“There are stupid ideas, Hawk, and then there’s going back into a fucking murder hole for—”

“Henry,” Hawk said, heartless. “I’m doing it for Henry. You want to tell me it’s not worth it?” She paused for a moment, trying to decide if her words were justified or not, because she knew she’d just gone for the untested jugular. Yes, she decided, for one reason. “I went for Alex. Shouldn’t I go for you and Henry, too?”

“Henry’s dead,” Em said, miserably.

“Right. So get his body up where it’s not going to decay fast and let me go get help.” Hawk said. Not that she had to. Captain Spectre and the other military boys had already hefted the terrible bulk of black tarp to their shoulders. They moved quickly, hastily, with awareness that for human medicine, the time to act had already passed. That was why the help Hawk was about to go for wasn’t human.

Spectre, having gotten his people moving, now returned to Hawk. He overheard a small amount of their conversation, and he interrupted them at Hawk’s last words. “Ma’am, I hate to interrupt, but—”

“If you’re going to stop me, shoot me. If you’re going to send help, they’d better be really damn good. I’m going down that spire and I’m going to get help, and I’m doing it right now.” She said.

“I was going to say you can’t go, and then I was going to tell you it’s what I have to say.” And he glanced up, where General Mulligan, the guy several ranks above Spectre’s own CO, was heaving Henry’s body up the rope ladder towards Earth. “And then I was going to say, if you wanna go, you gotta go now.”

She gave a thin smile. “You won’t get in trouble?”

“Not as long as I tried to stop you.” He paused. “That was it. That was me, trying. Get going, you two, before the boss sees you go.”

Hawk, who had planned on going alone, looked at Em expectantly. Em, who’d had zero plans of going, looked back. And then, as one, they started towards the world within the Rift once more.

***

They did not use the Shadow’s small, secret entrance to their Nexus. Hawk suspected it might not be there anymore. None of them had known what was going on when they’d entered Holia, their name for this dark, gods-infested universe, the first time. Shadow had come, and he’d been hostile. He had known only that people were digging through his blocade, and had responded with rage. Justified, as it turned out; this Nexus, and the crystal it was made from, were all that kept the Archetypes—the so-called Gods of this world—from draining Earth dry. Their power was fueled by life, and as drawing power from Holia would have reduced it to cinders and ash in seconds, they pulled what they needed from Earth. This resulted in the increase of Glass energies, the strange and unknown energy signature that transformed organic matter to something more frail and silica based. Holia was draining Earth dry.

It would end, and relatively soon; Holia, like any Rift, was created when light refracted through a specially built Prism, a device of carved crystal that functioned off light. It was Kaiser Willheim’s invention, just as it was Willheim’s plotting that put Hawk and so many other humans in harm’s way. This was the third Rift Hawk had encountered, the third Prism blasting its way through our reality with galactic force, the third time Glass had spread like salt across the wounded ground. The first Rift Hawk had encountered closed while she was on site, sending her and Alex into the wreckage of his client’s mostly destroyed house. The second had been in the Bronx zoo. While it hadn’t yet closed the last time Hawk was topside, reports showed it was nearly there. Hawk hadn’t worried too much about the first, but she also hadn’t known that there were, indeed, people on the other side. People were found at the Bronx zoo, when she met the highly evolved Apes that were descended from the gorillas in the zoo’s monkey house. That was also when she’d met her first Archetype.

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The Prisms would kill; this was obvious and clear from the first moment, and that first Rift, which killed an old woman, her dog, and god only knew how much wildlife in its dead zone. It had killed in the Bronx too, murdering humans where they stood, skeletonizing trees and worse, eating deep into the soil to destroy the organics there. Only Apes, honeysuckle vines and honeypot ants had survived, all of them drastically changed by the environment and the massive amount of time it took for these pocket universes to collapse. Time ran faster inside them than outside, after all. A single day Earthside could be a hundred years inside a Rift…or a thousand.

Apes, honeysuckle, and honeypots. All had immunity in the Bronx because all three species had a representative inside the Prism—a drugged gorilla, a case of honeypots, and the vine the honeypots were feeding off of. If you wanted to survive a Rift, you, or something very much like you, had to go down inside of the Prism when the Rift was made. Or else, you had to consume honeypot nectar, the golden fluids built up in a honeypot ant gaster. That had kept both Hawk and her husband, Alex, alive for their first and second rifts.

Humans could survive in this, the third Rift, because Alex had been inside the Prism—along with all of Bittermoss School’s 4H projects. And they’d quite clearly populated this whole realm in the time that they’d had.

Hawk didn’t know what would happen to everyone down here when the Rift closed. Down below her was the Temple of Light, the building constructed out of the remains of the Prism. That was what would ease back into the hole above, hidden by the Nexus’s bright crystals. She had no idea what would happen to the people living down here when that happened. That might be something they all needed to consider.

Em lead her to a small outcropping of crystal and stone beside the central pylon. Here lay climbing equipment, discarded and corpse-like in the milk-crystal’s light. They were going to need to rappel down the pylon…which was hundreds of feet above their goal.

The Temple of Light glowed in the distant down like a beacon of hope. Hawk knew better. Nothing of the Holian religion was good. Their gods were real, former humans who had been converted to Archetypes not by surviving inside of a Prism but by eating part of the proper Archetype…who had been her husband, Alex.

She wasn’t sure how much of Alex was left in the creature this pocket universe named the Shadowmaster. He’d been disabled, somehow, reduced to the core, which the Gods of Holia had consumed. What was left was powerful, not very human, and not a whole lot like Alex…except when he was. What Hawk did know for certain was that he didn’t know anything about his life before the Prism—didn’t know her, didn’t know Earth, didn’t know the Gods’ human identities—and that he was incredibly dangerous when he wanted to be.

And he loved Mattias, the Archon of Light.

She guessed, as they began rappelling down from their lofty heights, that she had achieved her goal: She had convinced Kaiser that she did not love the new Alex, that the Shadow did not love her. She had forgotten, though, the number one rule of survival: You don’t have to run faster than your enemy; you just need to be faster than your friends. She had shown Kaiser that the connection between Hawk and the Shadow was too much work. But the connection between the Shadow and Mattias, the reluctant and battered priest, that was easy pickings.

After what felt like hours and miles piled in layers, Hawk’s feet reached the solid moss lawn of the Temple of Light.