Finish Off – 24.3 | Pale

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“Hey,” Verona told Lucy.

“What?”

“Stop looking at Hollow Yen.  You’re bothering him.”

Hollow Yen was sitting on a parapet, almost reclining, one leg propped up, arms wrapped around it, facing the horizon.  He kept glancing back and looking annoyed that Avery and Lucy kept looking at him.

“You’re not going to explain that part of the plan?” Lucy asked.

“There’s nothing to explain,” Verona insisted.  “And if there was, which there isn’t, it’d be a bad idea to explain any key components of the plan where others could overhear and utilize it.  We can’t trust that every last person that came with us here is going to stay on our side.”

“We could extract oaths,” Lucy said.

“We could, but how well do you think that’s going to go?  A few people are going to bail before they risk getting caught up in a bad oath that puts them under the thumb of three practitioners.  Way different than us showing our proof of concept, pulling this off, and them signing on to a wider deal about the handling of Aware and the Carmine.”

“Right,” Lucy said.  She glanced at Hollow Yen.

Verona punched her in the arm.

“Ow.  I’m still sore.”

“Good,” Verona grumbled.

Lucy sighed.

Verona and Lucy watched as Nicolette laid out cards.  People were taking a moment to get organized.  Here on the Path, the sun was shining and the temperature was warm.  A bunch of the Aware had taken off their coats, and were looking around at the scenery, which was a sprawling castle.  The sun swept overhead every few minutes, and when it was overhead, sections of the castle and landscape would be pulled skyward by reverse gravity.  They would then drop when the sun passed, and crash down, shattering.  Add in a number of Lost and it seemed pretty intense.  Except they weren’t really going anywhere.

The weight of anyone standing on or placing key things down on top of a given section counteracted the reverse gravity, so they’d kind of spread out, with a few people -mostly Dog Tags- tasked with holding down parts of the surrounding buildings.  Avery was too restless to sit and watch Nicolette, so she was moving between people and groups.

“When you’re in another realm, the dynamics of augury can change,” Nicolette said, moving some cards.  “If you’re in the Abyss, it tends to focus in on you, a lot of augury will dwell on if you make it through the next few minutes.”

“Valid,” Verona said.  Julette sat in her hood, chin on Verona’s shoulder.  Alexanderp had draped himself on the other, with Peckersnot standing on her shoulder beside Alexanderp, hands on Verona’s collar and Alexanderp’s hair to steady himself.

Alexanderp smelled a bit like a package of meat she’d cracked open and couldn’t decide if it had gone off or not.  Which, like, she wasn’t normally about to fuss about that stuff – she hung out with Peckersnot, so odd smells were usual, but if Alexanderp was actually going bad, that was a concern.  He’d taken a beating earlier but seemed to be holding up.

“Ruins goes the other way.  Big picture but a lack of clarity on details.  You can view things through a Ruins-lens to get fast, broad-strokes readings, large areas, that sort of thing,” Nicolette explained.  “Spirit world for your random nonsense you’ve got to decipher…”

“Right.”

“Varies, of course.  Realms have sub-areas with their own specifics,” Nicolette murmured.

Verona loved this stuff, but there was too much heaviness going on, so she couldn’t get properly excited about it.  She flashed Nicolette a smile to let her know she was receptive.

“But here?” Nicolette asked.  “I’m not sure of the specifics.”

“Hmmm.  Avery!  Jude!”

“What’s up?”

The sun passed overhead.  A few thousand tons of castle soared skyward.  They, except for one part of the immediate area, were A-ok.  A single tower flew upward, though, and it looked like it’d be messy when it fell.  Some Garricks began to draw up diagrams to contain the damage.

Jude had to wait until the sun had passed before he jogged over.  He had one of his kid cousins sit instead.

When he was halfway over, the tower that had floated up came crashing down.  Diagrams flared, chalk glowing yellow like heated metal, and the rubble was kept within the bounds of the diagram, instead of flying into people’s heads or eyes or whatever.

“Hey Ave,” Verona greeted her friend.  “Do you know if there’s any Garricks who’d know how Augury interacts with the Paths?”

Avery made a face, then turned to Jude.  “Augury and the Paths?”

“Crap.  No, not really.”

“All these Garricks and nothing?” Verona asked.

Lucy lightly whapped her in the arm.

“There’s some practitioner families where things split off into branches, and each branch will do something a little off the main practice,” Jude said.

“Like the Whitts,” Avery said.  “Chase and Fernanda’s family.  Emotion manipulation, but Chase went and became an Augur, using emotion reading to help get a bead on people, Tomas Whitt does emotion-altering alchemy…”

“Right.  Well, we try to buy and trade for as many of the books on Finder variants as we can, just to know what’s going on, sometimes our guys dabble, but mostly we’re Finders.  Arguably Path runners.”

“A distinction that feels a bit forced to me,” Verona said.

“Bringing stuff back versus going exploring,” Jude said.  He sighed.  “Uncle Peter!?”

“What’s up?” the Garrick patriarch asked.

“Did we ever get that book on Seekers?  Verona’s wondering about Augury.”

“Nicolette’s wondering about Augury, and I’m wondering as a result,” Verona clarified.

“It wasn’t a good book,” Peter replied, in a grumbly tone.  “Curtsinger takes shitty notes, doesn’t explain anything, knows that if he binds his notes in hardcover and puts a price tag on it, he can make a few hundred dollars from various Finders and Finder families who’ll buy just about anything Path-related that gets put out there.  Does that twice a month and I figure that’s how he pays his rent.  I figured that since he wasn’t doing anything else, I’d task Shane with reading through and seeing if there was anything good… I guess he has the book now.”

“Damn,” Jude muttered.

Verona sometimes lost track of all the Garrick names, but Shane had been the one to betray the Garricks and go join Wonderkand, along with his wife.  “So… Seekers, then?”

“Paths are open to interpretation.  Things like your Turtle Queen force their own interpretation.  Combine the two, you can force Path configurations and brute-force some puzzles.  I’d rather get more clever with the name, but ‘Seeker’ is what we’ve got and it’s too much hassle to get all the Finders out there to change the terminology.”

“Anyone else besides this Curtsinger guy?” Lucy asked.

“Not so much.  I don’t think it’d be what you want, anyway.  It’s in the direction of augury- you need something to pin down Scrivening Others.  But it’s more deep analysis of something specific than what I’m guessing you’re looking for.”

“Okay,” Nicolette said.  “What I’m getting is a fast response but a lot of noise.  So… I’m going to have to couch what I’m doing and be careful, and you all are going to have to not put too much trust in what I’m saying.  Things may be off.”

“How long until sunrise?” Lucy asked.

“Clayton!” Peter barked, touching his wrist.

“Seven and change!”

“Seven minutes.”

“Let’s bring some people in?” Lucy asked.

They called over some others.  Nicolette laid out a piece of paper, and began to outline.

“This is, I’m reasonably sure, their setup,” she explained.  She sketched out some triangles, with some lines to mark out the T-shaped intersection of roads things were built around, with dashed lines to make things clear.  “Some tents as temporary quarters, but they may not be in use by tonight.  Maybe.  I’ll try and get to that.”

She adjusted her glasses, checked notes, and then switched to drawing out an irregular shape.  “This looks to be a main house operated by the Kims, with Kims coming and going, and it’s where the meeting with Ottawa is currently being held.  It’s fenced in, elaborate, and rigged with traps.”

She drew out some squares.

“There’s a scattering of buildings erected by the Allaires, partially fabricated with glamour.”

“So if we can get in, it takes very little effort to ruin hours of work?” Avery asked.

“Probably.  Which is why the tents might still be in use.  Or they’re staying in the Kim house.”

“I’m staunchly against arson,” Snowdrop said.

Nicolette turned to look at the opossum, who smiled toothily.  “I remember.”

“And goblin firecrackers,” Lucy said.  “We should check our supply.  Toadswallow?”

“I can do inventory,” Toadswallow said, from the sidelines.  He stood by Bubbleyum, who had her tongue extended and reaching behind her, holding down some wall, just-in-case.

“I think these are also traps, the tents,” Nicolette said.  “They have a lot of scattered, lesser Others there.  Goblins, bogeymen, technomancy predators, violent fairies, at least one or two oddfolk.  The tents give them somewhere to stay.  Get too close, trip an alarm, and they exit and attack.  Some won’t be in tents at all, and lurk in the dark, beneath snow, or something like that.”

“Tents will be cold to sleep in,” Brayden’s dad said.  “How does that work?”

“Yeah,” Nicolette agreed.  “There’s magic there.  Bit of cloth, rods, basic magic circle to insulate heat.”

Verona looked at Lucy and Avery.  It reminded her of her first day out as a practitioner.  Staying in the tent, sleeping in shifts, with insulating runes to keep the warmth in, because it had been early spring.

A few months shy of being a year ago.

“The roads are clear, mostly, in case any non-practitioners pass through, but there are things around with noses that will sniff out the slightest bit of glamour, ears that will hear a whispered bit of practice… it’s not as simple as being safe as long as you’re on the main road,” Nicolette explained.  “And it gets much, much more difficult when you actually want to do anything like get indoors.”

“Wards, barriers?” Verona asked.

“Among other things,” Nicolette said, as she made some notes on the corners of the map.  She reached down for her bag, got out a bag of chalk, and then dumped a handful over the entire setup.

The chalk hung in mid-air as if it dusted invisible model houses and tents.  Part of the Kim house fell apart, so Nicolette re-checked her notes, erased a part, re-drew it, and dropped more chalk down.  It held up better this time.

“Now, according to the cards, I need to stress that this is not fully accurate, I may have missed things, I may have added things that aren’t there…”

She got a stick of colored chalk and put it out, then drew a half-circle between the wall that encircled the Kim property and the house, like a little rainbow or archway.

The circle filled in with vague, nondescript magic circle stuff.  The second one didn’t, though, and part of the image collapsed.

“Damn it,” Nicolette sighed.  “Sorry, spent too much personal power last night, preparing for and helping to keep the Belangers safe after the raid.”

