Mattias insisted Henry Dyson was not dead.

Hawk West knew differently. Henry Dyson’s body lay on a plastic tarp, amid glorious crystal spires and the deep heart’s red of his own blood. One of the soldiers under Captain Michael Spectre’s command had done a very cursory examination of the lethal wound. It had pierced Henry’s heart. He had bled out rapidly, in the arms of his lover, Emile Yong. They knelt beside the tarp wrapped body, touching it infrequently. Not as if for comfort, but as if they could not believe this thing, this hundred-eighty odd pounds of meat, had been their moving, living, breathing person just a few minutes ago.

“He is inside of me,” Mattias insisted again, and then he paused. “I can hear him speaking. He is confused, he is—”

And then another shuddering seizure; Mattias had just come out of a dreadful Grand Mal. Hawk and two of the soldiers, including the lone medic, both lurched for him. He’d begun seizing when Kaiser Willheim, billionaire Lion of Industry and all around scumbag asshole had stabbed him with a syringe. Hawk was very worried about what might have been in that syringe, given that moments before he assaulted Mattias, Kaiser had mur—no, not yet—stabbed Henry Dyson with a scalpel. They’d found it lying on the floor of the enormous geode they were currently hiding in.

And Henry Dyson was dead.

No, she thought. Focus on something else. Anything else. The Geode. What the Holian residents called the Nexus. It was a round, huge room, hundreds of feet by hundreds of feet, a dream cavern for a spelunker, filled with milky white crystal. At first Hawk had thought that it was quartz, but it wasn’t. It had properties that defied the laws of physics, was mailable in the hands of newly discovered beings called Archetypes. It was everywhere in this room, encompassing the whole of ceiling and floor; it had a comforting warmth that almost made the spreading red beneath Dyson’s body less horrible.

Dyson is dead.

No. She wasn’t ready for grief, yet. Think of something else. Like why she was here.

Kaiser Willheim had brought her here, though he’d also done his best to get rid of her. She and her husband, Alisdair “Alex” West, had encountered the ninth in a series of Events. Glass Events, they were called, because they occurred when a specially constructed device, called a Prism, ripped a hole in the fabric of reality itself. The Rifts, as Kaiser liked to call them (it was a better name than “murder hole”, which was Emile Yung’s contribution) opened to newly created pocket universes. But it came with a terrible side effect: energies seemed to storm out of the hole, ripping life from matter and rendering organic substances a kind of inert, fragile silica. Humans could be reduced to a pile of glass-like ash in moments.

While exploring this Rift, Hawk had discovered why: There were beings down here, Archetypes of whatever happened to be within the Prism when the Rift was created. And they were draining the world above of life. Their powers to create and sustain the reality inside the rift came at the cost of the reality outside of it.

And her husband Alex was one of them.

There had been five Archetypes down here when Hawk started exploring this Rift. There were four now. She and whatever was left of Alex had killed one—and there was another subject she had to dance away from. She was not ready to think about it, not ready to fully explore the horrors that Kaiser Willheim had created.

Because it was all his fault. He, manipulator that he was, had played his own business partner, Edgar Studdard, into attempting suicide. He’d tried to kill Alex and Hawk multiple times, using their own morality, their own drives against them. When that failed, he’d maneuvered things so that when Naomi Studdard looked to attain godhood, she had Alex to use to attain it. And then, in the end, when he’d been cornered by the General and informed that he would, in fact, be held accountable for what he’d done, he’d stabbed Henry in the heart, and injected Mattias, Archon of Light and friend to the Shadowmaster (neither title something to be held lightly) with something that caused immediate seizures. And now Hawk was caught between a collegue she’d known for decades, dead, and a man she’d known for perhaps a week, alive and distressed and swearing that Henry, the dead man, was alive inside his head.

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Em stood and stalked across the Nexus, across the sheets of heavy duty plastic they’d all laid down to keep the razor sharp crystals from shredding them to bits. They were always a hard-wired bundle of nerves, but now they looked like they wanted to murder someone, drink their blood, and make bird bait out of their entrails, and they didn’t look too willing to discern between friend and foe right now. Hawk, knowing a bit about what they were going through, intercepted.

“Do not hurt him,” Hawk said.

