Adaire sits down on a barrack bench across from Caspar, her legs wide and slouchy like a cock-of-the-walk trooper. “So, Mr. Caspar. How long have you been at the warlock game?”

  Caspar’s gun rests on his lap, pointed broadly in her direction. He and Jordan have found a two-way radio, but he trusts that she’ll figure it out, gearhead that she is. “Bout a week,” he says, “give or take.”

  “Just a week.” Adaire seems genuinely impressed. I’d ascertain how true her reaction is, but a warlock’s mind is walled off from intrusion without their patron’s permission. “I’d have guessed longer, the way you were slinging those evocations. Were you a hedge mage or something?”

  “Yes ma’am,” Caspar says.

  “Let’s keep the ma’am out when I’m in boymode, if you please,” Adaire says. “I’d prefer to immerse.”

  “Yessir,” Caspar says. “How long have you been at it?”

  “A hair over a year.” Adaire slices a sliver of nail from her thumb and drops it to the deck. “I’ve been Corinne all month, trying to make Tilly an asset. I believe I’m close. And this… kerfuffle doesn’t have to be the end. In fact, it might be a unique blessing. My suggestion is we keep at it. Make him think I’m cooperating out of fear and let him feel like the gallant keeping me alive. If it seems like he’s a flight risk, I’ll warn you.”

  “Should we be talking so loud?”

  “We’re fine. The man’s a log.”

  “So it’s back into the wig when he wakes up?”

  “Yes indeed. Just seizing the opportunity to masc out for a while before I’m back to the weepy mistress. Manspread, pick my nose, et cetera.” Adaire scratches her groin. “Not that Corinne isn’t fun. Fear is a satisfying emotion to portray. But it’s been a long performance. Normally I have more opportunity to flow, if you will. One must have one’s breaks. I wonder how you more dedicated character actors don’t lose your minds.”

  “I never was much of an actor,” Caspar says. “Made getting to Chamchek a nightmare, tell you the truth.”

  “Don’t be so down on yourself. You’re simply specialized. In fact, my good warlock, your demurring is proof of how fantastic a conservatory the seminary is. Your training is so sublime as to be completely naturalistic. I admit, at times, to envy.”

  “How’d you know I went to seminary?”

  Adaire titters, then morphs. Her shoulders raise, her lips draw, her posture softens, and Caspar’s nearly twice Adair’s weight but he has the uncanny feeling he’s looking in a mirror. “This is how,” she says.

  She snaps back into soldiery. Caspar isn’t sure whether he should clap. He settles on “Well, how about that.”

  “Once we’re in Pastornos, well. I can’t do the things you and Mme. Darius did, but I like to think my uses are obvious. And I do still have swords in my arms. If need strictly be.”

  “We’ll be glad to have you.” He adjusts the gun on his lap. “Uh, if we have you.”

  “And if not? Do you presume Irene will want me executed?” Adaire leans forward. “Will you do it, or will you defer to Darius and squeeze shut your eyes?”

  “It’ll work out.” Caspar’s firm. He truly believes this. “She’s kind.”

  My dorsal buoyancy chamber vents in happy exhalation. Now I have to find some kind of Adaire-sparing deal with Salome.

  “Women pick their nose, too, y’know,” Caspar says.

  “Women, sure.” Adaire locates her blonde bob. “Corinne is a lady.”

  ???????????

  Salome refuses to be hosted. Wary of a trap, I suppose. She insists repeatedly we find her in her crystalline home: the skeleton of one of the Father’s warbeasts, its guts petrified to gemstones by her magic. I threaten her warlock’s execution using one of our language’s more chummy tenses (we have a couple hundred of those).

  She just as chummily calls my bluff. The Irene of last month would have shrugged and had Adaire killed. The Irene of today, though, really wants Caspar to fall in love with her. And, to be fair, my sister and her warlock would be quite useful on our side.

  I send a pulse of inquiry to Saoirse: will she make an appearance with us? My baleens flicker with apprehension at her response; her genteel avariciousness is still fresh in my mind, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we were a now-finished marriage of convenience.

  It’s a pleasant surprise when she happily tags along.

