Simon’s footsteps echoed down the tunnel’s length. The flames wreathing his head set the damp stone walls flickering, made his shadow judder and dance. He navigated the circuitous, wending route back to Phoenix thoughtlessly, his mind racing. He stared at the palms of his hands, examined the fresh skin on his palm. Hours ago, the meat of his hand had been skewered through by rebar, shredded by chunks of stained glass, and yet his hand looked as unmarked by injury and uncalloused by labor as it always had.

  There was another layer to the universe, he knew now. A separate strata of energy and physics that operated not by the cold regularity of mathematical principles and physical rules, but purely at the beck of some alien higher intelligence. Reality was just as governed by the predictable mechanisms of atoms and their charges, forces and their impacts as it was by the swirling, chaotic intent that, he now knew, powered and directed life. Living things weren’t just the emergent result of math and chemistry, they were created and directed by something wholly separate, higher.

  And he knew how to reach out to that higher intelligence, now. Recognized it in himself, animating his cells and organs as much as, if not more so, the electricity coursing through his synapses and the chemicals detonating in his mitochondria. He could tap it. Not control it, not direct it with the same dictatorial strictness he now wielded over simpler forces like heat and light, but he could goad it, point it in a direction and let it do its work, like something part domesticated beast and benevolent god.

  He was immortal. He’d never die.

  He pinched at the skin on his left knuckle, drew the flesh back like he was opening an envelope, and watched, wide-eyed, as his flesh knit itself back together.

  He had found Phoenix’s answer, that was for sure. He knew how to heal. But even now, as he traced the path back to his newfound mentor, he reconsidered letting him in on the secret. This struck Simon as a truth too beautiful, and too powerful, to be shared with just anyone, let alone a clearly mentally diseased megalomaniac. One who Simon had every intention of ditching the moment he’d seen enough, had worked out how Phoenix’s power worked. He was more confident than ever that he’d be able to crack that puzzle and put the man’s technique to use himself; if he’d been able to intuit this, after all, had reverse-engineered the nature of reality while bleeding to death on a church’s floor, surely working out the tottering old bat’s mind-control gimmick would be achievable.

  He was still considering his next point of action when he crept back into the tunnel junction Phoenix was currently using as his makeshift throne room. He was sitting where he usually sat: propped against the dank back wall, bandages wreathing his chest, Aura fluctuating as he used it to continually massage his body, holding his organs in place and forcing his heart to beat. Glazed-over acolytes sat motionless along the edges of the chamber, staring off into the middle distance, eerily still. One stood next to Phoenix, holding a dented can of Coke, ready to proffer it to him.

  Phoenix’s sunken eyes didn’t swivel to meet Simon as he entered, oddly. They were fixed on an unexpected audience: a woman, dressed in a perfectly tailored pantsuit, standing in the center of the chamber.

  The woman glanced aside to take Simon’s measure as he walked in. She flashed him a knowing, prim smile, an expression Simon would have expected to see plastered on one of Father’s socialite friends, or some CEO gracing the cover of Fortune. Her eyes, though, chilled him. They darted once, twice along Simon’s length, and he felt, irrationally, as if in that moment she had taken an inventory of him far more complete than he would have liked.

  “Simon, my boy,” Phoenix croaked. He didn’t look away from the woman. “I thought you dead, at this point. You were just taking your sweet time, then?”

  “I got held up,” Simon said. “Who is this?”

  “My name is Gabriela Maldonado,” the woman chirped. Her voice was silken, radio-ready. She was the kind of person who pronounced, and meant, every vowel and consonant in every word she spoke. “I’m here to offer you and your partner here a word of advice.”

  “He’s an acolyte,” Phoenix said. “Not my partner. Acolyte.”

  “He doesn’t look like one.” Another sweep of her penetrating gaze. Simon resisted the urge to cringe. “His Field is very distinctly his own.”

  Phoenix reddened a shade. “He’s an acolyte nonetheless. You’re bold, coming here and speaking to me with such impunity. “

  “Apologies. I figured it prudent to skip the pleasantries. We’re both short on time, as it were.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Phoenix wheezed.

  “You’re manually pumping your own lungs and dragging your open wounds around a sewer,” Maldonado deadpanned. “You’ve got, maybe, 36 hours before infection or sleep deprivation or both kill you.”

