Pietro stared up at the night sky, bemused by the warning that had just boomed from it, the woman's voice urging him to find cover. Cover from what?

  The term "nuclear warhead" scratched something in the back of his mind. He understood, foggily, that it was synonymous with danger, with widespread destruction, but he couldn't picture what the term actually heralded. A war head. What was that? He didn't know how to get underground, the house he'd been sharing with Yelena, the house he found himself inexplicably, willingly continuing to return to, didn't have a basement. Would his powers protect him?

  He shifted to turn back inside, to find something sturdy to hide under, when a cold hand clamped onto his shoulder and held him in place. Yelena had materialized behind him, emerged from the dark soundlessly in a way that still very much put Pietro ill at ease.

  "No need to hide, child. This is something I'd like for you to see."

  She pointed, guided his gaze back up into the unassuming black of the sky above.

  "What's a warhead?" Pietro asked. "I feel like- I feel like it's something I know, but I don't."

  "It is the weaponization of the purest form of true power, the closest imitation that mortal man has ever made of true oblivion. It's not a fraction as pure as what actually awaits beyond death of course, not nearly so awesome as that, but it's just near enough that I expect to feel a little homesick watching it." Yelena had sidled next to him now, smiled down at him. "Come. Let's watch the fireworks together."

  He only had to wait a moment.

  And then a sickening white light bloomed in the sky.

  *  *  *

  Fitz digested what the flying Demigod woman had said, nodded thoughtfully to himself.

  That woman, Rai, she had been easily among the most formidable Consecrated he had ever seen. The size of her Shroud alone had been enough to stoke some very rare awe in him.

  And yet her voice just now, loud as it was, had been clearly laced with fear.

  A nuclear warhead?

  Matthieu had said something about those, had intimated that this latest breed of man had devised weapons to rival their own strength.

  Now, as then, Fitz doubted it.

  He clambered off of the barstool he'd been perched on, within the ruins of what he'd assumed to be yet another of the queerly standardized taverns dotting the city, and wandered outside.

  He absently tugged on a few straps, tightening his armor, and rested his hand on the pommel of his sword while he stood, craning to look up at the sky, waiting.

  After a few seconds, he felt a sudden pang of actual, chest-tightening panic. A nameless fear gripped him, shuddered through his nerves, as a voice, one eerily like Matthieu's own, screamed within his head for him to abandon his foolish hubris and run inside.

  Then, as quickly as it had come, the impression left, and Fitz chuckled. He shifted his weight from one sabaton to the other. Whatever this was, he knew it would never be able to hurt him.

  He just wanted to see. He wondered how much longer this would take, half hoped that this Rai woman hadn't actually managed to stop the weapon's arrival.

  And then a sickening white light bloomed in the sky.

  *  *  *

  "It's okay. It's okay, we'll try again later."

  Peter placed the half-full cup of water on the ground beside where he sat, wiping the hem of his shirt where some of its contents had splashed.

  Shiv thrashed at him, bit mindlessly in the air, flecks of foam gathering at the corner of her lips. She buckled and pulled against her restraints: a series of chains locking her body in place, wrapped around a loose metal door, almost like a stretcher. She'd managed to swallow some of the water, at least.

  Peter felt recognition bucking against the walls of his mind, stronger with every passing moment that he looked at this woman's face. He knew her. He knew her. He definitely knew her. ("-be just fine, I promise, I'm gonna- I found a man, Pete, and he's got powers, and he can use those to fix you up. We'll all be okay).

  The feeling was agonizing and promising at once, the pain of a splinter loosening before coming free.

  The front door of the abandoned home they'd claimed burst open, and Sylvia hurried inside.

  "We need to go. NOW. Down, into the basement."

  "Is this about the voice?" Peter asked. "From outside?"

  "Fucking, uh, yes, Peter. Do you want to get nuked?"

  "Is that what she was talking about?" Peter paled. He knew what a nuke was. He wasn't quite sure how that had stuck in his brain, but it had. He watched, still stunned, as Sylvia hoisted Shiv from the ground, door, chains, and all. "Will going downstairs be enough?"

  "I really hope so, man. Come on."

  Peter rallied, chased behind her. He turned to close the door behind him, and caught one last glimpse of the placid night outside, framed by a shattered window in the empty home's parlor.

  And then a sickening white light bloomed in the sky.

  *  *  *

  The tunnel was clogged with mindless drones, dozens of men and women standing with their faces slack and arms at their sides. Simon doused the flames on his head and sidled past them, edging through the mass until he reached a clearing.