“It’s okay,” Avery said, crouching down so she was at eye level with the map.  “This is cool enough.”

“The augury around the house came with a set of cards suggesting a pop-up book or jack in the box.  If it’s a jack in the box, it’s something that stays compressed until the ritual to undo it happens, and then it springs up into its full dimensions.  If it’s a book, it’s like one of those childhood books you open, the individual components unfold, and then they have a dark mansion, gardens, and surrounding walls.  The wards are like strings that start up loose but stretch out taut as things settle,” Nicolette said.  “You can imagine it as a cat’s cradle of snares or a webwork of those lasers from spy movies you have to dance around.”

“Can we dance around them?  If we find a way to see them?” Avery asked.

“I can’t say for sure, but I think the gaps are too small for a person, and it’s too hard to tell the difference between a gap something smaller could crawl through and a hole meant to look doable, that has a hidden snare on the other side.  Poke your head through, and…”

Nicolette made a ‘kssh’ sound as she mimed the snare at her neck.

Verona nodded, and glanced sideways at Julette.

Julette shook her head.

“You’d be more likely to survive than some,” Verona murmured.

Julette narrowed her eyes.

“I’m kidding.”

“Mreh.”

“If you get caught by these traps, it takes things to ten out of ten badness,” Nicolette said.  “Augury says it’s doom and disaster.  Considering who we’re dealing with…”

“You get horrified?” Lucy asked.

“Yeah.  So while it looks like this big open building, there’s no easy entry in from the roof, over the wall, through a window… front path only and the front path has guards.”

“Question,” Grandfather said.

“Ask?” Lucy told him.

“Our goal is to get to the Carmine Exile and catch him at the one place we know he’ll be?”

“Exiting that meeting, yeah,” Lucy said.  “Or we knock out enough of his support systems and power investment that it sets us up to go after him.  We need to make him spend enough power that it goes past what the international powers gave him. Make him recall some of the Others he’s made and whatever other things he’s got in the works.”

“So we need into that house,” Grandfather said.

“Ideally.”

“And we can’t blow it up?”

“Not easily.  Wards,” Nicolette said.

“And it would probably sit badly with the rest of the Ottawa council if we, you know, blew up half their members,” Lucy said.

“Got it.  And-”

“Sorry!  Interrupting!” Clayton called out.  “Just under one minute, then we need people already in their places.”

“Let’s get people moved.  Go to where you were before.  Come up with your questions and ideas, come back,” Peter told people.

“I’ve got minor clarifications on the wards, after!” Nicolette called out.  People were already scattering to get to where they’d been sitting moments ago.  Verona took a seat, and McCauleigh came over to sit beside her.

“You’re not a pair I expected,” Nicolette said.

“You know, there was a short story I liked as a kid?  The cat that walks by himself?  I mainly liked it because it was about cats, and I was pretty cat obsessed when I was a kid.  Cat earmuffs, cat-”

“You were so cat obsessed,” Lucy said, from about thirty feet away, sitting on a wall.

“Past tense?” Avery asked.

“Okay, but seriously,” Verona said.  “Basically, it was about how the cat could be both independent and dependent.  A wild thing, but also capable of living in a house with people.  That’s what makes the cat special.”

“Sure,” Nicolette said.  “Mentally, I’m chalking that up as another symbol for my augury reading.”

“I thought about becoming Other versus staying human, I thought about buying into society versus-”

The sun rose.  Sections of the landscape began to rise, then rocket skyward, until they were specks in the distance..

“-failing society, I thought about passing school versus failing out, all that.”

“A lot of pressure,” Nicolette said.  “I get that.  Surviving versus not.  Or working under Alexander.”

“Yeah.  Kennet above versus Kennet below,” Verona said.  “I think there’s a third path.  Taking what you need out of both cases, going your own way.  Gotta find the opportunity, identify what people want, accept some dog is going to bite your ass.  But there is a way to be the cat that walks by herself.”

“I don’t think I got that chance,” Nicolette said.  “Or maybe I did and I didn’t recognize it for what it was.”

“Maybe you’re finding it now?” Verona asked, shrugging.

“Maybe.”

Didn’t sound like Nicolette wanted to engage with that question in a big way.  Sure.  “Anyway, McCauleigh and I are very different people-”

“Very,” McCauleigh said, moving so she was lying down on the slab they were sitting on, behind Verona.

Peckersnot jumped off Verona’s shoulder and onto Mccauleigh’s stomach.

“What?” McCauleigh muttered.  “Oh.”

“-but I think we’re both cats like that-” Verona said.

Julette climbed out of Verona’s hood and leaped onto McCauleigh’s stomach as well.

“Ow!  Fucking cat,” McCauleigh grumbled.  But she put a hand on Julette, and Julette curled up there.

“-finding our own path.  Saying ‘fuck it’ to a lot of the rest of what’s going on, parents, school… easier to fumble along together than to buy in.  Us and Mal and Anselm, until…”

“I’m sorry about your friends,” Nicolette said.

Verona’s eyes dropped to the stone below them.

“How are the Belangers?” McCauleigh asked.  “Any casualties?”

“Not sure what the damage is.  We got forced out right when they arrived and we didn’t get fully organized after.  I don’t know if anyone fell behind or if they didn’t make it.  There weren’t any Belanger bodies, but they could’ve been eaten,” Nicolette said.

“That’s what it’s going to be, I bet,” McCauleigh said.  “If we even make it through this without having to leave the area and scatter, it’ll be weeks of realizing that so-and-so you recognize or whatshisface, friend of a friend, gone and dead.”

Too heavy to dwell on.

“I’m mad,” Verona admitted.  Her hands clenched, and her left hand jumped with a stabbing of pain.  “I don’t like being mad.  It’s so fucked, making life and extinguishing it.  Good people, nuanced people, wiped out for a power hit?”

Julette nodded, before stretching across McCauleigh and resting the top of her head against Verona’s butt.

“I think a lot of us are mad,” Lucy said.

“The trick is to not let it make us make mistakes.  Say what you will about Alexander and the rest of the Belangers, they were pretty good about being a cold, calculating, mean sort of mad,” Nicolette told them, as she turned over cards, doing readings.  She reached into her bag, pulled out a folder of papers with individual tabs, and flipped through to find a tab.

“Looking up the Belangers?” Verona asked.  “Sorry, didn’t mean to change the subject.”

“No.  Trying to get you all sorted,” Nicolette said.  She sighed and looked up from the cards, meeting Verona’s eyes.  “But about what you were asking before?  The more I follow along, the more I feel like the Belanger family has spent generations straddling this weird existence where they’re significant enough they can’t be ignored, they’re a resource and have resources, even if those are mismanaged, but nobody actually wants to take ownership of them.”

“What about Jen?” Lucy asked.  The sun was passing.  Lucy had left her perch.  Others were moving over, talking among themselves.

“Even Jen.  But I don’t want to get into another family’s politics.”

“Do you think you could run it?” Verona asked.

“She just said-” Lucy started.

“No, I hear you,” Nicolette said.  “This is more about me than about them, but still, don’t repeat this elsewhere?”

Verona and the others nodded.  When everyone else was nodding, from Avery, Lucy, McCauleigh and Verona to Julette and Peckersnot, Alexanderp joined in.

Nicolette, satisfied, said, “I think if we left here and I made a call to them, I could put them on the job, and there would be very little pushback.  If there ever was a time to make a play for something fresh and new, it would be now.”

“But do you want to?” Lucy asked.

Nicolette shrugged.  “Dunno.  I…”

Other people were coming over, now that things were settling.  The ‘night’ began, the sky a dark blue chased with purple from the fading sunset.

Nicolette sighed, and didn’t share whatever she’d been thinking.

It was too warm for a sweater and coat.  Verona had put off taking them off because she didn’t want to put it on a stone and have that stone go flying to the stratosphere, but… she started to pull them off, moving Alexanderp aside before she did so.

McCauleigh helped, tugging up the back end of the sweater.

Fuck.  Verona was a bit sweaty.  If they went back out into the cold…

“I wonder if we can put the Belangers on the job,” Lucy said.

“Well, if you want to talk about being mad?  Gillian’s… sort of mad.  Her emotions are out of whack, but I don’t think she’ll turn down the opportunity to do something.  Chase is out there too.”

“How’s he?” Verona asked.  “Like, both in the sense that he’s…”

“He’s got some Augury, still.  No, I get what you’re asking.  Not just about him being horrified.  Chase is still Chase.  Not my favorite person, even if he stepped up,” Nicolette said.  “But for right now, we share goals.  He’ll help once I find a role for him.”

One more moving piece to take into account, Verona thought.

People had all arrived.

“Alright.  Sorry about that,” Peter said.  “Anyone have thoughts?”

“Deborah Cloutier, Storm Chaser out of Thunder Bay, right hand of the Lord of the city,” Deb announced herself.  She’d removed her coat, and her sleeves were rolled up.  Frostburn, lightning, and burn scars on full display, almost proudly.  “I see something as elegantly constructed as all of that?  I think an interesting weather event would set the stage… or upset their stage.”

“Shall we do the usual?” Ann asked.

“I would love to do the usual,” Deb asked.

“Clarify?” Avery asked.

“A bit of the Abyss to go along with the storm.”

“They’re pretty Abyssal, with an expert in the field.  That could turn against us,” Avery said.

“Then Ruin instead.”

“What does that mean?” Jeremy asked, from the back.

“My daughter can explain, I hope.”

“They’re an overlapping realm, non-core, exists intermittently, across place and time, with other realms sometimes taking up the same function.  They’re best described as a filter and processing space confluent but not convergent with the Spirit World-” Ann’s daughter started saying.

“Echoes -ghosts, basically- and rain,” Verona cut her off.

“Ah,” Jeremy replied.  “Thanks.”

“The Carmine’s faction has Ruins stuff too,” Avery pointed out.  “The serpent worm thing?”

