Vy ordered a dinner that she thought Ariock would like, and she had it preserved under domes so the sauropod steaks would stay hot. She pushed the hover-tray up the grand ramp. Dignitaries and clerks eyed her with curiosity. Vy was the Lady of Paradise, not a chambermaid who would be tasked with deliveries.

But some of the dignitaries looked encouraging. Some were even hopeful.

Everyone waited for daylight to pierce the overcast sky. Snow blanketed the rooftops of Freedomland. Crops were frozen. The Bringer of Hope was taking too long to mourn his losses.

How long would he avoid battles?

During the first few days of his return, Vy had not even thought about duties or politics. She had curled up by his side. Ariock did not weep or moan about what he had done, but there was a haunted look in his eyes.

He had attended the stately funeral procession held to honor Jinishta and the other dead war heroes. It had been a miserable day, with cold sleet, and Ariock had not lifted the weather. Nor had he attended the commemorative feast hosted by nussian battle captains.

He was ignoring survivors. His heart seemed to be with the dead more than with the living. People whispered that Ariock was being rude.

Only Vy saw the hollow sadness in his eyes.

Ariock probably didn’t trust himself to speak in public about the disaster. He was quietly beating himself up, hating himself, but nobody else saw that side of him. Only Vy.

Oh, and the mind readers, of course.

Garrett visited Ariock every day, sometimes multiple times per day. He gave annoying pep talks that went ignored.

Thomas, on the other hand, had only visited once. Vy had cringed when her foster brother stated bluntly: “You screwed up.”

But Ariock had appreciated the criticism. He’d sat across from Thomas and said, “Do you know how glad I am for a friend who can actually tell me that to my face?”

“We should switch roles,” Thomas had said blandly. “If you were the Wisdom, you’d get nonstop criticism.”

Ariock had admitted that wasn’t fair. But then he had leaped directly into a self-flagellation monologue. He was a murderer. A tyrant. He should not be trusted with power or authority. He dared not go near war zones. He dared not risk flying into a rage. Not ever again. He wanted Thomas and Kessa to take full leadership.

Thomas had looked more and more embarrassed, until his emotional absorption circuits seemed to hit a critical overload point. He had backed out of the room with excuses. Sorry, he had to get back to work.

He had shot Vy a parting look full of desperation, and she knew, without needing to ask, that he expected her to work miracles on Ariock’s psychology.

Vy was supposed to fix the messiah. Somehow.

Maybe she could do it with the aid of telepathy gas? But Ariock refused to sample a Torth weapon, and Vy supposed he had good reasons. Anyway, no one wanted a loved one rooting around inside their brain. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea, either. She didn’t want Ariock to glimpse every minor little judgment she made about him. That wouldn’t be good.

Thomas had said that he would check in on Ariock again. So far, he hadn’t.

Garrett, on the other hand….

“…This much guilt isn’t healthy.” Vy heard Garrett’s grandfatherly voice as she pushed the dinner tray into the lobby atrium of Ariock’s giant-sized suite. “And it isn’t right.”

Vy slowed. She no longer held any hope that Garrett could succeed where she kept failing, but even so, she didn’t want to interrupt a private conversation.

“I understand your fears about insanity gas.” Garrett had a long-suffering tone. “But people need you. I can’t save two planets by myself. I’m trying, but…”

Garrett paused, interrupting himself. He must be listening to Ariock’s unspoken thoughts.

“Well sure,” Garrett said after a moment. “You’re a big target. But we have to take risks. There’s no other…”

Another pause.

A heavy sigh. It sounded like Garrett was frustrated.

Vy could commiserate. During those first few days, she had held Ariock. She had been wholly with him, even supportive of his guilt. Never mind the petitioners who cried for the Bringer of Hope to teleport their recaptured loved ones out of danger. Never mind the hundreds of Alashani warriors who were on strike, refusing to fight unless the “alleged messiah” rejoined them in taking deadly risks. Never mind the unseasonable snow, emblematic of Ariock’s depression.

But unlike Ariock, Vy left the suite sometimes. She didn’t just overhear news. She saw the faces of the people Ariock ruled.

He had built an empire. He held it together. And it was unraveling.

Hordes of people were being re-enslaved on Umdalkdul and Nuss. Survivors hid in the ruins of their cities, using guerrilla warfare tactics to fend off Torth raiders. How long could they hold out?

