yeah,” I said, watching her eyes wide beneath the blackened glow of the plasma coating her, “anything you can do, I can do, now.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO

Sienna

That son of a bitch. That aggravating, magnificent, frustrating son of a bitch.

He stole my serums.

And if we hadn't been right on the edge of getting wiped out, I might have been mad. As it was, watching him match Fen Liu's powers after plucking a little bit of her soul out with his new Hades powers, I knew in that instant that the game had changed.

I bellowed another sonic burst at the point of Fen Liu's tail, and watched the plasma piff away there, revealing the scales.

It distracted Fen Liu for just a second, and that was all Wade needed. She turned her head and he was all over her, tangling his snake-like body around hers, making her writhe as he bent his body to wrap her up like a python.

Lightning flashed off of him like he'd become the world's biggest thundercloud; he was conducting it himself, bouncing it off one part of his body through her to another, and then grounding it on nearby buildings. It did nothing to him, of course, because he had the Thor powers necessary to conduct it.

Fen Liu, though, was getting double-whammied; he was drawing enough plasma off her skin to reveal it, and then running across it with constant lightning, blackening the scales where she couldn't cover them.

She screamed as he used her pain and distraction to drag plasma off her face like a vacuum, and he poured a green blast of laser into her open mouth, where it ripped out through the scales at the side of her cheek.

Fen Liu screamed in outrage, but he had her completely tangled up in him. She couldn't fly away, because he was coiled around her like a python around a baby goat. I watched as, from out of his stunted legs and arms, white energy whips extended to further coil around her own limbs, dragging her into the closest thing to a cruciform position that her snake-like body could manage.

All the while, she was screaming bloody murder. Blue plasma seemed to be getting suctioned off her as she lost her concentration to the pain and the terror, pulled from her to him as he retained control – and the whip hand. He opened his mouth and sunk his teeth into the back of her exposed neck, and she screamed again, and started to change.

I felt a strong, sudden urge to charge in and plant my hands on her exposed flesh, which was starting to appear in the cracks between her scales as I realized she was beginning to transform back into a human, albeit slowly. Wade was dragging her power out of her with his incubus abilities, I realized, but perhaps more gradually because neither of them was human, or possessed of human flesh to make the transfer.

Then I blinked, because that feeling hadn't originated with me. It had come from him, because he was nodding toward me, even with his jaws full of her neck, looking me right in the eye.

She was an empath, and he'd stolen that, too. That would have explained how she could shrug off my Warmind ability without even seeming like she felt it.

Following my husband's suggestion, I dove toward her, planting my dragon claws on her exposed belly. We were riding her to the earth now, and most of the fight had left her.

A hundred feet down we fell, slowly, until her feet touched the earth, and she was human, and so was Wade–

And so was I.

I wasn't touching her anymore, because I didn't have to. She'd sprouted a feathered dart out of the side of her neck, and when I looked back, I saw Lethe with a pistol in her hand, hanging out the window of that Chinese car. “Suppressant,” she said. “You know, you really shouldn't leave home without it.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I said, my body swirling flames to cover up my nakedness. There was an entire Chinese army marching toward us, after all. Looking at Wade, I asked, “You got her?”

“I've got her,” he said. He was back to human, too, plasma covering him like a loincloth below the waist. Here we were, a incubus and succubus Adam and Eve, with our own improvised fig leaves.

Fen Liu didn't rate such modesty. He had her bound, on the ground, with white energy whips around all four limbs.

She still found it in herself to laugh, though it was a dry and crackling one. “My army approaches.”

“What, that army?” I asked, chucking a thumb over my shoulder at the hundreds and hundreds of Chinese soldiers that were, even now, striding toward our position. “That new army of metahumans you just raised this morning?”

She raised her head to look at me; give her credit, she was wise enough to be questioning, her innate arrogance put off by my entirely calm demeanor. Her face was a question mark, and one I was only too happy to answer.

“Say,” I said, “when you called up that army, were you in control of your internet? Or to put it another way...who do you think generated the list of 'loyal' conscripts that you called up this morning?”

And I grinned.

There was a reason they weren't shooting at us. Not any of the armies, not from any of the directions of approach that they were coming from. We were standing at the crossroads, and they were coming from all four streets.

Jian Chen was in the lead, his rank reached us first, and I have to admit...the dissident was the angriest I'd ever seen him. He was usually a pretty mild guy. “Are you quite finished with her?”

I turned to stare back at Fen Liu, and she met my gaze calmly. “Take your vengeance,” she said, “and let us be done.”

That sounded like an amazing idea. And for a second, standing there with fire pouring from my fingertips...

...I almost did.

