Mark struggled for 74 minutes before he linked together all the separate pieces necessary to actually stop his runaway Shaper Decouple Ritual. His solution was elementary, but putting together all of the pieces had taken some time.

  Mark held out a hand and shaped his adamantium into a ball in his left hand.

  He plummeted, falling through the sky.

  He released the adamantium into threads at the last few seconds, stopping his fall and turning the land below him into even more sand. With another twist of kinesis, the threads came together into a ball in his left hand, hovering there, holding there. Mark fell again, but only a few meters this time.

  Mark cleared his mind as he landed on his feet on the sand, only thinking a few thoughts.

  Thought number one: The adamantium is a ball in my left hand.

  Thought two: Breathe out the astral energy. Breathe in the astral exhaustion.

  Thought three: Stay the fuck awake this time, but don’t think too much about being awake/asleep at all.

  Gradually, with every beat of his heart, the world calmed, the ball in his hand hovered there, occasionally freaking out into lines that carved the land, but with some mental re-centering Mark turned the thready ball back into a solid ball.

  With eyes focused on the ball in his hand, making sure it stayed solid and spherical, Mark breathed out astral energy and breathed in astral exhaustion. The ball wavered, quivering into threads to splash ahead and down and everywhere, some of them slapping Mark in the face like so much rain, but Mark centered himself, and the ball returned to being a ball, and droplets of adamantium flowed through the sky and out of the sand, returning to the ball from whence it came like asteroids striking a water planet—

  The adamantium flashed into an explosion of meteorites and waves, spreading far and wide—

  Mark breathed in deep exhaustion, centering himself, and the asteroids and adamantium water returned to his hand, to form a solid black sphere that was also exhausted. Or at least Mark imagined it was.

  And that was the final trick.

  Mark breathed in exhaustion and breathed out energy, and soon, gradually, his mental slipups did nothing to the adamantium ball. It quivered, but it did not jet around. It splashed, but it did not detonate.

  As the world became a dim thing on the edges of his vision, as Mark struggled to stay awake, to even hear the world around him, the adamantium orb fell into Mark’s hand and it stayed there and began to weigh him down like an impossible weight. It was like Mark had already lifted to exhaustion and he was beyond his final ‘one last rep!’ rep—

  The ball fell from Mark’s hand to crash into the sand and Mark’s eyes fluttered.

  He was so cold. So very cold.

  Mark collapsed onto the ground, breathing easy, Union deactivating.

  He blinked.

  He blinked again, trying to open his eyes.

  - -

  Blackthorn’s hovercraft descended and the adamantium ball rolled to Mark’s insensate hand and stayed there, wrapping around his hand a little bit, forming spikes on his knuckles and claws on his fingertips and scales all down his forearm.

  Blackthorn muttered to himself, “Well that’s peculiar.”

  Talzarki magic was very strange, sometimes.

  Blackthorn wondered what would happen when the kid denounced getting his adamantium from Addavein, when he told the world that he was adamantium blooded. Would that break the tenuous talzarki happening here? Or would it make it that much stronger?

  Getting adamantium from one’s brother was one thing.

  Being recognized by the world as adamantium blooded, just like the giant dragon that was also adamantium blooded, was something else entirely.

  - -

  Isoko sat on a recovery bed in Blackthorn’s private hovership. It was a pretty nice bed. Calming. No loud colors or imagery. Not like the rest of the ship with all of its wild colors and angled furniture. This place was just a room with a bed and a viewing screen for the outside.

  Isoko had that viewing screen trained on Mark ever since she had woken up from her own induced experience. She had been impressed with the hovering. The flying. Even though he couldn’t control it at all. Even though he was left incredibly vulnerable afterward and Blackthorn was just now carrying the insensate guy into his own recovery room on the other side of the ship… It had been impressive.

  He was probably going to get slapped with a monowire fine, of course. Isoko had no idea how expensive those things were, but they involved the forfeiture of a percentage of total wealth. Usually something like 20% or 35%. It was a big fucking fine. Catastrophic, usually, but not apocalyptic. Recoverable.

