Of all the times someone tried to kill me, this one easily took second place. The only thing better than fending off an enraged sea captain was what I did to piss off Sarah Melbrook at her seventh birthday party. You had it coming, you little bitch.

Unlike Sarah Melbrook, Captain Erid had a sword and some inconvenient convictions about where it was supposed to go. We’d have to agree to disagree on that—I just got this body, I didn’t want scratches on it. I batted a slash aside with the fetoulia branch I’d snatched off the ground.

“We can talk about this!” I said, bending under a follow-up stroke that would have cut my head off. “I don’t want to fight you!”

“Then stop dodging.”

“Come on, Erid,” I whined, side-stepping a pair of thrusts and knocking a third aside with my improvised weapon. “I know things didn’t end well—”

“Die already!”

If only she knew. “Erid, we have pirates to hunt!”

“We my salty ass!”

She lunged; I slapped her saber away and spun past her. Darwin, but it felt good to move. My new body was stronger, faster, and more agile. This fight felt like a casual spar with the commander.

The moon was high and bright, shining through the fetoulia leaves to the temple’s inner sanctum. The darkness had color now. My artificial eyes carried visual data to my newly enhanced neurology, picking out every subtle shade of blue on the captain’s cloak as she tried to gut me.

I laughed with pure joy. I was alive.

“Will you stop treating this like a game!” Erid shouted.

We both paused.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry, did you want me to take this a little more seriously? I can try to be more serious if it’s hurting your feelings. You know, while you’re trying to kill me.”

Erid snarled and lunged. I tried something I’d seen in a Star Wars movie once and tried to backflip onto the fetoulia tree. Apparently my augments weren’t Jedi levels of powerful, but a few moments of scrabbling later, I was hanging from a tree branch out of sword range. There was a thunk as Erid’s blade embedded in the tree.

“Are you ready to talk now?” I said. “Or parley, if you prefer. Parley is more pirate-y.”

“You and your goddess-damned pirates!” Erid glared up at me. She probably would have thrown her sword at me if it weren’t stuck in the tree. Was that Kives’s fault? Considering that we’d just threatened Kives with the annihilation of all life on this planet, it was still surprisingly ambiguous whether she was trying to kill us here.

“Val, say a Val thing!” I said. “I don’t want to beat up an old woman.”

“No,” he subvocalized. I couldn’t even flip him off because I needed the hand that wasn’t holding the map to hang on to the branch.

Erid’s eyes narrowed. “You have a rare talent for making enemies, Idiot.”

“My parents always said I was gifted.”

“I didn’t know Calamities had parents.”

Now Val deigned to speak up. “‘Calamities.’ Parochial, isn’t it?”

Sandaled feet left the wooden deck that surrounded the tree, treading on the roots themselves. Val had translated himself a beard, which was braided like his hair in the Estheni fashion. The moonlight lent a sharp cast to his face, green eyes faintly luminous in the dark. He looked old, like the ghost of some ancient Viking coming back to fight Ragnarok.

“I’m at my limit for mysterious strangers,” Erid said, drawing herself up. “Who the hell are you?”

Val tilted his head. “I thought you knew. We’re the Calamity. The end of this age.”

“Opsec, my dude,” I subvocalized.

Erid freed her sword with one last tug and rounded on him. "Why are you here?"

"Ask the All-Mother," Val said. "We came to"—his eyes flicked to me—"parley, then you appeared as by sheer coincidence. It would seem our goals align."

Erid glanced at the map in my hands. "Or you're lying, and Kives brought me here to kill you."

Val and I burst out laughing at the same time. The unexpected reaction seemed to catch Erid off guard. She looked between us.

"Your bladework is good," Val said. "But if you're here to kill us, you didn't bring enough angels."

We all looked at the sky. Nothing happened.

"So it would seem," Erid said grudgingly.

"I'll contact my captain," Val said. "She'll meet you tomorrow morning to plan our campaign against these pirates."

"I'm not working with the Calamity and I'm not working with her," Erid said, jabbing her sword in my direction. "The only reason I haven't spread the news far and wide is because the angels told me not to."

"Of course not," Val said, looking at me and tilting his head toward the exit. "See you tomorrow, Captain. We're done here."

"We are not—" she said, whirling to face me. The sight of an empty branch stopped her cold. She turned back to Val, a question forming on her lips, but he was gone too.

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"Sea urchin of a dildo!" she shouted. She stumped out of the inner sanctum.

I hung onto the tree for another thirty seconds or so, deep in presence meditation. As I focused on my soul, I saw the results of the ak ha var process were already bearing fruit; soul-wisps of what I now recognized as anger manifested to my noetic sight as waves of heat. One day it would be a clean flame: fluid, dangerous, striking without being struck. For now, it was more of a space heater with attitude. That was okay. Progress was progress, and I was immortal.

I dropped to the ground, turning off the etheric cloak augment that was countersignaling my soul. Strolling past the dead body of the guy who'd brought me the map, I exited the inner sanctum and found Val leaning against a wall.

"You don't have a cloak," I said. "How did she miss you?"

Val smirked. "I don't need a cloak to walk around the corner."

I chuckled. "Commander, the mission was a success. We're heading back."

*

Val checked the moirascope for the third time, jotting down another row of figures. He stared at them silently, tapping the stylus twice to the back of his wrist.

"It is not any trap that my methods can identify," he concluded.

The commander stirred. "Which means it's a trap they can't."

Abby was in casual dress, forgoing the hakmir and the empty scabbard. She sat with her back straight, forest-green eyes observing the pirate map beneath a brown pixie cut. Her fingers drummed on the arm of her couch, as they did when she was deep in thought.

"That's what she wants us to think!" Markus said cheerfully. "It's probably fine."

"You really have to stop saying that," I said. "You're tempting fate there."

