Em blushed, and Hawk saw it.

It started with the name Henry Dyson, a man Hawk knew Emile hated. She knew this, she supposed, the way sailors had known where the dragons lay. It was a thing you assumed, like sunrise's inevitability. And the two scientists had robbed each other of research more times than Hawk could count.

But there, to Hawk's joy: the blush. The evidence for the romantic cryptid, more precious and feral than a Tasmanian wolf. That was a thing destroyed by men like Willheim, the men who pen up and poison the wild places. They spent the eras of humanity the way they spent their wealth, splurging on tiger hunts and wide open lawns, on coliseums drenched in the blood of prisoner, slave, and heretic. The survivors are penned, not to salvage for some future generation, but for the promise of a guaranteed trophy. They wanted the world at their pleasure, stretched out and pinned to cards like butterflies. And what remained is tamed, a tourist attraction with no true teeth. Nature conquered, they moved on to the mind, stripping it of things they don't understand. The unsafe, untamed loves, the lusts they cannot fathom, the faiths they cannot achieve. Things no one should touch, for the human heart is the ultimate untamable beast. It is Chimera, it is Scylla, it is the great dragon coiled around the root of the world. It is the lions that guard sheep, devour only the enemy, and turn velvet to the beloved touch. Here came Willheim and men like him, and Chimera is caught, flayed, drowned in formaldehyde. The lion, no threat, is now footstool, bedspread. Not tamed; dissected. People like Emile were reduced to simplistic lovers on television, their homosexual taxonomy a thing of corporate compromise, and both the actors playing them are straight. Teeth pulled. Claws removed. How could there be anything new here, those compromises whisper. How could there be anything worth your eyes or time? And here was Emile, with blush, at the whisper of her supposed enemy's name.

This was undiscovered country.

Hawk was rapidly reviewing a near decade of interactions, and coming up with a thesis she rather liked. It had to do with that blush, roseate across a colorless past.

Well. This could actually be interesting, She thought, and filed it away for later.

So it was Alex who broke the silence after Kaiser left. "The truck threw me," he said, as the truck itself coughed to life and began its retreat from the Yong residence. "Somebody loves that truck. I thought it was him. He almost got me."

"Why isn't it him?" Em said. "It looks like it got polished by a diaper cloth before he drove it over."

"He dressed up for us. That flannel and the designer jeans. That's a nice, folksy lie to put us at ease. Nothing about the persona he walked out for us is genuine, anymore than the first persona we met was the real Kaiser. First time we met him," Alex jerked his chin at Hawk, "he was Willheim, Billionaire magnate, Lion of Technology. This time we got Kaiser, farm boy made big and overwhelmed by a disaster that—note how he implied this—isn't of his own making." Alex spread his hands out, a kind of shadowed Mia culpa meant to mirror his words.

"I thought it was real nice he had a name ready to go," Hawk said. She looked faintly sick.

"Yep. Thought you'd broken through to the real man, didn't you?"

She'd never felt so much dismay as she did, right now. She'd been watching, goddamn it. She'd known he was crooked, had all her guards up and in order, and he still got through to her. And there was a mirror of her own expression on Emile's face. Dismay, despair. They'd been less vulnerable to Kaiser than anyone...in theory. Their anarchist philosophy, their trans-ness, both should be considered an inoculation. They recognized the great, rotted belly of the corporate whale...and they'd still fallen for the ruse.

Alex smiled thinly. "I almost swallowed too, kids. Until he told us that bullshit about letting us just get kind of sick and just kind of fumbling the ball. I ever tell you about the time my Daddy's best buddy told me to shoot myself in the head?"

Blinking at the non-sequester, Hawk said, "What the hell, Alex?"

"Daddy's buddy thought a kid with a nicked ear would be more sympathetic to the cops. Daddy kicked his ass five ways to Sunday, because you can't just 'nick' your ear at that range. Same way you can't just nick an ear, you can't just wander into that sort of shit the way he let us and not die. I don't know what plans he had for us, but if they did involve letting us walk to his precious fucking Prism, he wanted us fucking dead. Irony is...if he had copped to setting us up, I would have believed him. That's the kind of unvarnished honesty you can land giants with. So thank God he isn't just a liar. Nope. Kaiser lies dumb."

And then he looked to Hawk.

