Slowly, like rising out of a dream, she began to hear the familiar sounds of Earthside life. The doppler effect took moaning tones and slowly turned them back into car horns, cell phone rings, human voices, exhaust backfiring into the atmosphere. The scents of smoke and fresh greens, of ashes and of flowers, both gave way to the heavier smell of gasoline. She hurried as quick as she could to the top of the ladder, a climb that should take only seconds but felt like an eon down there in the Rift. And her sense of reality, of the place she called Holia, changed. This was a world of blue skies—the afternoon sun spread wide and high above her, making her nearly dizzy with the sheer beauty of vertigo. An uncovered ceiling. A breath of fresh air! Home, and all that it entailed, settled around her like fragments of glass.

Glass. Oh, god, she had climbed from one ashen nightmare to another. Those terrible beige ashes were piled in the corners and edges of this work area. Huge machinery was dragged from one place to another, all of it a warning canary yellow, or else Army beige. Lots of PPE on lots of bodies made her feel suddenly and glaringly naked. Helicopters swooped overhead—or hovered; there was a news copter overhead with brand livery on its sides and front. The marks of capitalism seemed…almost strange to her now. As if they were rolls of Nasheth’s green-and-gold silk, or Argon’s fire. Emblems of gods, with a little g, the small and petty ones that govern little household tasks. Here’s this god’s pervue—god of the morning answers, and the evening gloom. No one ever felt better for watching the news.

She walked—well, half limped. Her muscles ached and she discovered every inch she had run through Holia seemed now baked into every cramp. But when she was approached by a soldier with a sort of herding expression—as if he were a sheepdog, and she freshly fled from the pen—she managed to say, “I’m Dr. West. Mulligan’s looking for me.” One brief radio call (How many hours in Holia did that one call burn through? How far away was Kaiser now?) and she was released from figuring out what to do next; the soldier lead her safely to the General, then left.

The Shadow was already there.

Mulligan looked at her and said, “Darlin’, you look like something the cat dragged in.”

“It was one of his cats,” She said, with a sad smile. “And that was several days ago. For me, anyway.” She paused. She really, really wanted a chair. “Can I—”

“Get a chair for this woman before she falls over.” Mulligan was already moving. “You might think you’re superwoman on toast, but you’re not, Dr. West.”

And, god help her, the Shadow flinched, then turned disbelieving golden eyes her way. As if she’d betrayed something, lying about her name. It was only fair, she supposed. She’d felt this betrayal every time she lied.

“I ought to let you know, sir, I used a cover name—my maiden name—while I was down there. I’m sorry.” She said this last to the Shadow.

“I see something else happened down there, too.” And the General, who had been looking at missing persons photos of Alex West for the last four days—good god, it’d only been four days—studied the face of the Shadow, and made the correct assumption. “So, sir, I have to ask how you are related to all of this.”

“A few moments ago I would have had an answer. Now I do not know.”

“Alex West is dead,” Hawk said, in the same moment. She took a deep breath, that blatant lie burning like bile in her chest. But it had to be said. “And unless we all want a mess I don’t think we’re equipped to clean up, it has to stay that way. He died down there in the dark, and the so-called Gods ate him. That’s how the story ends.”

“Is it?” The general said.

“It has to be,” she insisted. “I can’t see another way to…”

“You don’t see another way to keep us from blowing our own heads off because Daddy forgot to lock the gun safe. Dangerous ideas, am I right?” the General shook his head. “Where are those kids with the goddamn chair?”

“I don’t need one.” She insisted. “I can stand for this meeting and then I can go back to the Rift for rest.” It was safer to rest in there than up here; she wasn’t wasting as much time.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“No,” The General said. “Sorry, but you’re going to have to go from here to the medical tent. This issue with Mattias…well, let’s get into the full briefing for both of you, because out of all of this, you are the best bird-dog I’ve ever met…and you, sir, are the only sane person in that hell hole down there.”

The Shadow gave his sharp-toothed smile. “I suspect we are doomed, if that is true.”

Mulligan sobered, horribly. “More than you know, kid. More than you know.”