  Phoenix’s beady eyes narrowed, one hand flexing into a claw around nothing. “You get one- one more. You speak to me in that tone one more time and we’ll see who’s the one with open wounds.”

  Maldonado chuckled, the kind of clipped hm-hm that might punctuate conversation at a gala or In a board room. “Fair enough. Truth be told, you have more pressing concerns than that, anyway. Pema, a Demigod, is going to be here soon, and he’s going to be looking to kill you.”

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  Phoenix grumbled a wet laugh. “He’ll find his hands full with that. I’ve six hundred Acolytes scattered around down here, ready to mobilize at a thought.”

  “With all due respect, they will be of little use against a Field Manipulator of Pema’s caliber and experience.” Maldonado spoke quickly, hoping to head off another of Phoenix’s outbursts. “In a direct confrontation, you’ll lose to him. And if, by some miracle, you beat him, you’d have my former employer, Lakshmi Rai, hot on his heels.”

  “Former?” Simon said. He recognized the name: one of the premiere Demigods still active in the Twin Cities. Not someone he’d personally have wanted to be fired by.

  “I presume,” Maldonado said. “She’s away on business overseas, but seems to have had a change of heart regarding some guidance I offered her. I predict that my time in her employ is very short-lived now.”

  “If she doesn’t want your advice,” Phoenix interjected, “then why should I?”

  “Because I can save you a bloody, desperate fight with one of the four strongest humans on the planet,” Maldonado said. “Because I can guarantee you his essence upon killing and absorbing him. With that kind of windfall, you would ascend to the level of Demigod easily, and I imagine healing your injuries would become trivial. Expanding your network and sphere of power would, naturally, follow just as effortlessly.”

  Phoenix studied her, jowly face an unreadable mask. “What do you want? You have something you want me to heal on you? Bombs give you some cancer you want gone?”

  “Oh, no, no thank you. I’m fully aware of the price of your services,” she said, making a sidelong glance at the line of acolytes along a nearby wall. The acolyte standing at Phoenix’s arm stepped forward and raised the Coke can for him to sip from. “No, I want two assurances from you. First, that upon ascending to the level of Demigod, you make it your priority to kill Ms. Rai as soon as you can.”

  Phoenix let out a low whistle. “Guess it’s true what they say about a woman scorned.”

  Maldonado held up a manicured hand. “Please, this is far from personal. I harbor no ill-will toward Ms. Rai. This is about the fate of our collective species. Unfortunately, in my estimation, Ms. Rai must be stopped before she can accrue sufficient power to rule the world, as she aims to do. It would be an objective moral failure on my part to allow that to come to pass.”

  “You’d rather I do it?” Phoenix said, almost a little incredulous.

  “It doesn’t matter to me who comes out on top, here, so long as it’s not her.”

  Simon studied her. Maldonado didn’t betray as much of a flicker of inauthenticity when she said this, but Simon suspected it was a lie. It had to be. Phoenix assuming control of the planet would be an obvious unmitigated disaster, even a halfwit could tell that.

  Phoenix, for his part, seemed less dubious. “Fine. Never liked her anyway. Smug, elitist, you know, all that. Your second request?”

  “I need you to use your network to locate and deliver a man to me. Benjamin Robinson.”

  “What, your boyfriend run out on you?”

  “Mr. Robinson stole information from me. Terabytes of highly proprietary research.”

  “Terabytes? He stole digital info?” Simon asked. “What, you didn’t make any backups?”

  “Of course I made backups.” Maldonado’s voice chilled a degree. “This request, that he be found and delivered to me alive, is personal.”

  Phoenix grinned cruelly. “That’s more fun. You, you seem tough.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Very- very strong,” Phoenix wetted his lips. “I know talent when I see it.”

  “You’re too kind.”

  “What if, and hear me out here,” Phoenix said, straightening. “What if I don’t want to be at the beck and call of some up-jumped secretary? What’s to stop me from pouncing on you here, turning you, taking a nice big share of that talent for myself, rooting around in your noggin, and extracting the advice you were going to give me from you that way?”

