Dukerino Wrote:“Wait. Wait, I hear it.” Lisa’s grimace of concentration broke open and hatched an excited grin. She waggled her dark brows at Seth. “I’ll be damned. There’s the bell.”

Tiago smoothed out a corner of the waterworks map across the carriage’s foldaway table and weighed it down with a tin tobacco box. “What’s the pattern?”

“Four rings between pauses,” Lisa said. “Who’s four rings?”

“That’s…” Seth scanned the roster. “Hannah il Teffik. How loud is it?”

“Faint,” Lisa said. “Getting fainter. Walls or distance.”

“Time is… five past three.” Tiago ran a finger down the map of Fontana’s underground, with a hastily-woven spiderweb of criers’ assigned routes along it. “At a guess, she’s at this green-line junction below the Paostwari House.”

Half the tunnels down there used to be catacombs...

“That would be a stroke of luck.” Ofelia huddled over the map with her brother. “It’s a gray-water part of the system. Fountains and not feces.”

“We’ll meet her at the exit gate on Dulcet street and confirm.” Tiago stretched his gangly legs out of the carriage. “Not to be a cynical little shit, but they might have just flushed the rock, or swept it into a storm drain, and we’re chasing a trash heap.”

“They might have. But it’s worth investigation, anyway.” Lisa reached both broad hands across the table and clasped Ofelia and Seth’s shoulders. “My geniuses.”

“I did absolutely nothing,” Ofelia said. “You’re welcome.”

Seth found his cutlass in the cluttered corner of the carriage he’d begun piling his stuff. Lisa loaded her panoply of bladed weapons onto her body, from baldrick to belt, and retrieved her broad-brimmed roadwarden hat, tsking as she punched a dent out of its thick felt crown. Tiago buckled his wheelgun to his side and shrugged his sheepskin jacket on. Ofelia picked out a book with a torso on it called Claimed by the Cavalier and folded it out to her current page.

Tiago gave it a dismal look. “You need to at least bring a knife, Feeli.”

“I can borrow one of mother’s,” Ofelia said.

Lisa exchanged salutes with the hermandati waiting outside the carriage, filled them in on the discovery, and cheerfully waved off their offers of accompaniment. “My family and I will handle it fine, thank you,” she told them, and Seth wasn’t sure why she hadn’t included him in that statement, or whether, perhaps, she had.

They trooped through Fontana’s streets. The antigravitational repulsion of the al Ydrises cleared a swathe of path before them. Stares followed them. Conversations died and rose again as whispers in their wake. Seth hadn’t ended up with the Hummingbird hexentat across his back, but he needed no sorcery to know what they were talking about. The one lit man in the company of a clutch of undead.

Dulcet street was a tight line of row houses, whose narrow and multicolored progress reminded Seth of a stack of Ofelia’s books. At the end of one gridded block squatted a brickwork bunker with a wrought iron gate set before a staircase down into the earth. “Like a portico to the Panvesian underworld,” Ofelia observed, whatever that meant.

Tiago produced a brass pocket watch and flipped it open. “Half past,” he said. “If they haven’t caught her and slit her throat, she’ll be here any minute.”

“My dour boy.” Lisa bumped him with her hip. “I should’ve brought Anna so the two of you could be broody together.”

“I don’t mind Lisa.” Tiago clacked the pocketwatch’s boxy lid shut. “Enhances the contrast.”

From the staircase came the tromp of heavy boots. A lambent green appeared around a bend in the cavern and attached itself to the bright globe of a mitelamp, held in the leather gauntlet of a stout red-nosed woman. She grinned up at them and rang a bell in her other hand. “Wotcha,” she said. “You must be the Verdugo.”

“I suppose I must.” Lisa smiled and inclined her head, but true to her warning, her posture was stiffer with this grubby little worker bee than Annalise’s would be. “And you’re Hannah il Teffik.”

Hannah bit the finger on her glove and yanked it off with her teeth. “That’s me, your honor. Or whatever I call you.” She stuck her stubby hand out. Lisa gamely took it. “I guess you’re here on account of the dings.”