“They have almost everything,” Matthew replied.  “He made sure to cover the bases across the different realms when he was restricting passage, and we have to assume he’s got a lot of those same Others all playing guard now, or he got replacements.”

“He’ll have been working all night,” Nicolette said.

“Elemental storms appear all across the world alongside elemental disasters both natural and manmade, wherever there’s a sudden void in human presence,” Deb said, moving closer to the stone block Nicolette was using for her map.  “When they pass through an area, they tend to wreak havoc with local bindings and practice, tearing up things like this webwork of wards.  Storm Chasers like myself anticipate the Storms, get to them, and handle the immediate issues.  Things like the Beorgmann and worse get free when a Storm undoes bindings.”

“And we can manufacture a Storm to undo what they’ve got?”

“And upset the goblins and whatever that are in tents, break up glamour… okay, I think?” Lucy said.  She turned to others.  “Okay?”

“Doable,” Matthew said.  “I and a few others can manage in the middle of the Storm.”

“There is a great deal that can be done in the Storm,” Deb said.  “Many of the heavier-hitting practices welcome any cover against Innocence, as you yourself demonstrated, conjuring a dangling piece of construction material out of nowhere to put Mrs. Ferguson on the back foot.”

“That sounds almost like a compliment,” Avery said.

“Me deigning to be present is a compliment,” Deb said.  “Not at you in particular-”

“Now you’re spoiling it,” Avery muttered.

“But in general.  In any event, I think there’s a great deal we can do.”

There’s a great deal they can do too, though, Verona thought.

“Can we get Mrs. Scobie in on that?” Avery asked.

Deb looked at Nicole Scobie, fellow elementalist, owner of the Abyssal cow, frequent caretaker of the goat, and she did not hide her disdain.

“Please,” Avery said.

“Only because we have a dangerous greater power to unseat,” Deb said.

“Let’s assume the Storm clears the way, puts the enemy on the back foot,” Anthem said.  “From what I’ve seen, what I know, it’ll help, but it won’t be enough.  He has Lords, still.”

“We can work on that,” Lucy said.

“Of course.  Assuming we get past that… that only gets us to the door.  There are the Kims.  Strong practitioners, backed by whatever isn’t bothered by the Storm.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said.

“Do you have what it takes to hurt Charles?”

Avery glanced at Verona, with Lucy quickly following.

“I think so,” Verona said.  “But before I get to that, let’s talk about one issue.  One of the quote-unquote benefits of the Storm is that it clears Innocents out, right?”

“The location of this place puts it a few miles away from the nearest settlement,” Nicolette said.

“Can verify, I’ve got a map on my laptop,” Zed said.

“Better than me having to draw it,” Nicolette said.

“You can cover bases I can’t.  I can’t get satellite photos of their setup,” Zed told her, as he brought the laptop over to the stone block.

“Julette, my bag,” Verona said.

Julette became human, and she was sitting on McCauleigh, who groaned at the change in weight.

“I’m not that heavy, I’m made of sticks and twine and stuff.”

“Heavy enough,” McCauleigh grunted.

Verona turned to a page in her artbook.  She leaned forward to see what Zed had on his screen, and he turned the laptop to show her more clearly.

“What are you thinking?” Lucy asked.

“Can you show me the view from the street?” Verona asked.  “From the settlement, looking toward where these guys are set up?”

Zed obliged.

“Explain?” Lucy asked.  “Before we have to scatter to hold down the fort again, here?”

“We’re dealing with powerful practitioners that, all added up together, might give Durocher a run for her money, right?”

“Probably,” Zed said.

“Working on a similar ‘fuck everything’ scale.  The Storm does a lot of things we want it to, but it also lets them go all out.  Actually, instead of me doing this with my notebook, can I borrow your laptop?”

“Provisionally.”

“Yes.  But be good.”

“Yeah,” Verona said.  She had to move carefully to not knock over Julette, Peckersnot, Alexanderp, or even McCauleigh, who was sitting up and leaning into her back.  She knelt in front of the laptop.  Screenshot the street-view, open Macroware Draw, ctrl-paste…

She used the spray tool to draw a bunch of squiggly arms, reaching up and out toward the clouds.

“Like… at least like this.  There was an image like this in my Horrific Coitus book…”

“Your what?” Caroline asked.

“Best not to ask,” Melissa commented.

“…or not like this, but like this in terms of scale.  So we know horrors can operate like this.  It’s like for Durocher, saying hey, you don’t have to have your primeval thing stay mostly burrowed with only a finger or tongue sticking out of the earth.  They can go full city-trampling kaiju.”

“This is a thing?” Brayden’s dad asked.

“Surprisingly often,” Melissa commented.

“Because,” Verona pitched her voice to be heard.  “There’s a Storm in the way.  They can go that far, up to that scale, because there won’t be people in the next city over saying hey, what the fuck is that?”

She quickly chose the largest spray tool size and then obscured everything with a gray cloud.

“Storms are more impressive than that,” Deb said.

“Less than a minute again,” Clayton said.

“So what happens if we go… boop?” Verona asked.  She hit the keyboard combination to ‘undo’.  The cloud disappeared.

“We take responsibility for shattered Innocence,” Zed said.  “A line you’ve already violently crossed.”

“Free sharing of information, right?” Lucy asked him, tone wry.

“I… very much believe in that, but it’s complicated.”

“There’s a way,” Verona said.

“Time to move, get seated, hold down the fort,” Peter said, clapping his hands.  “Hurry!”

Verona took a few steps back and hopped up onto the block.

“A good way?” Lucy asked.

“A third, cat-walks-by-herself way,” Verona said.

Three teams.

They were lucky that the Garricks could open a door and take them to the outskirts of the settlement.  People filed out, going from warm early summer temperatures to brisk winter cold with snow moving in drifts, snow forming walls on either side of the road, taller than Verona.

They were about ten minutes of walking south of Charles’ new setup, and about fifteen minutes of walking north of town.  There was a place for trucks to pull over, carved out in snow, with a billboard style thing mounted with a plexiglass covered display saying something about the nearby lake, but it was so covered in condensation, frost, and snow that it was barely legible.  An outdoor toilet stood off to the side, with a path dug out to the door that was about the width of a snow shovel.  Their entry point from the Path to here.

Fuck, she’d known she’d sweated too much.  The cold cut right through her sweat-damp self, even with her sweater and coat back on.

She debated using alchemy.

Lucy and McCauleigh were talking plans, and both glanced Verona’s way.  Both reacted in the same instant, lunging for her.

Lucy grabbed the back of Verona’s collar and yanked, producing an ‘urk’ sound from Verona.  Lucy used Verona’s weight and momentum to balance out her own forward momentum, sticking out a foot.

A clawed hand with white flowers growing out of it reached out of the side of the snowbank.  Lucy kicked it aside while putting Verona out of the way.

McCauleigh, a step behind, kicked the elbow of the outstretched hand, so it bent the wrong way.

The thing moved, blurring as it did, becoming an indistinct, vaguely human shaped mess of greyish skin and white flecks that blended into darkness and snow.  It retreated, over snowbank, the damaged arm fixing itself as it blurred.

Anthem, emerging from the door and noticing the Other, threw a knife.

Pinning the Other to the first tree it got close to.  It didn’t look solid, but even so, the knife worked, glowing faintly in the gloom.

“Damn, you got to Verona before I did,” McCauleigh said.

“The important thing is she’s safe.”

“You can say that because you saved her.”

“It’s not a competition.”

“I could call that insulting.  You think you’re that superior to me, that I don’t even compete?”

“Maybe less bickering,” Avery called out.

“She’s messing around,” Verona clarified.

“I wasn’t one hundred percent sure,” Lucy replied.  “Okay.”

“Watch our backs?” Avery asked.

“I’m watching,” McCauleigh said, at the same time Lucy said, “I’m listening.”

“Okay.”

“I think we’re okay for the moment, just stay towards the center of the road.”

People shifted position.

Anthem had to climb up the snowbank and trudge across snow to approach it.

“Solid spirit,” he called back.  “Halfway between spirit and animus.”

“Check it’s not a thinking, feeling living thing?” Lucy asked, standing on her tip-toes to look over the partially collapsed wall of plowed snow.

“Spirits like this rarely are.  That’s not me being a prejudiced practitioner either, I’m reasonably sure,” Anthem said, his voice getting quieter as he approached the tree.  “You don’t see as many of these as you used to.  They’re the appendages of simple gods…”

Verona fixed her collar, clearing her throat.  “Thank you.”

“No problem,” Lucy said.  “You going to be safe without me?”

“Going to try.  Goes for you too.”

“I could stick with you,” McCauleigh told Verona.  “Mix things up just a bit?  Avery’ll have Liberty.”

“It’s not the worst idea,” Verona admitted.  The part she didn’t say out loud was that she knew McCauleigh was feeling the recent loss as sharply as Verona was.  McCauleigh had kind of been crushing on Anselm, and he’d been vaporized.  Had found kinship with Mal, and Mal had been reduced to something less than a smear of blood.  Eaten to feed their enemy.

Each of the three of them had a role they were best at in the group.  So, sorting out the people they’d brought with, Verona was specializing in the back line support and problem solving.  Nicolette, Zed, Kass and Mr. Knox, Sebastian, Matthew, Tashlit, Daddy Driscoll… she waited for more to come through.

It would’ve been nice to have Monty and the Turtle Queen for this, but Monty was hurt and they felt it was better to have them back in Kennet, guarding things.  They’d done more than enough, apparently.

Avery would be going between the Aware and the front line, and brought those capable of moving as fast as that required.  It was a shorter list of practitioners, for sure.

“Gremlin wing steam–”

“Waitwaitwait!” goblins cried out.  “Not ready!”

Liberty paused.

Goblins scrambled, some diving into the side of a snowbank.  There were frantic cries and rummaging sounds.

Alpeana set up near Avery.  So did Theodora, the pocket-world collector they’d stolen from.  That felt weird.  Verona wondered if Theodora was even capable of moving that fast.