  The three of us wend our way through the jeweled ventricles of our second-eldest sister’s home. She’s laid vicious, mangling traps here and there that swat our scout forms from the air, necessitating a patient wait for her to disarm. One of them catches Bina and shears off a house-sized claw. She huffs in annoyance and begins the process of regrowth. “That’s a dozen tons of good biomass,” her manifestation grumbles from its beanbag bed next to my lounger. “I coulda made a ziggurat with that.”

  “You don’t want a ziggurat,” I say. “It goes against your whole tomb yard aesthetic. Maybe an obelisk.”

  A few dozen more scoutforms flambéd and dismembered, and we arrive in the beast’s skull, its two massive eyeholes girded with great panes of colored glass that reduce the ruins of heaven to blobby shapes and cast crawling colors across my sister’s floor.

  Salome’s symmetrical mandala form turns like a slow ornament in the center of the cranium, refracting the light off its jagged geometries. She bristles with tessellations and spikes, like a massive malevolent snowflake or a disturbed child’s drawing of a star. She welcomes us with a diplomat’s formality and an apology to Bina for the severed limb, couched in just a touch of big sister superiority.

  We manifest in her chrome halls. Infinity mirrors catch our reflections and hurl them outward into the indistinct dark. Her manifestation awaits us at the lip of a cylindrical pit, from which glows a pale-white fire. Hanging octagonal fresnels amplify its light into thin beams that fret the air, colliding with prisms that dazzle them into rainbow lasers. Salome has always been fascinated by light and dark, heat and cold.

  “Welcome, sisters.” Salome approaches with measured step, her shadow thrown by the white flame. The baking heat casts a shimmer through the air. “How honored I am to be hosting this… faction? Coven?”

  I glance at my sisters. Bina has her big black-and-pink tongue out, panting to relieve some of the igneous heat. Saoirse is humming a little song to a worm she just birthed, flexing her fingers as it crawls across them.

  “Alliance,” I say.

  “Just so.” Salome’s manifestation smiles, with a silvery hiss of metal-on-metal. Her body is a single sheet of chrome, folded with mathematical precision and artful insight into a broadly human shape. Her gown is ruffled and faceted. Her limbs end in razor points. “I’ll tell you true. Adaire was the one who proposed the meeting. Without my consultation.”

  “Oh.” Bina’s ears stand up. “What the hell.”

  My shadow stuff flickers taller. “And yet you’ve agreed to meet.”

  “I have. And I can’t even be upset with her, the little fox.” Salome chuckles ruefully and shakes her head. “The survival drive these mortals all have. It impresses me.”

  “I hate to interject.” Saoirse raises a disintegrating finger. “Can we lower the temperature a little?”

  “Of course.” Salome flicks a hand at the cylindrical pit. The flames turn black and plunge the room into a darkness beyond the human perception of light. We take a moment to adjust our visions to the new infrared spectrum. It has gone from sweltering to freezing. Saoirse looks more amused than upset at Salome’s ribbing.

  “So, you’re willing to join us?” I ask. My breath puffs out in a little cloud.

  Salome reconfigures her shoulders in the origami equivalent of a shrug. “Possibly.”

  “I don’t mean to belabor the point or come off as threatening, but If you don’t, I’m going to have to shoot your warlock and toss her into the Montane Ocean.”

  “Look, Irene.” Salome pivots on the end of her razor-thin leg and paces in a slow orbit around us. “You get me, you’ve got half of us lined up with you. That’s really something, right? And I know my worth and my warlock’s worth. Kill her if you must, but you don’t have a plan in Pastornos. And by the time you’ve formulated one, I’ll have a new agent. I’d miss Adaire, and I’d regret the loss of our potential alliance, but I can’t just surrender.” She lifts a limb to the closest ray of photonegativity and bounces it off the far wall in a beautiful splash of vantablack. “I have my pride, you see. And I have an ideal extraction of terms. One that will help both of us. One condition.”

  “I had two,” Saoirse serenely notes.

  “Hush,” I say.

  “Can I guess?” Bina’s vestigial wings twitch and dislodge a glittering curtain of frost. “Does it have to do with Ganea?”

  “It does,” Salome says.

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  I roll all three eyes. “This thing again.”

  “Why do you hate Ganea so much?” Bina asks.

  “You know well why,” Salome says. “She has never once apologized to me for Gliese 682 Scorpii.”

  “Ganea’s Ganea,” I say. “Violence is her love language.”

