In a previous life, Momo would have frozen.

  She would have let that rejection sting for weeks on end. Balled up in bed, her knees cradled to her chin, light barely peeking through the curtains. Her emotions would have devoured her to the bone, then licked the cadaver clean like a hyena.

  In this life, Momo took an hour to herself in her room. She stared out the window into the crackling storm forming over the horizon, scratched a couple drawings into her notebook, and then exited, wordlessly, into the hallway, where Marie found her.

  “Momo?”

  It was then that Momo realized her ears had been faintly ringing. She turned her head slowly, eyebrows creased from the sound, and found herself faced with the scientist dressed in a bath-robe, her hair tousled in a messy bun, toothpaste blotched on her lower cheek, soap suds still staining her collarbone.

  Momo gave her a tight smile. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, I just…” Marie tugged at her bath robe. “Mallmart slammed the door behind her when she left. Rather forcefully. It was enough for me to hear it inside the shower.”

  Momo’s tight smile grew a little tighter.

  But then—like a string—it snapped.

  All that exhaustion fell from her shoulders in one great exhale.

  “She’s mad at me,” Momo said, surprising herself at the confession. In the past, she would have never admitted it. “I don’t know if she’s going to come back.”

  Marie frowned, and her lips dimpled slightly at each side. Momo thought this was an endearing feature on another person. How strange that this other person was herself.

  The clone stepped forward, water dripping onto hardwood floors. Her arms came to wrap themselves, tentatively, around Momo’s middle, like an embrace from a wet rag.

  Momo sagged into it, and felt lighter.

  “Don’t worry.” Marie threaded her fingers through Momo’s hair, then laughed lightly. “One thing about us. We always come crawling back.”

  ***

  The clones, plus Richard, and down Mallmart, paraded through the city streets like a troupe of marauders. The mission today was simple: to test their powers in the field. They had heard rumors of a serious amount of demon activity at the pier, so they made their way there on the trolley—which was now being operated by a purified nether demon in a tracksuit—and got off when they could see the sea lions in the harbor.

  As they got off, Momo watched a family clamber back onto the trolley, the jelly-donut-faced children pulling curiously at the hem of the demon's pants. The adults watched in mortified terror, but they didn’t get off. Just gripped their kids a little closer.

  Huh.

  It appeared to Momo that, in absence of minimum wage workers—who had now all abandoned their posts to pursue the delights of super-ism–the purified nether demons had taken over the essential services. This seemed to, at first, repel normal customers, but then, faced with the idea of losing consumerism entirely, they went along with it.

  Humans evolving past discrimination in the face of losing their luxuries did not surprise Momo. In fact, it was all very San Francisco. What did surprise her were the demons' apparent inner draw toward… helpfulness. Momo saw examples of it, again and again, as they walked: five minutes later, by the crosswalk, the creatures helping kids and old ladies across; then again, with the sealions by the docks.

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  “So this is how the animals have been surviving the apocalypse,” Marie whispered.

  Every time a would-be attacker threatened the sealions, one of three nether demons in scuba suits—god knows where they got those from—would bob out of the water, like a strange looking shark, and promptly tear them limb from limb.

  This apparently proved enough of a deterrent to make the sea lion den into something of an animal safehouse.

  Crabs, gulls, even some household dogs were now floating on the wood.

  “Seems your research was a little misleading, Marie,” Richard said with a hint of amusement in his voice as they settled into a small, touristy-cafe on the pier. One of those joints that had ten TVs all playing the same news broadcast. “None of these demons need our assistance. In fact we might think about recruiting them.”

  Momo was only vaguely aware of Richard’s voice in the background. Her eyes were stuck to the TV screen. It was playing a broadcast from all the way out in Minneapolis. They were reporting on the same exact phenomena there—purified Nether demons playing at being hosts and wait staff, nurses and firemen.

  The broadcast cut out, then switched channels. It was replaced by a news segment from Orlando, Florida. Extreme weather had nearly taken down an apartment building on the coast. And again, nether demons—white as clouds—were there, hazy and pixelated, picking out people from the wreckage, heaving them out of the dust.

  Momo was stunned.

  Sure, they had purified a handful of demons, and those demons had to have purified another handful of demons. That was her grand plan, after all, so she was happy to see it working. But this amount was just… too many, too fast, too far away, for a few days' work, wasn’t it?

  She'd never been gifted at math, but this seemed… beyond exponential.

  She leaned over to Marie, who was nursing an espresso and a pile of waffles, her eyes similarly glued to the television.

  "Marie,” she whispered, grabbing the scientist’s attention. “If you could estimate, how many demons do you think we've purified since you arrived?”

  Marie's eyebrow arched in that excitable way it always did at the prospect of math. Momo wondered, in a sort of terrified awe, what went so differently in their respective timelines that her eyebrow could ever pick up such a habit.

  "Let me think."

  Marie perched her hand on her chin to give the impression that she was mulling it over. In truth, Momo knew she was just waiting a few seconds to save Momo’s ego.

  Finally, with a quick breath inward: "I think… twenty-two."

  Momo nodded. That seemed about right. "Twenty-two, okay. Okay, and if those twenty-to went off and purified like five other demons each per day..."

  Marie bit down on her lip to avoid interrupting Momo. But she did anyway, unable to help herself. “While you and Mallmo were off to grab those spellbooks, I actually followed one of those purified demons around. They managed to purify about… ten? Fifteen? In a day. But then of course we have to account for exponential spread…”

  Momo let out a surprised laugh. “Okay. Fifteen. So that would get us…”

  “Somewhere in the thousands at the very minimum by now.”

  More than Momo thought, but still… “That doesn't seem..."

  Momo trailed off and Marie finished her sentence for her.

  "It seems too small for the amount of purified demons we're seeing.”

  "Yes!" Momo's eyebrows rose. "You're noticing it too?"

  "Of course, it's all I've been thinking about,” Marie muttered, eyes blazing with that quiet intensity of hers. “Those thousands, if there really are thousands, would be very concentrated in this geographic area. Few would have gotten past the Nevada border, even at their top speed. For them to crop up in Florida of all places…”

  A door wheezed open. The sound was barely audible over the television stream and the raucous sounds of people inside the restaurant, but it was the weight of the footfall that came after that made the goosebumps run up Momo's neck.

  Heavy, she thought. Someone would have to be wearing heavy, heavy boots, from the way the floorboards creaked underneath, whining.

  Then, the sound of a gunshot crackled through the air.

  Momo whipped around. Once she realized that the shot had been nothing but a warning—fired straight up towards the ceiling, making a hole through the roof—she relaxed, her eyes dulling from their sudden red back to brown.

  Seven men in heavy, black armor stared back at her.

  Interlocking plates covered their bodies, etched with glowing, faintly pulsating lines that hinted at some hidden energy source coursing through the suit. Their helmets were fitted with visors that emitted a dim, ominous red light, obscuring their faces entirely.

  But most strangely, on the chest plate of each man, was a brand logo.

  Richard must have recognized it, because within half a second, he had shot up from his chair and immediately hurled the closest sharp object at their center mass.

  “Richard!” Momo hissed. “Are you stupid? They have guns!”

  The object—which turned out to be a salt shaker—bounced very anticlimactically off of their armor before shattering on the floor. It was not much of an assault, but it was enough for one of the men to point their automatic weapon straight at them.