It looked like Avery maybe wanted to say something to Theodora, but her mom interrupted.

“So we go, we do what we can, and then we’ll keep going?” Avery’s mom asked.

“Call the Garricks if you can, get out of dodge.  We take our stab at this, then, ideally, I come to you,” Avery said.

“I hate that ‘ideally’.”

“I hate not being able to give you a white lie.  I- we’re with you.”

“Ready?” Liberty said, in the background.  “Gremlin wing steamjunk princess, transform!”

She threw a smoke pellet.  Goblins dived into the smoke.

“Cold, cold, cold… hurry!  Please tell me you guys brought the cute pilot jacket.”

The smoke cleared.  Liberty wore steampunk goggles with deep gouges and cracks in them, a metal corset, and a skirt paired with a pilot’s jacket with the furry collar, both pieces of clothing with gouges, and burn marks in them.

The main thing was the dangerous looking contraption attached to the metal corset.  A twisted hulk of what looked like a wrecked plane, one wing without panels, but with a pink, steam-scalded bat wing nailed to the inside, the other on fire.  A gremlin was on her back, hauling on a cord, producing chainsaw revving sounds as it tried to get the engine started.

“Almost had to use a second smoke pellet to buy time.  We should drill these more often,” Liberty said.

“You couldn’t do the bat wing bomber thing?” Avery asked.

“I could have, but we burned through a lot of my bomb and firecracker supply on New Years.  It’s not a very good bat winged bomber if there isn’t a trail of explosions below me while I’m cackling, is it?”

“Hey, Ribs?” Lucy called out.  “In five?”

Her hand moved.  Gesturing.

“Yep,” the Dog Tag replied.

“And Deb?  You-”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Seven o’clock.  Fire?  Or lighting, or-?”

“What are you even-?”

It was Nicole Scobie who stepped up behind Deb, turned to her seven o’clock position, and produced a blast of flame.

Ribs chose that same moment to do his own pivot, lowering his flamethrower, and emptied flaming oil over top of the snow.

Nicole wasn’t very strong, so she didn’t make much headway into the snow, but she did enough to catch a creature inside- hairless, vaguely ghoulish, but not a ghoul, eyes cataract-covered with bits of skin stretching over them, mouth much the same, vaguely slimy.

It turned to burrow into snow,

Deb whispered something, moving her hand.

All sound cut out.  There was a flash of lightning, emphasis on the flash, and the melty-skinned thing, halfway buried in snow, already on fire, was struck down.

Sound resumed, but Verona could only see stars, still.

“Holy shit,” George said.

“What was that silence effect?” Deb asked.

“Me,” Lucy said.  “I kind of guessed there’d be either an explosion or lightning.”

“If you’d timed that differently, you would have cut off my invocation.”

“I know.  But Nicole pretty much had it, good response, Nicole.  Thank you, Deb, for the insurance.  Good job, Ribs.”

“It’s subhuman,” Anthem said, trudging over snow toward the road, holding his knife.  He’d dispatched the Other.  “Emphasis on the sub, hyper-feral…”

“I really hate the term subhuman,” Lucy said.  “Oddfolk?”

“You can’t be serious,” Ann said, as she went to stand by Deb.

“Oddfolk, sure,” Anthem said.

“I suppose we can adjust terminology,” Deb said, arms folded.  “Good tactics, Ellingson.  Perhaps enunciate clearer when giving directions?”

The look on Lucy’s face made it clear she thought she’d enunciated clearly enough.

“It’s not dead, by the way,” Anthem said, as he hopped down beside the Other that lay in a pool of melted snow, spine visible with the damage the lightning strike had done to its lower back.

He pulled a loop of chain from his belt, metal clinking and splashing as it fell into the puddle beside the thing’s face.  It reacted, waking up, squealing, and lunged for him, best as it was able with its legs barely functioning.

He caught one claw with a loop of chain, fended off the other with a forearm, and then looped chain around the thing’s upper body, pinning arms against torso.

It squealed again, and lunged for his throat.  He pushed it down.

“That puddle was deeper than I thought,” he said, looking down.  “Socks got wet.”

“I’ve got spare socks, if you don’t mind them being mismatched and girly,” Liberty said.

People sorted themselves out.  As they came through, they were directed to one group or another.

“I hate this violence for you,” Jasmine told Lucy, as the two of them drew closer to Verona and Avery.  She kept her voice lowered.  “You did that too easily.”

“I know.”

“I hate that this has- that you’ve gone from being the girl I knew a year ago to-”

“I’m still her.”

“But you’ve been through enough to desensitize you to violence.  Or you went through something, was it one event?”

“Both.  One event I spent a while dealing with,” Lucy said.  “But also the numbing.”

“You’re talking about John.”

Lucy nodded.

Her mom put a hand at the side of her face.  Then reached out.  Verona was a half-step too far to be touched by the reaching hand, but… she stepped closer.  Jasmine rested a hand in her hair.

Avery had already said goodbye to her parents, who were mostly corralling the Aware now.

“I’m not mad at you,” Jasmine said.  “You know that, right?”

“It feels like you are, a bit.”

“I am, a bit.  But I’m upset at this situation.  I’m upset it came to this.  I had my heart set on the idea that you’d be free and clear of this violence after tonight, and I really wanted it to be true.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said.

Verona glanced at Toadswallow.

It would be best to not specify that it was the parents who’d wanted to make this one last fight.  For Lucy’s sake, and Avery’s, a bit.  They’d see it as a betrayal it wasn’t.

Avery had nearly died.  Lucy kept accumulating scratches and scars.  Verona hated that-

She rubbed at her palm, interrupted a bit when Jasmine pulled her into a hug against one side of her body, doing the same with Lucy on the other.

Jasmine’s arm moved, maybe making a hand gesture, and Avery joined in.

Verona hated that her friends were nearly dying and getting hurt.  Mal had died and it felt like a thing she hadn’t even wrapped her head fully around- maybe wouldn’t, until she returned to the House at Half street, and hours turned into days and her friend didn’t come tearing through to find cabinets to rummage in or crazy news to share.

Or Anselm- sitting down to do art or doing something and wanting to talk about it, having a void where an art friend had been.

It would be ten or a hundred times worse if it was Lucy or Avery.  Was that shitty to think?

If she was gainsaid, with no magic, alchemy, or items?  Standing where Jasmine was now?  Yeah, she’d be fighting to keep them from this.  She’d be looking and hoping for another route, that didn’t mean her friends had to go and be at that kind of risk.  Even if she knew that it was less efficient.  She was pretty sure Matthew, Toadswallow, and the others were on the same page on that, which would be why they were playing along with it.

But she did have alchemy and magic items and practice of her own, so…

“We’ll protect each other, best as we can.”

“You’re splitting up, though?” Jasmine asked, breaking the hug and stepping back so she could look Verona in the eyes.

“When we’re apart, we fight like hell to hold up our end,” Verona said.  “And that makes us stronger.  “When we’re together-”

Alexanderp jerked, lifting his head up, and shifting his weight.  Verona cut herself off.

“I think-” Avery interrupted.

“Yeah,” Verona said.  “Eyes are on us.”

“Augury said this was a safe spot they weren’t looking at much,” Nicolette said.

“Maybe those Others we dealt with were supposed to loop back and report in,” Lucy said.  “Mom?  Love you.”

“Love you too.  Please be safe.”

“You too.”

There was a pause.

Verona got her mask out.  “Knife?”

Lucy handed her one.

Verona scraped the knife across the eye.  One mark at a diagonal, one straight down.  Two marks in the section of the mask that was more Kennet Below flavored.

She pulled it on, and tied the ribbon.

Avery pulled hers on, and then put the floating antler above the stump.

Lucy’s still had a bloodstain on it, from the fight earlier.  She didn’t hide it from her mom.

They nodded at each other.

Then Lucy and Avery went separate directions.

Avery and Liberty ushered Jasmine to the rest of the Aware.  Zed passed Jeremy and Wallace some items for self defense.

Lucy got the group together for the more offensive front line.  Combat practitioners, combat Others.  The more aggressively-inclined goblins, minus the recent dead.

Deb, Nicole, and Nat Scobie hung back, staying with Verona.

“Get us started?” Verona asked.

“The field,” Deb said, indicating the field off to the side of the road.  “Melt the snow.”

“You’re not in charge.”

“I am an expert in Storms,” Deb said.

“Please make your collaboration a plus, not a negative!” Verona called out.

Lucy’s group headed toward the Carmine settlement.  Avery’s headed the opposite way.  Away from all this.  An assortment of goblins followed behind.

And Verona stayed put, lifting Julette up the snowbank, having Julette become human, and offer her a hand.

“I was telling Avery before the New Year, I’m not a lifter or a puller,” Julette complained, grunting.

“I carry your skinny ass around half the time, you sit in my hood-”

“I’m lighter.”

McCauleigh climbed the snow, then took over for Julette, lifting Verona up.

Zed mainly knocked out a section of the plowed wall of snow, until there was a loose ramp he could climb.  He had stuff he was carrying, which made it harder.  He helped Nicolette up.  Mr. Driscoll was long-limbed enough to manage the awkward climb up crumbling snow on his own.  Then there was Mr. Knox and Kass Knox, Fernanda and Raquel, and the Kierstaads, so that was interesting.  Verona had picked up a lot of the ex-Blue Heron students.

Toadswallow plunged into the side of the snow wall and burrowed up at an angle until he could emerge, covered in snow clumps.

Matthew and the two hosts who’d stuck around hung back, looking around.

The snow had come down wet and hard enough and things had gotten cold enough it was possible to walk on without sinking in.

Alexanderp looked around, flexing.  Verona pulled on one side of her collar, to move her hood closer to her shoulder.

“Corbin?” Verona asked.  “You do the subtlety dabblings.  Silent invocations, silent practices, practicing around Innocents…”

“A little of anything that allows a practitioner to pull off something tricky.”

“Anti-Augury?”