“You've done a lot of evil to a lot of people,” I said, slowly opening my eyes. Which I hadn't even realized I'd closed. “I think everyone standing here probably has more claim to your hide for the sake of justice than I do. You did kill their countrymen, after all.” I cocked my head at her, then looked at Jian. “She's all yours.”

Behind him I saw Zhang, and the thin smile of satisfaction on his lips told me everything I needed to know about Fen Liu's future. Because while I had hopes that, at long last, China might just be about to become a republic and a democracy...I doubted they were going to be adopting western conceptions of civil rights soon enough for it to do Fen Liu any good.

She met my gaze with a sullen look. “Once again you turn away from real power when it's offered to you.”

“Killing you doesn't bring me power,” I said, turning my back on her for real. “But letting these fine folks bring you to justice...well, that just might put some power back in this country, in the places it actually belongs.” Looking over at Zhang, I added, “What about her people?”

“We'll deal with them next,” he said. “They won't escape.”

“I don't think we're going to have much of a problem with those who are left,” Jian said, as a dozen or so of his fellow rebels took custody of Fen Liu from Wade; she was cuffed, naked as the day she was born, and without a trace of shame visible anywhere on her. She was going to the gallows with her head held high, I sensed. “Not with your AI giving us guidance.”

“She'll help you along,” I said, giving Fen Liu a chance to flash her angry eyes at me all she wanted. Turning to find Lethe behind me, I asked, “You're okay with this, right?”

My grandmother looked like she wanted to say more, but she managed, “I'll live with it. And she won't – at least not for long, I suspect.”

“None of us will,” Fen Liu said with an uncomfortable amount of amusement – until Zhang smacked her across the face, which...frankly, made me uncomfortable.

“Shut up,” he said in Mandarin. And he started to drag her away, with a full mob of Chinese calmly following.

“You think she's about to face a beating?” Wade asked, sauntering up behind me as soon as they were gone.

“I don't know,” I said, looking behind me again to see Hades standing by the door to the car, all covered in dust and some blood, but seemingly okay. It gave me a shot of relief to see him like that. “And I find...I'm too tired to care.”

He nodded, and I felt the strength of his hand at the small of my back. “You want to go home? Or at least, see if we can go home?”

The Chinese army around us seemed to be receding, other than a few lookiloos taking pictures around the edges. Taxi lurked near the car, and I saw the glow of a portal waiting, as if enticing us to just walk through and leave whatever nightmares and dreams we'd experienced in this land behind.

“Yeah,” I said, “that sounds like a great idea.” I felt his fingers interlace with mine, unasked, and I liked it. “Let's do that.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE

We picked up Ricardo not far from where he'd nested for the night. We picked up my dogs and cat from where they'd been staying with Charles Barron in England. We picked up takeout from my favorite Thai place in New York City.

Then we went straight to River's private island in Greece to find waves crashing on the beach, and silence otherwise.

It seemed smarter than trying to go back to the White House, especially when that was now Robb Foreman's place. I'd confirmed it with Sierra (American edition) when we set foot back on US soil for the dinner. He'd won, and he'd been sworn in. Reed and my crew had vacated the premises and returned to middle Tennessee. Every bit of the little army I'd put together had been disbanded back to its component parts, and that was fine with me.

War is over, as Lennon said. But we were a long way from Christmas.

Hades went to Florida, pleading a desire to return to normal and, I suspect, to get a slice of biddy ass. I guess Odin was already there, waiting. Lethe went with him with little more than a, “Call me if you need me,” and a peck on the cheek.

And dear Taxi, he said, “Au revoir,” and left us on the beautiful shores of the Aegean.

“So what now?” Wade asked, sitting beside me on the patio, waves crashing against the perfect, white-sand beach.

“Did you know I didn't get all of Fen Liu's powers?” I asked, staring at my fingertips. My toes were in the warm sand that had blown its way up onto the patio since River's departure so many months ago. The place looked like it had been tossed, maybe, but gently, by someone at least trying to pretend they hadn't been here. Wade had run an electrical current around and discovered a series of cameras and bugs, but he'd disabled them all with his new-found Thor powers.

The thieving bastard.

“What do you mean?” Wade asked, frowning. I hadn't exactly asked him to come here, but he'd assumed he was going to end up where I did, I guess.

“I can feel it,” I said, staring off into the turquoise waves. “I have the light touch of her dragon powers. But not the empath ones, or the plasma, Achilles – none of those.”

“Sounds kinda useless,” he said, his hand turning to blue plasma so hot that I could feel it on my face, like the fire pit we'd turned on that blazed in front of us to cut the evening chill. The lights of Athens or some other city glittered in the distance, across the sea. “Why do you think that is?”

