Dyantyi considered himself a hardened man. Hard to shake. He'd seen violence, been embroiled in it as a matter of lifestyle, since well before his adulthood, and had become far more inured to bloodshed than the vast majority of people could even dream it was possible to be.

  And he was shaken to his core. The sounds of Maldonado and Rai's conversation, fast and clipped and intent, droned in his ears, muffled by the rush of his own blood.

  He'd received the call urging him to collect his men and flee underground only an hour and a half ago, and in the brief interim since he'd picked up the phone the world had died around him.

  In the time since, he'd born witness to what eight nuclear warheads could do to a major city. He'd seen, just before ducking into the freight elevator leading to their makeshift command room in the vaults beneath the University of Minnesota, the ghoulish white light of their detonation color the sky. He'd watched as the skyline was rent, the face of the city pushed over effortlessly by the shockwave.

  When he had made a brief sortie back to the surface, to usher in the last of his men, he'd smelled the searing odor of the ruined landscape, a cocktail of windborne ash, electrical fire, melted rubber, and seared flesh.

  He'd heard the distant chorus of screams and moans emanating from the city around him, before he'd collected those few, doubtless radiation-poisoned, soldiers and retreated back underground.

  And how he was seated around yet another table with his employers, having yet another strategy meeting, as if nothing had changed but their surroundings: no longer were they holding court in the upscale comfort of the penthouse. The archives were carved out of sandstone, tall-ceilinged and undecorated. The room they were in was choked along each wall with crates of old books. The air was stale. Blissfully uncontaminated with radiation, yes, but dry and stagnant.

  Dyantyi noticed, absently, that his nose was bleeding. He couldn't even muster up the presence of mind to worry about whether that was from contamination or just the archive's fetid air.

  "-useful to delineate our current threats, and to come up with priorities now," Maldonado chattered. She was talking quicker than usual, her luxurious corporate model's voice tinged fraying at the edges just a bit. Dyantyi wasn't sure if anyone else noticed, but he had an ear for those things. Benny, the lackey with the misfortune to have been dragged into this cataclysm, sat mutely at her side, looking even more dissociated than Dyantyi felt.

  "Sure. Sure. Right. Might as well make a hit list," Rai said. Dyantyi had never seen the woman look so tired. Her eyes were sunken, the skin around her face slack. Her attention was fixed on some point in the middle distance, her gaze going right through the table before her.

  Maldonado nodded, a hair too quickly, and began reading off some file on her tablet. "You've successfully shocked the few remaining risk vectors from the military or private enterprise into submission, and between that and the overall global chaos expected to stem from the detonations tying their hands, I think we both agree that the odds of standard human intervention at this point remain near zero."

  Rai grunted, still far away. Her hands picked at the table before her, gouging little furrows into the metal. Every once in a while Dyantyi would spy a blister open on her skin and begin weeping fluid, before the woman's miraculous healing would kick in and smooth the lesion over. Even if he hadn't been in the throes of shellshock he would've known better than to ask about that. "Right. Uncle Sam's ejected from the game."

  "Which leaves Sensitives and Sensitives alone as our remaining obstacles." Maldonado cleared her throat and straightened the hem of her astonishingly still-spotless pencil skirt. Apparently it would take more than a few nukes to rob the woman of her infuriating need to playact at perfect competence at all times. "Most of the local mid- to low-level Field Manipulators were eliminated in the blast, but unfortunately essentially all of the power players remain. In no particular order of risk, rogue elements sufficiently powerful to interfere still include: Phoenix Above, whereabouts unknown but presumed local. Hannah Zhao, or the Saint Louis Stalker, whereabouts unknown but, doubtless, wherever Phoenix is, she'll arrive sooner or later. Pema, last name unknown, last seen on the move in Woodbury. Henry Fitzhenry, last seen holed up in downtown Minneapolis. Yelena Kovalenko, last seen-"

  Maldonado shot an expectant glance over to Benny, who took a moment to shake himself out of his fugue. "Shit, uh. She's still holed up in that house. House up in, uh, Apple Valley. Last I saw of her at least."

  Maldonado continued on. "Qiang Gao, last seen hurtling out of orbit, location unknown but, for now, provisionally considered out of the running. Madison Cooper, last seen returning from low-earth orbit somewhere over Tanzania. She's probably just outside Dar Es Salaam for now; we'll be better able to track her if she takes off flying again."

