Waia sat on a rotting log and stared out at the cloud of gas that was only now beginning to settle, dispersing into the urban sprawl surrounding what had once been Salem, Oregon. Mark, Quet and Horan sat off to the side, quietly examining the faraway look in her orange eyes.

Horan broke the silence first. “You know, uh, none of us really thought you were dead. We figured that some guy just dropping you into a pit was too easy. And, uh, heh, here you are! Crazy how… things work… out.”

Waia blinked and turned towards the other three. “What… What day is it?”

Quet frowned. “A–Are you okay? Do you need, like, medical attention? Because, um, Mark’s gotten pretty goo– I’m sorry, this is too much too fast. Just… One thing at a time, is everything okay with you?”

Waia blinked again. This time, she seemed to mean it. She shook her head and shifted into her human form, her eyes finally focusing on the people in front of her. “Yeah, I… I’m fine. Just been a weird few months for me.”

“Been a weird few months for everyone,” agreed Horan. He leaned against a derelict telephone pole, folded his arms and looked Waia up and down. “Well, it’s… It’s been a while, how about we do a little bit of catch-up? What’ve you been doing since… Last time we saw each other?”

Waia stared at the snowy ground and shrugged. “I… I dunno. Fighting, I guess. I pulled myself out of that hole after a week or two of digging– It was only maybe a mile or so deep– and, y’know, I’ve just been going up and down, trying to stop the Servants. That kind of thing. How long has it been, actually?”

Quet sat cross-legged in the snow, unbothered by the cold. “Trying to stop them from doing what, exactly? We’ve been up the coast of half a continent, and we haven’t really seen hide nor hair of any plan of theirs besides ‘kill every Primus left’. And as far as we know, that’s just you, me and Horan.”

Recognition flashed on Waia’s face. “Wait, so… What happened to your place? I wa… I wasn’t really expecting to see you guys out here; I thought you’d all just be staying in that big pyramid of yours.”

Quet pulled her dirty-looking cardigan tight around herself. “…Guess you didn’t pass it by on your way out of the hole… Wait, you didn’t come back to find us?”

Waia shrugged again and wiped her forehead. “I mean, I… I couldn’t really find my way back, and I–I figured it would just be a better idea to track down Torch and force them out of their cheap tricks. If I could jus–”

Mark climbed to his feet, pulled his gas mask off and stormed up to Waia. “Okay, you know what? I was just going to be quiet this whole time, I didn’t think it was worth risking the radiation poisoning. But this is as good a time as ever to lay a few things out now that we’ve run back into you.”

Horan leaned forward and tried to get Mark’s attention. “Hey, dude, what’re you doi–?”

“Not now,” said Mark, immediately turning back to Waia. “Apparently, you haven’t gotten yourself out of this whole ‘me-against-the-world’ thing after five actual months. Because, by the way, that’s how long we’ve been out here for. I kind of figured that almost dying would have knocked some rational thought into you, but I guess I need to spell it out for you: That’s not going to fly anymore.”

Waia stared up at Mark. “…Okay, yeah, I get it.”

“I would hope so!” fumed Mark. “Thanks to you and your little playact of thinking you’re some infallible chosen one, people are dead! Quet’s entire family got blown up because you thought you were the one Primus out of thousands who was special and awesome enough to stop Torch in their tracks!”

He leaned close to Waia’s face. “You’re coming with us. You’re too useful for us to leave behind, I’ll give you that you’re better at punching out of problems than all three of us put together. But we work together. I don’t want to hear anything about lone wolves or special little superheroes, because it’s thinking like that that gets people killed. More people killed, I should say. Got it?”

Waia seemed more tired out from Mark’s demands than anything else. “…Sure. Right. You know, you’re not the first to point out how much of a screwup I am. But sure, I’ll help you with… Why exactly are we up here?”

Quet scrambled to her feet, eager for a change in conversation topic. “Well, we haven’t really found any new potential ways out of…” She glanced up at the impenetrable clouds above her. “…So the Seraphium is still our main priority, at least until something more practical comes along. You probably remember. Find the extra-special everyone-summoner, summon everyone, bing bang boom, forget this ever happened. Minus the billions of people who died in the interim. The big hole by our house turned out to be a dud, but after the Servants levelled our house, Rachna– You remember Rachna, right?”

“Pretty hard to forget,” replied Waia, watching Mark put his gas mask back on and sit to the side, eyes still trained on Waia.

“Right, so…” Quet zipped open another ambiguously-real pocket and rummaged around in it, reaching in up to her elbow. “Rachna stuck around for us and tried to communicate some help to us. You remember how the guy is, but he did– here we go– he did give enough for us to formulate a lead.”

Quet pulled out a water-stained brochure and unfolded it to reveal a Spanish-language tourist map of the American state of Washington. “We managed to piece together that he was directing us towards one Mount Rainer.” She pointed out a corresponding dot on the map to the south-southwest of the gray blob labeled ‘Seattle’.

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Horan nodded at the sight. “He wouldn’t-slash-couldn’t give us much detail as to what’s actually there, but we don’t really have any other options for what to do with the rapidly-shrinking time we have left to live, so we’ve just been heading up the coast for the past few months. It’s, uh, it’s been slow-going ever since all the gasoline in, like, the world has been hogged by the Servants for military operations. They have cars locked down tight.”

“I could hypothetically construct one of a number of matrices that would allow an expedited trip,” explained Quet, “but with neither my carving setup back home nor the mobile station that was in my sash that exploded back in the Down Below, any matrix of adequate caliber would require more time to construct than it would take to simply walk to the given destination, even had I begun work on the first day of travel. I occasionally regret not learning the Assyrian method. Very occasionally. I won’t push it.”

