The flight to Arizona was five hours long plus change. Hawk and Em were crammed together in relatively tiny couch class seats in a world of beige and bad smells. Mulligan had been reluctant to allow them to leave on what he dismissed as “some fool’s errand”—Hawk had left out most of what they were doing, claiming only that with Kaiser on the loose, securing any and all Orbs ought to be a priority. Hawk was fairly certain that he already knew what an Orb was for, that consuming it would mean immortality to the lucky consumer. She was less sure about her assumption that he could be trusted with it. He was a no-nonsense kind of man, who seemed to want to be a good person. He was also a general in the United States Army, and the only reason Hawk wasn’t more on edge having him here, interfering with the Rifts was the firepower he brought to bear. They couldn’t fight the Gods on their own.

  Be less certain about that, Hawk’s own conscience seemed to whisper. You and the Shadow took out Kali’Mar.

  Yeah. He’d been the weakest of the gods, the least feted. His inclusion had seemed an after-thought, as if they merely had to have a fourth to complete some sort of occult roundness, and he did as well as anyone else could. And Hawk would have died if the Shadow hadn’t been there…ditto for the Shadow. It’d come down to the wire for both of them. She’d been leaking blood and lymph from burns. He’d been leaking too, the strange cream-colored fluid that meant an Archetype was on the verge of physical collapse. The other three surviving Gods—had they figured out Kali was gone? They had to have by now. It'd been hours here, and that meant days to weeks down in the Rift—they weren’t going to be half as easy.

  Yes, they needed the military’s firepower. Both to fight the Gods and to keep Kaiser from inserting himself again. One thing she could know for certain: Defying an active duty general who gave the command to arrest you wasn’t the smartest idea in the universe, especially when you wanted what the military was protecting.

  But nothing says it will stay this way.

  Time was the thing that bothered her now. She could feel it flying past her, eating into her hope for the future. It was easier when they got to the airport and she could get a rental car—and how strange that felt, how pedestrian, using a car after Fleet-Hares and other Holian beasts of burden. A car felt like something half glimpsed in a dream down there, and the effect hadn’t fully evaporated yet—because it meant she was moving. She could tell herself she was racing the time.

  Em was quiet. They slept most of the plane ride, a choice aided by a dose of hot pink Benadryl purchased from a kiosk as they went through Boston airport. Their slight snore had been the one constant on the whole flight. Bleery now, they stood silently as Hawk traded money and a credit card for a new set of car keys. They was even more reticent on the walk out. Their first words came quietly once they were on the highway.

  “I’ve never been to your house,” They murmured.

  Hawk shrugged. “It’s nice enough. It should still be pretty clean, too. Kaiser’s people gave it a once over, after they searched my stuff.” She was still annoyed with that. All his white, clean-suited people telling her “I think you’ve got ants. You’ve got ants in that terrarium. Want some Raid? You’ve got ants.” Goddamn it, they were her pets.

  “You still have Campos?” Em asked, and that paved the way for safe conversational ground. No Henry. No Alex. No Kaiser. Just ants. Camponotus got them through most of downtown Phoenix, with Aphenogaster and Pogomyrmex bringing them to the fringes of suburbia, where Hawk’s trim little house resided. A home built for two, now reduced to one. Fan…

  …she was going to say “fantastic”, but something was off as she pulled up towards her drive. She couldn’t have put her finger on it. Her house was there. There weren’t any strange cars in the drive. She parked the rental in front of her home and studied it.

  “Hey. What’s up with your blinds?” Emile asked.

  They were moving. A small bit, but not so small that you couldn’t see it from the street if you knew where to look. Someone, or something, was inside her house.

  “Maybe it’s Kaiser.” She said. She didn’t believe it was Kaiser.

  “He wouldn’t be hiding in your house. Maybe he’d go there to pick up the orb, but he’s not going to stick around in your little slice of suburban hell. Let’s go.” And without waiting, Emile left the car. They made it a few steps up the walk to the door, and then stopped dead. Stared for a moment, then began making frantic come hither motions at Hawk.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Bracing herself for something vile, she took the keys out of the ignition and followed after Emile. “What?” She said, when she reached them.

  “There is a body in your bushes. I think it’s been glassed.”