  There, lit by a handful of requisitioned work lights, Phoenix sat slumped and pale. Three of the drones were crouched near him, mopping up the blood still oozing from his ruined arm, re-applying the bandages around his chest.

  Phoenix's eyes swiveled to Simon as he entered. "Was I right? She was here, wasn't she?"

  Simon nodded. "Found her at the mouth of one of the tunnels. She knows you're in here."

  "You killed her, yes?"

  He felt a pang of petulance at the question. Of course he hadn't killed her. To expect that of him, so new to this, was so gross an overestimation as to be actively dismissive of just how talented Simon was. "I scared her off, but she was too fast for me. She lost me in the tunnels. But I acted as if I was trying to prevent her from going Northward, and I think she took my bait. We have time, for now."

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  "Fah," Phoenix spit. "She'll pay for this."

  "So you keep saying."

  Phoenix's gaze rested on Simon a moment, a fire burning behind his eyes. "These injuries are a humiliation. I need them gone."

  "As far as I can tell, nearly all of the doctors in the cities are gone, now. You'd have to go elsewhere."

  "Impossible. No, there is another way." Phoenix wriggled, repositioning himself against the wall. "The Demigods, they remain. They- They can heal themselves."

  Simon's brow furrowed. That didn't align with any of the base principles of how Fields were supposed to work. "How is that remotely possible?"

  Phoenix cracked his grandfatherly smile, but the effect was ruined somewhat by the sweaty pallor of his face. "They're a mysterious bunch, them. I suspect it has something to do with their ability to summon energy seemingly out of nowhere."

  Simon nodded. He'd watched and digested as much footage as he'd been able to find of Qiang's rampage, and of the four Demigods' fight downtown. "I just assumed they'd collected their energy earlier, and that their retention was just very efficient, and their Fields outfitted with better storage capacity than ours."

  "No," Phoenix said, almost rueful. "No, they pull it from nowhere. One second they're a dead bulb, the next they're a blazing fire. It defies explanation. Almost-" he coughed, wetly, jostling the mindless man busy re-applying his bandages. "Almost as much as their ability to regrow their very flesh. Simon. Simon, come here."

  Warily, Simon approached.

  "You're a very perceptive boy, you know," Phoenix said, with a solemn nod. Simon quashed the impulse to feel a thrill of pride at that. "You understand much just by seeing. If you could go-"

  Phoenix reached out for Simon's wrist at this, and the boy took a step back, whipped both of his hands behind his back.

  "No touching," Simon said. "Remember my terms."

  Phoenix's smile took on a darker tinge. "Like I said, very perceptive. If you got eyes on a Demigod in his environment, if you watched them do what they do, I have a feeling that you'd be able to help me uncover the mechanism with which they're healing. I have a good sense for people, a great sense for them. I believe you to be capable of this."

  Simon nodded, lost in thought. "How am I supposed to find them?"

  "Oh, you'll sense them. When they're active, they burn like beacons. Plus," Phoenix added, "they have a tendency to knock buildings over. No, you find them, watch them. If you come back to me with anything, anything that helps me begin to reverse the damage that witch did to me, then your reward will be beyond measure."

  Simon knew better than to get his hopes up at the prospect of this "reward." But his curiosity had been piqued. "I'll go now."

  He threaded his way out through the crowd of zombies and hurried off. He turned some stored electricity into a jet of heat behind him, laundered that into kinetics, ended up with far more force than Newton would ever have allowed, and bolted off through the tunnels. He'd spent the last week getting his head around his knack for making more heat than he should reasonably be able to, coming up with uses for this loophole, and was satisfied to find that his progress put him well above the capabilities of most of the other Sensitives he'd seen.

  Maybe, sometime soon, even Phoenix.

  First, to find a Demigod.

  He was maybe a quarter-mile away from the distant opening of the tunnel now, could barely make out the stars outside, framed by its mouth.

  And then a sickening white light bloomed in the sky.

  *  *  *

  Gloria had been peeking into a flight cage, watching the cardinal bounding around inside, when the voice had boomed its warning down from the sky.

  The building to her back was dimly-lit, but the lights inside were on. There were still people, here, taking care of the animals. A skeleton crew, just two haggard-looking younger women and a single veterinarian, hustling around to tend to a greatly diminished stock of still-injured animals. The sight had warmed her, somewhat, had made her regain some much-needed trust in humanity following the massacre she'd seen at the refugee center.

  The massacre she'd participated in. She clenched her hands around the phantom sensation of the chunk of rebar she'd wielded. Evil maniac or not, she had stabbed someone. Gloria didn't know how to feel about that.

