"She's prickly," Willheim said, as Alex went after Emile. His body language read I'm going to make them behave, but she knew Alex was making sure they'd be okay with this much concentrated transphobia in flannel and shitty cowboy boots. Show off for the Mark, but make sure your people know that you're safe for them.

"They," Hawk said. And waited. They had both sat down upon Emile's oversized, overstuffed couch.

"Beg pardon?" Kaiser said.

Hawk kept her chin up, her glare bare. She kept waiting.

"They," he sighed. "Come on, Dr. West. Forgive an old man his troubles."

"You're sixty-seven. You went through the sixties. You can absolutely pull your head out of your ass and stop using my friends' soft points as your leverage." Hawk said.

"I'm not used to this level of hostility," He said.

"I'm not used to being set up by somebody who could have gotten all the cooperation he wanted twenty-four hours ago." Hawk said.

"You didn't have anything I wanted, twenty-four hours ago. Now, you're my first priorities."

"Aw," Hawk said, dripping on the sarcasm. "I'm so fucking touched." Then a sigh. "Emile grew up in one red state and lives in another. They get rocks thrown through their front windows so often that they bricked them in. And they're an avowed anarcho-communist. You are everything they hate. And they still let you in their living room."

Willheim had been scowling harder every moment. This last one brought him up short. "Beg pardon?"

"They do not and will not trust you without a hell of a lot of work on your part. It was the same for me when I met them, and the same for Alex when I introduced them. They never really had a chance to grow out of the teenager limit-testing phase. They are always testing every single person they know to make you reject them before they decide they like you. Let them be prickly. Let them say obnoxious things. Park the pride the way you parked that nice Chevy out there, and you might find them warming up to you."

"I apparently almost let their friends die," Willheim said, and raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah. But you're also the guy with the keys to the kingdom. The one thing I can promise you, Kaiser, is that they do not like having the fate of the world resting in your hands without any checks and balances. Right now, they want to shoot you and stitch the whole world back together by hand. But all three of us do recognize that we're going to have to keep dealing with you, no matter what. I'm making recommendations so that you two don't eat each other alive."

"You think that Emily could eat me?" Kaiser said.

"Emile, and yes, they could. With their choice of beans and a great wine list. There are a few rules in life. One of the big ones is do not fuck with Emile Yung."

And that was when Alex and Emile returned. Emile had taken the time to put on lipstick and gotten out a couple pink things to layer over the rest of their clothes. Puffy things. Hawk was pretty sure one of them was some species of duster. She had no clue about the other thing. It looked like a very complicated legwarmer made of telephone cord. It was, Hawk thought, the first things Emile grabbed that they could put on quickly. Well, Kaiser had gotten his warning shot across the bow. If he kept being a transphobic dipshit, she'd help Em boil the tar.

Alex walked over to Willheim and placed a large square in front of him. A photo, Hawk realized, of dirt. But not entirely.

In the middle of this photo, beside a dime that looked like a wagon wheel, sat a shape a mere fraction of that size. It was clear, refracting like cut glass or polished quartz, and shaped like a three-sided pyramid, with small diamond-shaped mirrors at each corner. It was purposeful. Man-made.

"Start talking," Alex said, after the silence had echoed through the room for a while.

"You did find it," Kaiser said, more to himself than anything else. Then he visibly collected himself. "The name you're looking for is—"

"Wait," Em said. They crossed to a rummage bin that might, at some point in its life, have been a pedestrian dresser. The drawers might even have been capable of closing at some point this decade. After a few moments of shuffling, they produced a recording device. They made a very big deal about setting it down in front of Kaiser. "Continue," they said.

The glare he delivered could have melted paint. "The name you're looking for is Edgar Studdard. Do you want me to spell it for you?"

"The name's familiar," Hawk said.

Em snorted. "Jesus, Hawk. You pay about as much attention to the bourgeois that they pay to ants."

"Ants are better." She said, simply.

