The VTOL hovered steady and silent, its open sides turned to face out over the endless expanse below, a glossy black even without the sun shades AEGIS had made all of us wear.

I stared across it, uncomprehending.

It was so vast. There was just so much of it...more empty land there than I'd ever seen. The sky was utterly cloudless and seemed a greyer, yellower shade of blue than I'd seen elsewhere -- a trick of the reflection, or just...a contrast against the unending obsidian beneath it. Or something.

I didn't know, and looking at it skeeved me out a bit. No matter where my eyes went, the glass seemed...fractal, in its emptiness. There was so much nothing here, that no matter how hard I focused, no matter where I looked, I could see smaller and smaller details of nothingness.

How the glass subtly waved and curled on itself like a frozen tide. How the million pinpricks of reflected light made the black seem almost white in how it sparkled. How the horizon looked just as distant as the ground beneath us, in its confusing, glossy, opaqueness.

It was more like a dream than reality. Such things as a black earth and grey sky, or a blackness that shines with light, or an endless expanse all one color...those were surreal visions, not something anyone should be able to fly and see, a mere few hours away from the bustling urban metropoli of Japan. It was like we'd stepped into another world, one in which life was the outsider, where our craft and all the people in it were utterly insignificant compared to the void, where time and space were meaningless, compared to the reaches of the black.

A shiver ran down me, and looking around at the others crowding the doorway with me, I wasn't alone. Lia looked a little pale and concerned. AEGIS' eyes were darting every which way, her pupils going wild, dialating and focusing as she swept the expanse for signs of anything. Karu stood muted and resolute, her face a mystery behind the visor. And Tem just gaped, open-mouthed.

But Saga seemed the worst of us all. She was shaking her head, muttering, her eyebrows working up and down as she struggled with some kind of comprehension she just couldn't reach. I drew back and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, as though to say it's okay.

She pulled it from my reach and glared at me.

"What?" I asked her. Though by all rights, she could have asked me the same, and I would have no good answer to word my unease.

"It's fucking gone," she spat, her bewildered eyebrows solidifying in fury. "All of it."

"It is," Karu said, crossing her arms and turning from the view. "And it has been for a great many years."

"No, you don't understand," Saga continued. "That spot of land there, the peninsula, the islands. Do you know what that is?"

Karu shrugged. "The glasslands."

Saga wheeled on AEGIS. "Tell me you know. You can pull it up."

AEGIS took half a step back, smiling apologetically. "Um...sorry Saga, really don't know what you mean."

Saga took a few furious breaths before jabbing her finger again at the black earth. "Shanghai!" she shouted. "Shanghai!"

We all glanced at each other, completely lost. And slightly afraid. I felt Saga's rage intensifying and tried to keep it out.

"Shanghai!" she screamed again, stomping and jabbing her finger. "Do none of you fuckers know what Shanghai is?"

"Is that a place?" AEGIS asked, her voice soothing. "Is that an important place, to you?"

"It's the largest city in the world, AEGIS. Millions, and million of people. My whole family was from Shanghai. A full, like, tenth of the world or something was in Shanghai. Or...Shanghai and Beijing. Or something like that. Millions of people!"

"Had you ever been there?" AEGIS asked.

"That doesn't matter!" Saga screeched, her face going red and tears glistening in the corners of her eyes. "I can't believe you fuckers."

"Dude, this whole country was glass before any of us were born," Lia said.

"Not...you fuckers, but you fuckers," she argued, wiping tears against her palms. "Who the fuck would do that? Why the fuck would anyone do this?" She turned back to the glasslands, stretching infinitely before us, and looking back at it now, I had to wonder...was my unease because the place was haunted with a million, million ghosts? All Saga's family, and millions more, turned to glass and fire in a heartbeat?

I swallowed hard and sat down, feeling safer with the harness buckled around me. I absolutely didn't believe in ghosts, but if they were real, they'd be here. The creepiness of the place attested to that.

"It's...not like you didn't know," Lia said. "You've heard, just like we all have, what happened in the Sino Wars. They shot first, and America shot harder."

"But this is excessive. This is insane."

"War is excessive and insane," Karu said. "War is the failure of people to see others as people, of objectifying power and placing ego over virtue."

Saga stared at her. "Well I know I must be insane now, because I'm starting to agree with fly-girl when she's preaching. I must have fallen on my head too many times because this is madness. The whole country can't be like this. It was the largest country in the world, some of it's still gotta be out there."