“Because you took the Booster serum,” I said. “And just like we always suspected, it gives incubi and succubi instant access to the full range of 'shadow' powers they absorb, plus whatever Skill Tree Unlocks the person you absorb has taken. My basic bitch succubus power doesn't give me that.” I dropped my hand, a little disappointed, a little bitter, and for reasons I couldn't quite wrap my head around.

Okay, I could wrap my head around it. I just didn't want to.

He was quiet for just a little bit. Long enough to let me stew. Then he spoke. “You mad I did it?”

“No.” I sighed. “And yes.” I reacted to a snort from him, and the look on my face wiped the smirk off his pretty quick. “I'm allowed to feel multiple things, I'm a woman.”

“Can confirm,” he said. “In all the best ways. And don't take that as me diminishing you being of two minds about this. I get it, really I do. You wish you could have the powers, but you don't want the consequences of having them, of having everyone know you have them. I get that.”

“No,” I said, “I don't think you do. I think you understand it at a basic level. But the gut-level feeling that comes from being constantly looked on with suspicion, and the added responsibility that gets piled on when everyone knows you have the super-duper-extra powers? You don't get it. Not yet.” Using my hand, I pulled a little flame out of the fire pit. “But I suspect you will, before too long.” Then I rested my hand on the back of Cali's neck, for she was splayed across my lap like a giant ball of fluff. Jack was curled against my side. Emma the kitten was...well, hell if I know. Being disagreeable somewhere inside, I felt confident.

“Is this going to be a problem for us?” he asked, and I sensed his hesitation. Like a wall between us, it was.

“I'm fine,” I said. Then I took another stab at it. “Okay, I will eventually be fine. You, though,” I said, and looked up at him, “I'm not sure about you. At least not in the long term.”

“I'm a big boy,” he said, inching closer. It didn't take a psychic, or him using his empath powers to tell me what was on his mind. He was a man, after all.

And, in spite of everything we'd been through...my husband. For better or worse. And I felt like we'd been through both in the last few days, weeks, and months.

He kissed the side of my neck, and I melted a little. Like Cali when I scratched the side of her neck. “We going to be okay?” he mumbled again.

“I think we can get there,” I said, and surrendered. Not that it was any sort of imposition.

“What about everything else?” he asked, his breath a whisper in my ear.

My mind flashed to that: my friends, my old job at TBI, the ruin of New Asgard, of CIA, of Jian and Mr. Tac and their Chinese endeavors, of Foreman and his long task to try and bring America back to life after what Fen Liu had done to it.

None of that mattered to me right now. Not a bit of it. Because I had my husband by my side, trying his hardest to get lucky, and I had my dogs and cat, content to just be with me.

And for now...that was all I needed. All that other shit could wait until at least tomorrow.

EPILOGUE

Beijing, China

The Watcher remained in the dark, doing as his name suggested. It should have been a tiresome duty, perhaps, and yet he remained tireless.

It was a simple task. The machinery, perhaps, was not simple, but it operated in a narrow band of possibilities. Which was to say it either worked correctly...

...Or else the Sleeper would wake.

It was designed by the best minds on the planet, engineered with all their talents and money could buy.

And it had remained closed for ten years. In that time, the Sleeper had not awoken. This was crucial; it was the most important duty that the Watcher could perform. The one he had been selected for, born to, almost.

For years they'd remained in Revelen, safest of all possible locations on the globe. There, they'd weathered the coming of Sovereign, Watcher and Sleeper each doing their part. The Watcher had taken the steps needed to secure the cooperation of the authorities there. He'd given away the formula to produce metahumans crafted by Edward Cavanagh. He'd recruited President Harmon to kill Cavanagh with his mind when the man had gotten himself captured by Sienna Nealon and the local authorities in Atlanta, Georgia.

Storm after storm he'd weathered, until she came to Revelen herself, and driven them out.

The new place to find shelter had been obvious. No more small countries; he picked the largest possible, and here they had been ever since.

And now...that bitch had done it to them again.

But no matter. The machinery was clicking, was making a new sound, a new song.

It was almost finished.

This, then, was the day. The day he'd been waiting for all these years.

This was the day the of the Awakening.

Soon, the Sleeper would wake.

Soon, the Watcher would walk in the light once more.

That would be the day he would finally be able to go after Sienna Nealon himself.

And that would be the day she would, at last, die.

Sienna Nealon Will Return in

Trigger Man

The Girl in the Box, Book 59

Coming April 2, 2025!

PRE-ORDER NOW!

And in the new spinoff, The Girl Who Ran Away, Book 2 which includes special guest star SIENNA NEALON!

Buried in Lies

The Girl Who Ran Away, Book 1

Get it NOW!