  Dyantyi shook just enough of the fog from his brain to clear his throat. "Madison Cooper? I don't know that one."

  "Sixteen year-old girl, one of the recently-awakened who your men failed to neutralize."

  "What was she doing in space?"

  "She can fly."

  Dyantyi felt a spike of resentment at Maldonado's placid, matter-of-fact mask. She was flaunting her superior intel, here, and she knew it. "I gathered that. Why was she flying into space?"

  "To neutralize Qiang."

  Dyantyi blinked. "Neutralize- neutralize the Demigod. I thought you said she was recently awakened?"

  "She was. She was one of the lower-level Field Manipulators in Victor's care, and the only survivor after he was ambushed by Qiang." Benny winced as Maldonado said this. "She somehow managed to absorb Victor's essence before Qiang–we're not quite sure how but I theorize that it was due to a knock-on effect of how his Knack interacts with consent–and used the windfall of energy to propel herself and Qiang, based on her velocity, some several thousand miles out into space."

  Diyantyi, despite himself, felt his eyebrows raise. "Oh. So he's really out of the picture."

  "That's what I said," Maldonado quipped. "Continuing on, two other recently-awakened, Simon Lindberg and Ali Martin, remain at large. Their current offensive potentials and aggression profiles wouldn't be normally make them cause for alarm, but the recently-awakened are decidedly anomalous, and both have demonstrated monstrous growth in their abilities at a rapid pace."

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  "Well, if that's all, our work's cut out for us," Rai began. "If we start-"

  "Well," Maldonado said, "there's also the Mayan."

  "Fuck, right." Rai wiped at her face with her hand, pinched the bridge of her nose. "The Mayan."

  Dyantyi braced himself to be patronized by Maldonado again. "Who's the Mayan?"

  Maldonado shot Rai a polite glance, and Rai waved her off. "Go ahead. No use keeping her secret now."

  Maldonado nodded. "An inestimably powerful, eight-hundred-year-old Demigod from Central America. She had been considered completely dormant before suddenly waking and single-handedly laying waste to Singapore earlier this year."

  "Singapore? I thought that was a meteor impact."

  "Most uninformed people still do."

  Dyantyi bristled. "This 'Mayan,' where is she now? What's she capable of?"

  "The upper limits of her power are unexplored, but she seems to have a Knack that interacts strangely with gravity. The finer points of how that works elude me as of now. Her whereabouts are unknown. "

  "Hm. Sounds pretty uninformed to me."

  Rai groaned. "Let's forget the fucking Mayan for now. She's a ticking clock in the background. Maybe she shows up, maybe she doesn't, but there's nothing I can do about her yet. I was pretty much deadlocked when the other Demis and I fought earlier. Killing and absorbing a score of low-levels didn't do shit to close that gap. What I need is a big enough single score to put me a head above the rest, and then I can go about mopping this mess up."

  "I mean, Phoenix is the obvious choice," Dyantyi said. "He's got the most potential to snowball, he's the most malignant, he's the biggest wrench in the machinery, and unless he figured out your healing trick, he's currently jiggling the handle on death's door. Should be an easy hit job for you, once we find him."

  "Absolutely not," Maldonado interjected. Dyantyi turned to gape at her, almost shocked that she'd let her disdain for him interfere with such an obviously ideal strategy. "His Knack is too much of a risk. We don't know for sure if he'd be able to subjugate you, Ms. Rai, but if he managed to it'd essentially hand global hegemony over to an omnicidal narcissist in a single moment. It's not an acceptable risk."

  "The fuck do you mean, risk?" Dyantyi looked from Maldonado to Rai, who still had her eyes closed in an expression of abject fatigue. "He's stronger now, sure, but he's new to this, completely inexperienced in combat with anyone approaching his level. He almost got offed by the Stalker, who, herself, is a small fish at best. Rai could flatten him from a mile away."

  "She'd need to close the distance to absorb his essence. Normally I'd say that's no issue, but as we saw with Victor, Knacks can seemingly still trigger following death, which changes the risk calculus."

  "He'd have to reach her body through her Field, which, unless he grows a twenty-foot-long arm in the next day, we all know he can't do."