  “You are all far too accepting of her brutality.” Salome’s voice is clipped. “It’s enabled her. I want Ganea laid low. I want her apology. All four of us, we can extract that from her.”

  “Salome—”

  “I know, Irene. I know. Sisterly solidarity. I love Ganea, of course I do. I love all of you. I just also want to kick her dumb fucking teeth in.”

  “She’s stronger than any of us,” I say. “Than all of us except Eight. Even if I was willing to attack her, she’d rip us apart. It might take years to reconstitute ourselves. Years we don’t have.”

  “Ah. But I have a plan.” Salome’s excited. Her body emits a low vibrational hum like a played wineglass rim. “I know where her warlock is. In Pastornos. Her little peerless warrior. If we can get him cornered, get his life threatened, we’ll have her.”

  “Oh, my,” murmurs Saoirse.

  Bina’s eyes bug. “You want our warlocks to go after the Iron Butcher?”

  “There’s no way,” I say. “We’d need double the manpower. And can your warlock even fight?”

  “We have to do it eventually, sister,” Salome says. “If they don’t come to him, he’s going to come to them. And if he has the initiative, he slaughters all three of them. No.” Salome stops her pacing in front of me. “There’s a way we give our warlocks a shot. And that’s by attacking Ganea. Here.”

  “You’re asking me to raise a hand against a sister,” I say. “I swore to you all I’d never do that.”

  “That was in another time. That was when Eight wasn’t Eight and we still had Milinoe. This has to be done.” Salome’s turned beseeching. “I’m not proposing we brutalize her or eat her. I doubt we even can. But four against one is enough at least to distract her, force her to turn her power on us. She’ll have none to spare for her killing machine on Diamante. Caspar and Jordan will have a shot. If they can capture him, Ganea will fold. She adores the Iron Butcher.”

  “Caspar and Jordan.” I cross my arms. “Not Adaire?”

  “She’ll only get herself killed,” Salome says. “I don’t select for lethality like you and Bina.”

  I look at Bina. She looks back, her face anxious but hopeful.

  “Fine,” I say. “Takes a sizeable piece off the table. But you’re in charge of the plan.”

  “Leave it to me, dearest Irene.” Salome sparkles. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”

  “Saoirse?” I ask.

  “I haven’t anyone in Pastornos who fits the bill,” Saoirse says. “Nobody in bloom for a sacrifice. But I’ll join you in our little Gan-Gan visit. We’ve all racked up a certain debt of pain to extract from her.” She chuckles. “She ripped a few of my heads off last month.”

  “All right. Deal’s a deal, Salome.” I extend a shadowy hand. “We go for Ganea. Maybe she’ll finally see reason once she’s humbled. And then we’re five.”

  Salome’s creases sharpen. “You want to bring her in?”

  “Of course,” I say. “She’s our sister. Why wouldn’t we?”

  “For one thing, they don’t make leashes big enough for an Old One. She’s a brute.”

  “When we knocked the Father’s house down, you remember what we said?” I pull my hand back and lay it on my chest. “What I said when I signed on? We do this together. Eight sisters, one pantheon.”

  “Surely that’s out the window. Even Eight? After what she did to Milly?”

  “I’m not holding my breath on Eight, but if it’s possible, yes. Even her. And I think we can get Milly back, for the record.”

  Bina ooohs. She and Milinoe were quite close.

  “I hate this competition shit, Salome,” I say. “You know that. We did such incredible things when we were together. We conquered worlds. We could do that again. We could be the best fucking gods for these mortals. We could show them the way.”

  Salome’s lips purse. “Are you implying what I think you’re implying?”

  “Yes, I am. With guidance. It could work.”

  “The Father gave up on them. And he was powerful.”

  “We wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, my,” Saoirse says. “I didn’t realize this was your intent with the little things, Reenie.”

  I flinch at the nickname. She’s spent too much time with Bina. “It could work, Saoirse. They could be more than just fertilizer. Eventually.”

  Doubt is written all over Salome’s knife of a body. “Have you seen what they inflict on each other? The atrocities and petty little evils? They’re severely limited.”

  “Everyone has to start somewhere,” I say.

  “What about the hunger, Irene?” Salome points to my stomach. “You have it too.”

  “Of course I do. We all do. But we can all control it. You weren’t going to start eating them, were you?”