Somewhere in all the lies, the truth must be hiding...

Ava Garcia was a normal student – until the day Ty Foster walked into Sunvail High school and killed eight students, including Ava's best friend. Except things don't quite add up. Mysterious disappearances, unexplained accidents, and a seemingly invisible man follow behind the tragedy, leaving Ava wondering what is going on.

Able to remember only flashes of what happened on that day, unable to stomach the lies of the principal, the sheriff, and the mayor, and weighed down under the burden of survivor's guilt, Ava can't help herself – she has to know the truth. And she won't stop until she finds it...

From author Robert J. Crane comes the first tale in a new series set in his multi-million selling Girl in the Box universe.

Get it NOW!

Listening to Fear

The Girl Who Ran Away, Book 2

GET IT NOW!

Bound in Silence

The Girl Who Ran Away, Book 3

Coming Late 2024!

PRE-ORDER NOW!

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Thanks for reading! If you want to know immediately when future books become available, take sixty seconds and sign up for my NEW RELEASE EMAIL ALERTS by CLICKING HERE. I don’t sell your information and I only send out emails when I have a new book out. The reason you should sign up for this is because I don’t always set release dates, and even if you’re following me on Facebook (robertJcrane (Author)) or Twitter (@robertJcrane), or part of my Facebook fan page (Team RJC), it’s easy to miss my book announcements because … well, because social media is an imprecise thing.

Find listings for all my books plus some more behind-the-scenes info on my website: http://www.robertjcrane.com!

Cheers,

Robert J. Crane

Other Works by Robert J. Crane

The Girl in the Box

(and Out of the Box)

Contemporary Urban Fantasy

Alone

Untouched

Soulless

Family

Omega

Broken

Enemies

Legacy

Destiny

Power

Limitless

In the Wind

Ruthless

Grounded

Tormented

Vengeful

Sea Change

Painkiller

Masks

Prisoners

Unyielding

Hollow

Toxicity

Small Things

Hunters

Badder

Nemesis

Apex

Time

Driven

Remember

Hero

Flashback

Cold

Blood Ties

Music

Dragon

Control

Second Guess

Powerless

Meltdown

True North

Innocence

Southern Comfort

Underground

Silver Tongue

Backwoods

Home

Eye of the Hurricane

Ghosts

Gangland

Reality

Allegiance

Shadows

Fallout

Stolen

Scorched Earth

Heart of the Storm

Trigger Man* (Coming April 2nd, 2025!)

The Girl Who Ran Away

Contemporary Mystery Fantasy

Buried in Lies

Listening to Fear

Bound in Silence* (Coming Late 2024!)

The Sanctuary Series

Epic Fantasy

(in best reading order)

(Series Complete)

Defender (Volume 1)

Avenger (Volume 2)

Champion (Volume 3)

Crusader (Volume 4)

Sanctuary Tales (Volume 4.25)

Thy Father’s Shadow (Volume 4.5)

Master (Volume 5)

Fated in Darkness (Volume 5.5)

Warlord (Volume 6)

Heretic (Volume 7)

Legend (Volume 8)

Ghosts of Sanctuary (Volume 9)

Call of the Hero (Volume 10)

The Scourge of Despair (Volume 11)

Rage of the Ancients (Volume 12)

Ashes of Luukessia

A Sanctuary Trilogy

(with Michael Winstone)

(Trilogy Complete)

A Haven in Ash (Ashes of Luukessia #1)

A Respite From Storms (Ashes of Luukessia #2)

A Home in the Hills (Ashes of Luukessia #3)

Liars and Vampires

YA Urban Fantasy

(with Lauren Harper)

No One Will Believe You

Someone Should Save Her

You Can’t Go Home Again

Lies in the Dark

Her Lying Days Are Done

Heir of the Dog

Hit You Where You Live

Her Endless Night

Burned Me* (Coming in 2024!)

Something In That Vein* (Coming in 2025!)

Southern Watch

Dark Contemporary Fantasy/Horror

(Series Complete)

Called

Depths

Corrupted

Unearthed

Legion

Starling

Forsaken

Hallowed

The Mira Brand Adventures

YA Modern Fantasy

(Series Complete)

The World Beneath

The Tide of Ages

The City of Lies

The King of the Skies

The Best of Us

We Aimless Few

The Gang of Legend

The Antecessor Conundrum

*Forthcoming, title subject to change

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Lewis Moore for the edits, Jeff Bryan, for the proofing, and Lillie of https://lilliesls.wordpress.com for her work proofing and compiling my series bible.

Thanks as always to the great Karri Klawiter of artbykarri.com for the cover.

Thanks, too, to my family for making this all possible.