“When you return, you will achieve great things.”

The words had not been meant for the once-Professor James Anthem. Though the HSG Rumblehood swayed in the bullwheel terminal with its enormous hold peeking out of the garage, its officers standing on the prowl, and its provisioners loading large machines, cannons, and stores of supplies, none of the scale and scope of the Emergence Corps operation impressed Anthem more than those words.

The speaker was a girl and an abomination by physical standards—eight years old but with the voice and command of a seasoned military general. The things that bothered her were not likely the same that wracked the minds of children her age—real children.

James Anthem would have known if a strand could make someone stop aging. He had memorized the names and functions of the hundreds of strands that existed, and he could see on the Second Signature’s person, through her lack of mutations, that she was mostly pure. Thus, it must have been a clause in the Decree, a product of the Written word that anchored her while time’s river flowed around her. This mystery was many others James Anthem vowed to solve.

He dwelled on the Second Signature's words during his nights at Hyrnlak, never speaking about them to anyone, as he hadn’t with most of his past.

At Cliff House during the months before Anthem had neutralized Frine and set his survival in motion, he had stirred awake to see the Lone Soldier peering through one of the temple’s netted windows.

“Hey.” Unwin had spoken over Devitt’s sleeping form between them.

“Yeah?”

“You’re the only one who is going to make it out of here.”

The remark had meant nothing to Anthem at the time. “Why me?”

It had taken the Ox-infused a moment to answer, a time in which Anthem thought he dozed off. “There’s something different about you,” Unwin said. “Maybe because you’re the only one who actually believes they can get out. No one ever talks about going home. You know why? They’ve given up.”

Unwin didn’t say anything else after that or mention the conversation again. Anthem thought he had forgotten it, or it was only a dream, or the Ox-infused had been talking in his sleep. Neither of them broached the topic, and Anthem had stricken it from his mind.

When the Corps reached Jubilee and Anthem had seen the maligned take his friends and the Thurmgeists, he was not entirely conscious or in control. Taking the fire seed from Fleet Admiral Delah Stalt’s pocket was autonomous. Still, in that form and under the influence of this strand, he understood quite well the significance of such a gesture.

It was on the Glownabar, dangling back over the Swathe, nearing the Lapasian coastline, when the plan had burgeoned before him.

“Let me hand it to her,” Anthem had spoken aloud, and it was assuring to know he possessed a semblance of agency. “She will not be able to turn it down. I can attain Surgeon Elder, which will put me in a great position of authority.”

Desperation pressed him to negotiate with the strand when he discovered thoughts traveling in his mind that didn’t belong to him. The Inciter strand—he would come to know it years later—considered getting rid of him, hurling him off the side of the Glownabar, and letting whatever organisms roamed there consume him. It was miraculous he even made it this far. He had been spared, but he was not out yet.

“You prefer hosts with authority, don’t you?”

It took some cajoling. The Inciter strand never responded with words, only pulses of intention and knowledge. It remained quiet at the time, senseless, and that was as good a confirmation as any that his plan was somewhat adequate and worth playing out. He only discovered later, after the Second Signature squashed the first Kaskitian riot, that the Inciter strand was not accepting his plan—it simply was not listening.

Anthem recalled how Frine had looked when he had dragged him towards the maligned at Cliff House during the first attack. The meathead’s snarling had seemed excessive, and at the time, Anthem attributed it to a combination of male and Ape-infused aggression, annoyance, and spite towards the zoo man. This assessment was only partially correct.

“That’s when you reached him,” Anthem said on a cold night in his quarters in the Second Signature’s alcazar after returning from his lab. The Inciter strand, wherever it was, focused elsewhere. So, he spoke freely.

Was it related to proximity? What about interest? Had the Inciter strand finally grown tired of him? Anthem suspected it wasn’t as simple as that latter possibility, but he wouldn’t rule it out.

A shred of himself emboldened, Anthem began the slow transition from pawn to observer while eluding the Inciter strand of the shift. He concentrated on that presence, tracked it leaving and returning as closely as someone would through their bedroom door while they pretended to sleep. He began to sense the exact moments when the Inciter strand looked over his figurative shoulder, as evident as standing in a room with someone else—someone you didn’t want to be there.

“You are omniscient,” Anthem had said out loud in his lab while he worked. “But you get distracted. Your attention is not infinite, and most of it drifts to…” He had stopped talking then, for he felt the Inciter strand return, peeking through a window into his mind as if to check on his progress. And he had indeed made progress.

