She hadn’t gone down the spire on foot before. She’d been given a Fleet-Hare, the giant deer-like beasts, and been told to let it follow the rest of the procession. Now she had to make the same trip, alone and shod in combat boots, which weren’t the best choice for the hike. They were a size and a half too large. Once she was over the gates and on the proper path, she felt a great deal of her energy and focus drain out, replaced by confusion and fear. Maybe she was wrong to do this. Maybe she was dying of oxygen deprivation as she stood. Maybe—there were too many maybes. She could do the next right thing, which right now was putting one foot in front of the other and moving, until she got to the Shadow and could—

--could do what, sunshine? You really think he’s going to listen to you? She ignored this voice. A harder question to ignore was, do you think it’ll be a good thing if he does? She was already petrified of Kaiser Willheim figuring out that he could put a gun to her head and make this Shadow-Alex do what he wanted. The only prophylactic to this she could think of was distance, and here she was eating that up by the footstep.

But while she had recognized the loyalty she loved in the Shadow’s eyes, she’d missed who it was pointed at. So caught up with her own grief, she’d missed that the Shadow was loyal to Mattias, the Archon of Light. Which was how they wound up in this current mess. Kaiser knew his best chance to escape arrest—an arrest, mind, that was flimsy in Hawk’s eyes—was to delay Hawk and the others, and he’d done it by stabbing Henry—who had apparently lost all importance to Kaiser—and injecting Mattias with that unknown substance. She’d selfishly misjudged—

--No, Hawk. You didn’t selfishly do anything. She forced herself back down that path of thought, even as she tentatively and fearfully made her way down the spire. She’d done things, yes, but it wasn’t self-centered to think that ones’ husband (or at least, the pieces of him the Gods had left un-eaten) still cared about you. Kaiser had created this situation. He’d even given it that little twist, aren’t you so selfish, thinking only of yourself while I’m murdering your friends. And she wasn’t an idiot; that was as purposeful a motion as any step Kaiser ever took towards a goal. He was the kind of survivor that came with a billion dollars, or a knife in the back of others.

Her hate got her down the spire. She knew when she’d reached the main crowd of frightened people, because fewer and fewer of them were trying to get up the crystal spire to the temple. Most were crowding around the nearest colored robes—Red robes, blue, green, and yellow—in the hope that they and their God had a plan.

People mostly went to the red robes, representative of Argon, god of war and Master of Fire. These were supposed to be the men with the plans in the face of their gods’ wrath, so they should have known what to do. This was, after all, Argon’s fire. Shouldn’t Argon’s priests be able to stop it? Hawk saw five red robes from where she stood, all of their so called holy garments singed (and in one case burned from hemline to waist. Two of the other red robes stood around this wounded third, looking from burned robe to their fellows and back, fear on faces that should know better) and all of them lost, hurt, and clueless.

She did not see Shadow. She felt Him, though. There was a leonine purring to every shade, a lingering touch in the darkness, and a growing rage that seemed to begin the moment she showed up.

Whelp. In for a penny, in for a pound. She chose the nearest high object and elevated herself and her white robes above the heads of others. Beyond she could see the angry reds and oranges of fire, clouds of smoke muting it from draconian roar to a more sedate crackling, the occasional pop in the roar a promise of things to come.

“We’re asking everyone to go to the Temple of Light,” she announced. Not that they had anywhere else to go. The flames had already wrapped around the spire. “Please, come on. Please hurry. Up the spire to the Temple. Please go.” And then, on pure impulse and falsehood, she said, “There will be water and medical attention. Water and medics, up ahead.”

And then a voice no one else would (or, for that matter, could) recognize seemed to spill from several sources. Hawk had the feeling this voice would sound just behind you, perhaps a few people away. That’s where it appeared to her, first. She didn’t understand a word it said, but the unrobed throngs seemed to relax and turn reverent faces towards Hawk.

“White Temple, yes?” The nearest asked, in a thumb-fingered version of English she could barely understand. Something the uneducated spoke in the dark, with more than enough rough edges to bleed the ear.

“Yes. The Temple. Go up!” And she pointed. “Go up to the Temple.”

Her instructions were repeated in alien tongues…and the people who heard them began to move, delightfully, upward. She wasn’t going to have to watch the immolation of the innocent…as long as she hurried.

Now everything narrowed from Alex and Mattias to these individual people. Each one she knew for one instant, and she took them in, drew on them like incense in a temple, the fragrance of their thought, the unique revelations of each face. She could see the progress of phenotype, the remains of those missing kids who had gone down, down into the darkness built by Kaiser and Naomi Studdard. And then she told them where to go, and they were gone, and the instance of revelation gave way to a new one. This one smaller, or maybe fatter. The next, myopic, squinting at the world. Have you seen my glasses? She heard the question in the alien phrase and could give no answer but up. Go up. Gone through the smoke and ember flames. So focused was she on Up, go up! That when she was caught by a pair of violet hands, subtly clawed, elegant in their own way, she had no other message. Go up! Get away from the fire!

