Maldonado paced the length of the suite, phone held primly to her ear with an outstretched finger. Benny noticed that her cuticles looked chewed. This upset him. Up until yesterday, he’d never seen the woman with so much as a hair out of place. Today, though, her suit was ever so slightly rumpled, the skin around her lips and eyes just a shade redder than usual.

  “-give it an 80, 85% chance, yes.” Maldonado’s voice was clipped, rapid. Every few seconds, her eyes darted out toward the suite’s tall windows, to the line of ruined buildings beyond, culminating in the shattered shell of the stadium. “Things escalated so fast, and every indicator points toward the DoD getting even antsier than they normally are. Two mass casualty events in a week, each racking up, lowball, hundreds of millions in damages. Footage of Qiang and Victor loose on the internet, hundreds, thousands of individual accounts. All attempts at information quarantine are useless at this point, and the physical threat’s only ramping up. It’s a major metropolitan area and it’s being razed under their noses, and they know they can’t do anything. That kind of impotence drives action, and they only have one action they could take that could even theoretically slow things down.”

  Silence as Maldonado digested what was being said on the other line. Benny didn’t have a Sensitive’s sharp hearing, but he could still make out the frigidity, the harshness in the voice coming through the line, muffled as it was by Maldonado’s head. Rai was pissed.

  “You could. You could. Maybe. It’s an open question,” Maldonado said, brushing whatever Rai had suggested aside. “They’ll try again, of course- Well- I mean- Sure. No. No, the system’s stuffed with redundancies, you could kill them all and I’m sure some sort of dead hand switch would trigger. Whatever they use would doubtless be too large for you to catch, so you’d have to destroy it midair, which would almost definitely mean detonation. And- Sure. No, I know, I said I thought you could. I still do. But it’s not a certainty, we just don’t have the data… If I had to put a number on it, I’d say close to 90% chance you’d live, 60% chance you’d bounce right back uninjured. Still decent odds the sheer radiation dosage would slow you down.”

  More uneasy quiet as Rai talked. Benny didn’t like the new silence. The hotel’s power was gone, its rooms and hallways vacant of, as far as he could tell, all the staff and residents but them. Outside, dusk was falling over the city, and only a sorry smattering of lights had turned on to meet it. The city’s grid was devastated. A highway snaked through the middle of their view, clogged with long-abandoned cars.

  “Most are gone, yes,” Maldonado said. Rai’s voice buzzed, and she paused for a second, scratching idly at her chin. That made Benny’s stomach squirm again. The woman he’d come to know over the last few weeks had never been the kind to do anything idly. “I’d ballpark it at 150, 160k still in the city. Half that in the immediate blast radius if they go for an airburst, which they will. Triple that in the immediately fatal irradiation zone. Ten to fifty times that in the fallout range depending on weather.”

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  Another pause.

  “No, they would. They’d do it if there were five million here. They’d do it if there were three hundred million here. The casualties aren’t their concern. The power is.” Maldonado chewed her lip, leaving her lipstick a little smudged. “They’ve seen irrefutable evidence that their hegemony is at stake, and they’re flailing. A nuclear strike, they’d dress it up as preventative, but really it’s retributive.”

  One of Maldonado’s many tablets, stashed on her desk, buzzed. She glanced at whatever report had finished downloading, eyes absorbing an incomprehensibly dense string of data in an instant as she scrolled through it, then levelled her still-formidable focus back to her phone. “I’m upping my prediction to 95% odds. They’re firing. Tonight, tomorrow morning at the latest.”

  Rai audibly cursed on the other line, let loose with a hissed string of some invective. Had Benny not spent the last three days poring over recovered CCTV footage of Victor’s fight and death, not seen his good friend’s head cratered in from three angles, not watched as the children he’d known for so many years crushed like errant flies by a distracted Demigod, he imagined he’d be more perturbed about all the nuke talk. But all he could muster was a stifling numbness, punctuated by bouts of unease mostly centered around Maldonado.

  She’d changed immensely since yesterday. Since Yelena had arrived at the suite and pulled the woman into a room for a private conversation. A conversation that Maldonado had emerged from visibly paler.

  “We don’t need to follow her anymore,” she’d said to Benny later. She’d spent nearly two hours sitting stock-still on the suite’s sofa after the meeting, face blank, eyes darting, the gears in her brain almost audibly hissing with strain as she tried mightily to collate some impossible data point. Benny had never seen her struggle to think about anything before. “No more secrets to uncover with her. She just- She just gave it to us. Dumped it in our lap.”

  “What is it?” Benny had found himself brave enough to ask. “How does she- God, I dunno. Do what she’s doing? Why is she doing it?”

  Maldonado had smiled at him. Not one of her practiced, flawless impressions of a smile, but something a little more askew. “The answer to both of those questions is the same thing. It’s simpler than we thought. And, Benny, I mean this when I say it: you don’t want to know.”

  Normally he’d have protested, but something in the weird cant of her mouth, the ghost of something like a thrill to her voice, convinced him that she was probably right.

  “You’ll do what you think is right, I’m sure. I can send you some details about the delivery methods they’re likeliest to use, the missile size and speed, the payload, all that, if it helps. But know that you’re putting yourself at statistically significant risk if you try.”

  Rai uttered something quick and final, and Maldonado hung up. She stood still for a moment, faintly silhouetted by the dimming gray light outside the window, then turned toward Benny, her composure almost completely restored.

  “Well, we wrote contingencies for a reason.” She scooped up her tablet, began pulling something else up. “Call up Dyantyi for me, please, so we can tell him to round up the troops. We need to get underground, fast.”