Horan floated up to a snow-covered overpass above the highway and looked out into the distance. “…Hey, uh, Mark? Now would be a good time to have a new idea.”

In the center of a circle of melted snow, Mark looked up at Horan’s perch, his gas mask and form-fitting gloves already in hand. “You see it?”

Horan felt the hair on his arms and legs stand on end when Mark asked that question.

Portland had had no towering skyscrapers to fill the horizon. Like Mark had predicted, the city wasn’t quite large enough to count as one of the great megalopoli of humanity. Instead, they city had been a great carpet of concrete, sweeping highways and low-level urban sprawl blanketed across the earth like a vast patch of artificial lichen.

At least, it had once been.

The detonation of nuclear weaponry is not intended to incinerate entire cities in an apocalyptic fireball. Rather, they are typically detonated a short distance in the air, in order to give their radioactive payload a wider reach. In such a manner, cities are poisoned and cleansed of all that makes it a city, invisible death worming its way into every tiny crevasse. But nevertheless, the scars of such merciless instruments of death are generous enough to still be seen to a casual observer.

Where exactly the nuclear warheads had ben set off eluded Horan; doubtless, what had once been the heart of the city was too far off to be seen. Instead, the outer limits and outlying towns of Portland served as the initial exhibit. Shards of steel and concrete were haphazardly lodged in the sides of buildings and roads that faced inwards, shrapnel from blasts whose epicenters were still over ten miles away.

Something passed over and through Horan: A sensation, physical and more, that he had experienced a thousand times before, then another that was utterly alien to him.

The man who had once been named ‘king’ felt his arm extending outward of its own accord, its hairs on end as the wind passed over him. The frigid and irradiated breeze, to which his immortal body was once all but insensible, opened its secrets to him as he felt his sight, hearing and touch extend through his fingertips, beyond his body and into the winds of the shattered city.

Elegiac wind swept through streets of snow, ice, and cracked pavement. It flowed over barricades and checkpoints, set up by police and national guard as order and security unraveled within the city. It passed through empty, collapsed buildings, their windows and doors blown open as the icy darkness made them as much a part of the natural world as the remains of any state park or forest. It invaded houses and apartments, emptied first by forces incomprehensible to its occupants, then once more by those that they understood all too well. It spread its gaze over the frozen heart of the city, modest government buildings and office complexes thrown to the ground by bombs that split the sky. Where once was life, community, and family, was now nothing but snow and rubble.

The city’s sole custodian, its lone witness, wormed its way beneath the necropolis, into the tunnels and pipes that had once pumped the blood and waste of the city’s corpus. Portland, Oregon, had once held within itself over two and a half million people. Among the insects and starved rodents of the city’s sewers and basements, forty-six hearts still beat.

Horan lowered his arm and exhaled. With a slight shiver, his hair settled back into place.

“…I see it.”

A million miles below Horan, Mark sighed and nodded. “Okay. We’ll have to find somewhere in there that we can hide out for a few days without guaranteeing that I end up sealing my own fate. There’s probably a–”

“Underground.”

Mark looked up at Horan, who was floating back down to him. “Yeah, that’s what I… You hear something about that being a good trick?”

“Yeah, it’s, I, uh…” Horan looked over his shoulder, down the snow-covered highway that led into the city. “…You can stay safe from the worst of the radiation if you stay underground, in, like, the sewers and stuff. We can hide down there.”

Mark smiled, nodded, and patted Horan on the back. He extended an arm, and Quet unzipped a pocket and pulled out a heavy silicone blanket, which Mark wrapped around himself. “Good thinking, yeah, that’s the standard trick. It’s still a risk while we’re looking for a way down, but it’s better than nothing. Waia, if you would, please.”

Waia flexed her arm, which was coated in a thin layer of liquefied pavement. The black sludge slowly grew a halo of orange light as it heated up. The edges of the circle of dry tarmac that the group stood in the middle of began to retreat, snow melting and swiftly evaporating as Waia stepped forward, clearing a path for the four travelers. It was like standing around a mobile space heater with the luminosity of a streetlight.