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“Hawk!” A voice, angry, but most of the voices had been so. Wanting to know why their beloved gods were venting their ire so thoroughly.

“It’s not safe here, go—”

“There’s nearly no one left but me and you,” the voice said, and gave her a shake, and he sounded enough like Alex to pull her out of her robotic rescue. She looked around, and he was right. There was nearly no one near…save for the fire. It was essentially on their doorstep.

Great. She wasn’t going to waste time trying to save Mattias, only to have him burn up into nothing. “Okay. What can we do about the fire?”

He stared at her for a moment in a sort of open mouthed horror. Which was a bit unfortunate for him. It exposed how inhuman his teeth had become. Not that it was unattractive. But—Stop it, Hawk. Emergency now. You can think about how hot he is later. It was safe, after all, to think such things about someone she could not touch.

“We cannot do anything for the fire, as we have not started it and Water is not under my command,” he said this as if to a child.

And there weren’t any firemen down here. She had exhausted her bystander’s knowledge of fighting fires.

“Could Argon stop it?” She asked.

“Yes. And I imagine the price he’d pull out of you would be more than you could pay. He will not listen to me. I’ve struck first, and hard, a few too many times for trust.”

Good, she thought, but did not say. And she was glad for this, because his next breath nearly cut her off at the knees.

“Illyris…” he said, and then stopped himself. “No. She would never go against the other three—two, now, thanks to you. And I am pretty sure that news is not a-wing yet.” This came from the musing shadow, as he rubbed his pale, bare face. “She might have been more apt to help us if it was more known we had killed Kali’Mar. Not well known, but more known, you understand? There were grievances there, things I’ve used for a long time to…well, keep people safe, is the part you’d care about.”

She ignored the backhanded barb. The roar of the fire seemed ever louder, the line of firelight almost white where it ate at the ground. Each breath burned, in and out, and a cough made lungs feel full of nails. “Can we use them? Like, if we found her, if we could get word—”

“Word would help, surely, but I don’t think it would get her to stop Her Brother’s fires.” And he added enough emphasis to remind her that Illryis and Argon were both technically gods. And, technically, it was his forehead they’d sprung from…or rather, that was the location of the parts of him that they’d eaten.

And oh, was she going to make them pay for that. Just not right now.

“We need to leave, before the fires reach us.” He said.

“We weren’t worried about them when we fought Kali,” Hawk said, ignoring everything after the dead god’s preposterous apostrophe.

“It wasn’t as close. I can carry you, if you’d like?” And there was more than a growl to his voice now. Implying that he could become the Shadowcat, which was something Hawk already suspected. Meaning he’d drag her up that spire if he had to.

“I can walk. We’ll have somebody from emergency response up there by now.” They were stuck with what they had for who knew how long, but somebody would have responded to Henry’s body by now, right?

And Kaiser will be running from this hole as fast as he can.

“Just bring more people down from the God-World,” The Shadow said, and he began walking, very deliberately, up the spire, pausing only once to look back as he asked the question. Then he looked at her expectantly. She could feel his demand crawling across her skin. Given that she could also feel the heat, this demand was entirely reasonable: Get her ass away from the fire.

“We can’t,” Hawk said. “In fact, we put Mattias and,” Deep gulp of air. She could do this without crying. “Henry. We put them up the Nexus, what we’re calling Earthside, so that we can help Mattias.” Henry was dead. She’d seen the stab, watched him die, and held Em afterwards, which was a bit like trying to comfort a screaming octopus. Her gut threatened to rebel, and she wanted to start screaming, too. Instead, she wiped out a few rebellious tears and said, “Time moves faster…” And she stopped. Bad comparison. “Time moves slower in the God-World than it does here. Five minutes up there can be days down here. And it takes more than five minutes to mobilize a fire brigade.”

“Or to respond to an invasion,” he breathed, suddenly fully turned to her, his alien gold eyes wide with horror. “I always thought you had enough people to stop the Gods if they should choose to ride. That I only had to buy you lot response time.”

It wasn’t the first time someone had mentioned the Gods’ ultimate goal of taking over Earth. It was, however, the first time he’d confirmed he was part of the reason they weren’t already overrun.

“Well, the fire’s taking care of that, for now. But we can’t just let it burn.” She paused. “Can we?”

“Argon will eventually let it die. Or Illyris will do something before it threatens her people. But nothing says that will happen before both of us are cooked if we stay here.” And his tone shifted to something more Alex-like. “Hawk. Please.”

And she felt something inside of herself melt. Both good—oh Alex—and bad, because it was a deep vulnerability when the people down here ate the vulnerable for breakfast. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, when what she really wanted to do was go cry.

And with those words, he began helping her up the spire.