  Would the city of Memphi count Mark’s adamantium as part of his money? Would they go searching out in the field for any potential stray threads, where someone could die to a wrong breeze? If it were Isoko, she would make Mark go out and clean up this area for the next few days, at least, but this particular area was probably a no-go zone for at least 45 days.

  Isoko kinda wanted Mark to delay telling the world he was adamantium blooded, because then the adamantium he had would remain non-tradable, and the fine for a monothread incident would be a lot less. 35% of 300,000 goldleaf in total valuation (or however rich Mark was) was a lot less than 35% of 550 million gold leaf…

  Memphi would go after that larger number, for sure, even if it were ‘illegal’ to count dragon goods as valid for monetary trade.

  Nations were like that; taking what they wanted without regard for the law. They made the laws, after all.

  But that was for another day.

  Isoko felt out everyone’s vectors around her, from Blackthorn and his pilots, to Eliot and Sally, and finally to Mark, sleeping over there. Sally was probably talking about if it was really safe to bring Mark into the ship and Blackthorn was probably saying that it was. Isoko’s ability to feel out words and emotions with her Unionsense was almost as good as Mark’s… in a macro sense. Nuances to emotions were difficult for her. But the big stuff? The big worry that Sally had, and the calming vector from Blackthorn that then spread to Sally, and then to Eliot, and finally to Blackthorn’s girls, was pretty easy to suss out, even if Isoko didn’t know what they were saying, or what any of the nuances meant.

  Isoko was pretty sure that Eliot was feeling… concerned about monowire? He was one of the few people capable of making that stuff without any help, after all. He also had concerns about illegal fluids, and illegal machines, and junk like that.

  Sally was… darkly mirthful? What did that mean?

  Blackthorn was clearly picking up that Isoko was awake, and that news spread to the others.

  Eliot walked this way, while Sally stayed behind with Mark.

  The door opened with a woosh, and Eliot was there, his worry vanishing and his face happy as he said, “You’re awake! How long have you been awake?”

  “Long enough to see Mark be really vulnerable out there. I’m worried about tomorrow.”

  Eliot nodded, his worry returning but in a different way. He sat down on the chair in front of the recovery bed, saying, “Blackthorn says that Mark’s magic is fully solid again. The Decouple Ritual is over.”

  “Is it? You have more experience with ritual magic than me.”

  Eliot was suddenly not worried at all.

  Oh.

  Isoko realized that when Eliot’s worry returned, it had been regarding something else, and his words had actually been him trying to reassure Isoko that the danger of the ritual truly was over. Hmm. Yeah. Isoko wasn’t as good at vector reading as Mark. Not by a long shot. She shouldn’t try to read people like that, even if she really wanted to learn how to and be good at it.

  Eliot said, “Yeah. It’s over. The only reason it lasted as long as it did was because Mark was keeping it going with Union. It should never last that long.”

  Isoko found herself worried, though. “But it’s just a ritual that he can do at any time?”

  “Blackthorn and I both ran scans on him. His Adamantiumkinesis and Union are at… Well. His numbers went up. His understanding of himself went up. He might have awoken that button in himself that any Shaper eventually finds, that allows them to circumvent the speed barrier, but he didn’t break himself. He’s fine, Isoko. He’s in control of his Power again.”

  Isoko almost wanted to ask for Mark’s numbers, but… Eh. She let that go.

  Eliot changed the subject anyway, purposefully messing up his words, making them inexact as he asked, “Did the ‘Map your Binding’ Ritual work... or whatever it’s called?”

  Isoko rolled her eyes, saying, “You know a lot about this stuff and yet you pretend not to.”

  Eliot looked scandalized. “What? Me? No. I just remembered Blackthorn talking to you about that, an I’ve heard the word ‘binding’ before, and—”

  Isoko rolled her eyes harder.

  When she used her Unionsense to read people she always read too deep, but her normal senses were already well tuned to reading between the lines, everywhere she looked.

  “Okay fine. I… might have done a deep dive into mage lessons in the last half an hour while everyone was occupied and I have seen some stuff.”

  “You know that’s dangerous, right? Binding work and magery and all of that. Duchess Valen told us not to tell anyone about it, ever.”

  “You think I’m gonna let my friends do weird shit without looking into it?