As days of travel had turned into months, Quet could feel the life-essence granted to her by humanity and their collective thoughts and focus on the Mesoamerican civilization that had created her waning. With that loss of power and energy came the slow crumbling of the barriers between her and harm from the outside world. Cuts hurt more and took longer to heal, she grew more easily winded, and every new day saw more and more of the cold around her seep into her bones. Not yet enough to cause any legitimate concern or damage, but she had recently begun to catch herself shivering every now and then.

She found herself huddling close to Waia, cardigan pulled tight around herself as the warmth of the Primus next to her banished the cold.

A few feet in front of her, Waia noticed Mark donning his gas mask and pulling up his hood as the four approached the proper urban buildup of Portland. She glanced to her side at Quet’s quiet form. “Hey, uh… You okay?”

Quet blinked and looked down at Waia, whose human form was more than a foot shorter than Quet currently was. “Wo–would I not be for some reason?”

“No, it’s just, I…” Waia suddenly became glad that Quet didn’t make eye contact while speaking. “A lot’s happened to, uh… and it has to be a lot, just walking through all this snow for months on end, and… I’m sorry, is all.”

“Sorry for what?”

“…I…” Waia scanned Quet’s expressionless face. “I just want you to know that I know I need to do better. I had a chance to stop all this from happening, but I ended up getting dropped into a hole and leaving you all alone to die.”

Quet shrugged. “Nah, I get it. Everyone messes up every now and then.”

“Yeah, well, not everyone is me.” Waia stuffed her hands into her pockets. “I’m the one who got a mantra built around me about how I don’t lose when it comes to this kind of thing. You can try and make me feel better all you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m now two for two when it comes to stopping Torch from killing anyone else.”

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“…Okay?”

Waia furrowed her brow. “Is that it? Just ‘okay’? I’m talking about how I just got everyone killed. You don’t have anything to say about that except ‘okay’?”

Quet shrugged again. “You told me not to try and make you feel better. I– Do you want me to try to make you feel worse? It’s that or neutrality, and you just ruled that out so… Sorry if there’s some obvious answer to what you want me to say, because I’m not seeing it.”

“It’s…” Waia sighed. “No, nothing. Forget I said anything.”

“Anything? I mean, it seems like you really wanted me to know–”

“I said forget it.”

“…Okay.”

The two continued walking in silence.

Another two to five hours later (it was never easy to tell), the interstate highway began to split off into dozens of tributaries as it entered the core of the city. Buildings grew taller and more tightly packed, and dilapidated suburbs gave way to crypt-like business establishments.

Quet took a deep breath, tasting the radioactive air. “Okay, so, if we want to head below the streets, our best shot is a manhole, ideally one that still has the cover on. So loo–”

Waia nodded towards a side street. “There’s one pretty close that way, right?”

Quet peered down the snow-laden street that Waia had indicated. “I… guess? Maybe? Worth a shot, I suppose.”

“Great.” Waia turned and escorted the group down the street.

The bug-eyed lenses of Mark’s gas mask stared at Waia for a moment as the hunched, blanket-covered figure turned to follow her, then looked up at Horan.

Horan shrugged. “Place is weird.”

Quet leaned forward and started rolling faster on her shoes’ built-in wheels in order to keep up with Waia, whose stride grew more determined as she progressed down the road. “So, how did you detect a structure like that? I noticed that your abilities have understandably expanded in both degree and range over the months. Do you possess some form of seismic senses that allow for subterranean observation? Are you capable of reading heat signatures and detecting the minute alterations in temperature as found within underground pockets of heavier-than-air gases? Can you, like, hear really good? And you hear the… water? In the sewer?”

Waia stopped and stared at Quet. “Did you… not know about the manhole cover?”

“…No?”

“I thought we…?” Waia shook her head and continued, shrugging off a scrap of linen that had fallen onto her shoulder at some point. “Ugh, never mind. It’s there.”

On cue, a manhole cover was revealed underneath the layer of snow that it had been buried beneath. Steam arose from the small holes on either side of the disc.

Waia approached the cover to remove it and provide access underground, but when she was about five feet from the cover, something underneath pushed it up and slid it aside. A gas mask-clad head peered out from the hole like a meerkat, spotted the four strangers by the cover, and recoiled, crashing back down into the tunnel below with an echoing thud.