It had been years since he ascended to Surgeon Elder, trading the fire seed to the Second Signature and vowing to prove his suitability for the position. After the first Kaskitian riot, he assisted the Second Signature in erecting the enclosure, her gift to appease her people. With it came Anthem’s design for the network of pipes that would feed gaseous inhibitor agents into the dome, creating an atmosphere. He had helped develop a new paradigm for other cities to follow but had denied the opportunities to lead those advancements as other thoughts churned inside him.

Before malignment occurred, every strand ever to have existed provided some benefit to its host. The Ox provided strength, the Corvidae increased spatial awareness, the Olm reduced your metabolic rate, and even the Firestarter strand could have valuable applications if found in a person and not a seed. However, such an event had never been recorded.

It was only the Inciter strand that sought harm from the beginning. Its purpose was to turn its hosts against each other, quickly trigger malignment, and move on to another host. It was a strand, through and through, but it shared the same objective as a disease.

He delved into this reality during his most lonesome moments and tried to push his mind elsewhere when those figurative eyes eventually leered. Distracted, he theorized that his connection with the Inciter strand must have been a lot like having a mycorrhizal inside you—as he would learn after meeting Genebrict Stalt. Such a deep-rooted fungus would only link sensory perceptions and thoughts but could never direct actions.

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Anthem’s efforts to distract himself when his thoughts turned traitorous were imperfect; the Inciter strand caught him many times, and after each infraction, Anthem did his best to appease it. He begged to be spared, spending months never mentioning or thinking of the problem that was the Inciter strand’s very existence. During these lapses, he filled his mind with other topics.

“The Monad Ortet is a Mind,” Anthem had said, strolling through the alcazar’s manicured grounds one morning. “That is why you focus much on her—on Grace Kanis. She must reach far, and you see the value in helping a force so influential.”

Others heard him mumbling to himself, and everyone came to think the Surgeon Elder was a little disturbed. More than a little, in fact, but being misunderstood had never served Anthem better. He adopted the facade people placed on him of a traumatized veteran of the Hyrnlak Archipelago, the place’s only survivor, the one who wouldn’t talk of the horrors they had seen. Of course, he couldn’t mention them, for the Inciter strand would listen intently. Instead, when he and his thoughts were alone, he roamed his mental playground, exploring at his will and testing all the equipment, breaking bones and being scolded, but always returning to find new puzzles and opportunities.

As the years passed and Anthem further established himself in the alcazar, gaining the Second Signature’s trust and respect, so too did the Inciter strand come to trust him. By then, there were thousands of hosts—tens of thousands, spread between each other by drink and food and air and their saliva. It had years to spread in the towns and villages surrounding Kaskit, taking advantage of the Second Signature’s immigration policies to appease the external populace and forming a place for itself within the inhibited atmosphere. The Inciter strand took an interest in each host it found, considering every soul a story worth reading, but not even it could read a thousand of them at once.

The violet carafe of the attempted Inciter neutralizer hung in the wine rack of his quarters like the taxidermy heads of Lieutenant Nedland, Unwin, Watse, Devitt, Orey, Hamill, Fletcher, that meathead Frine, and all his other comrades on the archipelago. It was the reminder he had failed, and the Inciter strand loved to repeat this, occasionally pulling his attention to the thing. For Anthem, however, the last remaining carafe from Hyrnlak was as much a bane as the key to beginning again.

For the Inciter hadn’t stripped everything away from him. Anthem still had his relatively youthful body and spirit hardened from Hyrnlak. In addition, his position as Surgeon Elder granted him immense power and influence. He could order staff to record notes without context. He could requisition supplies for any purpose, even expediting procurement through smuggling networks. He could call on anyone he wanted, all under the guise of spreading the Inciter strand. Through it all, there was one thing the strand had given Anthem that he would take clear advantage of.

Time.

“So, you force the malignment of other strands, even in women, but you never malign yourself. You can direct actions as you see fit, but only when you are focused. You favor Minds, though almost too much. You are strong, but you are also limited.”

The blurb escaped Anthem as he dined on a plate of cultured crab, thinking it ironic that the creature he feasted on was one of the earliest Incited maligned species he had seen. He cracked its leg open and sucked out the innards so loud that he thought the Inciter would hear while its focus was directed a thousand kilometers away.

“I have a project, but for it to work, you cannot talk to me about it.” Anthem had continued to eat as if he had not spoken a word.