  Hawk turned to the privacy hedge just beneath the windows. There was a bundle of white fabric, blue jeans and shoes just beneath the window-sill, buried in the long brown limbs of her holly bush. Which was looking a bit ragged and brown the nearer to the house it got. And then she realized that what she’d dismissed as dried leaves was a hand, and that neither the hand nor the leaves were dry at all. They were Glass, the crystalline ashes she had come to loathe.

  “Fuck,” She breathed.

  “It’s a Rift,” Em agreed.

  Hawk decided to risk getting nearer to the dead, which meant crawling through the prickly bush from hell to get to the body. Green leaves, dark in a way that invoked blood and shining with their own tough exterior, slashed at her as cruelly as any alien god might. She felt each scratch, each welling of blood, and counted it to her own tally. She didn’t need to be this stupid, crawling on her hands and knees beside the bush they’d purchased for it’s very inhospitality. And yet she did. For the dead, who owed the world nothing. Or maybe just for herself.

  The body was completely glassed and degraded. She fished in pockets for a wallet and found an ID badge for the Arrarat Project. This body had belonged to a person, and while she didn’t recognize the name, she did know the face. It was one of the people who had broken into her house before, a female tech who had threatened her pet ants with a well-meaning can of Raid. The face on her ID was nothing like the shattered, slightly blush-tinted ruin that had been left on her doorstep. No…not left. The woman had been camped out here. There was a sleeping bag beneath her, the ripstop nylon now containing the ashes of feathers, and a few empty soda cans. And beside all of this, there was a pile of notebooks—now ashes holding their shape through some prayer of physics—and three square thumb drives. On top of all of this had been a note, and one small corner of it remained, just outside of the radiating Glass Line now surrounding Hawk’s house. It had her full name on it, Dr. Haven West, and a comma, and the hints of cursive words, just the tops of a few Ls and Hs.

  “Should we back up? Or call someone?” Emile said.

  “Mulligan, I guess.” She picked up the thumb drives. She’d check them later, on a system that wasn’t hers, and wasn’t hooked up to any internet. There might be useful information here, but there also might be the kind of digital herpes that turns computers into very expensive paperweights. She backed up, leaving the body in its little cove of ashes. “There’s a few tarps in my shed. I’ll grab one of those when we get the…” She trailed off.

  She had started to stand, which brought her head nearer the windowsill than it had been. A thick, sharp scent wafted out from the window base, as if it were leaking through a crack. It smelled a bit like vinegar, only planet-sized. It caught in the back of her nose, triggered her gag reflex, and made her back up twice as fast.

  She’d smelled that before, but not anywhere natural. Once, during her studies for her doctorate, she and a scattering of other college students had gathered in a lab for some unsanctioned experimentation. Two of them were there to make drugs. She wasn’t sure what kind. Probably LSD, given that they used blotter papers. She’d been there because she just wanted to fool around with her friends. She didn’t remember who had brought out the concentrated formic acid, only that it hadn’t been herself. She’d been telling a story about trying to help her professor deal with his nest of Asian Weaving Ants, which he wasn’t supposed to have. She’d gotten sprayed multiple times by their formic acid, which had smelled slightly of vinegar, and someone else had decided to get the concentrated bottle, just to see what the smell was like. It had been overwhelming, far worse than the casual attack of ants. Vinegar, curdled, might fit the description.

  “Em. Come here,” she said.

  The enby entomologist did, bending down near the body on the assumption that the dead, and not the smell, were Hawk’s focus. But they caught the scent almost immediately, acrid and stinging and strangely hot.

  “Fuck. That’s formic acid. Hawk, did you break a jar of the stuff?”

  She shook her head. “I mean, maybe someone did, but I don’t have a concentrate of the stuff. Only things with formic acid in that house are the ants.”

  And that was not reassuring.

  Hawk extracted herself from the holly bush and moved to her front door while Emile called the body in. Her heart was strangling high in her throat, as if some part of her already knew what she was about to find. Even her hands had taken on a tremble. This was more than just normal fear. This was instinct, the same ones that had known Glass ashes were lethal before she’d ever encountered them. A primal, more primitive Hawk would have understood, possibly without the necessity of words, what sort of territory she was moving into. But she was a modern human, her instincts blunted by suburbia and shopping carts. Only the strongest of them remained, and this was one of them. If she were making a map of her neighborhood, her own home would have been marked danger, here there be dragons.

  It's just your fucking house, Hawk. Go inside.

  She unlocked the door.