“Some.  But if this is Seth or the Carmine…”

“It’ll be Seth and his apprentice, maybe some of the others knowing a bit.  Get something going?  And explain it to me later?  Maybe someone else can expand on what you set up.”

“Okay.  Melody helps?  Or do you need-”

“Go for it.”

He and his sister went to get set up.

Only two goblins had stayed with Verona.  Peckersnot and Toadswallow.  The more free-wheeling goblins had gone with Avery and Liberty.  The fighters had gone with Lucy.

“I’ll!  I’ll have you know, sorry to delay so long and then launch into something so tricky when it comes to timing and organization-” Alexanderp started talking.

“Yeah, you guys are wondering what we’re doing now, huh?” Verona asked.

“They’ll send Others after us,” Matthew said, from the road.

“They’ll want to interrupt this, even if they can’t piece together what we’re doing just yet,” Verona said.

“I can do a basic ward over the area,” Mr. Driscoll said.  “It’s not much, but-”

“I’ll help you in a minute!” Melody called out.

Corbin didn’t focus on one big magic or one practice, but in all the various ways a practice could be modified, or the various little practices that could be implemented, with the idea of stealthy practice in mind.  So he knew some invisibility stuff, some anti-augury, some sleight of hand, some subtle mental influence.

Melody’s tricks lay in another direction.  Making practice last longer, reinforcing stuff, the diacritic marks that could allow something to hold up when it might collapse.

On their own, the Kierstaads wouldn’t do any world changing magic, but if they could help someone else squeeze an extra five or ten percent efficiency out of a practice?  Whether that efficiency was making the practice last longer or go longer without being noticed?  That was the niche they tried to fill.

So if Mr. Driscoll could set up a shitty barrier, maybe Melody could make it hold up a bit more.

“Zed?”

“I’m seeing what I can do for the other groups, remotely.  Your two Aware friends have devices.  If they need it, I can get some Others projected to them.  Then I’ve got to figure out how to back Brie and Lucy up.”

“Sounds good.”

And Nicolette was trying to stay on top of who was where.

Fire blazed as Deb the Storm Chaser began to work, melting snow with fire.

The Scobies joined in.

Verona kept to where snow was still solid, pacing around, looking.  She had the one vacuum bottle in her bag.  She could suck up a bit of the water.  But that wouldn’t be enough.

She knelt down, removed the jar of alchemical water vacuum, got out one of her eco-friendly water containers, and pried open a thing of watercolors.

She dropped the watercolor into the bottle, capped it, and passed it to Julette, who began shaking it.

Matthew had climbed over and was watching.  “What are you doing?”

“Prepping.  Hoping trouble’s not arriving.  Know anything about elemental voids?  Kind of ties into your ex-wife and Hollow practices, maybe?”

“Not so much.  Sorry.”

“Damn.”

“I’ll watch for trouble?  Guessing it’s coming from the direction of their camp.”

“Guessing so,” Verona confirmed.  She’d opened her book to the pages she needed.  She accepted the bottle from Julette, who picked up the book and held it.

Verona began to pour out the water onto snow, coloring it.  Basic elementary diagram, triangles to direct flow in through the perimeter, insulating diagram with angles specified with Sagittarius runes, suggestion of a circle…

Inside that circle, she made things ’empty’, inverting intent, and drew a water rune not by painting the snow, but by leaving snow untouched by color in the shape of the water rune.  When that wasn’t perfect, she scooped up a fistful of snow and dropped some down to fix a line.

We turn this from a bottle that fills up into an ongoing suction, hold onto water, insulate the void… need to funnel it.

She walked in a crouch to the edge of what Deb and the Scobies were doing, drawing out a line, then drew out another in parallel, walking back.

“Hey, Nico?” Zed asked.

“Yeah?”

“Let me know before you make a call.”

Nicolette already had her phone out.  “I want to make a call, to Gillian and Chase.  Get their unique eyes on things.”

“Okay.  I can’t guarantee this will go perfectly.  It depends how the enemy responds.”

“I know.  But I think this is vital.”

“Okay.  Give me a minute to set up the security I can…”

“Yep.”

Multiple people working on multiple things, with the tension that there could be trouble incoming.  Odds were good that Lucy’s group would draw attention from the mindless Others, but they weren’t perfect odds.

Corbin Kierstaad came running over.  It looked like he’d signaled Matthew.  He touched Verona’s arm.

It looked like Mr. Driscoll was on high alert, and he hadn’t finished the ward over the area.  Melody was with him.

Trouble was coming.

“Keep working.  Where are we on Storm setup?”

“Not even started,” Deb said.

“Okay,” Verona replied.  “You said it’d take five minutes.”

“I need to clear a work surface,” Deb groused.

“Going to draw out the water, if this works,” Verona told her.  “Careful?  I don’t want to dehydrate you.”

Deb nodded, but she didn’t do much to protect herself.

Verona put a spell card on the jar, then lobbed it, two-handed, over her diagram.

“Crack!” she called out.

The glass shattered.

The diagram lit up, responding to things, and the void appeared as a shimmer in the air, the snow in the air pulling toward it, as it shuddered and worked.

Water was pulled out of that space as snow melted from the agitation, into a bubble that surrounded the void.  And water was pulled in along the funnel-tube.

The crater of melted snow that Deb and the Scobies had been making began to empty of water, which flowed up the side of the crater, swirled as it flowed along the diagram, and then fed into the setup.  Flowing into the void, funneling out of void to fill the perimeter, forming that larger bubble.

The void was canceled out by having water in it, and Verona’s diagram work wasn’t perfect, so as water mingled with anti-water, the whole thing got weaker, but water could get pulled out by the diagram, which meant that a jar full of anti-water didn’t remove a jar’s worth of puddle from Deb and the Scobie’s feet and stop.

It just started out strong, which was good, and then got steadily weaker.

Maybe it’d go for a minute.  Drain out some of that water.

The bubble intensified around it, the insulating diagram holding water up and keeping the water from splashing down and erasing the paint, undoing the diagram.

“If that bubble pops, are we getting drenched?” McCauleigh asked.

“Dunno!”

“McCauleigh,” Raquel called out.

That trouble was close enough to be an immediate concern now.

Verona saw shapes in the woods.

It should mainly be the rank and file, Verona thought.

It wasn’t just the rank and file.  She saw static.

“Technomancy Lord!” she warned others.

The Others that were part of this contingent weren’t a mishmash like the ones by the road had been.  They were all technomancy.  Men and women with digitally blurred and otherwise obscured features, indistinct profiles, and digital glitches peeling off of them as they swung arms and legs forward, running.

A body fell from the sky, slamming into snow in a way that made it hard to believe their neck hadn’t snapped.

Where they’d hit snow, they exposed black wires in a thick tangle beneath a layer of snow a quarter of an inch deep.

A lot of the running footsteps did the same thing, the footprints behind them looking black, exposing more behind them.  Snow that was dry enough to be kicked up as a powder moved inconsistently, with static beneath it.

“Realms stuff!” Zed called out.  “Careful!  They’re going to try to move us onto their turf!”

The first Others reached the barrier Mr. Driscoll had put up.  They slammed into it, and the diagram work lit up.

“It’s not a complete barrier,” Mr. Driscoll said.

Melody reached out to put a piece of paper up against the barrier.  The drawing on the paper appeared around the paper, in the form of glowing lines.

It looked like a countdown, in some Kanji or other characters like that.  Every time something hit the barrier, the Kanji changed, with less lines in it than before.

Some others were circling around to the areas there wasn’t a diagram.

“Should we stop what we’re doing?” Mrs. Scobie asked.

“If you do, I’m betting we won’t get around to finishing that.  Do what you can,” Verona said.

They didn’t have many fighters here.  The idea had been to get things launched with the Storm, set up some defense, then be a relay point, and the people coming and going would be reinforcements as needed.

The timing was bad, here.  If this attack had come earlier, people wouldn’t have left yet.  If it had come later, the Storm would be live, or people would be on their way back north from Avery’s group.  Given there was an Augur on the other side, and that Nicolette had been working from the Paths, where things were a little messier for readings, that wasn’t surprising, that things were happening in this inconvenient way.

But it still wasn’t great.

Verona leaned on her elemental setup, using her watercolor water, drawing out some diagrams tied into the triangles, then putting down spell cards in the spaces.

Tashlit stood by as a bodyguard.

It was reassuring.  Tashlit had kind of pulled away a bit ago, but she was nice to have close by.

“You can handle being wet and cold, right Tash?” Verona asked.

Tashlit nodded.

She just preferred warmth.  Thus the sauna and everything.

Verona drew a line to connect the spell card and paint-on-snow diagram to the bubble of water.

A geyser of water erupted out, fueled by the bubble the diagram had created.

They were running on electricity, maybe even literally, and water didn’t play so nice.  The visual glitches got intense around points where the water splashed the technomancy people.  Some dropped like rocks after getting wet.

“Ground’s dry-ish, starting the diagram!” Scobie called out.

She wasn’t as good a practitioner as Deb, maybe by a long shot, but gods and spirits, Verona sure preferred someone who communicated and worked with the team better.

Tashlit caught one of the technomancy people in her arms, and swung them so their legs went out sideways, tossing them bodily into wet snow.  McCauleigh fought three.  Matthew and his shrine spirit hosts each fought one.

Others were filtering in through, and these were only the little guys.

The static, black wires, and the dull sound of a ringing phone were all sweeping in around them.

“Zed?” Verona asked, pulling her phone out of her pocket.

Zed looked up, and drew in a deep breath, nodding.

“I took classes with Ray,” Nicolette said.

“Yep,” Raquel said.  “I know little things.”

“It’s slow,” Zed said, turning to watch as the Other encompassed them.  It didn’t really try to push through the barrier, even though Melody’s security had stared to fail and entire sections of the barrier were being crashed through- the Others hurled themselves through the remaining Driscoll barrier like humans chucking themselves through glass windows.  They fell and stumbled, McCauleigh tried to jump and step on a few as they passed, but… no.