“That’s right. You’re the lucky one whose bell came through.” Seth held up a bundle in waxed paper, grease stains on its underside. “Hungry, Miss il Teffik?”

“You bring that for me?” Hannah shucked her other glove. “Bless you. Just about starved, I am. Lot of walking you had us get up to.” She plopped to the road, eased her back onto the waterstained edge of the gate behind her, and unwrapped the package. “Least I didn’t need to shout anything. Oh, bless you.” She uncovered the roasted chicken Seth had brought and commenced to tear it to pieces.

“We have to move fast,” Tiago said, over the sound of Hannah’s mastication. “There’s the risk they had people down there and heard the clanging. It’s not exactly a predictable move, what we’re doing, but it’ll put them on guard.”

“I know you only just surfaced, Hannah.” Lisa crouched to the woman’s level. “But would you mind terribly guiding us back down?”

“Let me finish this excellent fucking chicken here and I’m all yours, Madam Verdugo.” Hannah gave an affirmative wag of her drumstick. “You got a map there, young fella?”

Tiago nodded and unfolded the parchment. “It was around three we heard you. I had you placed right here.” He pointed to a four-way junction shaded in evening-sky green.

“Yep. Looks about right.” Hannah licked grease from her pointer finger and traced her route. “That’d be the green-line right here.” She diverted from the tunnel to a square room off its junction. “On the fork I didn’t take there’s a waystation you might look at. And then right here… hmm.” She tapped an amorphous lozenge on the other side, like a topographical marking. “That’s one of the old crypts.”

Tiago squinted at the shape, which now had a fleck of seasoning spice clinging to it. “Crypts?”

“Yessir,” Hannah said. “Half the tunnels down there used to be catacombs, y’know. They went and repurposed them for plumbing during the great big build-out that made Fontana Fontana.”

“What’d they do with the bodies?” Seth asked.

Hannah crooked her eyebrow. “The bodies moved themselves, young fella. You don’t know the tale? During the second emergence, this place was ground zero for a white feather. Rosh-Antakesi, the puppeteer. You heard about her, surely.”

Seth had. Graveyards turned to tidal waves of bone and rotten flesh, weeping victims flensed and filleted by their own ancestors, brought back up as corpse soldiers to shred their neighbors. “Yeah,” he said. The appetite he’d been building off Hannah’s chicken fell into the ravine of his turning stomach.

“Well, we here in Fontana were her first victims.” Hannah jerked a thumb into the darkness behind her. “The catacombs emptied themselves. Half the city was slaughtered. The survivors got very into cremation.”

“I, uh… I guess I can understand why that would be,” Seth said.

“So after the second E, we had all this underground room, and made the best of it.” Hannah wiped her face and tossed her crumpled paper serviette into the pile of bones she was making. “I say we like this wasn’t two centuries ago. The larger crypts like this one either went undisturbed or were made into waystations and quarters for the builders and maintainers. Once the construction project wound down, y’know, they didn’t need all the space. They held onto a few of ‘em, and others they collapsed or filled with rubble and dross from the building project. And then here or there you get derelict spots like this one that they just sealed and left alone. Too big or load-bearing or they just ran out of money and time.” Her finger circled the crypt and prodded at its red-inked entrances. “See these crosses through the tunnels around it? Those have been sealed.”

“So…” Seth turned his head to see the map from Hannah’s perspective. There’s no tunnel left in. No entrance.”

Hannah scratched a mole on her chin. “None of the personnel ones, no. Might be a choke tunnel you could fit through, though. Skinny sprat like you. Those ain’t marked on here.”

“You want me to go into something called a choke tunnel.”

“It’s a Kari-Kine loanword. Had a bunch of them on the digging crews back in the wayback. Chok means… something. Crawl, I think? Anyway, you won’t choke, probably.” Hannah set the remains of her meal aside and grunted back to her feet. “But you’re gonna have to crawl.”

icehead Wrote:As Paul Engemann said in Scarface, Push it to the Limit!

Whether that be the limit of how much of Heather and Andie's antics Kenneth can take without cracking...