"Actually, you are," said Val, looking up at me. "The more you emphasize the irony of the moment, the higher the chance that a dyad forms with some future event."

"Ha!" Markus tried to elbow me and I scooted to the side. I hadn't entirely forgiven him for what he'd done to Cades.

"Don't be so quick to gloat," said the commander. "I would appreciate if you presented fewer of these opportunities."

Markus looked embarrassingly sheepish for someone who was supposed to be the ship's social officer. "I'm just saying, we can play the 'I knew you knew I knew' game all day, and it gets us nowhere. Play it like any other target. What does she want?"

"We did just threaten her planet," I said. "Maybe she's actually working with us."

"How does a pirate map advance either of our goals?" Markus asked.

Val let out a hm. "These are maps to Horcutio's islands. If they're truly pirate havens, that means there's a community at each of these locations. And her instrument is Erid—a Varasite, defending the trade routes."

"Luchenko," the commander said suddenly. "She's implementing Luchenko."

"It certainly looks that way," Val said.

I checked Markus's face for signs of understanding. Unfortunately, I found them, which meant I had to be the one to ask the question.

"I don't think they covered that in the Academy," I said.

"It's part of secularization theory." Val set the moirascope down and stepped forward to examine the map. "Gods are insultingly inefficient with their energy. It's one of the reasons they need to cultivate religions; otherwise, there's no guarantee that they'll get a sufficient quantity of souls in the right frequency band."

"I thought it was because the ones who left it to chance got outcompeted by the ones who didn't," I said.

"That too," said Val. "But even without competition, the energy requirements past monophase are too steep to forego active cultivation of a food source—the exception being lucky outliers like Alcebios, who will always have a ready supply of conflict-attuned souls. That requires growing a persona within a culture so that they can convert a wider range of energies into aspect-compatible fuel. Kabiades, for example, exploited the Estheni gender norms to convert heterosexuality into athleticism."

"Okay yes I was paying attention in class, can we skip this part?"

"We can't. It's already over." Val smirked. "Horcutio is a monophase god of misfortune, and a relatively weak one at that. The natural supply of compatible souls is too low to sustain a monophase god—there simply aren't enough people who embody the act of inflicting misfortune on others. That makes him reliant on cultural manipulation to survive. If we can destroy or modify the culture to exclude compatible identities, he will starve. That is what the Luchenko Process is for."

"Horcutio is only one persona, though," I said. "I thought you can't get to monophase unless you have a bunch."

"That is detectable," Val said. "But there's another consideration: the catalyst for the Luchenko Process is an outside ideology. Kives has selected, almost naturally, Varas's religion. When Varas gets a taste for Horcutio's food, so to speak, it may motivate her to emulate the Luchenko process against his other personas worldwide. Either way, it falls to Kives to produce proof that she's working alongside us."

"She sure knows a lot about our strategies," Markus said. "Maybe she compromised another team."

"Of course she knows our strategy," the commander said. "We're planning to use it. We were originally slated to use Luchenko on Lorana's education system, and nothing about Kives's apparent proposal prevents that from happening. With the information we have now, we should expect her to know of this strategy whether or not we use it against Horcutio."

"Which gives us no information," Val said. "It promises information—we can detect whether she eliminates Horcutio's other personas or not. But by that point we'd have completed the op. It feels like a trap."

"We could hit the other personas ourselves?" I offered.

"She could have us flying around the world playing termites for years," said Markus.

We all looked at him questioningly.

"You know,"—he knew damn well we didn't know—"the kids' game, where you knock over the termite nest and then another one pops up, so you have to keep knocking them down."

"Oh, like whack-a-mole," I said. Now everyone was looking at me instead. "Uh, you know, it's this carnival game where all these little plastic moles pop up and you have to smack them with a hammer to keep them all down."

"Oh," said Abby, looking at Val. "The renter game."

"What do we actually lose if it's a trap?" I said. "Is she running out some kind of timer?"

"Opportunity costs, mostly," said Val. "Strategically, it might be better to infiltrate the palace and investigate whatever mechanism is connecting it to Kives's planetary shield. We should also be wary of attempts to compromise the ship."

"Then the bait has to be real," said Markus.

"How so?" asked the commander.

"Maybe she's double-crossing us, maybe she isn't," Markus said. "Currently, she's playing along because it gets her something. Probably control. The instant she double-crosses us, she loses that. The mission won't last forever, so if she wants to hold on to her advantage, she'll need to string us along until she's ready. That means she either needs to strike during the mission or sacrifice Horcutio. The only question I have is whether she would actually do that."

"It's possible, given her aspects," said Val. "I'd need to run the calculations on her behavioral distribution to be certain."

"Val," I said. "Abby and I were talking about whether Kives was a trickster god."

"There's already a trickster god," said Val. "Rucks. There wouldn't be enough resources for it unless we killed Rucks first. Additionally, the trickster aspect would need to progress from the oracle aspect, and at progressive monophase that's impossible. Progressive aspects aren't self-sustainable enough to grow progressive aspects of their own."

"So when she's pranking people, that's related to the oracle aspect?" I said.

"Presumably under the reasoning that adversity makes them achieve their potential," Val said.

"Then that's it," I said. "If Horcutio is a couple missed meals from starving, there's no way he can grow past monophase. This time, we're the prank. She's forcing Horcutio to adapt."

Markus nodded, impressed. The commander exchanged a look with Val, who graced me with a smile.

"Compelling theory." He smiled. Once again, the etheric content of his words was missing, but I was pretty sure it wasn't smug.

"But let me guess. You're still running the numbers."

"One day," he said, "you will grow wiser and more skilled than Abby, and your insight will cut like a surgeon's translator. And on that day, I will still run the numbers, because I still trust them more than you."