  “No.” Salome hesitates. “Not very many of them. But their faith, Irene. You’ve felt it, haven’t you?”

  I have. The warmth. The satiating warmth.

  “It slakes, Irene. It satisfies. That’s what the Father was doing. All those worshippers. They fed Him. That’s what we ought to do with them, the humans. Reprogram them, take their worship. Harvest it. Sate ourselves.”

  I think about it. I think about ruling the way the Father ruled. Caspar’s belief is so intoxicating. What would billions of you feel like?

  I clear my throat. “We can hash this out later, Salome. Once we’re actually in charge. I’m ready to get to work.”

  Salome nods her allowance. “One more thing.”

  “Argh, one more thing.” I point at Saoirse. “I blame you for planting this seed.”

  “Likely of me.” Saoirse wears a languid smile.

  “If I’m brought on, I want to be the second voice,” Salome says. “Second-in-command, co-leader, whatever you want to call it.”

  “That’s not how we work.”

  “Of course it is. It must be.” Salome encompasses the three of us with a sweep of her silvery arm. “Pretend all you like. Irene’s called every shot so far. And all the better—wartime requires a firm hand at the rudder. But I want an equal say.”

  Salome, for all I insist otherwise, isn’t wrong. I reconsider my strategy. “Bina’s already co-leader,” I say.

  Bina’s muzzle jerks in my direction. “I am?”

  “You are.” And I smile at her. “Salome, when I came to you for alliance, you told me to kick rocks. I forgive you, but cooperation wasn’t your first impulse.” I take one of Bina’s pseudopods. “Bina believed first, she’s put in the most work besides me, and her big gamble to bring Jordan on has paid off. She’s co-leader.”

  Salome’s still as a statue. “Perhaps we ought to adjourn, then.”

  “You’re forgetting who has the leverage. She’s a talented warlock, Salome. I’d hate to have her shot in the head.”

  Her icy gaze falls on me. I need to preserve her pride.

  “How about this?” I try. “Once we’re all back together as a pantheon, you’re the tiebreaker. We’re ever deadlocked four-to-four, your voice carries it. I trust your instincts.”

  “Four-to-four.” Salome grimaces. “You really want us all back. You think it’s possible.”

  “That’s right. All of us. The Sisters of the Void, united again.” I extend my hand. Salome’s sigh is like a wind chime. She shakes it.

  ???????????

  The last tank of fuel winches back across the waving line, followed by Jordan Darius hand-over-handing herself back into the interceptor. She lugs the canister into the cabin, then collapses onto a bench. “Fuck my life,” she gasps as she tugs her mask off. “My head’s burning.”

  Caspar chances to take his full attention off his captured warlock to look at his comrade-in-arms. “What’s that?”

  “Had a headache since yesterday.” Jordan removes her helmet and shakes her braids out. “Shit’s not getting better. I tried putting some of Bina’s magic to it, but it ain’t working.”

  “That’ll be the altitude, I think. Pressure change.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yep. Happens to some recruits. We called it Balloon Fever.” Caspar refocuses on Adaire and waves Jordan over. “Come here and take the gun.” She retrieves the rifle and they change positions. Caspar places his hands on either side of Jordan’s cranium.

  Her mouth twists. “Cas, what are you doing? This some kind of foofy massage thing?”

  “This is hedge magic,” Caspar says. “I reckon our warlock powers are for the big and fancy stuff. But for a headache, that’s pounding a casing nail with a sledgehammer. Wrong tool.”

  He bites his tongue and focuses. The heat rises in his palms. His fingers twitch as he feels the first flicker of Jordan’s aura. Find the pain. The hot little barb in her electrochemistry. There. He closes his will around it, teases it out. A sudden pinching pain as he takes the hurt into himself, then a sharp exhale as he vents it away.

  “Good God damn.” Jordan lightly touches her forehead. “And you could always do this?”

  “Guy in my regiment taught me. He’d use it when we ran outta morphine. I brought it home with me.” Caspar smirks. “You were on your way to Rogarth to ferret me out and kill me over it.”

  “Yeah well. My perspective’s been expanded.” Jordan squeezes Caspar’s wrist. “Thank you.”

  “Wasn’t nothing.” Caspar steps into his harness. “You two sit tight. I’m gonna get that hydro. You get everything you needed out of that yacht, Jordy?”