...or the limit of what Lily can observe in her extended family without doing something...

...or what Rick might be able to deal with if only he knew the full extent of what Keiko and Krista were getting up to!

Dukerino Wrote:“It’s missing the consequence,” Grant says. “That’s what they’ll be talking about, I bet. What happens when they refuse.”

“Let them talk,” Sykora says. “Let them see what we can do and extrapolate. We don’t need to dwell on it, and you don’t need to make yourself a villain.” She taps her tail twice on the metal armrest to obtain the film crew’s attention. “If our business is concluded here, my husband and I will depart with gratitude for your service.”

A universal bow spreads across the bridge.

“Attend, dove.” Sykora regally extends the hand that isn’t cuddling a daughter to her. “Let’s bring the children to their godmothers and then do some Maekyonite drugs.”

Grant chuckles as he takes his wife’s hand. “Let’s.”

The command group is waiting at the edge of the bridge, just away from the hubbub of the set. Waian eagerly accepts a pair of babies from the royal couple. “Hello, little tyrants. Who’s ready for their first trip to the engine observation deck?”

“We’ll get that footage loaded onto the drone.” Vora ties her cloud of silver hair back and secures her Princess-in-Waiting circlet onto her head. “Hopefully they broadcast it wide.”

Waian glances up from tucking the kids into their stroller. “Can you fuckin’ imagine what your old bosses and coworkers are gonna think?”

“I really can’t,” Grant says. “I’d pay a fortune to see it.”

“We already snagged one roommate.” Hyax stands to one side, chin jutted high. “The rest of the spy drones are spoken for.”

There is a shallow but clear bite mark on the scruff of Hyax’s neck. From behind the Brigadier, Waian must see Grant’s surprised discovery; she snickers silently and puts a finger to her lips.

Sykora crosses to Vora and kisses her cheek. “The bridge is yours, Viscountess.”

Vora returns the kiss. “Enjoy the cannabis, Majesty. We’ll ensure the garden level is cleared of observers.”

“Still not clear to me why this is necessary amid annexation preparations,” Hyax says.

“Surely you have little to complain about Imperials taking alien drugs,” Sykora says. “Last time it was Grantyde with Eqtoran xhurr, and you have the happy results on your neck.”

Hyax retracts into her HAK like a tortoise into its shell. Her scars stand paler against her blush. “I retract my objection and request to be excused that I might retrieve a scarf.”

As they take the lift off the bridge, Sykora snaps open the vacuum-packed pair of edible chocolates Kymai has prepared for them. “Will you do these with me?”

Grant shakes his head. “One of us should stay sober, just in case. And I want to watch.”

Sykora scoffs and pops a square into her mouth. “Thank the Gods of the Firmament the command group is otherwise engaged. They’d never let me live it down.”

“Lomanza’s gonna be there, right?”

“Lomanza’s Lomanza. She knows not to needle her commanding officer.” Sykora chews. “Hmm. Curiously herbaceous.”

They step into the garden level, a balcony overlooking the verdant terraces of the agro ring. A cloud of alien pollinators flit from bloom to bloom, borne through the sweet air on gossamer corkscrew wings. Majordomo Lomanza stands by with a trio of medtechs, and bows to the incoming royals. “Welcome, Majesties. Pardon our presence to supervise.”

“You are pardoned, of course, but perhaps you’re not necessary.” Sykora rubs behind her ear, face focused. “I’m afraid I’m not yet feeling any sort of—”

Grass.

---

“Beardy beardy weirdy beardy man.” Sykora’s little fingers scratch along Grant’s chin. “My husband. My big weird beard husband beardy man. You’re so big. You are so BIG. Give me—” She takes his hand and presses hers into it. Her palm is sweaty. “Why are you so big?”

“Ate my vegetables, I guess,” he says.

“Ate your—” She lets out a shrill cackle and falls onto her back. “Herbivore. My herbivore husband. Herby Hubby.” She tears a handful of grass from the ground and waves it around. “C’mere. Gimme your lap.”

