She left the tent, took two steps further, and looked up into the hot glare of the sky. A sky she hadn’t seen for what felt like eons, but what was most likely a week of Holian time, and less than a day here on Earth. This was the same sun that had shone when she entered the rift, on the same day. In that time, she’d been pared down to her most basic parts…or it felt that way. And if she kept thinking along these lines, she was going to be the one to collapse. She couldn’t even think about why. Not now. Not yet. That was why she’d wanted to comfort Emile. She needed something to do. Otherwise her own grief was going to strangle her.

  Maybe she should let it. Stop moving. Go home.

  No. Unthinkable idea. Going home to an empty place, an empty world void of the gods that had given it meaning. If an when she returned home, she would be forced to accept that an innumerable amount of things was over…with the first item being her marriage. It would be time to begin the unthinkable, made worse by how pedestrian it would be. Packing up his things. Taking him off bank accounts. Folding life across itself so that she could put it away in an attic somewhere, let it smell of fiberglass and mothballs.

  He's there. He’s here. You can still run to him and beg—beg—for him to love you. Like she didn’t have more self-respect than that. But that dogsbody urge was there, to prostrate herself, to whimper, to beg. To do whatever it took just to avoid that inevitable empty house…

  He’s still alive, hope warred with logic. Just walk over to him and explain it. About your fears, about Kaiser, about the Ape and her orb, about how you had this fear since well before Naomi Studdard used her Prism-greenhouse to steal your love away…

  But she’d gotten what she wanted now, hadn’t she? He hated her. She’d felt it in that tent, a hot burning that cauterized all possibilities beyond return, that might, if she were astoundingly lucky, be enough to save him from the hands that wanted to exploit him. All she had to do was solve his problems, kill the Gods, figure out how to jam that Rift open, and…

  And none of that was hers to carry. She couldn’t control him or Kaiser. She’d been an idiot to think she could try. All she could do was minimize one area of attack. And she’d done that by making…and even there she had to pause, because she hadn’t made him do anything. He’d chosen to hate her because of the risk she’d exposed Mattias to. Kaiser had staked all her hopes in the heart with that needle. Probably the one good thing he’d done since they’d met. Now if he could only bury the small little voice inside her, screaming that she was doing this “saving Alex” thing all wrong.

  I don’t think I have another choice. That’s the problem.

  And she found her heart sinking even faster, because the Shadow was coming across to her.

  For the first time she saw him in sunlight, the strange smoke-shadows of his hair hanging through the curves of every breeze. It looked like captured night once she had the sun for contrast. His mail was not rusted, but appeared moth-eaten. She realized that each hole was a long-healed wound, likely lethal to someone more mortal, and the rags of what had once been some opulent robes hung in somewhat ordered disarray. He was a mess. She wanted to tell him he was a mess, and then make him less of one. But that wasn’t her territory anymore, was it?

  His strange eyes fixed on her. Golden, with oddly horizontal pupils. She wondered why he’d chosen that, and if he’d chosen that, or if his entire strange, eerie appearance was something forced upon him. Then she dismissed those concerns, because he was drawing near. Damn it, she’d never been one of those people to fawn over her spouse. Now greif and fear were pulling her towards him like metal to magnets.

  “There you are.” He said.

  “Yes.” She said. “I was checking on Emile. They’re—”

  “Wait. Before you do anything else, go and get them. This concerns them as much as me and Mattias.”

  Em, Mattias, and the Shadow. That meant they were going to talk about Henry. “Em doesn’t want to talk about Henry. Or to talk at all. It’s their greif. I’m giving them space.”

  “Emile loved Henry, yes? They should be the person worthy of speaking for him. And I think we need that. The mind that is occupying part of Mattias is not a person, not fully, not yet. But I think there is hope—”

  No sooner had the words left his mouth than he was assailed by a very angry, non-binary honey badger with issues. “Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up!” And they swung at the Shadow, who caught their fist and released it in part of the same motion. “I held him. I was there. There is no hope for Henry—”

  “I can resurrect the dead. There. Will you listen now?” And he waited for them to stop swinging. There was another blow, a bit disjointed as their mind caught up with the shadow’s words. And then a fury ten thousand times hotter than grief caught in Emile’s brown eyes.

  “If you can fucking resurrect the fucking dead, why haven’t you done it yet?” they were nearly sobbing.

  “First, because up until this very moment, that was a useless endevor. I can rebuild the cells, restore them to life. I can order the hard-wired instincts to make heart beat and lungs breathe. I can do all that. But I cannot restore the minds of the dead. The bodies are simply empty shells. Every living being is a template for another, in terms of how a body should work. But I need a template for the mind that was, and humans are so preciously individual that a restoration on that level was beyond me.”

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  “Was,” Emile said.

  Hawk caught on. “We’ve got Henry’s mind. Alive in Mattias.”

  “Yes. With that, and the body, and a few other things, plus a great risk to myself—”

  “What great risk?” Hawk said.

  He looked away. A lying tell that Alex would have known to suppress. Then he seemed to have chosen against lying, because he said, “I will need to take a part of me. You know what part.”

  “No,” she said, before anyone else could respond.

  “It would be infinitesimal, but—”

  “You are not carving off still more of yourself.” Hawk said, firmly.

  “Not even to save an innocent man?” And he waited in the silence that followed. “One you care for? Greatly?” Again, he let silence pave his argument. “It would not be the desecration the gods visited upon me. It would be small, no bigger than a few grains of sand. No bigger than a single memory, or an instinct, or the knowledge of how to shape wind just so. I’ll survive the loss, and you will have your Henry back.”