Verona dropped a fistful of snow on one part of the diagram, to shut off a useless geyser, then activated another.  A curved line of paint-water on snow helped direct the flow, aiming it for a cluster.

“Part of the reason it’s slow, I’m guessing,” Zed said, “is we’re far from civilization, power, tech.”

“Always makes technomancy harder,” Nicolette said.

“Part of the reason is it doesn’t need to be fast.”

The ringing of phones intensified.

It started out like a trick of the eyes, like Verona had been staring at one thing long enough her eyes were getting tired, but then kept getting more intense; the snow they were standing on began to turn into heapings of solid television static.

“Backing out!” Toadswallow barked.  He sounded far away.

The sky dissolved into darkness, lit by flashes of electricity running along wires.

“Our work surface is dry enough, at least,” Deb said.  “Do you want me to continue?”

“Yes,” Verona said.  “The others are counting on it.”

Verona clicked her phone on, then tapped on one of the apps.  The Typetap Kitty had come up to her and it had climbed into her phone, appearing as the app.

Countdown Cassandra had followed after.

Zed had managed others, because he’d had some security intended for protecting sensitive systems against the Turtle Queen.  Partially because he hadn’t known she was restraining herself, with the binding deal she’d made to Kennet.  So he’d taken some of the bound Others from Basil and Opal and tied them to those defenses.

Now he released them.

A woman, either dressed in white or very pale and naked- it was hard to tell, because she looked like she’d been painted into reality with a dry paintbrush and inconsistent varieties of white and off -white paints, mottled and patchy- slinked forward.  A semicolon appeared in the air around her, then was joined by another, and another, all mashing in together, until they formed a serpent-like shape.

With eyes like smudges of black paint, and a mouth similar to the same, she opened both eyes and mouth wide, and voiced a syllable not with the spoken word, but the written- characters appeared with each utterance, some obscure or non-English, and formed a fanged head for the semicolon snake.

A figure that looked like an unfinished 3D model of a person, too shiny and untextured for most of his body, had an overly detailed, hairless face with the kind of gaps that came with bad modeling- like skin was a helmet or mask more than, well, skin.  There were fleshy bits visible between the glossy, detail-less mask-skin and the eyes, or between yellow teeth and the ‘lips’, which were pulled back into a grin, but there was no real sign of the face being connected to meat, or meat being connected to eye or tooth.  He appeared in a crouch, body sleek and featureless except for the spine, no anatomy between the legs, and then rather than move, he grew, arm swelling, then settling down, back into its gaunt dimensions, just in a different position now.

Head and shoulders did the same thing, and when they deflated, his face had been thrust a few feet forward, head now tilted, smile wider.

“My computer just locked up because these guys scare it,” Zed said.  “So whatever help I was giving the others is now kinda fucked.  Rebooting.  For all the good it’s going to do.”

“Right, sorry,” Verona said.

“No, it’s the reality, right?”

A body fell out of the sky, crashing into the diagram that had been absorbing and channeling water.  Water splashed out in every direction.  Electricity flickered, and black wires pulled away.

That’s that for that whole setup, I guess.

Verona had Typetap Kitty, perched on her phone screen, eyes wide, body arched, doing that technomancy style glitching around the edges, here and there.

“Do your thing, then come back?” she told it.  “Focus on that thing.”

She pointed at the wreath of limp, earless, sometimes limbless bodies that were held up by black wires.

The Typetap Kitty arched its back, preparing to jump, lost courage, started to prepare again…

Verona gave it a bit of help, moving the phone in an underhand motion to help propel it.

It leaped to the back of the semicolon snake, and as it ran, the characters changed from semicolons to random letters and symbols.  Making the white girl who was making and building up the semicolon snake turn her head, looking as angry as someone with paint-smear eyes and mouth could.  The mouth yawned open wider, a trembling and jittering combination of characters forming in the center of that black-smear mouth

“No, ignore the cat, thank you,” Zed told her.

Typetap Kitty leaped from the tail of the snake to a junction box that was growing out of a tree.  Sparks flew, then flew down a tangle of black cables.

The sleek 3D man bulged and warped like he was being manipulated with an editing tool, and as he resolved, caught a pair of falling bodies out of the air.

He bulged, hand becoming a sleek, textureless, amorphous mass, and the two bodies were absorbed into him.  The rest of him rippled, accommodating the extra two hundred pounds of mass.

He was smiling with no sign of gums connecting yellow teeth to lips, when the grin was wide enough it looked like all the gums should be visible.

He didn’t move, remaining as still as a statue, but bulged, resolved.  Hands expanded into a mess of shifting, textureless white, meeting, and then pulled back, and what had been fingers were now serrated blades.  The white blob extended out from him to swallow one arm, head, neck, and shoulders, along with several of the lesser technomancy soldiers.  When that resolved, the technomancy Others were impaled on the serrated fingers.  Blood with technomancy glitches appearing across it ran down the Other’s knife-hands and arms to open slots in the arm that sat waiting and prepared for the blood trickles.  Drinking from them with a macabre grin as they thrashed, struggling, impaled on a statue.

Verona gave him a bit more space.

She nearly bumped into Tashlit and Countdown Cassandra.  The girl stood there with eyes closed.

“If we haven’t launched the Storm or handled this whole situation, can you blow things up?” she asked.  “Try to get our guys clear?”

Countdown Cassandra frowned, eyebrows drawing together.

“Might have to be more specific!” Zed called out.

“Fuck.  Um.  I know you need a time, but I wanted confirmation first,” Verona said.

A body slammed to the ground about ten feet to her left.  She jumped back.

“Clarify who’s protected,” Zed told her.

“Fuck.  That’s a lot.  Me, Tashlit, Peckersnot, Julette, Alexanderp, Zed, Nicolette…” Verona said, pointing.  “Raquel, Fernanda-”

“You named a pint-sized goblin before you named me?”

“Shush!”

Another body hit ground.

The rain was intensifying.  Bodies falling from the sky, with a speed and intensity that could snap a neck if they landed on someone.  More falling every few seconds.

“Matthew, Toadswallow, Dorian, Lane, Corbin and Melody Kierstaad,” Verona said, pointing.  “Um-”

At every name, Countdown Cassandra gave a small nod of acknowledgement.

“If you’re timing this, we’ll be about two minutes!” Nicole Scobie called out.

“Don’t-” Zed shouted.  He looked.

So did Verona.

Countdown Cassandra’s eyes were open.  The digital readout across the surface of her eyes read 1:57 and was counting down the seconds.

“Now you’ve got to get it done a lot faster!” Zed shouted.

Nicolette shoved him, hard.

Just in time to stop Zed from being hit by a falling body.  The corpse or unconscious person hit the spot very near to where Zed had been standing.

Zed’s laptop crashed to the ground, landing amid the ‘melting’ television static that had once been snow.  He hurried to pull it free.

“Thank you,” Zed said.  He started to get up, and found black wires entangling one hand.  “I think?”

The sound of a jangling phone made Verona jump.  So loud it felt like it was in her head.

A transformer exploded into a shower of sparks.  Wires came loose, falling, and slapped ground.  Sparks collected and congealed into the form of a white cat with black eyes, who did a little tippy-toe dance.  The white electric glare of the cat’s body slowly faded to black again.

“Get over that way!” Nicolette called out.  The lenses of her glasses were opaque blue, like an error screen on a computer, showing the Sight she was using.  “Towards the cat!”

“It will electrocute you if you get too close this soon after it’s eaten!” Verona warned.

“Then don’t get too close, but get close!” Nicolette told people.

The various members of their group who weren’t good at fighting headed over that way.

Bodies thudded, landing hard.

Some were picking themselves up, moving like marionettes, wreathed in black wires that moved like snakes ready to strike.

The ringing in Verona’s ear got louder – far louder in her right than her left.  Julette nudged the side of her face.

She pressed a hand to her ear, doubling over in pain.  Her left hand throbbed-

She felt completely disabled.

Julette leaped off.  “What’s wrong?”

“You can’t hear that?”

“Verona!  Get the hell over here!” Nicolette called out.  “The digital cat thing made it so the rain’s less bad on this end!  You’re could get a body dropped on you!”

“It’s changing the terrain!” Zed called out.  “Not that far from you!”

Julette hauled on Verona’s arm, and Verona let herself be guided.

She made it about two steps before tripping on wires.  Only the fact that Julette was holding onto her arms kept her from falling face-down into black wires dusted in blood spatter from the fallen bodies.

No, not tripping.  The wires were pulling at her leg, but…

She pulled, moving her leg against taut wires, trying to see past pants leg to figure out how they’d gotten her, and Julette bent down, hiking up her jeans to the knee.

Two black wires extended out of the ground, threading up into Verona’s ankle and calf.  They’d gone into and under skin, and there were bulges showing where they’d snaked in and just beneath skin, and were creeping their way up the outside of her leg.

“Uh, no!” Verona called out.  Her hands -mostly one hand, because one wasn’t working so well- grabbed at the wires, trying to pull them out.  She managed to pull them free, slick with blood, but they were growing at about the same rate she was getting them out from under her skin.  “Nope, stop.”

“You need to get to cover!” Nicolette called out.

Tashlit bent down, trying to help, but her hands weren’t good for this.  The skin was too loose, and the hands that weren’t skin were eyeballs, and while less mushy, they were more slick than anything.

Julette stood straight, pulled up her sweater, reached into her ribcage at an angle, with a sound like dry twigs rubbing together, and pulled out a knife.

Tashlit, meanwhile, stood, and picked Verona up as much as she could, so Verona wasn’t sitting on more black wires.  She shielded Verona and Julette from anything falling from above with her body, leaning toward a wall.

She bent back down again and began to cut the thinner of the two wires.

Verona fought with the black wires.  The more she pulled them out, the more blood there was on them.  This place was dark, with minimal lighting, and the wires were black, and her blood was dark, so it was hard to tell, but they were really slick with blood, which made it harder- and her initial efforts to coil the wires saw them constrict, prehensile, trying to bind her hands.  Only the slickness of the blood and the narrowness of her hands and wrists really saved her, allowing her to slip free.

