“Yes, I do.” Hawk said. “I do dare. And I always will.” It was a promise to herself, as much as a statement to him. And then she caught the little flicker of amusement in those golden eyes. She felt as if a thousand snakes, curled around her ribcage, had suddenly let go. That was the twinkle Alex used to get in his too-blue eyes, when someone moved precisely where he wanted them to. The Shadow was playing with her. Emboldened, she added, “So stop fucking with me and do what you came here to do. Help people.”

He even had the grace to look shame-faced, and the smile threatening the corners of his mouth also threatened to shatter Hawk’s heart. “Perceptive,” he murmured.

“I was trained by the best,” She said. Oh, Alex…

“You’ll probably have to keep the Temple acolytes off my back. Some of them are what you’d call mage-trained. They can use the same powers as the Gods.”

“Don’t worry,” Captain Spectre said. “We’ve got your back.”

***

The soldiers pulled the crowd back into more organized puddles of humanity. It took a lot of work, and he asked, and got, the acolytes to run crowd control. Uninjured refugees were told to gather near the crystal pylon leading to the correct Nexus. The wounded still had priority, but as the smoke grew thicker, and thicker still, they knew they had to start getting people out before the air turned lethal.

The Nexus was the bottleneck. Spectre told Hawk about how only the first batch of wounded had cleared the ladder up, with each horribly wounded person forced to stand or sit or lay in pain until the precedent managed the climb…and then the slow, ever so slow walk into Earth, where people moved at glacial pace. Kaiser was gone. Mattias was gone. Someone had finally gotten Henry’s body out of the pit that held the way to the Nexus…but her focus was on Kaiser. Kaiser, gone. It had a chilling and strangling effect on any other form of hope.

“Do you think they arrested him?” She asked, and got a shrug in response.

While she dithered, the Shadow was busy. When a space was cleared, the Shadow asked for a length of ribbon or chord. The acolyte who brought it to him bristled as she realized who—and what—she had just handed a large roll of cord. Hawk was faster than logic, and got hold of the acolyte before they could scream.

“The Light Archon asked him to come,” Hawk lied.

“Why?” The pale-faced acolyte said, staring at her religious enemy with a combination of hatred and longing Hawk had never seen before. Well, she got the longing part. Alex was, and always had been, hot. The Shadow had an edge of danger Alex had not, and he had a few monstrous features, but he was still very, very pretty.

“Because he’ll help. Unless you can see the other Gods answering our panic.”

Nods, but there was still great concern in the acolyte’s gray eyes. “What is he going to do?”

“Make clean water for the wounded. But anything inside the circle will—erm…die.” Hawk said.

The acolyte blanched even further. “That magic is forbidden.”

“Good. Go tell Argon. He’s the one who started this fire.” Hawk said. “Go tell Nasheth. Have her comfort and uplift the wounded.”

“They are not here,” The acolyte said.

“Exactly,” Hawk said.

The Shadow was ignoring all of this. He slowly, carefully, let out each foot of rope until he had a circle ten feet wide. It looked huge to Hawk, encompassing a great deal of life. Not just the mossy lawn or the one unfortunate bed of flowers that was included in his circle, but the bugs and soil creatures, and other life-important things. All of it was crawling around and breathing and—and there was another cry of agony from the tent. Hawk girded herself for whatever might come…but she still had to ask a question. “Could…is it possible for you to draw on life at a distance?”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Without a boundary? I could easily devour the world whole. It’s nearly happened more than once, though not ever by me.” A pause. “The Gods draw life from the God-World to fuel their actions. You must have figured this out by now.”

“I have,” she said, with reluctance. All those acres of destroyed ground, glass reduced to translucent ashes, humans falling over as their skin hardened and their blood solidified. All that horror. All of it to fuel powers she could not comprehend.

And it was happening in Rifts that didn’t have Gods in them, she thought.

“I could do that, too. It’s less predictable. You often find yourself gathering too much power. And whatever is on the other side dies, just as surely as it dies here.”

And she realized, right then, that Argon’s fire probably hadn’t only damaged the world she’d nicknamed Holia. It had probably come from Earth, from the hole centered in the middle of Boston. “I thought you blocked that?” She said, weakly. She felt sick.

“I did. But it’d be a fool who would lock himself out of his own work. I can take it down again. I won’t. I know what will happen if I do…But I can.” He paused. “And it is not perfect. No one thing can be perfect. It leaks, despite all my efforts to the contrary. They can still draw on the life above.”

And Hawk wondered what, if anything, the events down here had done to Boston. Because they were sitting in the middle of it, on the side of a busy road. The Glass energies had spread for blocks already when she was up there. It spread with a surfeit of inevitability. And now she knew there were hands and fingers and thoughts behind this. Suddenly she could lay the deaths and disasters in Boston at the feet of Nasheth and her cronies…but also on the Shadow.

The question, how many, and its brother, how often, died on her lips. Not yet. Now was not the time to push. They needed water and what first aid he could grant. “Okay,” she said.

And he smiled, sadly, as if the Shadow recognized the questions Hawk had drowned. And without saying a word, he turned to his work.

***

The circle was drawn with silk cord. He did not cut it, but focused on it intently. He held a small bit of moss over it, about a dime sized clump of green and dirt brown. Before her startled eyes, two things happened: One was the uncoiling of the rope’s fibers, reknit to form one circle of cord. The other was the death of the moss. It turned beige and brown…but only at the tips, like it had been charred, but only so far. He let the cord fall. “A bucket. A bowl. Something,” he said.

The same acolyte who had brought the cord now breathlessly brought a bucket. She and six or seven other acolytes watched the little tableau with horror and immense interest. He ignored them, and walked to the edge of his circle, where they were nearest. He knelt in the moss and the damp, the glittering, glinting, half-rusted mail shirt he wore clinked like fairy bells. One taloned, violet hand touched the white perfection of the cord, and Hawk thought again, seize the white. We have to seize the white. She felt something rush through the air, and then…there’d been a touch she hadn’t recognized, that until this moment she would have called a hand on her throat. Not necessarily a threatening thing, but something there, and leonine. Now it was gone, and she realized it hadn’t been around her throat at all. His talons had been around her heart this entire time, and that of every person in this small field.

And he met her eyes as the realization spread over her. She remembered again the line from Narnia, not a tame lion, but for the first time she understood what it meant: That the thing you love the most, that you are bound to love, is the most dangerous thing in the world to you. And he could have killed her at any time.

There was sorrow in his eyes as he looked to her, and he nodded to her, across the safe buffer he had made so that he did no more harm than necessary. His left hand held the bucket, a rough thing of wood and iron bands, and his right reached down as he knelt, once more, in the moss. Now he touched the moss directly, perhaps allowing his awareness to fully encompass it, its life, its beauty. He was almost stroking it, the way one would a fatally wounded cat, as he wound his fingers and claws into its richness.

Then he drew his hand up, slowly, as if spinning fibers together into yarn, and a trail of water followed after. It was small, a stream that curled about the moss fronds and then spiralled up at the Shadow’s command. He drew this elegant swirl of water up towards the bucket, and then, with an abrupt motion, he gestured and the bucket was filled with water.

Hawk returned her gaze to the moss. Where his fingers had touched, a spot perhaps the size of a quarter had grown, the soft fibrous plant now ashy, frail, and the terrible beige of Glass ashes.