We were definitely gonna need Val to program a moirascope filter for “giant sea monster ambush” when he got here. If this happened a third time, the commander might turn the car around and go home as a matter of honor.

Our immediate situation wasn’t great. We’d just exploded enough octopus meat to stock every sushi restaurant in Japan for about eight years, and they probably heard the boom all the way back in Vitareas. There’s no way they missed that over in Bulcephine. We were about to make a lot of friends, very quickly.

On the other hand, it was an open question whether those friends would find us, given that we were hidden under a mountain of seafood and camouflaged by a lake’s worth of blood.

“What’s the plan?” I asked.

“Unchanged,” said the commander. “You can pull back the guns now. We can tunnel faster with a smaller profile.”

I glanced at the display. Yeah, she had a point. Thermal, visual, even etheric—everything was gummed up with leviathan smoothie. No point keeping the guns deployed if I couldn’t see what I was shooting at.

“So this was a prank,” I said. “Kives is pranking us. Is she secretly a trickster god or something?”

“No, there’s a distinct trickster god,” said Abby. “Rucks. If it’s really a prank, it could mean she’s trying to eat pronoun/him/her.”

I blinked as my comm failed to translate the Velean bigender pronoun, then told it to output “they.”

“What happens then?” I asked.

“Normally gods avoid that kind of contest. It’s messy. Even with progressive monophase against monophase, it’s a toss-up who walks away. If she weren’t in a progressive phase, I’d say it was to absorb one of their aspects, but there’s no such thing as a double progressive phase.”

“Unless she’s preparing for after she hits biphase,” I said, stomach sinking.

“We started from the assumption that this is a prank,” said Abby. “It’s just an assumption. I’ll have Val run the numbers when he gets here.”

“I feel like we should be worried about this.”

“We should be worried about the Bulcephine insertion,” said Abby. “If this is all intended to help Kives reach triphase, we’ll have years to react. There’s always the strike fleet.”

I frowned. “Yeah. That’s what worries me.”

*

The guys re-established contact while Abby and I were eating breakfast—jadisk, a Velean fish jerky served with sweet vinegar. Abby was taking hers with a side of fruit. I’d just put it on bread and slathered the vinegar over the whole thing like a weird-ass PB&J. Six out of ten.

“Good morning,” Markus said. “End of the thessim and we’re making good time. Nothing to report. Holler back if you can hear me.”

“Eyyy!” I said. “How’s it going, buddy?”

“He just told you,” Val said.

“I missed you too,” I said happily.

Abby ripped a chunk of fish off with her teeth. “How’s your cover holding up?”

“We’re with the Voranetes delegation,” said Markus. “They cozied up to the Vitaressi pretty fast after you left. Falerior tried to get involved, but they fired him a day after he made it clear he wasn’t going to let it drop. You could tell everyone knew it was going to end that way, but no one backed down.”

“Shit,” I said. “The dude was obnoxious, but he didn’t deserve that.”

“Tell him yourself,” said Markus. “He’s traveling with us.”

“Fuck no,” I said. “Make Val tell him.”

Val chuckled dismissively.

“Fine,” I said. “Then I guess he gets to feel bad.”

“Is he still investigating you?” Abby said.

“Not seriously,” said Markus. “I think he’s still adjusting to the change. The man lost his entire career.”

“He’s waiting for Markus to get in contact with Lilith,” said Val. “He could have been much more vicious during the initial interrogation.”

“He told me Oathkeepers get fired when they go after nobles,” I said. “I guess he’ll be gunning for me when he gets here.”

“One more reason to have you stay on ops,” Abby said. “How’s Cades adjusting?”

“The Voranetes representatives are keeping an eye on him. We can’t move freely, but we managed to sneak some time the other night.”

“Any new intel?” I asked.

There was a pause. “No,” Markus said wryly.

“Oh. Oh.” I wrinkled my nose. “Congratulations?”

“Congratulations on developing a high-value asset,” said Abby, shooting a blank look at me.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“He’s been a consistent source of high-quality information,” Markus said, as though we hadn’t just collectively decided his relationship didn’t exist. “He was leaned on enough that he picked up a bunch of the secrets. The social deviance of his sexuality was deemed enough leverage to keep him in line.”

“That was a really weird way to phrase that,” I said.

Val’s smirk was audible. “Did you know that agent-exclusive language doesn’t trigger certain kinds of memetic defenses?”

“Oh god…fire,” I said, hastily correcting myself at a glare from Abby. “Is it her?”

“Who?” Val said pleasantly. “I’m afraid I can’t confirm the identity of who- or whatever is triggering our mixed-detector overlays.”

For all that he was being stalked by an invisible assassin, he sounded remarkably like a spider attending to the vibrations of his web.

“It’s possible we’re being shadowed,” said Markus. “But we’re headed for the capital. Operatives have to report in eventually. This might give us some leads on a certain cult.”

“Good work,” said the commander. “There was a significant Dancer contingent traveling with the caravan, yes?”

“Yeah,” said Markus. “I think they’ve figured out Cades’s situation. The girls have been flirting up a storm whenever they see him.”

“He was pretty flirty when he met me,” I said. “I think that’s just how he masks.”

“Yeah, and they’ve picked up on it,” said Markus. “It’s all show on both ends. No one’s escalating. I was expecting some code-switching when we learned that Rucks’s faith welcomed marginalized sexualities, but this is high-level stuff.”