This was one of their more regular games. He'd identify someone's actions for her, their surface motives, and then let her try and figure out why such an action would support or defy someone else's con. So she tried to play the game now. Why was the lie dumb? "He lied about something we could verify?" She said.

He shook his head. "He lied about something that didn't matter, babe."

"If he tried to kill you, for real, that really fucking matters, Alex," Emile said.

"Not in the game we're playing now, it doesn't. You can't think about it in terms of life or death, because he isn't. You gotta get on the con's level. Get in the mud if you have to. Under it, more often than not, is how you get ahead of him. So get in the mud, and think of it as chess moves. Moving pawns, bishops, your Queen, your King. We're trying to checkmate each other and all of a sudden he's trying to move a pawn to the rear to get his Queen back. Sometimes that's part of a play, but sometimes it's because a player is nervous without the Queen. The rest of the context tells you if it's a play, or nerves. Kaiser's nerves. He cares too much about how we see him. Being honest about his intentions would have won him enough good will, we three would have swallowed his next lies whole. But he couldn't do it. He could not allow us to see him as a murderer. He cared too much about his image to land the fish." He shook his head. "Big mistake."

"Huge," Hawk muttered her libation to Julia Roberts. "But why show him you didn't buy it?"

Em looked confused.

A sigh. "Maybe I thought it was worth shooting across his bow. Give him a warning. A chance to make things right. Besides. Now he'll target me and not you two."

"What?" Hawk said.

"If he's honest, he won't," Alex said, quickly. "If he's honest, he'll suck it up and work to earn our trust again."

Hawk nodded. Waited a few moments to make sure Alex was done, and said, "If."

This got her a nod, a glance of pride, both of which buried under a healthy pall of fear. "Thus said the Spartans: If." He sighed. "So I said the quiet parts out loud. He's real pissed now, and he knows..." Alex stopped dead. The fear was full grown in his eyes. He was not letting it escape.

So Hawk did it for him. "He knows that if he wants to get to us," Hawk gestured between herself and Emile, "He first has to get rid of you."

"Exactly," He said. And then he kissed his wife as if there were nothing left in the universe to fear.

***

"Help" proved to be the expected Henry Dyson and a laser that did not work. The laser was a large, vaguely incomprehensible bulk that gave Hawk the willies. Henry Dyson was much more approachable. He was a short-ish little man, the sort that seemed folded so tightly you could bounce a quarter off his psyche. His hairline suggested the beginnings of male pattern baldness. His eyes were beautiful, especially when they looked at Emile.

Oh, my, Hawk thought, as she watched her friend and their erstwhile rival look at each other. Em was pure subterfuge. Each glance came from shuttered eyes, a muttered greeting from angry lips. It was as if the incarnation of "Fuck the world" were facing the cognitive dissonance of actually finding one good person.

Except he stole their research, Hawk thought.

And Henry was absolutely gonzo on Emile. In fact, it was nearly funny. If Em had cut less of a chip on their shoulder, they might notice the way Dyson's eyes followed them around like they were a puppy. Not his puppy. You didn't look longingly at something that was already yours. But he was the incarnation of want, the manifestation of restraint, all wrapped up in an ill-fitting lab coat and a very old pair of dress shoes. Not woof. More like yip.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"Hello, Doctor Yong," he said, and then glanced once at Hawk. "Hey, Hawk."

"Hi, Henry," she said, cheerfully. Either this was going to be a disaster of nuclear proportions, or this was going to be fun. Either way, her seats were ringside.

"Henry," Em sniffed. Em's sniffs came in a myriad of flavors. This one was definitely in the "Grudgingly positive" category. Henry obviously hadn't hung around Em very often, because he looked a bit crestfallen.

Hawk looked at Alex, who was watching two highly observant adults being completely blind to each other, and who looked rather like a cat viewing a small, slow rodent. He met his wife's eyes, and gave a small shake of his head. Meaning no, he was not going to give Em or Henry a push. He was just going to watch. Aww. That was nearly disappointing.

The laser was a more predictable disaster, because there was no way in hell its more delicate components could have survived the trip, and all four people gathered around it knew this.

"DOA?" Alex asked a disgusted-looking Emile, who had opened a panel of things that looked very important, in an incomprehensible way.

"Definitely," they said, and gave the non-functioning device, about the size of a shopping cart, a heavy push.