The general moved warily back to a makeshift desk, literally a board across two sawhorses. “So we’ve got three problems right now. Problem Number 1. Is that damn fire and those, god bless em, damn refugees we’ve got pouring out of that Rift. Is there anyway you can get them to slow that the fuck down, West?” He was looking expectantly at the Shadow.

“No,” Hawk answered. “In all honesty, sir, we need to be moving faster down there. There’s some exceptionally wounded people at the Temple of Light. About two or three villages worth of people—”

“Four,” the Shadow said, with disgust. “The fire wiped out the three in its path, and took a fourth when it overtook the Temple Spire.”

“Well. We can add that to the fuckers’ ledger, can’t we? Can you give me a straight answer about who started the fire? All I’m hearing from my boys is stuff about gods and magic. Sounds like an L. Rider Haggard novel or something.”

“Haggard wouldn’t be pushing it too far, given that we have a She-who-must-be-obeyed involved.” Hawk said.

“Excuse me, West?” the general said.

“Naomi Studdard, sir. Apparently when you consume a certain part of an Archetype, you can assume a certain amount of their power. You fill the same role—I think. Naomi and three of her subordinates…” and she glanced apologetically at the Shadow. She was so sorry to be telling him now, telling him this way. She had other, better ways she could have done it. “…killed Alex and ate that part of him. They’re basically Gods. Enormous amount of power, it might as well be magic for all we know. And they are behaving,” she chose her words carefully, “exactly the way you would imagine someone like Studdard would.”

“The world is their fucking oyster, huh.” Mulligan said. And she knew the small path his mind started down. What if I…

“Power corrupts.” Hawk said, softly. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Whatever else she did in the past or does in the future, Naomi Studdard’s legacy is going to be one of violence, genocide, greed, and destruction. And that’s just based on what I saw.”

“You saw her at her mildest,” the Shadow whispered. “You saw her at her best.”

“I saw her turn a few hundred people into fucking trees, and that’s her at her fucking best?” Hawk said.

There was silence in the command center. It was, she thought, a little hard to award something that was little more than boards and dirt “Command center” but the sawhorses were there, and ash-laden dirt crunched underfoot, and the choices made now, in these few moments, were going to affect far more people than those men at carven desks, or Nasheth on her throne.

“So, kids,” The general said, pulling things back to his unstated itinerary, “It looks to me like we’ve got three giant headaches. Headache number one, my friend, is you. Half the people from down there, the half that can speak English, are telling me that I should kill you where you stand. Should I?”

“I’m a monster. Of course you should.” He said, in his soft and strange voice.

“A couple people have also suggested that you’re a Power of the same grade as this Nasheth creature, which I gather used to be Naomi Studdard. Also a reason why I should kill you on sight, isn’t it?”

“Indeed. There’s a plethora of reasons.” He said, very mildly. Only a particularly wise person would catch the subterranean growl there, the violence promised to come.

Mulligan nodded. “But here’s the thing. Power or not, you were one of the handful of people who were there for those people. Sure, it was just water, but it was water for the burning and the desperate, and everything in between. And you stuck around when you knew that whole crowd wanted to shoot you.”

“I can block arrows,” he said, diffidently.

“And you helped my people. And, god help us all, you happen to look a whole lot like a man who is, according to his wife, deader than yesterday’s socks. Hawk West, tell me why he has to be deader than yesterday’s socks?”

“Because an Archetype can spread their power, if someone can consume…well, let’s call it their heart, for lack of a better word. And that is as far as I’m willing to go in explaining it.”

“Why?” The general said, and then, hastily, “I agree, don’t get me wrong. I think we lucked out with your boy here. It’s rare to find someone who has power who is generous in using it. Putting your neck out for refugees is a whole lot more good than anyone else has done around me in quite a while. But you also remind me of a wounded dog. A loyal one, the kind that won’t bite the hand that tends it, but wounded so deep…kid, my first thought was to shoot you. To put you out of your misery. And I can’t for the life of me explain why.”

“I’m not whole. I am ravaged and am only a fifth of what I ought to be. It’s something I feel, every hour. It’s something fundamental. Even an animal can sense that I’ve been broken.”