  Isoko smiled at that. “I think Sally knows how it theoretically works, too, and for a lot longer than a half hour.”

  “… Yeah. She’s not touching it, though, and neither am I.”

  “You sure?”

  “She and I have been together a lot at the settlement, when you and Mark were out working off your brig time and killing monsters together, and just now. We talked while you and Mark were out of it— Wait! Bad! You avoided the question!”

  Isoko had avoided the question.

  But now she grinned.

  For a good moment, she let the results of her own ritual flow through her mind. She hadn’t undergone a ritual nearly as impressive as Mark’s, but she had been guided by Blackthorn into seeing her own Binding, to understand the magic that made her Platinum Body function.

  She didn’t understand any of it. Not really. But she had seen herself. Fully.

  That was the first step.

  It had been like walking through a dream and finding herself standing upon a platinum sphere that was not a sphere, but a small planet, and the planet was her. But then she had walked inward, and she had been in a room that had space everywhere, like stepping into a house that was a sphere. And then there were the connections inside of the sphere, in the room, like twists of spider thread that twisted ever inward, creating the space and becoming the space at the same time.

  She knew, intimately, what those twists were, in that moment.

  She had forgotten all of the twists in the waking.

  Isoko said, “The Mapping Ritual worked, yes. I saw my Binding clearly, but I lost it all in the waking. I know what to look for now, so I should be able to get back to it better.” She thought back to the other day, when she spoke to Grand Mage Alistair Blackwood, the archmage’s son and the leader of the local Mage Society. She said, “I might even sign a real Mage Oath, if they can offer me good enough terms. Alistair seems like a decent enough guy. All he asked for was oversight into what I was learning from every source I find. I think that’s about as lenient as I can get, and once I sign the Mage Oath I can read mage books in all those libraries they got—” She added, “But after I learn Protect and Fly. I don’t need to concern myself with learning all the spells ever. Later, yes, but not right now.”

  Eliot nodded—

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Mark jolted awake on the other side of the hovership.

  Isoko said, “Mark’s awake.”

  Eliot looked that way, too, right at a wall. With a small voice, he said, “His adamantium made scales and claws on his left arm. When he was unconscious. He has scales, now. He’s not a hidden dragon but… It’s talzarki stuff, and that means…” He frowned. “The dragon.”

  “Addavein.”

  “Yes,” Eliot said, without reservation. And then he stood up and went through the door.

  Isoko got up and followed him.

  - -

  Mark laid in bed and looked at his left arm.

  Scales rested on his skin like black leaves, completely covering the outside of his hand and up to his elbow. The sensitive parts of his skin, like the interior of his forearm and his palms and fingertips, were devoid of metal, but the outside of his forearm, his knuckles, and his fingernails, were solid black with overlapping adamantium scales.

  Mark moved his hand, flexed his forearm, and twisted his arm back and forth, and the scales stayed with him, exactly where they needed to stay on his skin.

  He wasn’t consciously controlling this at all.

  That was the freaky part.

  Blackthorn said, “Try to shape it normally. Into a ball, for instance.” He added, “Also, here’s a scale. The measuring kind.” Blackthorn produced an electronic scale and set it on the side of the recovery bed. “You know… In case you were wondering how much you have now, for whatever reason.”

  Mark flexed his adamantium and the scales peeled away into a solid ball that he put down onto the measuring scale.

  9.3 kilograms.

  Ah.

  Some of his internal reserves had gotten out… Maybe.

  Mark’s internal reserves still felt like clouds in his bones. It was maybe 3 kilos, still? Mark had no idea.

  “Can you make it into scales again?” Blackthorn asked. “The dragon kind, you know.”

  Sally just stared.

  Mark picked up the black ball with his Adamantiumkinesis and started making scales and putting them on his skin—

  The whole ball of adamantium kinda fell apart into scales, joining to his skin. Mark definitely did that himself. He had turned the adamantium into scales and now they rested on his skin in the exact right way to form overlapping scale armor up to his elbow.

  But it had been an almost natural sort of Shaping.

  As though he did that all the time. A rote repetition.