  If Maldonado was perturbed by the violent swing in Phoenix’s tone, she didn’t show it. “Because if you do, your mother, Eleanor, will be getting a very illuminating email about her son’s whereabouts and actions.”

  Simon frowned, a little thrown. Telling his mom? That was her leverage? Phoenix didn’t seem the mama’s boy type.

  A glance at Phoenix’s face convinced Simon otherwise. He was pale, now, colorless with rage.

  “My mother’s alive?”

  “Your father lied to you, about her death. She didn’t drive her car off the McKinley bridge back in 1965.”

  Phoenix seemed to be flickering from apoplexy to despair several times a second. “I- How the fuck do you- Why would he-“

  “The lie was initially to protect you from her. Later, as you developed into the man you are today, it was to protect her from you,” Maldonado said. “For my money, he might have eventually told you the truth, had you not killed him.”

  “He died in a house fire,” Phoenix croaked. “It was an electrical fault. I would never have laid a hand on my own family.”

  “He was killed and then his house was burned with his body inside, to prevent an autopsy. The electrical fault coverup wasn’t even particularly elegant. I suspect the foul play angle only went uninvestigated because it was more convenient for the Saint Louis police department to write it off as an accident, and because your father wasn’t a particularly important or well-liked man.”

  In an instant, Phoenix was across the room, his hands wrapped around Maldonado’s throat. He forced her to one knee as furious tendrils of Aura spiked from him, spearing into her defenses and spreading his poison instantly.

  Maldonado’s Aura flickered and began to change, to surrender itself to Phoenix. Then, with a bewildered roar, he was stumbling away, clawing at his own face, eyes squeezed shut. Maldonado’s Aura pulsed and shivered, slowly returning to its normal state as Phoenix’s foreign energy was purged out.

  “The fu- Wha did- What- Do- My head-“

  “The mechanics of my Knack are complicated,” Maldonado said, as she dusted off the knees of her trousers and rose to her feet. “To oversimplify, I wield extremely precise and intuitive control over the energetic architecture of my own brain. I usually use this trick to accelerate my own thoughts, to streamline and direct the firing of my nerves and synapses to prioritize efficiency. I can also, if need be, build failsafes and traps into my brain’s structure. I can dig little circuits and dead-ends into my grey matter, can make it very, very inhospitable and uncomfortable for someone without my cognitive gifts to try to inhabit and take control of.”

  Phoenix groaned, still clutching his head, retreating back to his wall. The opportunist in Simon perked up, and he briefly considered lunging for the old man, making a move to kill him.

  No. His Aura, confused as it was, roiled still with a deeply threatening strength. If he didn’t kill him immediately and outright, Simon would be dead. Or, he thought as he studied the nearest acolyte, worse.

  Maldonado seemed to come to the same conclusion. She stepped toward Phoenix, hands clasped behind her back, the clack of her heels echoing with each step. “The pain you’re feeling now is just a taste of what Pema would experience, were he unlucky enough to try peering into my mind at the wrong time. Do you see what I’m implying, here?”

  “Fuck you,” Phoenix breathed. “Talking about my- my mother. Oh, God, my mother. Oh God. She’s alive.”

  “You let me stay here, let me emerge when Pema arrives, draw his attention. He’ll be stunned, debilitated. It’ll be child’s play for you to kill him, then.”

  Phoenix was quiet now, cowed, confused, furious. He glowered up through his brow at her. A long moment passed. “Fine. Deal.”

  “You’ll kill Rai and find Benjamin?”

  “I’ll-“

  “Remember, if you don’t, your mother finds out who you are. Where you are.” Maldonado was leaning over him now. “If anything happens to me, if I’m indisposed for even a day, the email goes out. I have a deadman’s switch gating it, a password I need to enter to prevent the information being released. You understand? I die, or you don’t fulfill your promise, and Eleanor knows everything.”

  “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fine.”

  “Thank you. It’s been a pleasure doing business.”

  Simon watched appreciatively as Maldonado walked past, disappearing back into the depths of the tunnels. An uncommon feeling stirred in him, one he hadn’t felt toward another human being since before Father had grown so discouraged by his progress: admiration.

  If there’s anyone in the world with real G, real intellectual gifts, Simon thought. It’s that woman.

  Then: how do I get there myself?