Ida drifted reluctantly back into consciousness. The eternal fluorescent lighting burned shadows through her eyelids, aggravating the migraine that had set up shop in the front of her skull. She ran a swollen, spongelike tongue across her lips and rose to a sit.

  There was no way to track the passage of days in her chamber, no windows to watch the sun through, but her internal clock's hunch put her at two, maybe three days since the last time a soldier had slid her any rations and water through the door. The remnants of three meager bowel movements sat uncollected in a pan an arm's length from where she was chained.

  Something had happened, something had clearly collapsed for the military on a foundational level, because the base seemed all but abandoned. The heightened awareness of vibration and sound afforded to her by her Field seemed to imply as much: she'd sensed some great clamor shortly after her last meal, and then, for the hours and hours that followed, nothing. No sense of distant footfalls or muffled vocalizations. The lights were still on, but Ida didn't have any idea just how robust the kind of backup generators in a secret Government blacksite would be. If the place ran on nuclear power they could stay on for years.

  She rolled her sore neck, arms and shoulders chafed completely insensate by her tight bindings, and swiveled to look at the sleeping woman on the gurney beside her. "Lisa" had been largely unconscious since she'd been brought down, drifting between fitful bouts of sleep and barely-lucid spates of mumbling and moaning.

  Ida almost flinched back when her gaze was met by a pair of bloodshot, unblinking eyes, half-obscured by the cloudy lenses of goggles.

  "Where are we?" the woman, Ida remembered Agent Steiner referring to her as "Lisa," graveled.

  Ida cleared the debris of days of inactivity from her throat and rasped back to her: "Deep underground somewhere, I think. Super jail. Do you… Are you…"

  "Awake? For now." Lisa coughed wetly. "Alive? Unfortunately."

  "You were dead before."

  "Is that a question?"

  "No, it's…" Ida blinked at her. "You were dead before. How-"

  "You look just like- I'm sorry," Lisa moved to rub at her eyes, made a little grunt of discomfort when she realized her hands were shackled to the gurney. "Do you know who Talia Miller is? Was?"

  Ida frowned as if she'd been asked a particularly nasty trick question. "That was my mom, yeah."

  Lisa's reddened eyes managed to brighten a shade. "Oh, wow. Wow. You're- Wow."

  "You knew her?"

  "You're little Ida, aren't you?"

  "Little?"

  "I only ever saw you once, when you were a kid." Lisa chuckled, shook her head. Her black hair, neglected and unwashed, rasped as she did. "You lived. She figured it out. She actually pulled it off."

  "You knew me when I was sick?"

  "Well, I mean didn't actually pull it off, since you're here, with me, in fucking hell. They clearly sniffed you out eventually. Say, you haven't- How long have you been here? Chained up?"

  "Not sure," Ida said. "A couple weeks?"

  "Oh good. Okay, so you made it to, what, your thirties? That's a great run. That's really a fantastic run. God I didn't think there was anything left to make me happy, but the fact that Talia really did manage to help somebody with all this, it- It recontextualizes things a bit." Those bloodshot eyes were swimming with tears now. "In a good way."

  "Wait, sorry, back up. Who was my mother to you? Why are you talking like you're older than me?"

  "Oh, honey, I'm so much older than you." Lisa looked worse for wear, for obvious reasons, with the kind of brittle, neglected features one would expect of the victim of what seemed to be prolonged capture and torture, but Ida couldn't imagine the woman laying before her could be a day over 28. She was completely unwrinkled, well-built if malnourished, her voice clear and youthful. "I'm at least, oh, God knows. Forty? Honey, what year is it?"

  "2025."

  Lisa blinked, hard, visibly a little rattled by that. She paused, as if processing some private grief. "Oh, Lord, okay. Fifty-six, then."

  "No, you're not- You can't-" Ida's gaze drifted to the wires and electrodes dotting the woman's flesh, remembered the series of violent resurrections she'd been forced to watch this woman endure, and held her tongue. There were things going on here that she didn't have the context to explain. "Who were you to my mom?"

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  Lisa readjusted, groaning softly at some private discomfort. "A colleague. Part of the team of contractors the DHS had cobbled together to do Field Manipulator research. Your mom and I were the only two who made any real progress. She had her own motivation pushing her forward," Lisa dipped her head in Ida's direction, "had her sick kid at home."

  "And you?"

  "I just… I needed to know." Lisa let out a bitter little laugh. "And now I do."

  "Know what, how to make one?"

  Lisa shook her head. "No, that- I mean, clearly, no. I wouldn't be like this if I figured that out. No, I still had maybe a decade of research left to do before I solved that problem. Head of the program disagreed, insisted that we had all we needed, that we'd be moving to human trials. Wouldn't listen to reason. I insisted that I be the guinea pig, partly because I knew it wouldn't work and my guilty ass didn't want some poor political prisoner getting killed for nothing, and partly because a greedy part of me hoped that, if it did work, I'd get all my questions answered at once." She grimaced. One of her restraints had cut into her wrists again, and a thin sliver of blood oozed out from beneath the strap. "I didn't do this to myself, the trigger-happy jingo fucks signing the paychecks did this to me, but I'm not surprised by what happened."

  "This, the, the machine that keeps killing you, it was part of a swing at making the government's own Manipulator?"

  "Making their own Demigod, actually."

  "So they figured out the whole near-death-experience part of the equation at least."

  "Oh, honey, that's been a known quantity for a long time, the first experimental confirmation of that principle, that all Field Manipulators had to briefly die to get their powers, that came during World War 2. They had a whole Manipulator research team working parallel to the Manhattan project, you know. Oppenheimer just outpaced them."