The boy across from him, blonde-haired and barely out of his fifteenth year, was a medical zoologist apprentice named Koyle. He was not one of Anthem’s brightest staff and was actually the most forgetful. This would be helpful.

“How does that work?” Koyle had asked.

Anthem stared at him, translating the point through the unspoken word even though he was sure the Inciter strand wasn’t watching. Koyle seemed to understand and ate the rest of the meal in silence.

The two met sporadically in patterns the Inciter strand could not discern. It may have been a useless precaution, but Anthem would not fail this plan through carelessness. He fed the boy instructions through disjointed letters, through riddles in the spoken word. He advised Koyle where to find the ingredients and how to synthesize them. He taught the boy how to operate the equipment needed. Above all else, Anthem explained to Koyle the intricacies of subterfuge.

Koyle’s mind also sharpened, understanding the implications as quickly as a literary scholar when examining a dated text. He became Anthem’s greatest pupil, and no one knew.

It was the day before the Second Signature called James Anthem to the vats when Koyle presented him with the syringe. A violet liquid churned inside—the product of years of additional effort. They were down to one of two possible versions of the project. If what was contained in this syringe did not work, the other one sitting in the Surgeon Elder’s lab would.

Anthem made sure he was seen entering the incubation vats. It was Koyle’s idea to be cast down to leave his medical zoologist apprenticeship to work the tanks, becoming the high matron’s assistant for months before the day. Cobriline, even now, did not question Anthem’s rationale for inspecting the strandular composition of the incubators.

The Inciter strand, however, had questions. It turned its entire attention on him for the first time in years and asked what he was doing. Why was he here so close to the vats? What was that thing in his pocket?

“Direct injection gets through inhibitors,” Anthem said to himself. “If we begin here, we can compromise an entire generation. Families will succumb. Can you imagine?”

The Inciter strand could imagine—it loved imagining. This explanation seemed to delight the presence, but it remained, watching Anthem intently, careful not to alert the matron and her assistant, neither of whom were Incited.

At a time decided upon earlier, Koyle distracted the matron, and Anthem, under the guise of checking the mixtures in one of the amniotic tanks, injected the mixture. It fed through a tube into the vat of a red-haired incubator, a woman Anthem had never known but would become integral.

By this time, the Second Signature’s suspicions towards him had grown. He was not surprised when she called him to the incubation vats the next day. The girl, however, had not detected that Koyle chose the red-haired incubator in particular.

James Anthem watched the gruesome proceedings with the delight any researcher would have when testing a hypothesis. Failure did not mean defeat; it meant confirmation.

To the Inciter strand, however, the distinction was meaningless. It was not happy. James Anthem had exposed the Inciter strand to the alcazar, far ahead of its careful planning. This was a monumental step back, especially when the strand would soon commence its attack on the alcazar. It was beyond disappointed, and it never took its eyes off Anthem until the end.

It forced him to his quarters, ransacked his possessions, burned them, and uprooted Lieutenant Colonel Tatlock’s mycorrhizal Anthem had used to falsify the Hyrnlak reports. It was enraged, giving in to its emotions as it attempted to destroy everything Anthem had worked for. The Surgeon Elder’s trust meant as much as to the Inciter strand as the flecks of dirt cast aside when it forced Anthem to pull the mycorrhizal out and burn it. Those specks of dirt meant more to the Inciter strand than Anthem did now. Little did it know those traces would be its downfall.

The Inciter strand pulled Anthem to his lab, but by then, the man had already prepared it. It took one flick of a switch to lock the doors irreversibly, close the vents, seal off every bit of air, and release the neutralizer atmosphere.

As the gas flooded in, enough not to kill the Inciter strand but to corrode Anthem’s entire body, he resisted the presence, pulling him towards the drawer that held the second instance of his and Koyle’s plan. Another violet syringe, the complete opposite outcome of the vat experiment, and one he was sure would work. Even if it didn’t, others would augment it.

The Inciter strand found it in a drawer. Anthem’s legs were giving out, corroded by an overdose of neutralizers that pulverized his bones. The strand made it as far as a chair, sat Anthem down, and held his hands around the syringe. It tried with all Anthem’s remaining strength to smash the container to pieces, then to inject it into himself and waste the concoction, but it couldn’t, for Anthem’s strength was a fraction it once was.

As Anthem sat glued to the chair he murmured, “Outsmarted by a man, can you believe that?”

Far off in a deep part of his psyche, the first vaccine to any strand balancing in his limp hand, Surgeon Elder James Anthem thought he heard the thing beyond cry.