"Edgar Studdard is this guy's business partner," Em said. "And up until thirty seconds ago I would have called him the lesser of two evils." Pause. "That made you the big evil. Kind of like spooning, only for businessmen."

"Hey. He's talking." Alex put a gentle hand on Em's elbow. "Listen now, obliterate later."

Kaiser continued "Up until recently, I would have called him my friend. But we weren't. Not really. Just the nearest thing powerful men can become. Rivals, maybe, is another word near what we were to each other. We worked together, yes, but he always wanted to one-up me. Made things difficult, sometimes."

I bet, Hawk thought. And she thought Studdard wasn't the only person obsessed with one-upping a rival. Studdard must have scored a few times to make Kaiser look like he'd just eaten three lemons.

Alex reached across the table and tapped on the picture. "Let's get back to the point. What the fuck is this?"

A sigh. A collapse like the side of a mountain in the storm. "We call it a prism. It's something my organization, the Ararat Project, invented. It's supposed to be a magnification attachment to a laser array. In theory, we could create a cutting laser that could carve holes in mountains, and we could run it off the same wattage as a laser pointer."

"The cat toy?" Emile said.

"That cat toy is the difference between a payload of mostly equipment and one of mostly food. If we're looking at Terraforming Mars—which we are, thanks to climate change—then we need equipment that can do the most with the least. Being able to run mining lasers and heat and oxygen generators off low-voltage solar panels is a piece of the puzzle we're building." A slump. "Or, I should say, we were building. Because the first time we hooked that up to a laser and turned it on, it ripped a hole in the universe."

"How big an explosion did it make?" Alex said.

Kaiser, laughing but not pleasantly, shook his head. "You don't get it. If it exploded or just dug a deep hole I'd be selling the fucking thing to six different governments. It didn't explode. It didn't radiate. It literally cut a hole in the fabric of fucking reality."

"It cut a hole," Hawk repeated, tasting the words to find some extra meaning behind them, "in reality?"

"And whatever was on the other side of the hole was—and is—producing a hell of a lot of that energy signature. Half the people in the lab that day were killed within minutes. I watched it happen. They crystalized and burned and became..." Willheim gulped. "We're calling the ash produced Glass. It's what stuck in the early days. About an hour after testing the array, the missing chunks of the room came back, including the laser array. Whatever was on the other side had battered the shit out of it. But it came back with the tip.

"We call these Prisms," Kaiser tapped the photograph. "They're made of seven pieces—four slabs of crystal for the base and facets, three mirrors to refract light into the core of the system. One of the downsides is that the process of cutting into reality fuses the crystal together and the prism becomes useless unless you can separate the bits again. Which you can't always do without damaging the array. They work off light. Even ambient light in a room is enough to trigger one if you leave it exposed long enough. We also know the energy is stopped by glass—both its own ashes and the stuff in windows. It's the only reason I'm still alive, why half our team is still alive. We were the ones behind the glass when it activated." A sigh. "We lost a lot of people. And a lot more got hurt. It was all classified up the wazoo, so we kept it out of the papers. Worst day of my life, up till now, started the minute Studdard hit that switch."

"Just how lethal is this shit?" Alex said.

"Well, let's say it's a good thing Mrs. West here uses glass test tubes. That said, with an organic stopper—dead matter takes longer to burn, but it will burn—you'd better drop that sample tube in the nearest terrarium and drop a pane of glass on top of that fucker, because we killed four techs before we figured out that glass is the only known safeguard...ironically enough, against Glass itself."

"So if it's that fucking bad," Alex said, with emphasis and care, "did you do this shit a second time."

"I didn't," Willheim said, and the glare he gave Alex could have blistered paint.

Hawk thought sideways for a minute, then said, "Studdard. He's doing it."

"At least, that's what you want us to think you think," Em said, arms crossing the flat planes of their bosom.

"Kid," Willheim said, after a loudly pregnant pause, "Do other people usually need a fucking spread-sheet to track your sentences or is it just me?"