"America is. The largest, I mean," AEGIS said, pushing up her glasses slightly. "Russia was at the time of the war, but with the United States absorbing Canada and--"

"I don't care," Saga said, and AEGIS cut short, looking hurt. "Don't give me that. Don't just stand there and casually spit out factoids when this--" she swept her arm backwards "--is all that's left here. What the fuck is this?"

"Saga, calm down," I ordered.

She spun on me and bared teeth. "No. You calm down."

I glared at her. "As everyone's been saying, the country has been gone forever, Saga. I don't know what you were expecting to find out here, but this one wasn't just some big XPCA cover up. There was a war, and one side won, and one side lost. And this is what happens when you lose a nuclear war."

She frothed at me, her mind bubbling like a boiling vat. "None of that gives anyone the right to just wipe out everyone! My family was innocent, Athan. They were--"

"What," I interrupted, slapping her with her own mental energy. "Did. You. Expect to find?"

The others were silently slipping away, Karu back at the helm and everyone else getting as far from the argument as they could. Saga just stood and simmered, though she didn't have a response for me.

"Look," I said. "You probably wouldn't have liked anyone here anyway. You're not fluent in Chinese, right?"

"I know some!"

"So it would have just been hell, like Tokyo was."

She thrashed her head in disagreement, but I saw her tears building and lip trembling again. I sighed.

"I don't understand how you can feel it's alright, funny even, to kill people by the boatload, and then take this so personally."

"Shut up," she said, storming away from the door. "I hate you. Just go away."

"Seriously, Saga? That's like the most teenage thing--"

"I said SHUT UP," she said, and I reeled. Karu hadn't yet disengaged the autopilot and seemed to decide to leave it on for now.

"No. What the fuck?" I asked. "You giggle about dismembering people. You talk about how funny it would be to traumatize children, you laugh at soldiers dying in horrible ways. And now...are you crying?"

"I'm not! Fuck off, Athan."

"Just what the hell is so different about all those Sinos? Is it just because it's your family? Your people? What?"

She glared at me, her breathing slow and shallow, barely visible under her oversized clothes. Her face twitched for a second, and then she let out a very long, very slow breath.

"I don't know, okay?" she said.

"Okay," I frowned at her. "You don't have any idea?"

She went silent and stared at the blackness for another long moment before sitting on the metal floor and folding her spindly legs under her. "No. Yes? I don't know. It's sad. It's fucked up." She snapped to staring at me again for a moment. "You know, I spend most of my life not killing people, you do realize that, yeah?"

I nodded and she went back to gazing.

"Even when I'm doing all the damage I can, it never feels like I'm doing anything. It's just people...people I can see into, know what...what they're like, you know? You get a feel for who and what they are, and they're all disgusting. Humans are made for eating and fucking and being self-interested. They're awful creatures, they're all so focused on how every situation can benefit themselves, how they can avoid embarrassment, mitigate personal risks, who can help them, who can take the fall. Over, and over, and over again. It's so gross."

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She turned to me again, this time smiling. "It's why I like you guys so much, honestly. You and Lia, you're basically children, how you think." I started to argue but she continued. "You just do right because you think it's right, and she just sees the world like a game. And then Tem's practically a baby, and Karu is so broken she doesn't even count as human. You're all so fun, even if you are all people underneath."

I blinked at her, unsure of where this all came from or where it was going...or why Saga had suddenly turned soft in front of everyone. But she wasn't yelling anymore, so that had to be a good thing.

"But this--" she gestured at the glasslands "this wasn't personal. Nobody saw through the eyes of their victims here. Nobody cared what was in anyone's head. Someone just pushed a bunch of buttons and boom, everyone died."

I saw her wrapping it up, putting her facade back on again, the brief glimpse of a scared little girl who was too old and had too much power, disappearing again. "Besides, I take killing as an art form. Of course I'd take it personally that someone's trying to mass-produce my work."

"All right, Saga, I got it," I said, unbuckling so I could pull her back to her seat.

"What?" she asked, and I felt my mind heavily probed.

"It's fine. Don't worry about it. Karu, can you take us inland?"

Saga glared at me another few long moments, but she didn't want to continue the embarrassing exchange any more than I did.

She'd really dropped her guard there, in her outrage, and was regretting it already. Doubly so because she knew I'd seen right through her at the end, but even worse, right in front of the other girls. For someone who'd just ranted about how selfish and petty humans were, Saga made a very convincing human herself.

And that thought got me punched in the ribs by her, with a pouting frown. I had to laugh at how much it didn't hurt, so she tried again, full-force, and I just caught the punch easily.

"You're such an ass," she informed me.

