Hawk was trying to clean up what Kaiser’s cleaning team had missed, which fortunately did not include a single one of her ant tanks. Her campo girls were winding down towards diapause (her least favorite time of the year), her pogos were happy with their seeds. The latter sat just beside her brand new tank of fire ants. She glared at them as she gave the Pogos more seeds and a chopped up mealworm...and, reluctantly, gave three worms to the goddamn fire ants. Oh, she hoped that Orb was worth giving the invasive little shits a foothold in her territory. Every time she walked by that tank, she dreamed up new ways to get that tank into a deep freeze. She really hated red imported fire ants.

And her honeypots were still at Em's. She'd need to go back and get them. She just didn't have the heart to write her poor, depleted colonies off just yet. She might be able to get them to recover if she babied them. And there was also the vanishingly small chance that Kaiser might get desperate and give her the giant Queen she'd captured at the Zoo. Probably not, but a girl could dream.

But the ants were the only good news. The white-suit's reluctance to dig through ant hills had not extended to the rest of Hawk's belongings. Her bedroom had looked like a tornado had hit it, with every drawer out of every dresser, clothes on the floor, on the bed, on every chair. It had been cleaned, in that things were put into drawers again, but they were the wrong drawers. Plus it was the thought of it, her things being manhandled, tossed about, put away wrong. It felt like her fingerprints were gone, her scent evaporated from her own pillow. A dead woman coming back to life. That’s what she felt right now.

What on earth had these people been looking for? She hadn't done anything when they started doing this. Every cabinet in the kitchen had been rummaged through, and a lot of her plates, cups, bowls and utensils were scattered across counter top and floor. The cleaner had put them back without washing them. Her computer was gone, and she had no idea what Kaiser's men had done with it before Leo had them all arrested. Hopefully she was going to find it left in a bathroom somewhere. She was too overwhelmed to start reorganizing her bedroom or the wreck they'd made of her office (she'd never get that paper organized again. The draft of her doctorate was scattered in three different rooms), but she could compartmentalize, and tell herself she just had to do one thing. Just pick up the papers. Just pick up the socks. And to start, just do the dishes.

So she walked through the house to make sure she'd collected them all, filled as much counterspace as she could with organized chaos, and then began washing. Pettily, she thought, so there, Kaiser. I’m wasting all that money you paid the cleaning lady.

There was a comfort in chores. A sameness. Sure, the world as she knew it was mortally wounded, a hole was belching out lethal energy, humanoid apes and giant ants, and she had the core of some sort of demi-god Archetype-thing in a fish tank full of fire ants, but she also had to do the dishes, clean up the living room, wash the toilets and her laundry...life was normal, she thought, as long as you had a load of laundry you had to do. She could even pretend, for a brief, brilliant moment, that this was all there was. That she and Alex had never met Kaiser, that the old woman and her dog hadn't died, that everything was perfectly and wonderfully normal, and Alex would be through that door any minute.

He might still be through that door any minute. Bittermoss can't possibly take that long. He's there, and he'll be calling in a few minutes, and then he'll be home tomorrow at the latest.

And that was the mantra she repeated as she scoured her violated flatware. She'd made it through most of the dinner plates and was starting on her bowls when the phone rang. She picked it up and smiled. It was Alex, checking in. She answered it. "Hey, Hand—"

"Hawk, you need to listen to me." Alex said, and all light in the universe evaporated at that tone. The safe panacea of washing dishes was gone; she was back in Kaiser's world. Back to a place where the air could kill you. Alex sounded bad, and the cough he tried to hide from her sounded worse.

"Baby, what's going on?"

"Naomi Studdard just told me that Edgar Studdard attempted suicide by sitting inside the Prism he built for his daughter. He survived the way the Ape survived, except he apparently went off his gord from the isolation. Naomi is the one who has been setting off the Prisms, not Studdard himself." And then Alex gasped.

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"Honey, are you okay?"

"No. I'm not. I'm handcuffed, and the building I’m in…it’s a Prism, Hawk. It’s a giant Prism…I don't think I have a lot of time. They're so confident there isn't anything you can do to stop them that they're letting me call you to say goodbye." He gave a grunt. "And I think they drugged me. I'm having trouble focusing. It took me too long to dial your number...I don't know what's going on."