Flen and other self-styled preachers claimed that Ariock was nothing but a puppet dancing on strings held by the rekveh Thomas. They outright accused Thomas of having Jinishta murdered.

Vy had cornered Cherise, demanding to know why that toxic lie was spreading. And Cherise had admitted that she had no power over Flen. The truth could not be proven. No one had survived Ariock’s rage, except for Garrett and Evenjos and Ariock himself. As far as most albinos were concerned, there were no credible witnesses.

More than anything, people simply needed to see that Ariock was still interested in defending freedom.

Hope would go a long way towards easing tensions in the city. Vy could see that, even if Ariock himself could not.

“We can’t win this war without you.” Garrett was pleading.

Vy peered around the corner, trying to gauge whether or not to interrupt.

Ariock sat on the giant-sized sofa, where she had last left him. Bleak winter light filtered through the keyhole-shaped window. Pedestrians huddled in leather coats or padded robes.

That window framed the city in a picturesque way, lined by sea glass that was reflective enough to ward off enemy teleporters. Ariock gazed outside all day long. It reminded Vy of the way he used to gaze out of his sky room window, according to his mother.

Now, as then, Ariock was afraid to leave his sanctum. This time, however, he was more afraid of what he would do than what might be done to him.

“You’re wrong about that.” Garrett sounded gruff. “I understand exactly how it feels to be a danger to the people you love.”

He sat on the bench, mostly eclipsed from view. Neither one of the Dovanacks would see Vy unless she rounded the corner.

“I think I need to tell you something about my past.” Garrett seemed to gather his composure. “You’re not as bad as you think you are. I promise. Let me tell you, and you’ll understand.”

Ariock looked towards him. Garrett had actually gotten his attention.

Vy quietly sat on a plush chair, out of sight but positioned where she could overhear every word. Sure, it was intrusive to listen in without permission, but … well, mind readers listened in all the time, didn’t they?

If Garrett could rebuild Ariock’s self-confidence, then she wanted to hear how he did it.

“Your great-grandmother…” Garrett sounded unusually hesitant. “Julia. I never told you much about her. But she was the love of my life.”

Silence.

After a moment, Garrett responded to whatever Ariock had not said. “Well, that’s true. We changed our names. When I stopped being Jonathan Stead, she stopped being Julia. But I’d known her as Julia for longer than I knew her as Sarah. Remember, I’d spied on her family. I knew the Steads for years before they met me and adopted me.”

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Vy frowned. Had old Garrett married his adoptive sister? Had he stalked his future wife? Judging by the casual way he skipped over details, he must have already shared some of his past secrets with Ariock.

“After I escaped the Torth Empire,” Garrett went on, “and the Alashani underground, I came home in time to help Julia through the last stages of her pregnancy. I was so happy when our daughter was born. I delivered her myself.”

A pause.

“Nah,” Garrett said. “This was before I figured out how to avoid Torth spies and agents, so we were living on the run. I wanted to avoid hospitals and official records. Besides, it was 1928. I think my healing powers were safer for her than a hospital visit would have been.”

Vy supposed that might be accurate.

“Sarah recovered beautifully,” Garrett said. “And I thought, for sure, we were blessed to have a perfectly normal, happy family, for the rest of our lives.”

How normal could a family be, with superpowers? Vy wondered.

Ariock must have wondered the same thing.

“‘Normal’ is not the same as ‘average,’” Garrett said. “We could never be an average family. There were always Torth agents on Earth, hunting for anomalies, and I knew I had to avoid those mind readers at all costs. That was why I made it a point to become a multi-millionaire. Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy some protective measures.”

Vy recalled the Dovanack mansion. It was a fortress. A remote fortress, buried in an obscure forest, off a road that didn’t exist on conventional maps.

“I bought paperwork,” Garrett said. “Legitimate birth certificates and so forth, to make our false identities real. I wholly became Garrett Olmstead Dovanack.”

“God.” Ariock sounded judgmental.

“Oh, those initials were a harmless jest,” Garrett said. “A token of defiance. I was giving up everything about my former self, and I guess I wanted to retain a little shred of who I used to be. Not just a father and a grandfather, but a hero.”

A pause.

“And yes,” Garrett added in a tone of admission, “I could walk on water, if I wanted to. I had escaped an evil galactic empire. Was it so wrong for me to indulge in a little bit of vanity?”

The pause after that sounded awkward, to Vy.