  The thinness of the scales and their overlapping nature seemed like this was maybe a bad way to make armor? But it also felt very secure. Mark wasn’t sure how he felt about this. How did overlapping scales compare to solid, single-layer armor? Worse? Better?

  Probably worse, right?

  But… scales felt so natural.

  Blackthorn asked, “How does that feel?”

  “Easy. Weird.” Mark stood up and moved his arm around, and the scales flexed as though he were controlling a brand new muscle. And then Mark took the adamantium off, reshaped it into his helmet, caltrops, and knives against his skin, and that felt more normal. Quark maneuvered out from below his shirt, back up into his remade helmet, and Mark said, “Different.”

  Mark floated a blade of adamantium to the side as he turned the blade into a tiny propeller, and then he started to spin that propeller. Sally and Blackthorn watched. The prop moved at Mark’s fastest normal speed, and Mark could tell that Blackthorn was ready to cast some very big magic, very suddenly, if needed. Probably escape magic. Sally was ready to simply run away.

  Mark was in control, though.

  Probably.

  Blackthorn asked, “Same max speed?”

  “… Well.”

  Mark ‘held’ on to the center of the propeller and he sort of… ‘let go’… of the rest of it—

  The prop suddenly sped up as Mark held it looser than before in almost every way. He never really held adamantium like this. It felt vulnerable to theft to not have the whole thing under his direct control. But this worked. The prop spun way, way too fast.

  There was a breeze, and a bit of a pull in the direction of the fan. It sounded and felt like an unbalanced fan. Wobbly. Mark hadn’t crafted a very good propeller. He would need to get better at that.

  Mark stopped the spin. He was very happy, but experimentation would come later. He needed to get a better prop shape, too.

  Blackthorn calmed as Mark didn’t go out of control.

  Sally’s eyes went wide, and then her frown turned upside down. She grinned, saying, “Good shit, Mark.”

  Blackthorn nodded. “Put it away now, and please understand this: Do not attempt a Decouple Ritual unless you are about to die and so is everyone else, because it will kill everyone around you. Once you get some real capability in you, in several years or a decade or two, that ‘around you’ radius might be several kilometers. This warning I have given you will never go away. Do not Decouple yourself unless you are sure you want to kill everything and everyone around you.”

  With a twitch, Mark turned the propeller back into a blade to sit against his forearm, as he said, “I understand, sir. Thank you very much for your help.”

  Blackthorn grinned. “I promised you some basic magical training to supplement what you’re getting from Duchess Elaria Valen and I feel I have delivered 80% of that promise, for all four of you kids. I assume that incidentals over the next few days will take up the remaining 20%. Now I’m sure you’ll want to experiment, so I’ll let you figure out how you want to do that.” He walked away, calling out to the girls in the cockpit, “Girls! Take us to dinner somewhere! Eliot requested Nigerian, and I haven’t had that since...”

  The ship effortlessly began to move, rocking Mark in his seat a little before the inertial dampeners took over fully.

  Eliot and Isoko were waiting outside. Eliot had wanted to walk in, but he had figured out that Mark was playing with adamantium so he kinda stopped out there. Isoko remained with him out there for much of the same reason. And now, Isoko was holding Eliot back from coming in for a different reason.

  Sally was with Mark, and she wanted to talk to him alone, because Blackthorn had interviewed her about her desired path in life while Mark was out of it. She had some things to say.

  Mark began with, “It seems like Isoko got a good outcome from her ritual. She’s happy. Eliot is meeting with Sentinel later, and that’s what Blackthorn is doing for him. But what are you getting Sally?”

  Sally grinned, and then she was worried. And then she blurted out what she needed to blurt, even though she didn’t want to say it, “Possible size changing magic.”

  Mark paused, and then he smiled. “Okay! Good? Great! Very good!”

  Mark did not bring up the fact that Sally hated magic, or that she didn’t trust Blackthorn, or any of that demon-touched stuff.

  “… Yes, good,” Sally said, after a moment of studying Mark’s reaction and finding it good. Better than good. Sally sighed a little, grinning a lot. “I can’t get big like Titanfist, but getting small is supposed to be a lot easier. That’s years away, though. But! It looks like I’ll be learning magic right alongside you all, but not in the same area. I’m signing the Mage Oath with the Executioners of Drakarok.”