  She turned to wander back inside. She was still invisible, and she figured she'd just wander down to the lower level to take shelter, unseen. But when she turned to re-enter, she found the door to the building had automatically locked behind her.

  There was no keypad on this door, nothing to enter her volunteer's access code. She would need to hurry down and run around the building to re-enter.

  She turned to do this, tensing to run, and barreled directly into Pema.

  "Whoa! Pardon me!" he said, smiling.

  "Pema?!" Gloria looked over her shoulder, checked that nobody was nearby to hear her. She dropped her power, became visible again.

  "I thought I'd find you here," he said, catching her.

  "Where have you been?!"

  "My apologies, Gloria, really. I was caught up in other things."

  "The- The attack. On the refugee center." Gloria felt her voice strain with emotion here. She was traumatized, she was faintly aware, a fact she held in her brain with the loose detachment of a bored therapist making a diagnosis. "Did you hear about it?"

  Pema nodded solemnly. "Awful, truly. I had taken my eye off of Phoenix, had been focusing more on the other Demigods. I understand now that that had been a mistake."

  "Would you have been able to stop it, if you'd been there?"

  "Probably." Pema looked a little wilted as he admitted that. "I'm becoming more and more convinced that I should make a greater effort to intervene here. Things are escalating far quicker than I think anyone had anticipated. Speaking of which, there is in fact a nuclear bomb, or a series of them, inbound right now."

  "I know, I heard the-" Gloria gasped, turned to the cage of birds behind her.

  "No, they'll be fine," Pema said, intercepting her line of thought. He pulled her closer to the bird cage, unlatched the door, let them both in. The three cardinals in the cage beeped and chirrupped and caromed off the walls at their intrusion. Pema widened his Qi, strained to wrap it around the upper half of the cage. "I'll be able to keep us safe here."

  "The people inside-"

  "Have gone downstairs. At this distance from the epicenter, it should be sufficient to keep them alive."

  Gloria swallowed, hard, her hands trembling. She stared at the cardinal nearest her and felt a silly impulse, the same one that had driven her to wander here in the middle of the night, flash across her mind.

  Pema must have felt it too, because he smiled. "Yes, that's the same one. And yes, it does remember you."

  Gloria felt a moment of relief, then stiffened. "Are you telling me that because it's the truth, or because you looked into my brain and realized that saying it would calm me down?"

  Pema smiled sadly at her. "I'm just trying to help."

  And then a sickening white light bloomed in the sky.

  *  *  *

  "Listen, kid, we need to go, now," Marco urged, shaking Ali by the shoulders. Ali shrugged him off, continued sifting through the rubble field that, up until recently, had been Ben's house. He'd returned just that day, the first thing he'd done after finally waking up from his stupor and climbing out of the almost comatose state of shock he'd been left in by Jenny's death. He'd discovered that Ben's house, which had been located close to the Target Center, had been flattened by some other angry Demigod's fighting, and rushed over despite Marco's protestations that he was wasting his time, desperate to find his friend's body.

  "Your buddy, he's not here. There's no sign of him, no blood or anything. He probably high-tailed it out of the cities once things started heating up, like most of the smarter people around here."

  "I need to be sure," Ali deadpanned. With a grunt, he overturned a toppled support beam and began sifting through chunks of shattered plasterboard.

  "Did you not hear the big fuck-off voice in the sky tell us we're in Ground Zero right now? Take a, take a five minute break so you don't fucking fry."

  Ali let the tears well up and out, onto his slack cheeks. "I don't care."

  "Now is not the time for this bullshit. Jenny, that wasn't your fault, she was dead anyway, she was-"

  Marco had reached out to grab Ali again, and the boy shrugged him off with an almost thoughtless wave of kinetic energy, strong enough to send Marco reeling backward.

  "I'm not stopping," Ali insisted, tearful face turned down toward his work.

  Marco hesitated, eyes flicking from the boy to the parking garage down the street, still standing, doubtless with ample underground room. He shifted to flee, then seemed to harden.

  He sprang forward, moved to physically lift the boy from the ground, and got tossed again, harder, sent skittering across the ground.

  "Go!" Ali yelled. "Leave. Me. Alone!"

  Marco shot another anxious glance heavenward. "No, kid, no, I can't just let you off yourself because you're going through Baby's First Survivor's Guilt. It's wartime, now, accidents happen. You can have all the time you want to sulk later, but right now we have to HIDE, because a god damn actual nuclear bomb might be here any-"

  And then a sickening white light bloomed in the sky.