“I’m getting to the point.” Garrett sighed. “First, I want you to understand that we had a good marriage. Sarah isn’t here to speak for herself, so all I can do is give you my word and try to paint a picture. Neither of us had to work. I collected off-the-books income through poker, bridge, horse races, and high stakes casino games. Sometimes I played under the Dovanack name, other times, I faked a temporary identity. I moved money through proxies. I had a team on Wall Street who would bid on anything I told them to bid on. If it was corn futures, or soybean futures? Well, I made the weather. I predicted the crops.”

He didn’t sound like he was bragging. He had the same matter-of-fact tone that Ariock used when talking about his powers.

“The money freed us up to enjoy ourselves,” Garrett went on. “We didn’t need to endure long journeys on ocean liners or anything like that. I would just take care to fly us over uninhabited oceans or forests instead of towns. The sky wasn’t yet full of airlines, the way it is nowadays. So we left Rose with a full-time nanny for half of every week, and I took Sarah on trips around the world.”

Vy wondered what that had done to Rose’s early development.

“We joined the most elite clubs you can imagine,” Garrett said. “In Antalya, in Singapore, in Calcutta. We mingled with movie stars and kings and queens. We had a villa in Monaco, and another in the Maldives. Sometimes, we just wanted a quiet week to ourselves, and I would find a deserted tropical beach, or a volcanic precipice, and set up a little campsite.”

Garrett must be building up to a tragic end. Vy could sense it.

Ariock probably sensed it, as well. “What happened?” he asked in a gentle voice.

“Power is a strange thing.” Garrett’s voice was flat, like something deflated and dead. “We aren’t always in control of it. Even when we think we are.”

“What do you mean?” Ariock asked.

A pause. Garrett must be collecting his thoughts, or bracing himself. Vy wondered if the old man had ever revealed his secret to anyone, before now.

“We were camping on an uninhabited island,” Garrett said, “off the Central American coast. It wasn’t anything unusual for us. I must have taken Sarah to a hundred remote islands. We’d done trips like that a thousand times before. I imported a five star meal from Paris, and we picnicked while watching a gorgeous sunset. That night, we made love on the beach.”

Vy wondered if Garrett was ever going to get to his point. He seemed to be circling a topic, perhaps afraid to poke it. Perhaps it had lain dormant in his heart for a long time.

Garrett continued in a slow, frayed tone. “As I made love to her, I was oblivious to the ocean waves getting bigger. There was a vicious retreat of the water. I didn’t even notice.”

An intake of breath from Ariock.

“It was an underwater earthquake,” Garrett said, confirming whatever Ariock had not said. “That I caused.”

Silence.

Vy clasped her hands over her mouth, stifling her urge to vocalize. She did not picture Ariock’s reaction, or Garrett’s pained expression, because she was inwardly reeling.

Rage wasn’t the only trigger for a loss of control.

All of her fears about sex with Ariock were well-founded.

“I don’t understand,” Ariock said after a moment. “Are you saying you … caused … an earthquake? That killed her?”

“Yes.” Garrett sounded broken. “It was an accident. I accidentally killed the person I loved more than anything, while making love to her.”

That confirmed it.

This revelation shouldn’t be so shocking, Vy knew. Ariock had a certain lack of control whenever he got excited. How many times had she witnessed that? She was careful not to tease him sexually too much.

“But…” Ariock clearly had questions.

“The wave crashed over us,” Garrett said. “It ripped us apart. I was shocked, and it took me a second to stop drowning. I was choking on seawater. If I had to guess, it took me fifteen or twenty seconds before I had the mental wherewithal to start searching for her. The problem is that oceans are teeming with life.”

Ariock sucked in a breath.

Vy knew, from conversations with Ariock, that life sparks all felt the same, more or less. A nussian, an ummin, and a sky croc would radiate near-identical glows. There were variations. Bugs emitted teensy life sparks, and Yeresunsa were more intense. But people and animals of roughly the same size tended to have the same intensity.

“My best explanation for what happened,” Garrett said, “is she must have hit her head on a rock. There were a few sharp rocks underwater. If she lived after that, it was maybe for a minute.”

“Did you find her … her body?” Ariock sounded pained.

“I did.” Garrett sounded elderly. “I searched all night, and then all the next day. I searched for three days straight. I didn’t sleep. And yes. I found her remains on the third day.”

The sorrow in his voice was obvious.