"I'll make you do one for every crime, Mr. CEO. You just give me time," they purred.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"Hey. Stop showing your fangs to the competition. Wait until he gets in reach, at least." Alex waved a hand between Em and Kaiser. "God. Chill out before you wind up shooting the only guy who can save the world right now."

"At least you acknowledge that," Kaiser said.

"I'm not acknowledging shit more than your inherent value as a person. Because if you didn't have that you'd be dogshit in my books and I'd let them power-wash your ass out of here. You still are the guy who tried to kill me."

"Not like that," Willheim said.

"Hey!" Hawk said. "Focus on the energy signature eating through the planet, because that's a little more important." She waited. The silence was beautiful and, for once, still. "Alright. Mr. Willheim. Please. We are aware that you've been testing soil samples from nine different areas. I'm willing to assume that your first test was one, and last night was another. That means there are seven—"

"There are twelve dead zones. Not nine, and that's including neither our initial laser test nor the events in Mrs. Cummings' garden. We include those, and some similar incidents, the number is more like twenty-nine. We've only run soil samples on nine. The first nine..." he trailed off. "When we didn't really understand the danger. When we thought the rules still applied. This shit seems to be pealing our understanding of basic quantum physics apart like a goddamned banana peel."

"That's not how physics works," Em and Hawk both muttered this at the same time.

"I know that. Same as I know this just means we've found something new, changing our understanding, whatever. But it means that the stuff we thought we understood doesn't work, and that's the last thing we want right now."

"How long do these Events last for?" Hawk said.

Willheim gave her another of those long, measuring looks. "The first one lasted for an hour. Our attempts to replicate it—using much lower powered equipment—couldn't stay open for a tenth of that. We got it up to a minute before we recognized the danger and realized we couldn't push it, anymore.

"About two days later, we found the first dead zone. Again, we didn't understand what we were looking at, but based on the size of the hole, the amount of damage, and the rate of exposure at other sites, we think it was maybe the size of a sewing needle's hole and open for less than ten minutes...which was still more than we'd ever managed in controlled settings. That one's also not in the nine you know about. It's not on any records. I black holed the incident." A long pause, as Kaiser's jaw worked at an emotion. Anger, Hawk thought. It was the sort of thing that you'd chew like a bone. "I've got the fucker on camera, planting the Prism within twenty feet of my employees. What he did took out the entire facility. One hundred and seventy people died."

Em stared at him open mouthed, making a noise like a dying stork. Either that, or a duck in a hydraulic press. "That's what that was about?"

"What was what about?" Alex said.

"Dr. Yong is probably referring to the freak tornadic storm we had at a facility six months ago. And yes, Dr. Yong, that was what the 'tornado' story covered up. I'd brave a dozen congressional hearings about OSHA and employee rights if it kept the wrong people from finding out I have a device that can kill hundreds of people and you can fuel it with a flashlight. That was the first and only time we've had to use the National Guard to secure a site." A pause. "Ten of them died, too. It'll probably be fifteen before the end of the year. The after effects of surivival are something...well, perhaps it's something you Wests should pay attention to."

"How long did the first Event last for?" Hawk said, dragging the conversation back to what interested her.

"An hour, Mrs. West," he said. "And it was months after the first. About the same amount of time it would have taken us to scale up, if we'd kept testing the prisms consistently." He tilted his head now, and added, "Why don't you tell me what you think, Mrs. West? No, no. Don't look at your husband for a cue. Look at me. What are you thinking, right now?"

She'd looked at Alex because she knew answering his question would be a mistake. It would, she thought, be the first step towards trust. A dangerous thing, that, especially with this man. Now she couldn't look. He'd gotten her alone, despite there being two other people in the room, and for just a moment she felt this all was unwinnable.

So she asked herself, What would Alex do? And she grabbed the first reasonable thought to pass her by.