“They’d do well on Veles,” said Val. “If this sample isn’t an outlier, we should recommend preserving some aspects of the culture during uplift.”

“Duly noted,” said the commander.

“Aren’t the Voranetes observers going to figure it out?” I asked.

“No,” said Markus. “Bears can’t read wolfsign.”

It was a Velean figure of speech about social structures, reflecting the weird animal associations of their culture. Veleans think of wolves as battlefield scavengers, opportunistically feeding on the remains of human conflict. The botched experiment that led to Earth inventing the idea of the “pack alpha” never happened on Veles; instead, wolfpacks are seen as these highly coordinated social groups where individuals instinctively pick up on the thoughts of others. According to Velean folklore, that even extends to leaving notes for other packs: wolfsign.

Bears, on the other hand, are seen as gluttonous loners who don’t need cunning because they can take whatever they want with brute strength. Calling someone a bear on Veles is basically saying they’re an ignorant dumbass who thinks they’re winning at life when they’re actually sowing the seeds of their own destruction. So bears can’t read wolfsign because they aren’t looking for it.

Their ecology might have been suspect, but the ancient Veleans were apparently just as sociologically attuned as the modern ones. Every culture comes with power structures, and the higher you go, the more of a bear you become. It’s the ones on the bottom who need the wolfsign—the references, the figures of speech, clothing, bearing, and attitude; the loaded glances, shared rebellion in silent eyerolls and things not said to each other’s parents; all the little details that say I’m one of you and we can trust each other—to survive.

*

Over the course of a week—taking every precaution—we managed to tunnel the Ragnar in a broad quarter-circle to the foundation of the city walls. No further; that was just begging to get us noticed, either by triggering some etheric defense or accidentally undermining the wall. We’d filled the earth in behind us as we tunneled, but the immediate area had been translated into the idea of solidity, which we dispensed back into realspace as structural supports for a tunnel underneath the wall.

Eight thousand years of technological progress, reshaping the cosmos like gods, and we used it to build a bunch of arches. The Romans always got the last laugh.

I say “we” on all of this, but there wasn’t a lot for me to do, so Abby ordered me to start my meditations for the ak ha var process.

I’d initially thought that “Growing the Mountain from the Roots” was just a flowery name for the meditation technique, but it ended up being mostly literal.

“The body remembers. The soul remembers.” Abby told me again and again. “Both carry your past, and the past returns as your present. This is the mountain. It is what you are and what you must become.”

The body remembers.

I spent a day remembering pain and enjoyment. The time I broke my arm when my brother pushed me out of the treehouse. Blizzards from Dairy Queen after soccer practice. Hot chocolate in the winter. Group hugs in college. Period cramps I’d never suffer again. Soreness after a workout. Knuckles impacting bone, sparring bruises, the knife that sliced my side open during the destruction of Aguin. The agony rending my entire existence that last visit in Pastor Barnes’s office.

The soul remembers.

I spent a day remembering isolation and belonging. The weathered wooden sign in the backyard, “Boys Only.” Patricia inviting the whole team to her birthday except for me. Losing a snowball fight five to one. Kevin Ellis cornering me in seventh grade until I gave him a kiss; Dad’s lecture about modesty when I told him. Finally fitting in with my roommate’s friends; the fights when Trent started dating Brian and I reacted badly. Mom and Dad telling me to get over my depression. The uncertainty of the Academy and the bonds I forged there. Refusing to stay down in that last spar. Meeting Markus and Val and Abby for the first time. Saying goodbye to Kuril and Roel.

Become the mountain.

I spent a day finding the shape of it. The walls I’d built against expected violence; the holes I’d put in them to let people in. The way each hurt prepared me to fight the next one. The way I’d been made a victim; the anger that had carried me through. The full meaning of a sword in my hand, the experiences that built those meanings, their meanings in turn, and so on. Every moment, every thought, every experience the peak of its own mountain, overlapping to become I.

Is this the work of a unified self? Val’s voice asked me.

I stood at the peak and answered yes.

“Veleans do not bow to fate,” Abby said. “All your life, you have let yourself become. That is death—the creeping oblivion of time, dragging you piece by piece into the dark until a stranger inherits your past. From this moment on, seize control. Slay yourself and rise again.”

I spent a day slashing it down. I tunneled through anger and grief and pain and bewilderment, wielding my will as a weapon. I found the selves I’d been—the runt of the litter who never fit in, the awkward high schooler hunted by male gazes, the lonely self-sabotaging young adult—and I cut them down.

I followed the threads that wove them and found the mountain’s heart: The world was sharp, and I needed to be sharper.

I spent a day deciding who I should be. Not who I wanted to be, because my wants were the wants of the girls I’d been—the past returning as the present. Who did I need to be to take on eternity?

I needed openness without vulnerability. I needed strength without destruction. I needed resolve without rigidity.

If I tried to measure my blade against the world’s, the world would grind me down. I needed to become something else: I needed to become a fire. Warm to my friends, deadly to my enemies. Let the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune pass through me; I’d burn them all.

Slay yourself and rise again.

I spent a day finding the roots of the mountain I would become. Moments I’d stood up to my family. Moments where I’d adapted to succeed. Friendships I’d built. Enemies I’d beaten. My pride in my team and theirs in me.

The glowing embers of a fire that would burn Heaven, as Eifni did millennia ago.

We reached our destination that evening. On the seventh day, I rested.