"Don't do that," Dyson said, still flushed. He said it the way one would treat a sibling; he looked at Em like they were the crux of the world. "It'll get worse." Then he thrust a hand out to Alex, as if realizing there was a fourth member of their party for the first time. "Henry Dyson."

"Alisdar West. Call me Alex. Everyone does."

"Huh. And Dr. West. Good to see you. I enjoyed that last paper you wrote on Camponotus. Nice work. That must have been one hell of a colony."

"It still is," She said. "Assuming your people didn't hose down my pets with insecticide."

He winced. "Yeah. The boss really screwed the dog with you two."

"Why are you working for him?" Hawk said.

"Because he made the universe profitable for a hot minute. I can't do studies like your campo paper. There's no profit in it...or there wasn't, until Kaiser came along." Henry fussed with the exposed circuits Em had found.

"Huh," Alex said. He had his own version of the folksy down-home boy on, only his was basically himself, only guarded. "What'd he want to know?"

"I mean...the name is Project Ararat. He was planning for the end of the world. Just a different kind of end-of-world, if that makes sense." Dyson shrugged.

"Gimme an example," Alex said.

"Like, he asked me how fucked we'd be if all the isopods died because of climate change."

Alex saw Hawk wince. "How fucked would we be?" he asked his wife.

"Fucked," said Hawk, Em, and Henry Dyson all at once. Dyson was the one who continued. "Think about how the world would be if you fired all the janitors, the garbage guys, the crews at the sewage plants. That's what soil creatures like Isopods—you probably called them pill bugs or roly-polys as a kid—are for the world. They're the janitors."

"And the compost-makers," Hawk added. "They eat leaf-litter and poop it back out. Some of the lovliest planting soil is the stuff I've cleaned out of isopod cultures." She paused. "And we have no way to replace them."

"They're bugs. Can't..." Alex started to say, then stopped and sighed. "It's like the honeypot ants, isn't it?"

A nod from all three etymologists. "The best way to replace an isopod is with another isopod. Ditto springtails, mites, ants, wasps, bees, beetles. They're already the bedrock of our ecology." Hawk said.

"Which is," Henry interrupted, "what I think Willheim is trying to reverse engineer. The world's ecology. Before the Glass Events began, we were basically operating on the assumption that everything was going to die from climate change." Another pause. "Look, I get that Kaiser is an asshole. But he's trying to save the world and that makes him our asshole, and our asshole really wants to backdoor the ecology to the most basic of bare essentials."

"You can be an asshole and still have to wipe the shit off before you go in public," Em said. "And he's looking at the basic, bare essentials every time he goes out to take a shit."

"We're playing nice, Em," Hawk said.

"Oh, goody! Does that mean I can steal his research on the chemical tolerance of Yellowjackets the way he ganked mine on Weaver Ants?" Em said, hotly. She pointed at Dyson.

"I did not steal—" Dyson said.

"You knew goddamn well I was—" Em wheeled on him, shouting.

"Children." Alex shouted louder. Both scientists turned towards him with an abashed look on their faces. "End of the world trumps stolen research and the question of it was actually stolen. So I need to know if this," he gestured between the two of them, "is going to be a problem."

"It's built up resentment," Dyson sighed.

"Yeah. Plus I hate his heteronormative guts." Em crossed their arms and glared especially hard.

"Well, stop being provocative on purpose." Alex said.

"You want them to stop breathing, too?" Dyson muttered under his breath, which earned him a very sharp look from Em.

"So. Laser is a bust. I assume he wanted us to test the one Prism we've got with it," Hawk said, half shouting to be heard over the interpersonal friction. "But I'm also assuming he wanted the fucking thing to break."

"He assured me the laser would survive the trip," Dyson said. But he was frowning.

"Did anybody tell him otherwise?" Hawk said.

"Half the scientific staff. We only have two of these lasers." Dyson had his hands in his pocket. He was the definition of hangdog.

"Well, now you have one. So. Just how hard is it to recreate an Event in a lab?"

"As far as we know, we've never done it successfully," Dyson said.

Now that caught Hawk's attention. Hadn't Kaiser implied that these things could go off with exposure to ambient light? "Never?" She said.

"Not even once. We can do it with our own Prisms, but they're nowhere near as successful as Studdard's."

"Ever met the guy?" Alex interrupted.