Peckersnot had climbed down and was standing on the wire, clawed toes digging into it, little hands pressing against her leg near the entry point, his whole body flexing to try to add a bit more strength to the efforts in getting it out.

Julette managed to cut the wire enough that she got past insulation and to the actual wire.  There was a visible flash, an arc of electricity, and Julette fell back, the knife flying from her hand.

“Fuck!  Ow!”

“You’ve got one in your leg at the knee, Julette,” McCauleigh warned, as she came over, one eye on the sky.

“Right, that’s fine I guess,” Julette said.  Knifeless, she began helping Verona tug the wires out.  “Just so long as it doesn’t reach my fetch programming, I figure.”

“Would be great if it didn’t,” Verona groaned out the words, suppressing the growing panic.

“Do me a favor and don’t get any more wires in you?” Julette told Verona.  “This is already more than enough.”

“And there’s a box sticking out of the wall, looking like it wants to drop on us,” McCauleigh said.  “So we need to get moving sooner than later.”

Verona looked up, past Tashlit, to the wall above them.  Blood dripped from overhead, dribbling onto Tashlit’s head, shoulders, and back, running down Tashlit’s hair, dotting Verona’s face.

She could see an arm sticking out, moving as the metal beneath it slowly changed angle..

Not a box, but a chute.  It was opening at a glacial speed, but as two bodies fell from some point high overhead, they hit the lip.  The lip was serving as a bit of cover to protect them from any immediate drops from above, but it opened wider with each impact, and opened faster as the hits helped it get the rust out.

Possibly with a whole pile of bodies ready to dump over their heads, from a hundred feet up.

A wire moved, nudging at Verona’s back.  She let go of what she was doing and grabbed at it.  Her hands were too slick with fluids to stop it from flowing between them.

A cramp jumped from her hand up her arm as she tried to make an uncooperative hand squeeze tighter, to find traction.  She tried to steer it away, her arms extended as far as they could, elbows locked.

It curved, snaking into her belly button, and pushed its way in past flesh with no resistance.

The sound of a phone ringing in her ears doubled in volume as it made the connection.

“Kitty!  Typetap Kitty!” Verona called, no doubt with an unhinged note in her voice.  She could barely hear her own voice over the ringing.

The more bodies that fell, the more wires came dislodged.  Parts of the surroundings came loose, going from something that had been tightly packed to things like- like the chute overhead.  The more wires that were dislodged, the more prehensile limbs this place had to grab at them.

Machinery that had been in encasements was being exposed.

And the ringing-

The ringing made it impossible to think straight.

Verona screamed, to try to drown it out.

McCauleigh axed one wire, and used a foot to kick the stump away.  Julette pulled the remains of the wire sticking out of Verona’s leg out.

Making the sound easier to handle, but…

“Kitty!” Verona scream-shouted.

The Typetap Kitty moved closer.

“Such a good kitty, do us a favor and cut the power here?” Julette asked.

It did a little tippytap dance, turned around, showing its asterisk of a butthole.

“Come on!”

More wires were snaking closer.

McCauleigh axed one.  Verona hurried to pull away, free to use her legs again.  If she ran backwards, moving in the opposite direction of the bellybutton one.

She hoped it wouldn’t bring out any of her guts it was gripping as she pulled it out.

The Kitty pranced closer, and jumped into an outlet.

All the lights nearby went out, casting them into a patch of darkness.  The wires stopped moving.

“Get Alexanderp!” McCauleigh warned Verona.

She turned and looked.  The little homunculus had a wire sticking into the top of his head.  He was smirking smugly, a ‘just as I planned’ expression on his face.  He had not planned this.

Verona pulled the wire out of his skull, then stumbled back, helped by Julette.  McCauleigh had two wires in the side of one leg that had been closest to the ground, and Verona stepped on them while moving, to help increase the resistance, helping them to pull free.

Julette had some too.  They were too limp for McCauleigh to hatchet, and when they tried to pull Julette away, she stopped short, thoroughly entangled or ensnared inside the architecture of her leg.

The chute above them groaned, then banged, having come out enough the metal could swing down and slap against the wires and metal beneath it.  Blood or other black fluids came down in a thin waterfall.  Bodies were coming out, but formed a logjam at the exit.  Bulging-

No time.  Verona’s eyes communicated that much as they widened.

So McCauleigh raised the hatchet, got a nod from Julette, and then swung at Julette’s leg.  Meat was severed, cloth torn, then meat snapped dry, breaking like twigs.  The damage to the glamour ran all up and down Julette’s body, and she went a bit limp.

And it hadn’t been a full, clean severance.  Tashlit ended up being the one to reach down, pulling Julette’s leg apart.

They pulled away- Verona with the wire still reeling out of her bellybutton as she backed out, supported by Tashlit.

“Back!” Nicolette shouted.

McCauleigh reacted faster than Verona did, reversing direction, shoving Verona and Julette back.  Tashlit shielded them.

A pair of bodies slapped down where they’d been about to run.

“Come!  Fast!”

The wire at her stomach pulled taut again as Verona resumed running, making her entire midsection hurt, her body twisting mid-stride, corrected only by McCaueligh’s hand.  There ended up being a solid six feet worth of wire that came out of Verona before it finally came free.  No guts pulled out of her bellybutton with the last of it, thankfully.

They got away with seconds to spare.  As they reached Nicolette’s marked out sanctuary, the first body slapped down, more slick with fluids than the normal ones coming from the sky.  Then the rest came all at once.  A hundred bodies slopping down, all limp, wet, and naked, ears cut off, eyes showing only static.

They were slick enough that they flowed like thick fluid, piling up, then puddling out.

Deb and the Scobies were in the crater that they’d made- that had been snow but was now black wire all around them.  Burned black wire- they’d cauterized it so the wires wouldn’t grab at them.  The white, smooth 3D man was crouched over the hole, his body shielding them from everything coming from above.

“You’re lucky to have me,” Deb said.

She met Verona’s eyes with a hint of smugness in her expression.

Verona met Deb’s eyes with wide-eyed alarm, recent trauma, and zero tolerance for smugness in her expression.

“I prepared this in response to Ferguson’s antics in Thunder Bay, months ago.  I intended it as a counter-storm.  All I need to do is signal it, bid it to come… push past the resistance from the local Lord the Carmine put in place…”

“Now?” Verona asked.  She eyed the puddle.  If that puddle of bodies started slopping down into the depression…

And Countdown Cassandra was in the double-digits of seconds.  Maybe twenty or thirty, Verona couldn’t read that well at this distance with moisture and blood in her eyes.

“Only if you’ll excuse me for this being rougher than my usual work.”

“What?”

“Yes!  Excused!” Zed told Deb.

Deb motioned for Scobie to back off, looking irritated at her presence, held up a hand, and snapped her fingers.

There was a spark, like she’d flicked a lighter.  The spark hung in the air, then redoubled, sparking off more of its own.

“This would be-” Deb checked the sky was clear.  She climbed out of the depression, taking Zed’s hand.  “-the time I’d normally tell you all we should get far from the epicenter, but we seem to be in a closed space.”

“Got anything, Zed?” Corbin asked.

“Give me a bit.”

A half-dozen bodies were falling every second.

The spark had become a cluster of arcing lightning, and the diagram below it illuminated, causing it to rotate.  As it did, it flattened out.  Lightning struck from the cluster to the ground.  It hit the 3D man, who was still protecting the depression, and he didn’t seem to care.

Verona pulled back, her shoulder touched the wall, and she felt the ringing sound return to her ears.  She jerked back and away from the wall, turning.

The damage the Typetap Kitty had been doing was healing. Wires were stirring.  She’d let them plug into her when she’d grazed them.  Wires that passed into flesh as easily as she could put her finger into water.  No pain, only minimal blood, faint physical discomfort of skin stretching and flesh being displaced, and the audio cue of the phone ringing to go by.

“Check yourselves,” she said, touching people’s backs, moving them away from the wall.

Zed had one at his lower back.

The mini-Storm kept intensifying, growing.

“What’s your power source?” Mrs. Scobie asked.

“The nuggets of elemental power I’ve found Storm diving.  Set up around the bigger diagram I have at my place.  I tried to get it to draw from this place, but… hopefully that will gain more traction as it gets up to speed.  You need a lot more years before you can hope to catch up to me.”

“I don’t think it’s that important,” Raquel said.

“If you aren’t thinking about power and where you stand at all times, where are you going to end up?” Mr. Knox asked.

He and his daughter hadn’t been much help, but Verona sort of figured that if there was a case where they had a magic item on hand that could help, maybe they would.  They were collectors, like the Mussers collected implements and familiars, but it was more minor stuff.

Not the sort of thing where Verona could give them a task and expect them to follow through.

Verona glanced from Countdown Cassandra to the Storm.

This was the point she had to decide.  Did they want to blow all of this up, blowing some of their people up with it, and maybe come out okay, or trust the Storm would do its work?

“Countdown Cassandra?”

The Other was in the single digits, counting down from seven in one eye.

“Call it off.”

Countdown Cassandra closed her eyes, stepping back into darkness.  Then she faded out of existence.

The storm had moisture around it now, and the moisture was doing a lot to help carry the arcs of lightning around to walls and wires.

Bodies rained down from overhead, and it felt more deliberate now.  A few wires caught bodies out of the air and flung them-

Matthew, apparently with Enginehead inside him, caught one that was thrown at their group from overhead, and he tossed it aside, then resumed a ready position, ready to protect them from the next.

Others were falling around the storm diagram.  Trying to knock over the 3D man who was shielding the diagram on the floor with his body, or to get past his arms and legs to the depression, to smudge something or interrupt the connection.

A surprising amount of abuse was being directed at the semicolon girl in white.  Three out of five of the thrown bodies were tossed her way.  She was crouched, and her semicolon snake was flowing into the ground.  Two bodies hit the tail of the snake and were stopped as if they’d hit reinforced iron bars.  One slipped past, hit her, and smashed her to pieces, where each piece was made of mottled brushstrokes.