Quet gasped at the fleeting sight. “I knew it! The legendary Portland Sewer Man! Omet used to tell everyone ghost stories about it! I knew there had to be a moral to this story!”

Horan leaned over the manhole cover and looked down at the sprawled figure of the stranger on the floor below, his eye bathing the dark sewer in faint blue light. “You alright?”

The stranger pointed a single shaking, gloved finger up at Horan.

“Oh, yeah.” Horan shifted into his human form, making the light vanish from his eye. “You alright?”

Mark pushed on Horan’s back, ushering him down the manhole cover.

All four climbed down the ladder built into the wall of the underground pipe, with Waia bringing up the rear and sliding the manhole cover back into place behind her.

Mark took a few steps from the manhole before taking off his insulation blanket and gas mask. “Okay, uh… Sorry to bother you, we’re just passing through.”

The stranger pulled off his own mask, revealing a sandy-haired man in his twenties. He got to his feet and stared at Horan, then looked at Quet, who still hadn’t shifted into her human form. “…Que diable est-ce que vous êtes?”

“A Taurus,” replied Horan.

“Kahawai ‘Ele’ele Motorcyclists’ Club,” said Waia.

“INFJ,” said Quet. “…Wait, I thought you were born in March?”

“Not my fault the zodiac’s changed,” grumbled Horan.

“Can you guys stop being idiots for ten seconds?” Mark patted Quet on the shoulder. “Also, I need the thing, this guy’s French.”

“Québécois,” corrected the stranger.

“Sorry.”

Quet fished around in her pockets, then produced two glyph-covered pebbles. She glanced over her shoulder to Waia while she handed one pebble to Mark and tossed the other to the stranger. “By the time we – Can you just grip that for a second? Thanks. – By the time we made it to Hermosillo, Mark was so sick of not being able to talk to anyone by himself that he got us to stop for a couple days and let me make him a two-way translation matrix.”

Mark squeezed his stone, which began to glow with faint green light, the only illumination in the tunnel save for Waia’s arm. “Hi, sorry again, we don’t mean to be… all this. Ignore the magic rocks for now, they’re a thi– You’re going to report us to the other Servants, aren’t you?”

The stranger stared at Mark. “…The who? Again, what ar–? I thought you didn’t speak French! Is it beca– magic ro– Who are you people?!”

Mark breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay, still no Servants here, tha–that’s good. Kind of surprising there’s anyone here, but this isn’t so bad.”

Horan leaned to the side to look past the stranger. “There’re a few dozen more of you down here, right?”

The stranger blinked. “Yeah, that’s… right?”

Mark sighed. “Do they also speak French? We only have the two rocks.”

“Not most of them, no, jus– I speak English, you know! I’m from Longueuil, not some tiny village in the woods!”

“Then why did you speak French to begin with?”

The stranger pointed an entire arm towards Horan. “Because he spoke Fre– Do you, even? I don’t get you! Your eye was glowing! That girl’s arm still is!”

Horan closed his eye and put a hand over his chest. “My vast, oceanic soul transcends human social constructs like ‘language’ and ‘death’, connecting with your essence on a level too primal for most to comprehend.” He looked back at the stranger and grinned. “In short, don’t worry about it. The name’s Horan, and I’m older than western civilization. How are you?”

The stranger blinked and looked at the floor. “You’re all insane. Portland has been invaded by a gang of radiation-proof nutjobs with glowing body parts.”

“It’s mostly just eyes,” said Waia.

“I don’t care.” The stranger pulled at his hair and began walking in circles. “They’re going to see you, and they’re going to assume I did this somehow…”

“Okay, let’s not say anything too extreme,” said Horan. “How about you just take us to ‘they’, and once we’re there we can do some proper introductions? But yeah, while we’re on our way, we can catch you up. There’s not, like, that much on the way to explaining why Waia’s arm is going, as long as you’re willing to take a lot of things at face value.”

The stranger threw up his arms. “You know what? Sure! Why not?! I was supposed to go on a scavenging run this morning, but I guess I can bring in four glowing weirdos!” He turned around and began walking down the pipe. “I’m still holding this green rune-rock!”

“They’re actually called glyphs?” added Quet.

Horan gestured for Quet to follow him as he began down the tunnel. “It’s not worth it.”