  "His capabilities have evolved following his recent spike in strength. It's not inconceivable that he could manage to trigger his Knack through contact with the border of her Field alone-"

  "You're just making shit up now." Dyantyi stood up. He was jumping out of his skin, his earlier dissociation metastasizing into nervous, furious energy. The world was ending and this fucking department store mannequin was still playing games.

  Maldonado ignored him. "Personally, I'd advocate for making a jaunt over to Tanzania and claiming Madison. The strategy she used against Qiang wouldn't work against you, and she has Victor's essence stacked atop her own now. He was already slightly more powerful than Phoenix is now when he passed, anyway. It's a bigger payload for less effort."

  "That's a sixteen year old kid. She fled the playing field. She's alone, clueless, probably scared as hell. She's not a top threat."

  "You didn't have compunctions about killing minors before," Maldonado snipped. "Not that that helped you finish the job when it was assigned to you."

  "You're doing this again," he snarled. He jerked his head toward Rai. "She's doing it again."

  "What, exactly, is she doing, Mister Dyantyi?" Rai said, voice cool.

  "She steered us wrong once already, set us on that useless fucking goose chase, going after the new Manipulators, when we really should have been focusing fire on Phoenix. Now all the small players are dead anyway, you aren't any stronger, and he's more of a problem than ever. She's-" Dyantyi groped at the air toward Maldonado, where she stood poised and unphased, watching him. "I don't know if she's covering for Phoenix, or if she has some other, bigger plan she's working on, but she's clearly no longer operating in good faith."

  "Maldonado has been indispensably useful to me throughout this operation," Rai intoned.

  "Is she? She didn't give you the edge when you fought the Demis downtown. She didn't stop Qiang from levelling half the city. And let's not forget that, despite ostensibly knowing all there is to know about everything that she got caught fucking asleep at the wheel about the nukes. It's her fault that the entire city is-"

  Rai whipped one fist out, and the room quaked, thunder booming in Dyantyi's ears. Behind him, a crater the size of a garden shed yawned in the sandstone of the wall.

  "It's my fault that the nukes hit the city. Mine," Rai snarled. "It's because of Maldonado that I was able to stop the few that I did. You, meanwhile, have failed me at every turn."

  "Failed you?!" Dyantyi's gravel voice cracked. He wanted to laugh. "Failed you?! My men and I have been running ourselves ragged knocking up kill after kill after kill. We've bagged dozens of Apostles, sent Phoenix and his men running and scared since the moment this war broke out. We gave you total ground superiority and you threw it away to-"

  "Out." Rai said.

  "What?"

  "Get out of here. You're relieved."

  Dyantyi took a moment to process this. "I can't go to the surface-"

  "Not to the surface. You and your men are welcome to remain underground. But I will no longer be availing myself of your services. You're let go."

  Dyantyi felt a cool rage simmer in his chest, settle into something like relief. "Fine. Fine. This is fucking insanity anyway."

  He moved to exit the room, suddenly conscious of Benny's eyes on him. The scruffy, stout man's face was alive with thought, as if barely concealing some minor epiphany.

  Then he caught a glimpse of the smug expression on Maldonado's face, and his anger welled in him once more.

  "She's cracking, Rai. She's falling apart at the seams. If I can see it, I'm sure you can too, so I'd suggest you stop lying to yourself."

  "Dyantyi. It is only out of my respect for your previous contributions to my efforts that I'm not physically removing you from the room right now. Stop trying my patience."

  "Ever since that walking corpse woman she's obsessed with came and talked to her, she's been off." Dyantyi saw something shift in Maldonado's near-perfect facade at that, and he exulted a little inside, knowing now that he'd hit on something real. "What did she say to you, huh? When you had your little off-the-books meeting with the enemy? What did she show you that scared you so bad?"

  "Meeting?" Rai said, one brow cocked as she studied Maldonado.

  "We had a brief interaction. Only natural, considering how closely I've followed her lately." Maldonado regained her composure. "I can assure you, she said nothing of any real coherence."

  "Lying, lying lying lying, always the lying with her." Dyantyi saw Rai tense, and he stepped toward the exit. "Rai. Before I go, I need to say: I still believe in you. I want you to come out on top here. None of these other freaks are fit to take the wheel. But if you insist on having this obvious snake guiding your every move, you're going to end up dead, and the world's going to burn more than it already is."

  And with that, Dyantyi stormed out of the room.