  Em did not look hopeful, but they did not look like they’d been run over by a bus, either. “You think you can? Really?”

  And oh, if Hawk could have resisted, that stronghold would have crumbled at Emile’s tone. Because Hawk had been their friend for a long time, and she recognized when Emile was fighting off hope. Actively. As if it were an invasion. Not that hope can be beaten. It’s more resilient than kudzu. They were going to have to do what the Shadow proposed…if only to keep that sound out of Emile’s voice.

  “I’ve done it before. Just…without the template, the resurrected being is little more than an infant, barely even capable of aping an adult, let alone…”

  Aping. Hawk stiffened, eyes wide and wild. “What about a damaged Orb? Would you be able to get what you need from that?”

  He shook his head, and her heart sank. But his next words explained it. “We destroyed the part of Kali’Mar that I would need. I need that rind, and you and I obliterated that together.”

  “Did you eat that shit?” Em said.

  “No. We destroyed it. Nobody should get access to that shit. But I wasn’t talking about Kali’Mar’s Orb. I was talking about the remains of the Ape.” And hastily she described the first Archetype they’d ever encountered. Even Emile softened at the memory. The Ape had come with that god-impression, the urge to fawn not out of fear but out of worship and disbelief that such a being could exist and see you. And she had died of a bullet to the back of the skull, one that penetrated her Orb down to the core.

  “Alex told me to hide it. So I did. I took it home and I put it in a tank full of fire ants.”

  Emile blinked. “Solenopsis?”

  She nodded. “Invicta.” She said. In other words, the dreaded Red Imported Fire Ant, or RIFA.

  “Hawk, you don’t keep RIFAs,” Emile said. “Out of moral principle.” RIFAs were the most invasive and destructive ant on the planet. Certainly, it was one of the most painful.

  “We had a nest in my back yard I never got around to killing. I dug it up and dumped the ants on top of the Orb.”

  Emile shook their head in awe. “RIFAs and a wild harvested colony. Holy shit, Hawk, this crap has you breaking all your ethical barriers, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m putting the little fucks in the freezer as soon as we’ve figured out what to do with the Orb. He knows how to destroy it.” She jerked a thumb at the Shadow. “Emile and I can go get it. We’ll have to fly…” And here her plan started to unravel. The longer they waited…

  “The longer we wait, the more damage occurs to Henry’s body. I’d like to keep the repairs to a minimum. You know where you are going. I can use your knowledge to get you there.”

  Hawk shook her head. “The body is in the morgue. It’s refrigerated. Degradation should be at a minimum. What I’m scared about is what the gods will do while we’re running from here to Arizona. We cannot get enough people down there to answer them right now. The General and our military need you more than I do.” She even meant it. Watching Illryis try and fail to break Earthside three times had made her Earthly refuge feel eggshell fragile. “Besides, it’ll be what…one flight to Arizona, one flight back. How bad could that be?”

  “That will be weeks in my world. If not months.” He paused. “What are you calling my world, anyway?”

  “Holia,” Em answered.

  “It sounds lovely. Much finer than it deserves.”

  “It’s based on the word ‘hole’ because it’s a hole in the ground, and I think the Army kids coined it.” Em said. “It’s exactly what that place deserves.”

  He nodded.

  “And it’s going to close in like a week’s worth of our time,” Hawk said.

  “Buzz kill,” Em said.

  “By ‘close’, do you mean the way to the God-world will shut?”

  “Yes. Do you have any idea what that will do?” Hawk asked.

  “Why, what happens to anything when you close it up, with no light or food or outside resources?” He sounded almost surprised in his anger, as if they should have thought of these things on their own. “It will be the extermination of all within it. The slow extermination.”

  “Not necessarily,” Em said, a contrarian smile on their lips. “We have eco-sphere bottles. Put everything something needs inside the bottle, give it a bit of a shake-down to stabilize, then cap it off and wait to see what happens.” They paused. “There’s always a bit of a die-off, though. Usually of all the big things when they run out of resources. But the plants and other animals can always use the bodies for fertilizer.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t lock an ecosphere in a closet,” Hawk said. “You put it in a window where sunlight can reach it. It still needs that energy from outside of the system, otherwise the whole thing collapses.”

  “They don’t have sunlight in the hole, Hawk,” Em said.

  “No. We have the vital energies of this world. What is draining—I feel it—from the leaves and trees and the very earth itself. Why…I can feel it trying to feed upon you two, and failing. It’s something about me…yes. I am sure of it. Is that vain?”

  “You’re the Archetype. Your existence is what’s shielding us from the Rift’s Glass energies…which I guess means we humans can’t be drained by this Rift, as long as its Archetypes are intact.”

  “My point,” Hawk said, dragging the conversation back, “Is that the person best equipped to figuring out how to slow that closure down—or stop it completely—is you. We do not need you coming with me so I can get a ball out of an aquarium. We need you here, where if anything goes wrong—”

  “I can deal with it.” He finished for her. “At least, that is what you believe. I am less sure.”

  “What I am sure of is that we can’t do anything about that. Em and I, I mean. We can’t help with Henry’s body. We can’t do anything about the Rift. But we can go to my house and get the Ape’s Orb.” She paused, realizing she’d made a dramatic assumption. “Or I can go alone.”

  “Nothing fucking doing,” Em said. “Kaiser’s a fugitive who holds grudges like fuck. You aren’t going anywhere alone.”