She pulled herself back together, crouched, not even protecting herself against more abuse.

Wires that had been black and slick with fluids were turning white and maybe even dying.

Alone, would she have succeeded?  No.  But she was irritating and draining it now, and they were counting things by advantages they could measure in seconds.  Disadvantages by the same.  The Storm swelled, the wires were bleached, their friends were getting to better positions.  But at the same time, bodies fell, the wires snaked toward them, the entire areas was becoming more mobile and hostile…

Deb stood between them and the worst of the Storm’s energies, and she seemed to be a living ward against the elements.

Lightning struck a transformer box.  The effect was far more dramatic than it had been for the Typetap Kitty, and that stroke of lightning didn’t cease, didn’t stop, didn’t strike and disappear.  It remained as a blinding conduit between Storm and this place.

“That’ll do,” Zed said.  “I’m not strong enough on my own, but if it’s weaker…”

He opened his laptop, which had one broken hinge that required him to use one hand to hold up the lid and screen, and he selected what looked like a text file.

But the text file popped up and it was filled with ASCII characters forming a magic circle- or a diamond, rather.  Lines of running text ran in bands, diagonally, from the sides of the diamond to the edges of the screen.  The letters flashed, the screen went dark, and only the letters remained on the black screen, pulsing faintly.

“What’s the program?” Nicolette asked.

“Gives us a tunnel every sixteen seconds, will punch holes through this thing until it’s like swiss cheese.  Problem is, this place is more tall than it is wide.  So there’s a chance any doors that appear will be too high to reach.”

“Will swiss-cheesing it kill it?” Melody asked.

“Ha!  No.  Keep an eye out for the doors to the hallways.”

The Storm continued to intensify.  The power was cut to their area again, which meant they could back up another short distance, backs to the wall, without wires snaking into them.

There was a fritzing sound, and the fritz became a dull, distorted ringing.

Verona had to check there weren’t any fresh wires plugging into her.

The fritzing was a stuttering flashing of lights, not from the Storm -though someone could be excused for making that mistake- but from the broken tech surrounded by pooled, wet bodies.

I’m going to flash back to all of this the next time I hear an old phone ring in a movie, Verona thought.

The Storm kept getting worse, bright enough on its own that Verona saw spots, but there were also flashes of what the Other was doing, and in the afterimages of those flashes, she could see silhouettes.

“Bringing in help,” Zed said.  “And… I think I can deal with that…”

He opened the laptop, nearly broke the remaining hinge with the speed he’d flicked it up, and Nicolette steadied the screen.  “Thank you.”

“Of course.”

“Scrambling.  The weaker we get it, the more of a foothold I can get here, but I don’t think I can stop the Dropped Call on my own.  For right now…”

Code ran on his screen.

“There’s a pattern to what it wants to do.  If we get out ahead, predict it…”

Each flash on the far side of the area, with silhouettes appearing in the flashes, it came up on the screen as a bright white rectangle.  Almost like morse code, rectangle, rectangle, blank space, rectangle, but then it became quarter-rectangles, shapes, spaces…

Lines of code ran and processed below that.

And Zed’s program recorded the flashes, then posited one- a geometry-heavy magic circle flashed on the screen.  Guessing the next input- fail.  It showed a screen-wide error for a half-second, then resumed, following along for two more flashes.

Screen-wide magic circle.

And it guessed right.

Electronics on the far wall flashed, exploded, and spat out sparks and smoke.

It looked like a laser had carved out the magic circle that had been on the screen, burning it into the wall as a ten-foot-by-ten-foot image.

“Now he has to start over.  Balance how much he wants to slow down and encrypt the pattern against how willing he is to get out-predicted and-”

A black wire reached up from beneath them, smashing into the underside of the laptop.  Not breaking anything, but getting close.

Zed raised the laptop over his head to put it out of reach.

“If you hold that up like that you’re going to get struck by lightning,” Deb warned.

“Well let’s-”

“Door!” Raquel told them.

It was hidden behind a curtain of black wires.  But they could run- checking there was nothing coming down from overhead.  Matthew and Lane floated up, ready to intercept.  The Storm flashed, hitting another wall, making it spark and shut down.

From all of that into a concrete corridor.

And, rounding a bend, with no space to transition from corridor to outside, producing a feeling like missing a stair, they were back in the snow.

The Technomancy Lord was there, so big he extended from ground to sky, darkness, white static, black wires, and a rain of bodies.  But he pulled away, letting altered space return to being normal.  Pulled back and away from the crackling Storm, with its pouring water and lightning strikes, extricating itself like Verona had extricated herself from the black wires- slowly, painfully, with lightning or electricity holding onto parts of it, forcing it to leave chunks behind.

The Storm, freed of its confines, began to swell, rising up, kicking up snow.

The Other retreated, but as it did, it left Technomancy Others behind it.  The blurry figures with obscured faces, and traces of the flicker-people it had been trying to conjure up- like dark afterimages from seeing a bright light, but too consistent, standing in the woods.

Blocking their way from following after.

Not that Verona figured they were in great shape to go chasing the Lord down to follow things up.

“It’s hurt, it won’t be too much hassle for others?”

“Yeah, hoping so,” Zed said.

“I can do a reading… but first?” Nicolette asked.

The Storm was growing.  Lightning struck and produced no thunder.  It came with heavy rain, drenching things.

Verona flipped up her hood.  Julette, dressed in a white cat mask with a white coat to contrast Verona’s, with one leg missing, sat in the snow and did the same, moving her hood to match.

“Let’s get clear of the rain,” Nicolette said.

“I’ve got glamour and twine in my bag for your leg,” Verona told Julette.

Tashlit touched her shoulder.

Verona checked the damage- it was mostly to skin, with holes about a half-inch across, but the muscle and her stomach felt a bit bruised, just from being pushed around and abused.

“I can manage, I think.  Might need stitches.”

Tashlit nodded, and clapped a hand on Verona’s shoulder.  She turned, looking.

“My daughter had a chunk taken out of her,” Mr. Knox said.

Verona wasn’t sure Kass had had it that much worse than she did, but… they were allies.  Whatever.  Hopefully Tashlit would have enough child-of-something-divine juice in her to heal more people if it came down to it.

The rain continued to get worse.  Freezing.  Verona lowered her head, to benefit more from the hood.

She could see Hollow Yen over by the trees.  She gave him a nod.

Got a nod back.

“Where’s Toadswallow?” Verona asked, looking around.  She turned toward Hollow Yen, calling out to him, “Toadswallow!?”

He pointed.

Verona glanced up at the growing Storm, and was rewarded with cold rain in her face and at her neck and collar, running down to armpit, with the way she was standing.  She turned to go, limping slightly.

“Ann will be ready when the storm comes her way,” Deb said.  “Adding echoes to it.”

“Good,” Verona said, a bit curt, not feeling one hundred percent up to managing people.

But they had roles to play.

She recognized the truck.  Verona reached the kind of ‘ramp’ that had been made when Matthew had climbed up, and slid down.  Her calf throbbed.

The door was open, two of the car’s inhabitants standing by it, with Toadswallow sitting with his back to a tree, staying out of their sight while presumably engaging with them.

Clementine, and a member of Sargeant Hall that Verona didn’t recognize.  It didn’t look like Clementine’s romantic partner.  Just some guy, horseshoe bald, with thick eyebrows and thick lips, adding up to a bit of a weird expression.

“Verona,” Clementine said.

“Hey,” Verona said.

“Here to help.  Somehow?”

“And I’m here to be your relay point.  Get you stopped, set up, and sent the right direction.”

“The weather’s weird.”

Verona nodded.  “Yeah.  It is.  You good to chat outside the vehicle for right now?”

“I think.  I’m okay to help, but I don’t know exactly what it is I’m doing.”

“Your timing’s great.  A bad weather event is about to hit a new settlement to our north.  We’ve already got a bunch of people ready to reach out to authorities in the town, they’re going to go investigate after, in a very similar way to how you, Sharon, and Daniel investigated Kennet.”

“Hm,” Clementine grunted, frowning a bit.  She squinted a bit as the wind blew freezing rain into her face.  “Am I part of that?”

“If you’re willing.  There might be danger, but we’d do our best to protect you.  Hell, we’ve got family and friends there, so… you’d better believe we’re invested in protecting you all.  In the meantime, while you’re deciding how involved you want to be?  Meet…”

Verona checked he was there.

“Mr. Knox.  He’s actually a one-time friend of Lawrence.”

“Is that a good thing?” Clementine asked.

“Good question.  I don’t know.  But he knows stuff, and one thing I think he knows pretty darn well…” Verona trailed off for a moment, checking again.  Taking a dramatic moment to fluff the man’s ego.  “…is objects like you tend to find and carry around.”

“Ahh,” Clementine said.  “Am I selling?”

“Maybe.  I don’t know.  But if you’re carrying?”

“I am.”

“I’m suspicious a man of his talents can help you figure out exactly what those things you’re carrying are.  Or Nicolette here can, maybe, if he’s not up to it.”

“I think I’m a touch better than our good augur,” Mr. Knox said, “no offense intended.”

“No,” Nicolette said.  “None taken, really.”

Let them get cocky with the storm in play, then crash the town with a very confusing mix of Innocents and Aware.  Force them to adjust, pull back.  And because it’s the Aware who sent Innocents in, we’re insulated from responsibility.

Just got to hope the others have their bases covered, hope Lucy can force them to overextend, and keep our guys safe.

“I don’t suppose you have your room-shuffling puzzle bracelet with?” she asked Clementine.

Clementine hesitated, then raised a hand, pulling back her sleeve to show the bracelet with the thick, interlocking wooden pieces.

Mr. Knox looked interested as he saw it.

Clementine was willing to show it, but she did add a very guarded, “Why?”

“Because the guys we’re dealing with have a weirdly folded puzzle house, kind of, and I’m curious how they’d work together,” Verona said.

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