He lies down with her and gamely puts aside the grass she insistently prods toward his mouth.

“I wanna feeeeed you,” she protests. “I wanna watch you eat. I want you to get big and stout so you can squish me into a two-dimensional little piece of paper. Like that cartoon you showed me. With the kindek.”

“That was a rabbit,” he says.

“Rabbit,” she repeats, hypnotized. “What’s grass in English again?”

“Grass, I think.”

“Grass.” She sings a scratchy song. “Grassy wassy kassy. Eat yoor grass, hosband.”

He sprinkles some into her lap. “Your grass.”

“No,” she gasps, and hastily pats it off her. “Remember when Zee was eating grass and you went ho no no little lady? You sounded so funny.”

He chuckles. “She never wants to eat her lunch and then take her anywhere and it’s a turf buffet.”

“Remember Kiar’s little hat?”

“He’s wearing it right now at the daycare, I think.”

“He is. Our baby boy in his little baby hat.” Her eyes well up with tears. “They all look more and more like you every day.”

“I wonder if he’ll grow any facial hair,” Grant muses. “If Zee’s getting my height, it’s possible, right?”

“Oh he’d look so dashing.” Sykora hiccups. “Every time I hold them I just wanna whisper grow, grow, grow. I wanna know what they’re saying. I wanna talk to them about what they learned today. And sing stupid little songs with them. Grassy massy bassy wassy.” She wipes her nose on the ground. “I think I understand the Maekyonite drugs. Let’s go back to the cabin and have them bring us our babies.”

“That sounds perfect,” Grant says. “Let’s just have you come down a teeny little bit first.”

“Okay,” she says, in English. “Ho-kay do-kay. What a perfect little word that is. Okay. What a lovely language.” She runs her palms across the grass. “It feels like your face,” she says. “Why did I wait so long to try this, uh—what’d you call it?”

“Grass is its nickname.”

“Grass!” She falls into another giggling fit. “Do the Maekyonites call every plant grass?”

Grant sits with his little stoned wife cracking up in his lap, and digs his communicator out. Sykora told him not to take any pictures, but she’s so fucking cute stoned out of her mind like this that he has no choice.

Dukerino Wrote:He lay on his back in the still, stale air of the crypt for a moment (or what had better be the crypt, because Seth was not about to fucking do that again). Then he sat up, slipped the grate back into place as best he could with raw, scratched fingers, and clicked his flashlight on again.

He was in an oblong chamber, its contours determined long ago by pre-Emergence builders according to some logic of geological tide. Three exits he could see, if he didn’t count the choke tunnel, which he refused to. Two tunnels into the dark, one door—a thin sheet of metal, really, with hinges spike-hammered into the much older structure around it. That looked promising, and he was pleased at how quiet the hinges were after the creaking grate.

Geometric shadows shortened and lengthened again as he passed the gridded catacomb slots along the walls. Loculi, these were called. He’d heard the word in the smoke-addled stories of a tomb robber who’d owed Rohan. Alcoves for the dead. He kept expecting to see some moldering ossuary or leering skull. None presented itself. Hannah had told no lies about the extent of the place’s hollowing.

Seth came to another t-junction and again picked the side with a door and was rewarded with a cylindrical room, the floor of which was etched with a familiar circle. The place had been swept not long ago—piles of dust and pebbles at the edges—but one stone still sat in the circle’s center.

Seth picked it up and rubbed his thumb across the Fox on its underside.

Handle it.

“I don’t know if you’re listening,” he whispered. “But I’m in. Found the stone. There has to be an exit. I’ll find that, too, and let you in.” His fingers tightened. “Please be listening.”

He crept from the circle chamber and across the junction to the road not taken, and then a left, and then another, searching for more of those doors and doing his best to commit his passage to memory.

The next door he found not by sight but by smell. The kind of miasmatic odor that old physikers believed carried diseases right through the nostrils. How twisted-around had Seth’s life become at the hands of the Verdugo, that now he moved toward that smell, rather than away?

