> Threats! In cycle six! This could be a very short Maffiyir if the Clothes-Lovers let them get out of control.

> – Radio transmission from Voices for Non-Citizens

“Meghan! Meghan, wake up!”

I pulled the sheets up against my chin, not opening my eyes in spite of Pointy's imperious commands. “Wha time izzit?”

“Just before six a.m.”

I moaned pitifully, scrunching up against Gavin’s back. “I was on standby for an hour at one a.m.! There’s not another one at our pylon, is there? There can’t be!”

There was an irritated snort from the little turtle. “No. Our pylon is fine. For now. But there’s a crisis. I don’t know the details, but they’re planning to send someone to wake you and the boys up.”

“The boys, too?” Adrenaline coursed through me, driving away the lingering chains of sleep.

I didn’t ask how Pointy knew. After Cassie had been granted use of the Points Siphons, Pointy had gotten a lot stronger. Careful testing had revealed that she was physically much more durable, but that was the least of it. Her processing power had nearly doubled. The improvement to her senses was harder to quantify, but it had been similarly drastic. These days, she heard a lot that people didn’t intend for her to hear. With our quarters so near the entrance to the Quarry… well, she probably wouldn’t have heard much more even if she’d been glued to Mayor Alexandra’s desk.

I shook the boys awake quietly. “Get dressed. Start armoring up. Pointy says something’s wrong. I’m going to go find out what. You guys stay here with Pointy and Cassie, but…”

“But we should be ready?” Micah asked.

I hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. “Pointy heard people planning to wake you. I’m hoping that was an overreaction, but… get your gear on.”

My maimed hand didn’t make it much harder to throw on a T-shirt and jeans and shove my feet into my battered rainboots. I Telekinetically grabbed the sack I’d stowed my armor in, beginning the more-laborious process of donning it as I walked.

It was still in surprisingly good shape. I’d hired a Repair specialist to stop by our quarters each evening and do a touch-up on all our gear, and it had all gotten at least slight modifications by someone with Improvised Equipment, so it could benefit from the increased durability.

A few pieces had been replaced, and some others had been added - all the kids had simple steel breastplates now, and I ought to get my own tomorrow or the day after - but it was still largely the paper-based armor I’d inexpertly crafted weeks before.

How useful is this stuff for me still? I wondered as I tried to walk and Telekinetically tie on a vambrace at the same time. I know my skin’s much tougher. I guess any extra protection is good, but if what’s being added isn’t very meaningful, maybe this isn’t worth the effort.

I was still wrestling with the ribbons when I made it to Alexandra’s office. I had to step aside to let a crowd of bleary-eyed teenagers flood past me. A blonde girl stopped to stare at me in confusion. “Uh…”

“Let me guess, you’re supposed to tell Meghan Moretti and her two sons about what’s going on?”

“Well…”

“You can skip to the next person on your list, then.” I edged by her. I was certain I could get a clearer account from the mayor and the colonel. The girl shrugged and ran off.

Alexandra and Colonel Zwerinski were in the office already, as well as a few men and women I recognized as leaders of the combat groups on night duty. Everyone seemed surprised to see me enter seconds after I'd been sent for, but no one commented.

“Pointy said there’s trouble?” I asked.

“That’s one way of putting it,” said Colonel Zwerinski. “Look at this.”

A photorealistic image appeared in my mind. It was dim, clearly captured at night, but a spotlight illuminated a treezilla from above, casting shadows over a nearby empty parking lot and bushes.

No. Those are… trees?! That little building, that’s not some mom & pop shop, that’s a big-box store of some kind. Those little tiny paths are streets! I flickered Analyze.

“Holy shit. That treezilla’s over two hundred feet tall! And nearly as wide.”

Colonel Zwerinski nodded grimly. “And growing fast. That image was captured an hour ago by one of the scout teams the Arsenal sent out. I haven’t gotten the most recent updated image yet, but the Arsenal’s Analysts say it’s already eight feet taller.”

“Eight feet? In under an hour? So by tomorrow it might be nearly twice this big.”

“Or taller,” Alexandra confirmed. She was wearing her usual suit, but her hair was thrown into a messy bun and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. “If it’s already growing so fast, what if it accelerates? Already, the Arsenal fears it may be beyond our ability to stop.”

“Where’s it at?” I asked.

Colonel Zwerinski scratched his neck. “Well, that’s the thing. It’s about sixty miles southwest of us. So, it’s possible we could just evacuate the area around it and leave it alone, but…”

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“But the radio chatter makes that seem like a bad idea.”

He nodded. “They’re working to figure out how it got so big, but if it’s already this tall and might be twice the height tomorrow… well, I’m not great shakes at math, but…”

I frowned, relying on Analyze. A little over 5,000 feet in a mile, sixty miles away, already about 250 feet tall… The one in our neighborhood was a major danger to an area three times its height and a smaller danger to an area about nine times its height…

I spoke slowly as my ability drew together some unpleasant conclusions for me. “If it keeps nearly doubling in size, we’ll be in trouble in less than a twelveday. Even if it doesn’t accelerate, and just keeps growing at eight or so feet per hour, we might be in danger within a year. If it can get that tall, of course. Could it really grow twenty miles tall?”

Helen had slipped into the room as we’d been talking, and she spoke up now. “Tallest human-made building is about two-thirds of a mile tall, but the biggest reasons we haven’t made anything taller are practicality and capital. There’s no challenge to planning bigger things, but they’re real expensive and don’t tend to be too useful. You need too much space for elevators and stairs and supports.”