  Mark blinked. “Oh, shit. That’s big. Uh… Okay! What does it… uh. Require— You looked into this before?”

  Mark felt the slight sting of being untrustworthy. Of being the last to know something.

  But that was untrue.

  Sally hadn’t told anyone about this before, and now she was telling Mark. She almost didn’t need to tell him, though. He had figured it out fast, now that the two of them were here, at this topic and crossroads.

  She had looked into magery before.

  Of course she had.

  She’d been on Daihoon for something like 9 months before Eliot, Isoko, and Mark had gotten there. She and her old team had been targeted for exploitation by the demon Leash, who was targeting Mark to get to Addavein, to the demon Kanda who still ‘lived’ inside the dragon, like a drop of red in a bathtub of normal water.

  Sally knew a little bit about magic, she hated it, but now she wanted to learn more.

  She had changed her mind.

  “… Yeah,” Sally said. “I kinda… Had issues with the whole mage stuff after the… incident. I spent a long while with the Church of Drakarok and they told me a lot of things and I got… more difficult about it. But magic is the only true path to power, isn’t it. The demons laid the tracks, and there are no tracks outside of demonic eminence. They built the System that even the gods used to attain divinity, and all of us are steeped in their power already. To forgo that power is to ‘Break the Binding’, which is generally bad, and which Drakarok is telling me you have already heard about.”

  Mark did not notice the shift in vectors, in the world itself, until Sally spoke of Drakarok talking to her.

  And then all he saw was gold.

  Sally stood before him, flickering on the edges with spiky gold, her voice overlapped with a man’s voice, as she said, “We’ve dicked around enough with dangerous magics for today, Mark. There will be no Binding issues. And so, we should prepare for the Attack on the Gate. Meet the players. Meet the field. Did you know that Grey Phantom is Sentinel’s father? I didn’t know that. There’s a lot of overlap between the heroes and villains of Memphi! Titanfist is literally both.”

  And then the golden light went elsewhere, moving on.

  And Sally smiled, asking, “You think you can fly with that adamantium yet?”

  Mark wondered what had happened, but not really. He had seen paladins be visited by their gods before. Usually they commented on their visitations a lot more than Sally just had. Also, an actual contact was usually a Big Deal. The imparting of important information was Reason For Contact #1. Helping a paladin deal with some shit was reason #2. Sally had just rattled off about seven big topics to talk about, though she didn't seem to care about any of them. Not really. She didn’t seem to care about being contacted, either.

  She was talking around a very big topic that she did not want to touch, but which she was approaching anyway.

  But first: Mark had never seen Sally be contacted before.

  Mark asked, “Sally? Were you contacted just now?”

  “Uh… Yeah. I guess.”

  “… I would have thought that a contact would have been a bigger deal for you, but from your, well, everything, I guess it’s not? But then why haven’t I seen it before, Sally?”

  Sally kind of grinned, trying to brush it off, saying, “It happens a lot, but I try to not do it when I’m around you or Isoko or… or anyone who could tell, actually.”

  Mark knew she was holding back. Like. A lot a lot. Mark knew this already, but…

  Mark directly asked, “Sally.”

  “Okay! I’m… already on the track to become an Executioner— But I haven’t killed anyone!” Sally looked embarrassed. “Drakarok hasn’t Called me to a target.”

  Mark felt a deep exhaustion that almost sent him laying back onto the bed under his ass.

  Mark took in Sally’s words.

  Sally watched.

  “You’re already an Executioner, aren’t you. It’s just not official until you kill someone in the War For Life.”

  “… Potato patahto— Hey! So! You want to, uh… try to fly with your adamantium? Do the Attack The Gate scenario prep? Go… uh… subjugate a deplorable part of the world? Anything at all but talk about this and how I lied to you for so long… again.”

  Mark got up off the bed, saying, “Absolutely yes, but we’re not done talking about this, Sally.”

  “I know… But Mark…” Sally breathed deep, then softly said, “I might not be able to kill whoever needs to die in the next 36 hours. So… That’s why Drakarok contacted me right now. Everything else is… I’m… I don’t know. I think I’m gonna need a lot of help, and soon.”