  Jordan rattles a tin of loose-leaf black tea. “Yessir.”

  “All right. Farewell to that ride, then.”

  Caspar coils the massive hose around his midsection and clips himself to the balloon line. Then he clambers out the hatchway to the thin, chilly air.

  The hose winches from Tilliam’s yacht to the intake on the interceptor, and Caspar flattens out against the frame, the wind whistling and whipping past him as he watches the PSI climb. He lets the needle tick to the upper edge of the green zone, shuts the valve, then fills their backups for good measure.

  Tilliam’s yacht begins its slow-motion descent. It’ll take the rest of the day to sink all the way to the Montane. Caspar observes its shadow filter across the distant water and prepares to sever the connection between the airships.

  He hesitates.

  “Shit,” he mutters, and clips onto the line.

  Caspar returns to the interceptor with a trussed-up fawn under his arm. Jordan’s bemused stare follows him as he wrestles the panicky animal into the cabin. “What the fuck is that.”

  “I can’t just let the poor thing drown.” Caspar lowers it to the floor, where it thrashes.

  “Please do not untie the wild animal in the blimp,” Adaire says.

  Caspar wrangles the fawn back into his grip and opens the hatch door to the armory. The ziptied Archbishop is awake and immediately launches into a prepared statement. “Sir, I may not know you personally but I see in you a love for the Father that—is that a deer?”

  Caspar ties a rope around the fawn’s middle and tethers it to a gun locker. “You hungry?” he asks Tilliam.

  “Uh.” Tilliam stares at the fawn as it strains on its leash. “Yes.”

  Caspar unwraps a protein bar and sticks it into Tilliam’s mouth like a cigar. He twists the cap off a canteen and places it in Tilliam’s raised palm. “You can tilt that?”

  Tilliam wiggles his wrist and a few drops of water cascade onto his chest. “Somewhat. Er, sir. I must insist—”

  “Aim better,” Caspar advises.

  “Where’s Corinne?” Tilliam demands, as he moves to the door. “What have you done with her?”

  My warlock pauses on the threshold. “She’s cooperating,” he says. “You cooperate too and you’ll live.” He shuts the hatch and drowns out the tap-tap-tap of the fawn’s little hooves and whatever complaint Tilliam was preparing.

  Back to the cabin. Jordan and Adaire are talking about a television serial. “Team Calvin til the day I die,” Jordan says. “I like a bad boy.”

  “You told me you did die,” Adaire says, “and you don’t like boys.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “I read people,” Adaire says. “If it’s any consolation, you’re a tough nut. It was an educated guess.”

  “Well.” Jordan sits back. “Even as a girl-liker it’s obvious. Calvin over Tucker.”

  “I enjoy the concept of Calvin but the actor is rotten.”

  “How dare you.”

  “He is! During the dramatic scenes his mouth always goes—” Adaire thins her lips and twists her mouth, forming dimples that Caspar could swear she didn’t have before. “That’s his sole expression.”

  “Tilliam’s up.” Caspar brushes past them on his way to the cockpit.

  “All right.” Adaire pulls her wig back on. “Is he getting on with your deer?”

  “Yup. House on fire.” Caspar eases the clutch back now that their engine isn’t hauling a yacht.

  “What are you even going to do with that thing?” asks Jordan.

  “I don’t know. Let it out at Pastornos, maybe.” Caspar flips the rear booster into standby. “I’m gonna get some shut-eye and check in with the bosses, see if we can stop pointing that gun at Adaire. You hear a four-blast buzz from this dashboard, you come wake me.”

  “And interrupt your check-in?” Jordan’s eyebrow bounces.

  “Just listen for the goddamn buzz, please.” Caspar ignores Jordan’s shit-eating grin and heads for the bunks.

  He’s been up a while, and he’s been working his ass off. But as he lays down and gazes at the rivets and ribs of the vessel ceiling, sleep eludes him. He can feel his pulse pounding in his ears.

  He recalls the methods they taught him in boot camp, to sleep wherever he lays his head. He relaxes his jaw and counts his breaths.

  I watch and I wait as his racing mind slows and his brow unknits. My heartbeat quickens as his slows. That’s right. Slip away, my warlock. Leave your waking worries behind.

  Come back to me.

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