Her stomach, previously in freefall, hurtled down even faster. "What do you mean you're inside a Prism."

"I think they're too cowardly to put one of their own in here," and Alex raised his voice. She could hear grunts of effort. Other voices. A woman's cold laughter, as if someone were enjoying the tableau in front of her.

"I'm going to call the police—"

"Hawk, this is a school. It's in session and they fed all the students Honeypots. They're taking the children with them. And I don't think anyone can stop them in time—" he gasped again. "They gave me something, Hawk. An injection. Right before I called you. It's making it hard for me to think—"

"You just told me that. I get it. I get it. You can get out. You can fight!" she said.

"I'm in handcuffs." He sounded like he was about to weep. Then he said, "Do you remember what we got from the Ape, and who I told you to hide it from?"

She nodded, then realized he couldn't see what she was doing. Crying, that's what she was doing. "Yes," She said.

"Call them. Tell them what I just told you. That it's Naomi Studdard, and she's setting off a Prism in Bittermoss School. And that you have to come get me. That's your job now, Hawk. You have to find me, baby."

"I will. I'll get Kaiser to help me and I'll come get you. It'll be okay."

"I hope so. I have no idea how long it will take or where I'll be, but...you have to try—GOD, it's so hard to thin—"

And, after a sound like the world ending, the phone went dead.

For a few precious, heart-rending seconds, Hawk stared at the inert phone in horror. Then she raced to the living room, where the TV sat in a large entertainment center, beneath a Porthos vine and a picture of desert flowers. She turned on the TV, switching to a news channel and inviting hell into her last safe place. The first screen she saw was of the Bronx Zoo, and a part of her unclenched. Surely if the disaster Alex had implied had happened, they'd be showing Boston. Assuaged, she muted the television and found Kaiser's number in her cell phone, from one of the last times he'd called her. She hit dial and waited.

Waited.

Waited.

Finally, an answer. "Hello, Mrs. West. I was just about to--"

"Alex just called me from Boston. He said that Naomi Studdard handcuffed him inside a Prism, and gave him something that made it hard to speak. He was damn near incoherent. I think he needs someone to get there, fast."

"Boston?" Kaiser sounded suddenly shocked, even panicked. It was the first time she'd heard an emotion from him and believed it. "They're setting off the Prism in Boston?"

And then he hung up on her. She stared at the phone in disbelief, caught between the urge to run--run to Boston, run to Alex and Bittermoss School and save him--and the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing she could do. She was in Arizona. Even if she got in the car right now and started driving, there was no way to get to Boston before something happened.

And maybe you're wrong. Maybe Alex is incoherent. Maybe--

But all her hopes died when the television suddenly cut to a different Event Horizon. Gone was the honeysuckle-bordered horror of the Bronx Zoo's monkey house. In its place was somewhere she did not recognize, with freeways and highways and old growth trees. It could have been Boston. And then the crawl confirmed it. Disaster at Boston School. Then, a few seconds later, the crawl switched. Second energy hole opened in Boston.

But none of that even touched the horror on the screen. Because there was a second Event Horizon now, bigger than the one in the Bronx zoo if the roads beside the hole were anything to go by. Already, several blocks were Glassed, vegetation gone beige. As Hawk watched, a car drove in, through the freeway. It maintained speed at first...then slowed. As if the foot on the gas pedal couldn't quite maintain pressure anymore. Maybe it was limp and lifeless, but Hawk didn't think so. Hawk thought that hypothetical foot had just turned to ash and had been shredded by the pressure of the pedal.

It drove through the Event Horizon's aural spikes, that maelstrom of white and blue and gold rippling around the eternal darkness within the hole through reality. The car seemed to gain color, becoming something so bright, so red, so alive. It was like a small cherry in a bowl of neon milk, for just a few moments. Then it was through the Event Horizon and in the hole. It vanished then, likely from the time dilation past the Event Horizon. Another car followed, and another. No one had gotten a blockade set up yet. They hadn't had the time, and with that spread of energy, odds were anyone who tried would die. And at the heart of it all, staring through the television screen like an apparition of death, was the ink black hole, the tear in reality, the death of all hope.

And Hawk fell to her knees in abject despair, because this meant Alex was somewhere inside.

Hawk and Alex's Adventures will continue in

THE GODS OF LIGHT AND LIARS,

now posting