It led him to a larger chamber than any he’d seen on his way, built around a thick central column studded with upright sconces where, once upon a time, the dead must have slept standing. Concave scoops in the stone suggested skulls burrowing out from their seatings. What must it have sounded like, Seth wondered, that tsunami of bone breaking free; that thought’s grotesqueness was quickly dwarfed by the sodden canvas bags that lay in the outer wall’s loculi. And the stench. It was eye-watering in here. The kind of smell a rotting head makes, with any luck. He resolved to be about his business and then go on his way.

On the other side of the column sat a cluster of barrels, deposited against the wall like a massive insect’s clutch of eggs. Seth opened one, and was struck first by the smell, which he could not identify but which screamed wrong!!! in his mind with such force that he knew, instinctually, it was something dead that had been dead for a long time. The barrel was half-full of something. Some foul coagulation laying over a chunky, half liquid layer of…

Entrails, Seth realized. And blood. Organs and effluvia shedding gallons of monochrome grotesquerie. Those lumpen black-stained sacks stuffed into the stone shelves.

Those were unlit corpses. He had stumbled into an abattoir.

He threw up, then, but only a little, and he dragged the barrel on top of the stain to cover it, so that was fine. He steadied himself, forced the dancing spotlight in his shivering hand to stillness, and continued to cast it across the chamber. He ignored the screaming questions in the back of his brain. All this unlit blood. In the sewers. In the water system. What was this? What plot had he stumbled into?

It wasn’t all body bags in this storage room. On the far wall there was a shelf of stockpiled miscellany. Stacked bricks and trowels, a rack of rifles, a dented popmite spawnbarrel. And there, in a cleared-out spot as if given prized position:

A slack-jawed, gray-skinned, yellow-haired head. In worse shape than he remembered, its nose halfway crumbled away. But that was the head. The same one he’d stolen from Annalise’s trunk.

Seth’s mouth went dry. He drew a deep breath through his nose, and the queasy tinge the rank air sent through him was overpowered by triumph.

He raised the stone to his lips. “I fucking found it.” The excitement bumped his whisper into a near-voice. His lips were turned up of their own accord. “Shitting saints. I’ve got your head.”

He tucked the head under his arm. The uneven bumps of its dead face pressed into his side, but this was such a minor horror compared to the rest of the room that he barely registered it. “I’m coming back,” he whispered. “Can’t take that tunnel again, especially with this thing, but I—”

He froze. Around the corner there was a green, pulsing glow.

“Not alone,” he breathed. “Someone’s turned on the wall lamps. I—”

You’ll handle it.

“I’ll handle it,” he whispered, and slipped the stone into his pocket. He tied the head to his belt loop by its stringy hair. Inch by hissing inch he slid his cutlass from its sheath.

Dukerino Wrote:Seth struck, cutlass questing in a chopping overhand that felt as slow as if he’d swung it in a nightmare—which had to be some trick of his agitated brain, because when it connected with the thin man’s sword, it out a hellacious clang and sent a vicious vibration up Seth’s arm.

The swords bound briefly, and then Seth’s slid forward and turned off the man’s crossguard. Clockwise went the cultist’s edge, wrenching Seth’s blade downward and flickering itself horizontal in a clattering counterthrust that Seth whirled into a side-lunging crouch to avoid. Practice cut through panic and halted the turn of his cutlass. His grip hardened; his blade shoved the riposte awry, past his ear. I’m in a swordfight, he realized, with the sickening shock of the victim to a practical joke. An antic, disbelieving huff of laughter passed his lips. No hiding-place to flee to or strike from, no Tiago to blow the guy’s brains out, no Annalise to run him through. I’m in a fucking one-on-one swordfight.

A pulse of furious spite seized him, and he sprung upward from the knee this mean bastard had forced him onto. He’d really expected this to last longer, to have a few flashing exchanges, so he was almost as surprised as the man he impaled when his sword shoved through his stomach to the hilt.

“What,” Freckles mumbled, with a queer, flat affect. Seth tugged the sword out from his belly with a sucking splorch and hacked him across the chest, and for a moment you could believe all he’d cut was cloth and then a bright angry red stripe bloomed onto the man’s shirt, and he went to his knees, and then onto his slackening face.