A couple blinks. "Yeah. Back when the Ararat Project was still focused on Climate Change. He was a fucking asshole. Above and beyond Kaiser. My lab used to basically hide behind Kaiser when Studdard showed up."

"How do you activate your own Prisms?" Hawk said. Both men looked at her. She continued the redirection. "You said that you can only create a Glass Event when using your own Prisms. Right?"

"Yeah," Dyson said.

"So...how do you make yours work?" She said.

"Shove the laser at it. Turn it on. Shine it at one of the aux mirrors—the little diamond shapes that hang off the Prism—and let the light bounce around in the thing until it activates. Hell, we can activate one of them using ambient light. It doesn't go very far, but—"

"—but if we can figure out how to activate the Prism we found, we won't need a laser."

"And can we talk for a minute about how fucking scary that is?" Alex said. "If you can activate one of these things with ambient light—and yes, you said you can—then you have something you can bring anywhere. City hall. A crowded stadium."

"We've been imagining somebody sneaking a whole laser array into Mrs. Cumming's back yard. But if all they needed was a few slabs of crystal and a flashlight...they only had to go over her back fence. She was right. Somebody did poison her garden." Alex sounded sad.

"If you can power these things with a flashlight," Em said, "You wouldn't need to be Kaiser Willheim to turn it into a million bucks. Just...walk it into public places and start killing people until they're willing to meet your ransom demands."

"That," Dyson said, very softly, "is pretty much what he's doing."

"No, it's not," Alex said, even softer. "Because he hasn't asked for money, yet."

"Maybe he's trying to build up anticipation," Hawk said.

"Fuck corporate marketing. Fuck it in the fucking ear." Em said.

But Alex shook his head. "The government knows about it. They're looking for him. The longer he takes to make demands, the better the odds of catching him. He's on a clock, folks. Every Event brings the good guys one step closer to catching him. He is going to make a mistake. He probably already has. We just haven't caught it yet."

"And what would the point of that be?" Dyson said.

"They caught Dennis Raider, the BTK killer, with a mistake. He asked the cops if they could track a floppy disk back to its sender, and of course they said 'no', when they could. They tracked the disk back to Raider's church," Alex said. Then he added, "Asking the question was the mistake. If you have to ask, you shouldn't do it."

"You assume Studdard is going to do something that basic?" Dyson asked.

"Of course not," Alex said. "Raider didn't just ask that question, you know. The cops investigating him put a lot of time and effort into making him think they were stupid, that they were dumb honest, that he could walk circles around them so that he never thought for a second they would lie to him. It was a beautiful job, especially coming out of cops." Alex sniffed.

Hawk stepped forward. "What we need to do is get Studdard to think we're stupid?"

"Yep." Alex sighed. "Him too."

"Too?" Hawk said. He waved her away.

"So...maybe while we're figuring out what makes the Prism tick, we need to do the same with Studdard," Em said. "Figure out what makes him tick."

"Same things as the rest of us, according to Alex," Hawk said.

The other two etymologists turned towards Alex like heliotropes to the sun.

He sighed. "Daddy taught me. He didn't get Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, but that's what he worked off of. The hierarchy is—" he put his hand down, near the surface of the demolished laser. "—physical needs, so food, shelter, sleep." He stepped his hand up. "Safety and security, so employment, property ownership, sort of a trust that you'll be able to meet your base needs in the future. Then it's love and relationships," the hand stepped up, "Self esteem," the hand stepped up, "and Self-actualization. That's your highest level, where we develop morality, creativity, our sense of meaning. It's the pinnacle of the human experience. If you undermine any of the other levels, you cannot reach the pinnacle anymore. The best cons work by destabilizing one of the middle points in the hierarchy. Safety and security, or love and relationships. Cut them off from self-esteem and self-actualization. Make them think they need what you have, to the point of destabilizing their own financial security."

"I don't think we can apply con-artist logic to a murderer," Dyson said.

"Why not? The only difference is the scale of the crime, and the consequences. But people are people everywhere. Kill or con, anybody can become a mark. You. Me. Kaiser." A pause. "What we need to figure out is what need Studdard isn't getting. What made him think that this was the only choice he had?"

"And why was this worth blowing up his whole life," Em added.

"I'll just settle for knowing who he is," Hawk said.

And all three of them turned as one to Henry Dyson, who looked dismayed. "Why the hell are you people looking at me?”