Ida jolted awake from her dreamless sleep. She rolled her cottonball tongue across the cracks in her lips and tried to blink the film from her eyes. The blocky figure standing before her seemed to fill most of the narrow doorway.

  “Up, Manipulator. You’ll want to be awake for this.”

  Ida swallowed, throat spasming in protest. She shook her shoulders, all feeling in her arms banished by the weight of her shackles. “What? What’s happening?”

  The blocky figure - Agent Steiner, she knew, now that she could make out his face, nodded to someone in the hallway, and stepped to clear the way as a pair of masked men in fatigues wheeled in what looked like a stainless steel gurney draped in a bulky sheet.

  The gurney came to a halt beside her, the two soldiers careful to keep as much distance from Ida as they could manage. One pulled away the sheet, and it took Ida a few moments to decipher what it was she was looking at.

  A young woman, maybe in her early twenties, lay motionless on the steel surface. She was tan, not quite as dark as Ida, but still obviously pallid and sickly. Her head was shaved, her arms and legs, swamped by an oversized jumpsuit, were shackled to the gurney, and her eyes were obscurbed by what looked like a fully opaque set of goggles strapped firmly around her head. All around her, electrodes and wires sprouted from her skin and ran in loose tangles to a buzzing mass just below the table’s surface. Ida straightened fractionally at that: it was the first time she’d felt electricity with her Field in what had to have been days.

  “Go ahead and drain that energy, if you’d like,” Steiner graveled, pre-empting her. “But it’s not nearly enough for you to do anay damage with, and you’d be killing this girl in the process.”

  “She’s already dead,” Ida muttered, throat still too raw to vocalize much louder than a breath. The body stretched out before her was cold, devoid of any heat, synapses devoid of the usual whisper-hum of electrical energy.

  “Once again, you demonstrate how little you understand.” Steiner held a little featureless remote in between two blunt fingers and pressed a button. The wires wreathing the dead woman crackled to life, and the body on the gurney thrashed, seizing violently.

  A low moan escaped the woman’s mouth, and Ida, despite herself, lurched away from her in surprise. The woman’s hands were claws, now, grasping and jabbing in the air, the thin tendons in her exposed wrists bulging. Her knees bent against her restraints, her hips lifted inches above the cool steel as she folded backward, writhing under the current.

  Then the shock stopped, and the woman settled. She mouthed something, breathed a few words inaudible even to Ida, and then, suddenly, died.

  Ida had sensed death before, had seen the process at finer detail than nearly any human had the capacity to. She knew the usual rhythm, the surprising lethargy of the process, how different subsystems of the body held stubbornly on while others collapsed. This was different. A minute ago, every cell in that woman’s body had been stone-dead. Seconds ago, they had been alive with life, hot and active and thrashing in agony. Now, they were stone-dead again. As if she’d never been revived at all.

  “What-” Ida coughed. “Who is this? What did you do to her?”

  “She’s your new roommate.” Steiner was still holding the remote, fidgeting it with his thumb. “Would a nuclear bomb kill a Demigod?”

  Ida blinked, thrown. “What? The fuck is this? I don’t understand what’s going-”

  Steiner grunted and activated the remote again. The woman was back, heart and nerves and brain and organs suddenly afire with biotic vigor, screaming her soundless scream as she threw her body against her restraints. She writhed for five, ten seconds, and then, with the finality of a flipped switch, dropped dead all at once.

  Ida felt a wave of nausea. Every part of her wanted to be away from this woman, from whatever machine they had incorporated into her body. With a mightier force of effort than she’d have expected, snuffed out the urge to shut her eyes and flinch away. She leveled her gaze back toward Steiner.

  “Would a nuclear weapon, if detonated above Minneapolis, kill the four Demigods still at large within the city?”

  “Four?” Ida said. “What happened to the fifth?”

  Steiner continued as if she hadn’t spoken, his whole body completely impassive except for his right hand, still worrying at the remote. “Would a nuclear weapon-”

  “I hope, for all our sakes, that the fifth left and didn’t die.”

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  “-if detonated above Minneapolis-”

  “If someone’s managed to absorb a Demigod, it’s over. It’s already done, there’s nothing-”

  “-kill the remaining demigods?”

  “-you can do anymore. The power balance is tipped, now, and whoever’s pulled ahead is either going to snowball into a God whose mercy we’ll all have to live at, or, probably, the rest are going to blow the fucking planet up trying to take them down.”