  Ida rested back on the balls of her feet, frowned down at the floor. Her mom had made brief allusions to having worked with scientists before, but hadn't really expounded much about it. "Okay. Wait. So my mom was-"

  "Your mom was the foremost expert on Field Manipulators in general. She was instrumental in fleshing out our understanding of how the Fields work. Energy in / energy out, the semi-psychosymbolic delineation of "types of energy," that you can convert between, Knacks, the death-trigger process, she helped write the US guidebook on all of those things. Really the only major discovery she didn't make was the one I stumbled over, regarding Vital Energy."

  Despite herself, Ida felt a flash of curiosity. "Vital energy?"

  Lisa flashed her pained smile again. "Lord, you really are just like her. Can't help yourself."

  "Vital- like life? Is that how the Demigods-"

  "Heal, yeah. It's how they heal."

  "What the hell is it?"

  Lisa relaxed a fraction, her voice settling into the practiced rhythm of someone delivering information they'd thought through hundreds of times. "It's fundamentally different than the other forms of energy a Manipulator usually controls. Heat, light, kinetic, these things are all predictable forces with behaviors and origins well-explained by basic physics. Vital Energy is different. It's not particularly scientific. I could go into all the ways it bucks that specific label but most people understand it better if I just straight-up call it magic."

  Ida raised her eyebrows, then nodded. "Sure. Okay. I mean, magic is really the only way to explain Fields once you think about them for more than a second."

  "Sure, but Vital Energy is a billion times more woo-woo than your standard Field behavior. I was stuck, making zero progress on understanding it at all, before I gave up and accepted as a viable hypothesis that its source is the human soul."

  Ida blinked. "The human-"

  "I can't confirm it, but in my opinion, yes, the existence and properties of Vital Energy are best explained by the notion that the human soul not only exists but can exert real effects on the physical world. In the same way that electrical energy is created by the movements of electrons, and heat is created by friction between particles, Vital Energy is generated by the convolutions of the soul, and it's crucial for the existence of all complex life. Without it, anything more complicated than a paramecium ceases to be animate." Lisa was talking faster, now, a sheen of sweat forming on her forehead. "As a form of energy, it's somehow intelligent unto itself. The Vital Energy drawn from an individual's soul remembers the shape of the individual's body at the time of its generation, and it can coax raw material back into the precise composition it needs to re-form the cells and tissues that made up that body at any time. Hence how the few Manipulators aware of its existence can use it to heal. All it needs is to be retrieved and unleashed, and it'll do its job. And, conveniently enough, once one knows what it is, an experienced Manipulator can convert any other form of energy into Vital energy, and vice-versa. As a storage medium, it seems the human soul has a mind-boggling capacity for energy, which is how Demigods can do so much without having to lug around any batteries. Vital Energy doesn't expire, so they spend lots of time cramming energy into their soul as a bottomless stockpile and then draw from it whenever they want to do anything."

  Ida absorbed this, her heartbeat quickening. She took a rueful mental inventory of all the aches and pains in her body. "How do I sense it? How would I go about using it?"

  "If I knew that, I would've told you already. I've got some ideas, but they're all tied up in very risky methods that I wouldn't urge anyone to take a stab at." Lisa turned her goggled gaze to meet Ida's. "Namely, you'd probably have to die and come back, again. Which is hard enough to nail the first time."

  Ida felt a pang of despair as that possibility deflated. "Why all the death? Why does it always circle back around to that?"

  "Because," Lisa said, her voice heavy with the tone of a secret she felt hesitant to divulge, "because, and this is just a hypothesis for now, one that I'm, uh, currently stuck gathering data for against my will. But it's because, I think, the afterlife is real."

  Ida took that in, her breathing slowing almost to a stop. Lisa studied her face.

  "Your mom's passed, I'm going to guess?"

  Ida nodded.

  Lisa made a little sympathetic grunt. "The few people I've told about this, the ones who've experienced the death of a loved one, they all react like that. They get all quiet and hopeful."

  "The afterlife. You've… I don't know." Ida felt a little stupid asking this, but she couldn't avoid it. "You've been there?"

  "You saw me make a few visits back when that sunnovabitch Steiner was in here, yeah?"

  "Is it nice?"

  Lisa coughed a laugh at that. "Honey, I don't know. I don't remember anything about it. But it's real, and it's, and this is where I think this whole situation roots from, it's full of potential. I mean literal, raw, creative potential, embodied in the form of energy. And it's my hypothesis that that creative energy leaks out and follows people here, sometimes, into baseline reality, when folks die and are resuscitated at just the right timing. And it hangs around."

  "You're saying that Fields are…" Ida paused, taking a moment to gather the right words. "That they're just loose clumps of heaven? And Field Manipulators are just people who those clumps are sticking to?"

  "Ha! 'Clumps of Heaven.'" That's beautiful, that'd be the title of my thesis if I was back in academia and not a scary dead lady in a secret prison. Sure. That's a good way to think of it. In fact-"

  There was a distant, violent clunk, followed by the dull descrescendo of machinery whirring to a halt. The lights went out, plunging the room into pitch darkness. Almost immediately, Ida became aware of a chill creeping in, of the temperature in the room already beginning to drop.

  "What just happened?" Lisa said, a note of fear creeping into her voice.

  "Generator must've died. You weren't awake for this, but the 'secret prison' has been pretty much abandoned the last few days. All the soldiers fucked off to who-knows-where a while back."

  "That's not great for us, is it?"

  "Actually," Ida grinned to herself in the dark as an idea began to form. Then her grin vanished, replaced by a grimace, as she contemplated the actions she'd need to take. "Actually, based on some of the things you just told me, I think it might just be our ticket out of here. I'll need to ask you for a pretty awful favor, though."