“Really? How tall could we make a building?” I asked.

“I don’t live in Huntsville because I’m a huge skyscraper fan! That said… I do have a cousin who’s in architecture as well, and he loves going on about skyscrapers and space elevators and stuff when we meet up at the kids’ weddings.” Helen frowned, shrugging. “If I remember our talks correctly, we probably would have built something as high as two-and-a-half miles within the next decade or so. He thought much taller than that was technically possible, even if we didn't discover any new building materials. He had pretty good arguments for why we could make a thirty-mile-tall building, if some billionaire lost their tiny mind. Fool thing to do, still, and it’d have a ridiculously large foundation, but…” She sighed. “I wish I could say twenty miles is impossible, but… I can’t. Not with the improved materials the aliens clearly have available.”

“Possible doesn’t mean inevitable, of course,” Alexandra said. “But the space lawyers’ messages make me nervous. This tree grows more dangerous by the minute.”

“This might be our best chance to stop it.” I said, understanding.

“Might be our only chance to stop it,” Zwerinski grumbled. “At least without some kind of extended war. Plus, I think we can guarantee its growth will speed up at least somewhat, unless it hits some kind of maximum. It’s too far for us to easily and effectively evacuate the area, so it’s bound to kill more people. That’s our best guess for how it got so big to begin with, a large quantity of kills soon after it appeared.”

I took a deep breath. “So you want me, Priya, and George to come and Samar and my boys to be on-call to deal with any that spawn locally?”

The colonel shook his head. “No. The Arsenal is calling for a full mobilization. Any that appear locally, we’ll have to put down without the Intensifiers. They’re getting a fleet of vehicles together and clearing the way, and we’re going to send literally everyone who’s not on cooldown.”

I froze, my face blank.

“I’m sorry. It kills me, Meghan. I wish I could say they could stay. I don’t want to send kids into danger, but if we don’t put this down, we can be pretty well guaranteed that there are going to be thousands of kids in danger - probably including the ones here at Fort Autumn. And the eggheads who’ve been studying the relationships between the size of the treezillas and the number of Shards needed to down it… Well…” The colonel sighed, shaking his head. “It’s going to be damn close. It’s a sick, sick situation. Here’s what I can do for you: with so many Intensifiers at Fort Autumn, I’ve been put in command of this combat operation. We don’t have enough transportation to take as many attackers as any of us would like, but I can still promise that each child will have four soldiers assigned without Intensifiers, whose highest duty is to keep their assigned charge alive and well.”

He hesitated. “And… if we don’t bring it down with our Intensifiers, if we have to stay and keep fighting, you’ll be expected to retreat with your kids, under guard. You’re all a precious resource, even more than you were before.”

I was silent, but Alexandra frowned. “Retreating from something so large will still be dangerous!”

“I know. I know!” Zwerinski took off his cap to run a hand through his thinning hair. “But less dangerous than staying! We’re going to have to go inside the tree itself, which should at least protect us from its branches and roots while we fight… but I’m sure it’ll come with its own dangers. Yoshiro is handling the logistics, and I know he’s trying to get support into the area from Anniston, but Anniston’s already stretched to its limits. Just not a large installation. It’s a damn shame Rucker and Maxwell are so far.”

A knock at the door interrupted us. “Your ride’s here, colonel!”

“We’re leaving already?” I asked. This was all happening too fast.

“No, ma’am,” Zwerinski said. “A flyer’s been sent to pick me up and take me out there so I can assess the situation with a small advance team. We’re still scrambling the other transports, but we’ll have to take most of you by ground and pray we can make good time. You should be ready to leave in… Yoshiro says thirty minutes.”

Then Zwerinski was gone.

I turned to Alexandra. “How did this happen? How did the tree get so big?”

Alexandra sank into the chair behind her desk, shutting her eyes. “I wish I knew! I was asleep twelve minutes ago. I am still not convinced that this is not an awful dream.”

“Hah! I wish.”

Alexandra nodded. “The only things I know which you do not would be… hmm. Oh! Were you here when the colonel mentioned how many Intensifiers we have available?”

“No… he said he didn’t think it would be enough. We had ninety people come back from my last challenge. I know they weren’t all affiliated with the Arsenal or Fort Autumn, but that’s a lot. Plus we had a lot more come through the Challenge a couple days ago, right?”

“We did. The Arsenal is in contact with 73 people from your Challenge and 28 people from the most recent Challenge who have earned Intensifiers.”

“Only 28?”

Alexandra waved a hand. “We did not have many eligible. Keep in mind, any Titan fight you or your Challenge-mates participated in was likely hidden from viewers. We would likely not have had more than a dozen if the Arsenal had not gone out of their way to assemble some ‘visible’ kill teams.”

“Oh.” That made sense. It was something I’d expected, actually, but my sleep-addled brain hadn’t remembered my earlier musings.

“The problem is that many of those Intensifiers have been used,” Alexandra said. “At least forty are unavailable right now. Ten of those will refresh in the next few hours, but the others definitely won’t be free in time.”

“So we’ve got about sixty people?”

“About sixty people at most. Communication…” Alexandra flapped a hand disdainfully. “It could be better, still. I should hear back with exact numbers soon. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’ve got two transports to fill up in a hurry. I want them packed to the brim with anything we can send to improve your chances.”