"I think the only reason you're calling Dr. Yong by their honorific is because you don't have to discomfort yourself to respect her. You've consistently avoided any pronouns with them, and any name. And you've done the opposite with me, haven't you? You haven't called me 'Dr', not once. It's been Mrs. West, or 'Miss' when I annoy you a little bit more than normal. You're still playing games with us, Mr. Willheim. And you want us to trust you?"

The silence continued, until Hawk felt a real answer wouldn't be capitulation. It'd be putting the poor man out of his misery.

"He was testing, same as you. Studdard, he was testing the prisms and he outran you. Because he wasn't on the same page as you. He wouldn't have begun testing it in public if he thought he didn't have control. In fact, I bet you think that every single Event between your first test and now?"

"Just another test," Kaiser said. "With an increasing disregard for human life. Studdard never felt our employees were really human. He called them the human resource, and didn't mind that he burned through it in every community we ever ran a shop in. But outside of the job, if you weren't on his payroll, he did seem to treat people like they were...you know. People. But he's been losing that. His tests are escalating."

"How?" Alex said.

"Four tests were in the middle of nowhere, and they contaminated something little bigger than a basketball court. Well away from populations. And then they started getting closer to civilization, and closer. Mrs. Cummings was the first test in public, and it was exponentially larger than anything we've seen from Studdard so far."

"Why the fuck isn't the government involved in this?" Alex said.

"I've paid them off. More than once. I've spent nearly a billion dollars in my own money to keep this quiet." He trailed off. "I know you have faith in the government—" Em snorted, and Kaiser nodded to them. "So you don't have faith in the policies. But you have faith in the infrastructure."

"I use well-water," Em said.

"You use roads. You shop at a grocery store, which means you use the roads, and the farmer subsidies, and the corporate subsidies. Hell, the only reason most of you didn't eat grass and sawdust as young adults is because the government bailed out the banks in 2008. You have faith that the roads will always be there, and you'll get to continue to use them for free. And the Wests didn't have well-water. And I bet when the droughts hit, and the earthquakes, and the hurricanes, and all other measure of disaster, you sit down politely like a good little sheep and wait for the shephards from FEMA to tell you where to go. I've paid FEMA off four times in my life. Only two of them have involved this mess."

Silence followed this.

"Why?" Hawk said. "Why on earth would you do that?"

"They'd test things that I'd rather not get tested. In one case a facility flooded out. The EPA still can't figure out how a fairly herbicidal chemical managed to turn four fields into very dead earth. That was my fault. Second time an earthquake cracked something that was moderately radioactive. We got it cleaned up before a couple unofficial deadlines, so certain government organizations simply...didn't show up. And it cost people their lives. No one immediately, except for one poor bastard having a heart attack...but I'm pretty sure you can lay more than that on my doorstep. The government is only as good as its laws, and its willingness to enforce those laws. Money speaks louder than legislation, Miss West."

"Till it doesn't, anymore," Em said. "This time's different, isn't it? This time there was damage to people's property, in suburbia no less. This time you can't talk or buy your way out of it."

"This time I could and damn well did buy my way out." The hostility was immediate. It faded into something more apathetic nearly immediately. "But this was the last time. My contacts have told me I have this last chance to clean it up myself. Otherwise, they're going to involve the government agencies. And I can't do it."

These last words echoed louder than all that came before. Here was a man many considered the richest and most powerful CEO on the planet, and he was admitting to something he and his money could not do.

"You can't stop Studdard," Alex said, narrowing the focus.

"No. We can't. The only thing that makes me feel better is, if I can't do it, I don't think the government can do it, either. I have better toys. What I didn't have before was you two. You both remind me of Studdard, you know. Same stubborn bastard energy. You two beat me in my own game. Twice."

"Twice?" Alex said.