"Look," I said, keeping my voice low. "I'm sorry about what happened to your country and your people. It was probably just a shitty situation where a few assholes on both sides ruined everything for everyone. That's what I've learned through this whole stint through the XPCA and against them -- there's always going to be bad people like Dragon, Ichiro, and Idris who rise to the top just to shit on everyone else's heads."

"Good metaphor," she nodded.

"And I don't know anything about the Sinos, but I do know that most of the 'evil' Exhumans I've met were just misunderstood, or hurt, or dealing with an unfair world. And I'm sure it was the same for your people, too. I bet they were like us...like most Americans, probably. Just trying to get by, for the most part."

"That was my family," she said. "They ran a restaurant. They weren't hurting anyone."

"I know," I told her, and she went silent, so I did too.

It seemed an ill portent that Saga, possibly the most unflappable member of our team was already so flapped. But then again, we all were. None of us, I though, could shake the feeling that more than just blackness beneath us, there was a void, and it shunned us actively, so unlike any place or land we'd ever seen, ever heard of.

So while our entry was uneasy, the next few hours were simply depressing. After we got far enough inland to lose sight of the coast, there was nothing here but flat, endless glossy nothingness. From horizon to horizon, it was almost like being back over the sea again.

It was unnerving, I thought. The only thing that made me feel like I hadn't just gone crazy were the small details I could sometimes see in the ground far below -- small swirls where the glass hadn't finished settling before it cooled, or shimmering ripples where it'd been struck by wind while setting.

Maybe the strangest thing of all was just how still everything was. I'd have expected after a hundred years for there to be sand blown in, or the glass all worn away, but it looked spotless, pristine. All gloss and no dirt, as far as we could see.

I asked AEGIS to look and she thought for a few moments, conferred with Karu, and got back to me. "Where would the dirt come from?" she asked. "When the bombs went off, everything glassed over at once, and it's so smooth there's nowhere for any residual to settle really."

"There's gotta be some," Lia said, looking around with a frown. "Somewhere…"

"Karu says there's no wind or anything here either. No change in elevation, very consistent temperatures, high pressure zone...there's no weather here pretty much year-round. Maybe some winds at dusk and dawn, but that's it."

"Not even weather can survive there," I commented, and AEGIS gave me a grim nod.

"One of the many reasons nobody's tried to resettle it. It's just the world's most inhospitable land at this point, even worse than Antarctica. No water, no shelter, no variation or resources...a bit after the war, once the radiation had time to die down a bit, there was a big movement to colonize. All this space up for grabs, right?"

She pushed up her glasses, and I watched her yellow eyes as she recounted. "All ended in failure. As it turns out, space just for the benefit of space is practically worthless. There's tons of land on Earth we already don't or won't utilize because there's just nothing there worth living for. The deserts of northern Africa, much of the Middle East -- heck, the oceans themselves aren't really hard to build on or under...there's just no point to doing so. And now the glasslands are even worse than any of those."

"At least in the desert there's plants. And dirt," Lia commented.

"And there's aquaculture and kelp farms in the oceans. But at the end of the day, why live there when you can grow potatoes in a patch of rocky soil pretty much anywhere else?"

"So it's never coming back?" I asked, looking out again.

"I mean...hard to say. People talk about overcrowding and overpopulation as serious issues, but they're not the real problem. That's just shorthand for resource scarcity. And here, there's no resources."

I blinked behind my sunglasses at the infinite expanse beneath. This far and not a fleck of dirt or a drop of water. It would be pretty impossible for a farmer to get started in there. You'd have to bring in your own dirt, at which point, like AEGIS said, why not just put that dirt anywhere else? On a raft, even. Then you could at least go fishing all day, instead of being driven slowly insane by how empty and quiet and huge this all was.

But if nobody ever settled here, it'd remain empty, quiet, and huge forever. It just seemed bizarre to me that there could exist something so pristine, and yet so unwanted.

"Then...what are we doing here?" Lia asked, bringing me back.

"We're looking for...whatever it is," AEGIS confirmed. "Whatever the source is that IkaCo is using."

"And we have no idea where it is?"

"We have...some idea." AEGIS crossed her arms. "We can tell by their fuel logs and the amount of supplies they brought on their caravans the maximum range. We can tell the general direction they headed by where they chose to go inland, since it's not like there's any real established ports, or better or worse glass beaches. But otherwise, yeah, we're kinda guessing."

"And what are the odds our guessing works out?" I asked. "We've already been flying this VTOL a long time, how much fuel do we have?"

"Well...by my math," AEGIS said, giving her hair a little pull "we should be able to cover...about forty percent of the potential area we're looking for."