Footsteps and calling voices echoed off the slab walls. A shadow carved from the hallway mitelamp’s light rose through the corner as the first foe drew near.

Duck, Darling

Seth’s new hexentat. He hadn’t practiced it enough, fool that he was. But now it leapt to the forefront of his mind. The freckled man—what had he sounded like?

“He’s got a gun,” Seth cried, in a dead ringer for the deader man’s voice, and then—this will make you feel so stupid if it doesn’t work—he did his best imitation of a gun going off, entirely expecting to go “pshoo,” and perhaps stall his attackers with some kind of laughing fit.

What emerged from his mouth was a hellacious munition-mite BANG that roared its echo off the walls and put a horrendous ringing in his ears. He let out another—best they think it was a wheelgun—and the shadow thinned itself as the individual casting it flattened themself to a wall.

Hesitation. Seth took advantage. He bolted from the chamber down its perpendicular path, sprinting down twisting, silent halls. He lunged left, prayed this was some kind of circuit, that he’d loop round his pursuers, or that there was another exit, or, failing that, he prayed that the Turning Wheel was as gentle as the songs said, and death wouldn’t be such an awful thing as it appeared.

Another BANG behind him, this one not caused by any hexentat. A chunk of limestone burst, scattering him with dust and stinging shards.

“LISA,” he screamed, hoping a fool’s hope that she’d heard that, or heard him, through the Fox stone or through the sewer wall.

A door. A door, a door, thank every fucking Saint who’d ever swung a stick. An old sheet of rust with a wire window but it might have been the long-awaited Saint Portal opening to redeem the world, the way it surged Seth’s soul. He tried the knob and pulled it open and nearly laughed in panicky despair as it revealed a brick fucking wall.

Kick it.

He gave it a frenzied kick, mostly to register his displeasure at his evil fate, before he realized that one: the Fox had just spoken, and two: his kick had shoved a patch of bricks a few inches in.

BANG again. A bullet pinged off the swung-open door. Seth charged his shoulder into the bricks and they cascaded, a chest-sized opening of them, letting in a humid hosanna of rushing undercroft air.

And fucking Saints, she was there. Lisa al Ydris, his gorgeous, deadly, long-overdue miracle. Looking as shocked as he was, her blade bare and streaked with blood, and he’d never forget the look on her face, the expression of surprise and fear and gratitude and love.

Love.

He was sure of it. As surely as he loved her back.

A cried-out curse from behind him. Another bullet flew wide. Lisa threw her sword down. Her arms rocketed forward, hands linked, fingers spread.

Seth could see behind her now, where Tiago was stabbing an armed and coveralled man in the stomach as Ofelia bent his head back. Before he could process what was happening, Lisa said:

“Duck, darling.”

He ducked. Behind him, a warning was screamed too late.

Bright, scouring fire turned the night-haunted halls to day.

Dukerino Wrote:“Lywa’s offer of assistance was genuine, Grantyde,” Narika says. “I am invested in your success. It’s why I’ve focused my efforts on places besides your wife’s doorstep. And it’s why now that Maekyon is finally in the crosshairs…” She holds a sheaf of typeset papers up to the camera. She’s had them spiral-bound, of course. “I’ve gotten my hands on this report. It’s quite incomplete, and I’m sure your people have much they’ve withheld. But my analysis concerns me. Deeply. I want to help.”

“Help how?”

“We could present some united front,” Narika says. “An alternate annexation strategy, like the one you employed on Eqtora. Last time you slipped it under the Raptors’ doors before they could pounce on it. This time I have no doubt they’ll be watching. I could muster my coterie to speak in support of you. A whole additional sector’s worth of voices. Or perhaps other resources. Or connections, or…”

She pauses. She’s never hesitated like this before in front of him.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what you’re planning, where you are on this. But if you wanted to deal me in, I could help. I want to help.”

Forgotten How to Breathe

“Last time I trusted you, you nearly shivved my wife,” Grant says.