"You were supposed to be dissuaded. You were supposed to stay home and let the experts handle it. You were supposed to get sick—not die, just get very sick, the way Elizabeth Cumming's daughter is sick—and you didn't. You were supposed to die, once you got too near. And you didn't. You, Mrs. West—" A pause. "Dr. West. You're right. I'm being a pill. You walked into a building I'd fully occupied and walked out with..." A long pause. "Why the ants?"

"You want to know how we survived? We think it's because Alex and I ate honeypots as part of our last hurrah."

A long, disbelieving pause. "You ate ants."

"And they were fucking delicious," Alex said. "Like popping boba."

"Why the fuck would ants—"

"Why would cinnamon oil work?" Hawk snapped. She was more than a little tired of it. "Why would a laser and crystal array rip holes in space? Maybe it's the anti-microbial properties. We already know those are pretty cool. Maybe it's the combination of florals—"

"Not with your ants, its not," Em muttered.

Hawk did not throw something at her friend in front of a billionare. "And maybe it's a third factor we don't know about."

"Why wouldn't it be floral essential oils with your ants?" Willhiem asked.

Hawk sighed. "Because I use a commercial feed on my honeypots. They're fragile and hard starters, and its an element I didn't need to worry about. And that's why I went back to my house. Because Em is right. We don't know that every honeypot works. We aren't even sure mine work. Correlation does not equal causation, right?"

"And they're one of the more obscure species. Why couldn't you do Mexicanus?" Em said.

"I did do Mexicanus. They got eaten by ferals."

"What'd you do? Forget your barrier?"

"I'd appreciate it if we stayed on track." A pause. "So...you think ants are what made the difference?"

"I think we don't know what we don't know." Hawk said. "We need to test it out."

Kaiser leaned forward. "it makes me uncomfortable. I don't think we have that kind of time. We need to be able to run investigations in the center of these Events, before the hole closes on us. Right now, we can't get anything near it. Except maybe for you two."

"Meaning my honeypots might be the answer we're looking for." She paused, considerately. "Which would mean we're fucked."

"Why?" Kaiser said, alarmed.

"Because it takes two years for a colony to be established enough to regularly lose members and survive. And honeypots are goddamn fragile." And, quickly, she went through her three previous attempts at starting a colony.

Kaiser put his head in his hands. "There's more than one species of these things?"

"Forty-six, last time I checked," Hawk said. "Plus or minus a couple species groups."

"Species...you know what? I neither want nor need to know. What's the best thing I could do for you, right now?"

"Find us another M. Depilis colony. One that's mature, with Queen," Hawk said.

"But I thought—" Em said.

"If it's something unique to my ants, I can brood-boost from the mature colony and put the new colony on the same care regimen. It won't fix much immediately, but we should have a steady replete supply within a year...and we can probably start getting extra repletes within two weeks."

Em added, "And get M. Mexicanus. Hopefully this stuff is in more than just depilis."

"Shit in one hand, hope in the other," Kaiser said.

"See which one gets full first," Em said. "Problem is, that saying leaves out how shit is the thing you gotta get rid of. Hope is the thing you need to live, almost like oxygen." She paused. "But Hawk...why not just use your ants?"

"There's maybe, maybe twenty repletes in both colonies. First emergency we have, we're wiping them out. And how long does the effect last? And that even assumes that it is the ants...and that I'm comfortable letting Lex Luthor here take over that angle." Hawk jerked her chin at Kaiser.

"Well, I'll tell you what." Kaiser rose. "I'm going to get you your ants. And I'll get you some help, and some extra samples to work with. But you're going to have to figure out what to do with what I send you."

And that brought an outraged sound out of both Hawk and Emile. Alex just looked at him. "I take it you want to test out your gift horse?" He said.

"Gift my ass," Willheim said, and looked just as cranky as Alex thought he'd be. "You two are my new pet remoras. I can't make you go away...so I might as well see what you can really do. You'll get my presents here in a few hours. You can toss them out or work with them to solve our problem. Show me what I can trust you with, Mr. and Mrs. West. Ball is in your court."

And with that, the lion of technology left the room.