  Steiner watched her for a few moments, expectant.

  “Sorry, what, you want my answer to your inane fucking nuke question?” Ida shook her head. “I’ll tell you the same thing I keep telling you: I don’t know. I don’t know, but probably not. Either way it’s a hilariously stupid, ghoulish, evil idea, even for you.”

  Steiner’s face remained blank. He paused, unmoving, staring a hole through Ida’s head, for another ten seconds, then pressed his button again.

  The woman was back to life, pulling against her restraints. With an awful, wrenching jerk she jarred her whole body up and away, against her leftmost restraints, bending her arms and torso at an inhuman angle. Then she collapsed.

  Blood welled from a fresh gash along the woman’s right wrist, where she’d pulled it against the restraints. The dull tattoo of droplets of blood hitting the ground broke the otherwise total silence. Ida tasted bile in the back of her throat.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening. Who is this? What are you doing to her?”

  Steiner shifted his cool gaze to the woman. “She’s a puzzle that I have high hopes that you’ll be able to help us crack, and she’ll be staying in your quarters from now on. You can call her Lisa.”

  “Stay? What do you mean stay? She’s a corpse.”

  Steiner nodded, as if considering Ida’s words, then looked back to her. “Would a nuclear weapon, if detonated above Minneapolis-”

  “I already told you!” Ida rasped, a wave of panic buoying her voice up as near to a scream as she could go. “I. Don’t. Know-”

  The button again. "Lisa" was up and thrashing, tongue darting out between bared teeth, eyes bouncing in their sockets, scanning the room at a frantic pace. Ida watched as the fresh wound on the woman's wrist sealed itself shut, turning pink and then tan and then disappearing, matching the rest of her skin.

  Then she was a corpse again.

  Ida was shaking in her restraints. Her stomach was rioting, now, heaving in vain. They hadn't fed her recently enough for her to vomit much more than a think string of bile.

  Steiner eyed her with a snake's patience. "Would a nuclear bomb-"

  "It wouldn't work, you fucking freak!" Ida lunged, held taut by her chains and vest before she could move much farther than a foot. Steiner didn't blink. "It'd kill a million people. You'd murder most of the midwest and maybe kill a few Sensitives in the crossfire. All of the rookies and some of the stronger ones, maybe. But the Demigods would live, and best case scenario they're hurt but pissed, and worst case scenario they absorb all the energy of a fucking nuclear bomb and become that much stronger. The lingering radiation would probably fuel the survivors, give them more to- No, wait, no no no no-"

  Steiner had already turned his impassive attention to Lisa, was already flipping his switch again. This time the electrodes crackled louder, visibly sparking in a few places where the wires met machinery or skin. The strength of the woman's convulsions threw her bodily up, as if she was levitating, and she was breaking her body against her restraints now, scything the shackles into her flesh. There was a cherry-bomb retort as her collarbone snapped, as her ribs gave way to the force of her writhing.

  Ten seconds passed, twenty. Steiner adjusted a knob on his remote and the woman dropped, limp but alive, electricity still coursing through her but at a lower register.

  The woman's eyes rolled to meet Ida's, and, through what looked like immense effort and behind a thick mental fog, her animal fear coagulated into vague recognition.

  "Talia?" the woman croaked. Ida's heart juddered.

  Steiner pressed a button, and she was dead before Ida could respond, could ask how this woman knew her mother's name.

  That sickening quiet settled back on the room. Steiner let it linger for a few moments, then drew himself back up.

  "Ida," he said. "Would a nuclear bomb, if detonated above Minneapolis, kill the remaining Demigods?"

  Ida watched the blood weep from Lisa's fresh wounds and tried to convince herself that eventually Steiner would give up, would get tired of resurrecting and torturing this woman in front of her.

  Then she glanced at the man's face and, despite her best efforts, that fantasy dissolved. This would keep going until he got the answer he wanted.

  She hung her head.

  "Yes. It would kill them."

  Steiner nodded, satisfied, and stepped to her door. Before he stepped into the hallway, two soldiers already materializing at his flanks to escort him out, he flicked the knob on his remote again, and Lisa returned to life, breathing hard and moaning but, thankfully, not seizing again.

  "You've done your nation a great service today, Ida," Steiner said.

  "You're going to die for this," Ida responded. "You've dug your own grave."

  "Oh, I'm sure. Play nice, you two."

  The door shut with a clang and a pneumatic hiss, and, beside Ida, the corpse named Lisa began to cry.