“But I didn’t.”

“But you were about to. And then you jetted off after we let you hold our kid, and I haven’t heard from you since. And I’m glad to see you. Sincerely. But I had to call you, Narika. And it’s not a social call.”

“Was that such a burden?”

“I meant to keep in touch,” he says. “I did. But my life has intertwined with three new ones, and the braid has bound me up so tightly that the time slipped through my fingers.” He exhales. “Shit, listen to me. I sound like a Princess.”

“You sound like a Prince.”

“I just feel like we were close to getting somewhere,” he says. “Like you wanted to be let in.”

“I have been truant, too,” Narika says. “But I’ve been doing a great deal of pondering. A great deal. I’ve been attempting to come up with some sort of… olive branch is the Maekyonite term, yes?”

“That’s right. You’re studying up, huh?”

“I don’t want to be at a disadvantage,” she says. “By the time my nieces and nephews are speaking, you’ll all be bilingual. Can’t fall behind.”

“I really, really, really, really want to believe you,” he says. “But I can’t just let you in now, when you suddenly decide that it’s time to be a real sister during the greatest crisis Sykora and I have faced.”

“That is the exact reason I have decided, Grantyde,” she says. “The division is no longer some aesthetic pastime. These consequences go beyond petty Princess games.”

“I have told you over and over that I want to know you,” Grant says. “But I still don’t. And I want to trust you on this, but I still can’t.” He shrugs resignedly. “I’m sorry, Narika.”

She recoils from the word. He sees, but doesn’t retract it.

“How do I earn it, then?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Last time I was in this position, I hit someone with Compound Seventy and felt fucking rotten about it for a few cycles. And I don’t suppose you’d be willing to go that route.”

She shakes her head. “I will not put myself at you and your wife’s mercy in that way.”

“All right,” he says.

They stare impassively at one another for a few moments, as if waiting for the other to speak.

“All right,” she echoes, finally. “I’ve simply missed the window. I can accept that.”

“You haven’t missed it,” he says. “You’ve come at a time it’s boarded up for a storm. On the other side of this, Narika. I promise. I can call you every tenday and bombard you with baby pictures, if that’s what it takes.”

“So what now, then?”

“Now I guess I keep an eye on you,” Grant says. “And hope that one of us comes up with a way to fix it.”

“Ask your people for something called a collateral infortunity report,” she says. “They’ll tell you it isn’t ready. Insist.”

His expression darkens. “You want me afraid.”

“I want you informed.” She steeples her fingers. “I want you to know what annexing Maekyon means.”

“You think I don’t?” The lines of his frown sharpen. “You think I haven’t thought about this constantly already and that it hasn’t kept me up at night? I’m taking Maekyon because if I don’t, then what? Then some other Void Princess does. Maybe Dantia, maybe you. Maybe that’s what you want.”

“Do what you have to,” she says. “But the Grantyde I first met—the Grantyde I admire—I wonder, if you went back in time and presented this future to him, whether he’d recognize himself within it.”

“That guy was way out of his depth,” Grant says. “That guy wasn’t a father, and he wasn’t a Prince. Put him here and he’d drown. I’ve learned how to swim.”

“Perhaps you have.” She leans forward into the camera. “Or perhaps you’ve simply forgotten how to breathe, and your lungs haven’t started burning yet.”

He looks past her—at whatever camera he’s using, presumably. “Bye, Narika,” he says.

The screen goes blank.

Narika sits back from her console and sighs. She places her face in her hands.

icehead Wrote:

Hitting the Fan

This is where the proverbial shit hits the fan. Dana has been going about in a state of determined denial and blissful oblivion about what has been going on for a while now. But what is she going to do when the proof is presented right in front of her eyes and denial is no longer possible?

And what will happen when she starts telling others about it? How will Rick deal with the news of what his kids have been doing?

Meanwhile, we've seen Keiko becoming happier as she distances herself from Barry, but is Barry going to let go so easily? Does he have another card to play? And how will Keiko respond when he does? Will it be the final straw that tips her over the line into another forbidden impulse that she's been fighting?