"Forty" Lia sputtered. "That's a sixty percent chance we just...what, run out of fuel and crash?"

"I mean...we'd put down the VTOL before we crashed it."

"Down there?" I asked. "In the middle of nothing?"

"Well...sorta. Look it's not as bad a plan as it sounds. We're not just flying in a straight line, we're taking a curving loop that will...if it comes to it...dump us out at the end as close to Korea as we can get."

"And then...we just...walk out of China?"

"Well, ideally, we can make some kind of sled out of the VTOL and the glass is smooth enough...look, I appreciate the concern, but really, forty percent was as high as we were going to be able to get. It's not like we could stop by the gas station and buy a hundred gallons of jet fuel, anyway."

"We could have taken a fresh VTOL in Hiroshima," Karu intoned.

"Which is exactly why I didn't bring this up sooner. We already have decent odds of success and have already pushed the line on our criminality. This was the best compromise."

"Except you did not include us in the details," Karu said. "There was no compromise, merely your position."

"My position already accounted for all of yours," she huffed. "I knew Athan wouldn't want to kill anyone else we didn't have to, and I knew you all were just operating out of laziness. I picked the more noble path."

"You mean, the path that was more up Athan's butt," Lia grinned.

Karu pushed a few buttons and then released the controls to come back and argue properly. "Robot, should the worst come to pass and we are forced to walk through this blighted land because of your weakness--"

"I already said I'll fashion a sled, and more than likely, I'll be the one pulling it."

"I wonder if we could merely pull you apart and drain your cells for a few more minutes of flight," Karu said bitterly.

AEGIS crossed her arms. "Good luck with that. My cells are designed for long-term, low-demand power usage. They wouldn't come close to powering a whole VTOL, not even for a minute."

"Then we simply pull you apart for the pleasure of it," Karu sneered.

"Karu don't be a dick," I warned.

"This bot has sent us all on a fool's errand!" Karu argued, pointing an accusing finger. "A greater-than-not chance we all land in the glasslands? And as the pilot, when was I to be informed this was in the flightplan?"

"Be that as it may, it's already happened," I said. "Unless you want to turn back time and then argue with AEGIS, we're stuck sticking to this plan."

Karu glared at me. "You only act as such because she is sucking up to your ideals. The mission was more important than this when we took the first VTOL, and it would have been more important had we taken a second. Do not allow her excuses to drive you into weakness."

"Just fly the damn thing," I said, shaking my head. She muttered at me and then headed for the back instead.

"Sorry," AEGIS said in a low voice, once Karu was out of immediate earshot. "I didn't mean to...start a fight."

"You kinda did, though," I told her. "You knew this was going to make waves and so didn't tell anyone. That's kinda shitty."

She gave me a half-smile. "Well, I don't mind the waves, as long as you don't. I just feel bad making decisions for you again. I'm trying to cut back, I promise."

I was about to reply when Saga sat bolt-upright, and I wondered if she suddenly had insight into the conversation. She turned to me and I could see in her eyes...or mind?...that it was something far, far better.

"There's someone below us," she informed us. "A person, I think, way out here."

I shouted for Karu but she was already emerging from the back with a water bottle in hand. She threw it to me, unopened, and sat back in the controls, flipping switches and pushing buttons, and I felt the VTOL swerve under us, air suddenly rushing sideways through the craft as we turned.

"Where? Never mind, I see it," Karu said, and the craft began to descend.

"It's...crazy, it's like…" Saga said, holding her head. "It's...uh oh."

"What's uh oh?" I asked. "Saga? What's uh-oh?"

Karu also seemed to hesitate, and with her the whole ship. We were only a dozen feet off the ground now, the ground under us rippling with the air pressure of the VTOL's fans.

"It's one of the toads," Saga said, frowning as she concentrated. "Or...like them. I dunno. He doesn't seem hostile, but I can't tell." She swore.

"A toad, way out here?" I looked around at the others, seeing them all watching me, and I realized, everyone was waiting for me to make a decision. I shook my head. "Toad or not, they've gotta be living somehow. If they live out here, they might know something about the source, or if nothing else, we can see how they managed and be in a better place ourselves."

I turned to Karu and nodded, and she acknowledged. "Putting her down, then."

"And...what if they're hostile?" Lia asked.

"If they are...we've beaten toads before. We can do it again," I said.

"Very reassuring. Let's hope they don't like, wreck the ship and strand us in the middle of nowhere," Saga muttered.

"Yes, lets," I agreed, and slid the door open as the craft touched down.