“I had to return to Rose,” Garrett said. “I went home to my four-year-old daughter. And I had to tell her that her mommy was gone forever.”

Ariock was silent for a while.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

But Vy knew he must be struggling with self-recrimination as well as judgment against Garrett. Vy was saddled with a mixed bag of feelings, too, as heavy as cement. Could she ever be truly safe with Ariock? What if he killed her by accident while making love? Even if she decided to throw caution to the wind, would Ariock ever feel okay about doing so?

They hadn’t made love yet. Maybe they never would.

“You lost control of your powers?” Ariock said, as if to clarify things. “During sex?”

“Sex is a powerful drug,” Garrett said. “It can lead to powerful feelings. And those are the sorts of things that set us off. Rage, as you know. But also pain, and fear, and … well, unfortunately, pleasure.”

The sofa creaked. Vy could imagine Ariock resting his forehead in his hand.

“We are dangerous.” Garrett’s voice was heavy with regret. “There is no power in the universe that can change that. At least, not as far as I know. We are elemental. We are forces of nature.” His tone softened. “I never wanted to have this talk with you. I would have preferred for you to skate through life in a way I never did.”

“Vy.” Ariock said her name in a way that wrenched her heart.

He wasn’t asking to see her. It was a helpless plea.

Objects in the hall began to levitate. Rugs, vases, trinkets, the dinner.

Vy herself began to levitate.

Ariock wasn’t even conscious of it, she knew. He was just devastated. Tendrils of his awareness had leaked out, seizing everything in his suite.

“I never stopped loving Julia,” Garrett said. “I want you to understand that. Our love felt predestined, like it was an epic story. There was never a ‘down’ in our relationship. Only ups. I never got over her death.”

That did sound epic.

But love had not saved Julia or Sarah or whatever her name was.

There was a scraping sound, and Vy pictured the old man using his staff to haul himself to his feet. “I just want you to have a greater understanding of what you fear,” Garrett said. “We are major weapons. We can’t escape that fact. Whether it’s insanity gas that causes uncontrolled rage, or an orgasm that makes you feel divine … what does it matter? We have triggers. We can’t avoid it. Because we are, in essence, human.”

Vy heard Garrett limping away from Ariock, towards her.

What a pep talk.

But Vy understood it. Garrett had clumsily begged Ariock to embrace his own flawed nature and to settle for eternal atonement. Because that was how Garrett coped with his own terrible misstep. He thought that that was the only way to handle it.

Vy inwardly wondered if she might be able to control the intensity of Ariock’s lust. He had triggers embedded in his mind. What if she drugged him before sex? Maybe a tranquility mesh would work?

If not for the war, she would dose him with the inhibitor.

Whenever Ariock lost his powers, that was when Vy could truly focus on their similarities instead of their differences. That was when he was at his most human.

“I really didn’t want to have this talk with you.” Garrett sounded quietly mournful.

The levitating objects lowered with slow care. Vy settled back onto the plush seat. It seemed Ariock was back in control of his emotions.

“That’s why you wanted me to get with Evenjos.” Ariock stated it in a flat tone.

A pause. Then Garrett admitted, “Yes.”

Vy used to wonder why Garrett Dovanack was such a jerk. Now she understood. He didn’t want to risk an accident like the one that had killed his wife. He had no desire to get close to people who were breakable.

And he wanted the same for Ariock.

Old Garrett had set up a divider in his mind. There were people with power. And there was everybody else. As far as Garrett was concerned, the two types of people should never get too fond of each other.

“Don’t worry.” Garrett sounded resigned. “I’ve given up on trying to dictate who you love. That was wrong of me.”

Silence from Ariock.

But Vy was shocked. Garrett had tried his best to hook Ariock up with Evenjos. The fact that he now recognized it as a lost cause … that was a sign that Ariock stubbornly loved Vy, no matter what. He loved her despite the dangers.

“Who knows.” Garrett limped towards the lobby, staff thumping on the stone floor. “Maybe you and Vy will find a way to make it work.”

Garrett rounded the corner and saw Vy sitting there. He looked shrewd instead of surprised.

Vy held her breath. Had the old man purposely given that talk when he knew she would overhear? Would he make some rude comment about how inadequate she was for his precious great-grandson?

“I tried.” Garrett spoke in a whisper that would not carry into the next room. “If you can get him to face battles again, countless generations of future people will thank you.” He thumped past her. “So will I.”