“Henry’s dead.” Em said. “He’s dead. He died in my arms. He’s dead.” It was as if the fact of it had filled her mind. Which it had, Hawk knew. When you lost a loved one like this, it filled the world with sharp edges and hard turns.

“I see that too,” Hawk said, and waited.

“How can you look at me like that?” Em said. “He’s dead.”

“Because we have to make it worth something.” Hawk said.

“Yeah, but you had hope.” Em said. They didn’t wail, and their tears were starting to ebb. The iron hot control they kept over themselves was clear. This was an emotionless accusation, clear and sharp as a stiletto.

“I don’t anymore,” Hawk said. And her friend finally started to still. “Alex is as…” Deep breath. She could do this. Bare her own wound so her friend would know they were not alone. “He’s as dead to me as a stone. I can’t get him back any more than you can Henry.” And she caught Em’s hands before they could launch themselves into a grief-stricken outer orbit. “Kaiser did it. To both of us. And there’s a lot more here than Kaiser stabbing Henry.”

“What?” Em’s grieving eyes begged for an answer.

“He injected Mattias with something—”

“He injected me,” Mattias interrupted, “With Henry.”

A breathless silence followed this.

“Henry is explaining it. I have to use his words…I don’t understand half of it. He’s speaking in my head. It’s hard for me to keep him separate—he says, it’s a backup that Kaiser has, in case his important people die. He uses…what is a spinal tap? Or Stem Cells?” A pause, as the rest of them stood aghast. Hawk was, certainly; a lifetime drowning in decent science fiction had her filling in the gaps immediately. An injection, with stem cells. Some sort of concoction that could transfer memory from one person to another? Mattias continued, “He does not know me. He does not know why he’s here. All he knows is this means he’s died, and Kaiser…Kaiser will want something from him.”

“Well, he’s not fucking getting it,” Em said. But she was still lingering near the tarp-wrapped body. “Henry’s dead.”

“But he can still speak through—” And then Mattias’s eyes rolled up into the back of his head, and Captain Spectre and his medic both had to lunge to keep the man from flinging himself backwards into the milk-crystal.

And Hawk had an idea. “Grab him and shove him up into Earth,” She said.

“But Hawk—we don’t have the tools here, but they won’t have the time there—”

“We need more time down here than maybe he’s got. Shove him up into Earth and wait for me. I’m going to go get help.”

“Who the hell would help—” Began one of the soldiers.

Em interrupted, their face tear-streaked and still deluged with grief. They were a flood-plain, levies broken, unable to stem the tide. “Please tell me you’re not going back down there to find that…that…” but she couldn’t scrape enough horror off her sorrow to even act properly terrified. “He’s not any good. You walked away from him. You know he’s not any good. Not any more.”

Em had bought her disgust for the Shadowmaster as true. Her heart was suddenly somewhat flooded with hope. Not that she could ignite anything with the Shadowmaster, but that she’d successfully distanced herself from him. Because if Em could buy it, knowing that the Shadow was whatever was left of Alex, when Em knew how much Hawk loved him…maybe Kaiser bought it too.

And if Kaiser had bought it…

That doesn’t matter, now, she thought, with an even brighter flare of hope. Kaiser is going to jail.

And if you actually believe that, babe, I’ll sell you every bridge in this country. That’s what Alex would have said. And her imaginary husband had a point: Billionaires do not get punished for crimes in this country. He could say anything he wanted—that he panicked, that he was afraid, that he hadn’t known he was killing Henry—or say nothing at all, and as long as the right people were paid, he’d be fine. Justice wasn’t blind in this country; it was gagged.

One deity at a time. She thought. Our secular god is neutralized for now. I just need to worry about the ones that are still down here.

Who are, mind, still hunting me down.

 “I’m going,” Hawk said, to her friend. “Because I can’t see another way out of this without going after Kaiser, and that’s what he wants.”

“He wanted this? What, Henry dead? A stranger he doesn’t even know incapacitated? What did he even want with this?” Em sobbed, looking at the tarp-covered body like a moth to a flame.

“Put the body Earthside, too. Mattias and Henry’s body. Get them out of time so nothing else can happen to them while I do this.”

“While you do what, ma’am?”

She took a deep breath. “I’m going to go get the Shadowmaster.”