  Mark felt an uncomfortable weight upon him. He focused on the important fact. “Thrashtalon or demon?”

  “Both, probably.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  “No. Drakarok cannot see everything at all, and he’s not proactive. He’s strictly reactive.”

  Mark considered another uncomfortable question. The biggest one, really. Mark breathed in, and then—

  “Yes,” Sally said, gold light fluttering through her vector, as she anticipated his question and gave the answer in one word. Sally elaborated, wanting to come clean, as she said, “I was here to kill you if Leash got into you. We don’t think that will happen, though, so… parameters have changed.”

  “… Please walk away, Sally.”

  Sally nodded, and then walked away—

  Mark got up and followed her, ignoring all of the hurt he was now feeling, because there was obviously a job to be done and it was only partially HVP related because both Isoko and Eliot were experiencing their own divine contact in the middle of the ship. When it rained it hurricaned, apparently.

  Gold flowed away from Isoko’s platinum skin, while glimmers of something shiny left Eliot looking pensive.

  Blackthorn stood in the back, near the cockpit, with his girls. All three of them were looking their way.

  And just like that, all personal problems were swept away for the moment.

  Mark commanded, “Tell me what you know.”

  Eliot said, “High alert. Prepare for events and don’t stop the program. This is deep Curtain Protocol now. We cannot upset the grand order of things because then the Unawakened start to monsterize when that happens, and the Attack the Gate program has become the focus of the whole world.”

  Sally added, “There is a traitor in Memphi. Possibly a lot of them.”

  Isoko looked directly at Mark as she said, “Addavein might show, if he is called for, if the need is great enough. Union will bring him to you, if you demand it. Freyala will help if the moment comes.”

  Mark nodded, taking all of that at face value. “And so we focus on what we can do.” Mark looked to Blackthorn, who had a look of fear to him, and said, “We’ll be at the gate, of course, and as soon as the real problem shows we will be joining with the Collective and fighting those real problems. But according to Hearthswell the show must go on.”

  Blackthorn breathed in and out once, and then he allowed himself to be here, making big decisions, saying, “If you’re receiving notices then every other major power is receiving war orders, too. The Collective will be directed elsewhere. This means that you will have very little support at the Gate. Perhaps just Tartu and his people, yourselves, the untested gate security people, and Titanfist. Someone else might show, but this is doubtful. I know Titanfist wants to be around you because he wants more healing, and you can support him well, and that’s a whole sector of the city protected with just the two of you. Other heroes will be quietly seeded elsewhere.” He looked to one of the girls, almost incidentally, and the woman pulled out a mass of wires and LEDs and electronics from somewhere and she held it to her head, the mass turning into a headset with a visor and microphone. She started typing on an unseen keyboard. Blackthorn continued with Mark and his team, saying, “This sounds like a full scale attack, so the churches are likely calling parishioners to church to pray and a lot of things are going to start happening behind the scenes, under Curtain Protocol. The main thrust of the War for Life will probably happen here tomorrow, but these things do not happen locally. They happen globally.

  “I’ll be taking you to the gate, now. There’s a prep space that you can stay at. I imagine Tartu and his team will be moved there soon, too. I imagine Noel will want to get some footage before it kicks off for real. Maybe you’ll get through the whole scenario before the event starts. I hope so. You should train your new ability while you can, Mark. I imagine you will need it.”

  Mark bowed a little.

  Blackthorn’s girl with the techie helmet softly said, “Confirmation of multiple divine contacts. The Collective is moving en masse. Mayor Ramirez is calling an All Hands Under Curtain Protocol. Nothing overt, or else there might be monsterization when the walls fail and the kaiju get in.”

  Oh.

  Holy fucking shit.

  That’s why people would monsterize.

  They’re expecting the walls to fall.

  Mark felt himself shudder when he heard about breaking walls and kaiju getting in. Memories flashed, of the broken Bay Wall, of the roaring hurricane, and of the kaiju and the dragon. He could almost hear the explosion of nuclear fire that blasted across the land, while Mark, David, and Orissa were in a hover car at the bottom of a crater, watching it all pass overhead.

  But there was no sound.

  Just a memory.

  A terrible, terrible memory.