“…Yeah, uh… Words.” Waia looked between Mark and Quet. “So now what? Keep walking?”

Quet shrugged. “At our current pace, Mount Rainier is only two or three weeks away. Although, that timeframe doesn’t account for any time that we’ll have to spend finding whatever it is that separates Rainier from a normal mountain.”

Waia groaned and sighed. “Yup, there it is. Yeah, uh, it’ll probably skew closer to three weeks if those Servants keep hunting me down like they’ve been for… ever, I guess. But maybe if I don’t go all iron-monster for a while, their choppers won’t be able to pick out the five of us. It’s not like they have photos… of…”

A pit began to open up in Waia’s stomach. She noticed the blue cardigan that Quet was wearing. Quet seemed to understand what she was looking at and pulled the cardigan close.

Horan at his watch and floated into the air. “Oh, hey, look at the time. Let me just do something up here.” He hastily flew out of sight and just about out of earshot, audibly breathing a sigh of relief as he left.

Waia could feel Mark’s glare boring into the side of her head “…I don’t… I recognize the… I didn’t spend much time with that one. Could you, uh–”

“Omet,” replied Quet.

“Right, and when did–?”

“About thirty seconds after you went down that hole.”

Waia’s gaze drifted back down to the ground, where it lingered for a while. She mouthed something unintelligible.

After another few moments she looked back up at Quet. “The Servants are gonna come back here. If one of the helicopter-and-gas groups retreats and I don’t start moving again, a bunch of barricade-and-cannon ones start swarming and try to box me in, hold me in place long enough for them to drop one of the unlaunched warheads from right after the Nabbing on me. They’ve tried once or twice.”

Horan blinked as he flew back down to the ground. “Can you j– One of the what?”

Mark nodded at Horan and shrugged. “Waia might be able handle garden-variety drone strikes and artillery and chemical warfare and whatever else, but at least she’s willing to acknowledge that an atomic bomb is too much for her to handle.”

Waia stood up. “We gotta get out of here before they try and nuke us. I’ve been heading north for the past few weeks, so they’ll probably try and set up ahead of me that way. Which way is Rainier?”

“North,” answered Quet.

“Okay.” Waia turned around and examined the empty landscape. “C’mon, think, think for once in your…”

Mark removed his mask. “We could try Portland.”

Quet turned to look at Mark, surprised. “Wha– Why, what’s there?”

“Absolutely nothing.” Mark stood up and tried to get his bearings. “Portland, it’s a few dozen miles north of here. From what I’ve heard of– Is that enough time?” He turned to look at Waia. “It might take a day or two for us to get there, how long does it usually take for the Servants to box you in?”

“About a week,” said Waia. “They need to cover a pretty big area to make sure I didn’t zigzag them, and it takes a while to pull together a witch hunt like that.”

“Okay, great.” Mark fixed his gaze on the line of derelict lamp posts that marked where the north-to-south interstate highway had been buried. “Portland’s one of those major cities where it was big enough to get targeted when all the wars broke out at once, but not big enough that the government put enough into defenses that it came out okay, like with San Francisco or Istanbul. Also, uh, not so big of a target that it didn’t matter how well-protected it was, like with Cairo, Mexico City and Los Angeles. There’s, like, a Goldilocks zone. And Portland isn’t in it. Probably. I don’t know much about Oregonian cities.”

Quet nodded slowly. “Okay, so the city’s a wreck. How’s that going to stop the Servants? It makes for a good hiding place, but the Servants are still probably gonna flush us out. And if their strategy really is to nuke us like Waia said, do–does it even matter if it’s hard for them to find our specific location?”

“Stop thinking like a Primus, Quet.” Mark shouldered his backpack and stood up. “Start thinking like a human. People didn’t just avoid a place full of loot like Mexico City because it got hit by a bunch of big bombs. It’s because the fallout there makes it impossible to safely take anything from the city, and without any decent air filtration, the radiation gets lethal in hours. You’d have to be an idiot to risk going anywhere near a place like that, let alone stay there long-term.”

Horan sighed and stared at Mark. “Dude, look, I know it can be easy to forget thanks to the kinds of people you spend all your time around, but ‘human’ is a demographic that includes, uh, you. I’m willing to believe that the Servants won’t follow us in there, but I feel personally like you dying of fifteen different cancers kind of puts a damper on the prospect!”

Mark shrugged. He opened his mouth, which hung in place for a while before he closed it again. “Look, it’s still gonna be a few days before we get there. If, on the way, we find an option besides ‘ford the radiation hole’ and ‘become the epicenter of a brand new radiation hole’, I’d be more than happy to pick that. But right now, the longer we spend wondering what our favorite way to die is, the more likely it is that the Servants are gonna take that one choice we have away from us.”

Mark turned, spent a moment finding the northbound highway again, and started walking. “C’mon, we’re burning daylight. Probably. I don’t know if it’s day or not.” He began trudging through the knee-high snow towards the highway, and could feel the three Primoi staring at him as he nonchalantly walked off. “I said I’m going. You all can come if you feel like it.”

Waia glanced at Horan, visibly confused. Horan merely shrugged in response. “He’s kind of gotten used to making stupid decisions. I think he might be a bit resigned to his fate, but there’s no stopping him now. Looks like we have abandoned cities to be.” He floated out of the snow and followed Mark, shoes half an inch above the snow’s surface. “Gimme a sec, dude!”

Quet grumbled and followed suit. “What’s even the point of wearing wheel-shoes for five months straight if you gotta walk through snow everywhere…?”

Waia blinked. “Wear what?”