Gloria knocked gently on Suite 1004's door. "Siobhan? The supply run's done. Do you want me to leave yours here at the door, or should I come in?"

  No answer from behind the door. Gloria was still firmly unaccustomed to the eerie silence that had settled on the city following the nukes, now that those awful winds had started to die down. She'd never experienced the city without the hum of a dozen unseen machines permeating the backdrop; without the half-heard chorus of distant traffic and whirring A/C units and burbling plumbing, the quiet of the world felt choking, opaque, like a fog.

  "I'll just leave them here," she said, moving to deposit the grocery bags she was holding in front of the door. "Pema says he wants to do supply runs every other day, so you'll have to make this work for the next-"

  The door creaked open. The young woman peeking out at Gloria had red-rimmed eyes, raw from crying. Her short red hair was greasy, a tangled parody of what Gloria assumed had once, days or weeks ago, been a chic, stylish hairstyle.

  "She's not waking up," Shiv said, voice frayed and weak. She opened the door wider, stood aside for Gloria to walk in.

  "Oh dear." Gloria took that as an invitation and hurried deeper into the hotel room. Propped up in one of the suite's two Queen beds lay another young woman, her face covered in a sheen of sweat, tossing in a fitful sleep. The man sitting, half-asleep, at her bedside bore a powerful resemblance to her, his features broader and deeper but very nearly as sickly. Peter looked up at her, eyes flitting to the grocery bags in her hands.

  "You manage to find something she could swallow?" Peter asked. His voice also sound rubbed raw.

  "Yes, though it's a little- unconventional. I found some-" Gloria dug through her bags, retrieving items and setting them on the suite's single table: bottled waters, granola bars, a half-smashed sleeve of Strawberry Creme Oreos. "Have you ever had Gogurt?"

  "Gogurt?" Peter blankly eyed the two boxes of Gogurt that Gloria produced.

  "So sorry, but it was the only non-solid food I could find that wasn't smashed or, or too contaminated for me to get all the radiation out of." Gloria smiled apologetically. "I'm sorry, Pema's so much better at that than I am. I have Strawberry and Green Apple flavors-"

  "She hates strawberry," Peter and Siobhan said, simultaneously. They shot one another a look, mild surprise softening into something a little more intimate, a recognition of sorts. Sylvia took one of the green tubes of yogurt from Gloria and, with a flick of her Qi, sliced the tip of the wrapper off. She brought it to Sylvia and began coaxing small mouthfuls into her while she tossed and turned, massaging her throat every few seconds to get her to swallow.

  Gloria's heart ached watching them. They'd been the first refugees Pema had brought back to the hotel, three days ago now, and she'd taken an immediate liking to them. They were sweet kids, the girl so clearly in love, the boy so polite and understanding. They'd been holed up in their room their entire stay, watching after Sylvia, fretting and worrying. Every time Gloria thought about what Phoenix had done to the poor girl, what she must be experiencing, having her mind invaded by such a monster, she thought about the chunk of rebar she'd stabbed through the man's heart, back in that high school gym. She felt equal parts gratified that she'd done something, anything to hurt him, and frustrated that it hadn't finished him off.

  Their attempt to sever the girl's connection to Phoenix hadn't worked as well as they'd hoped. Pema had brought a knife home with these three refugees, taken, apparently, from the knight-man. Even with how familiar she'd become with the scope of his talents, the fact that Pema had been able to overpower such a formidable person, a Demigod who Gloria had personally watched help level half of downtown Minneapolis, shook her a little.

  The knife could apparently damage and destroy Qi fields (or Fields? That's what the other denizens of the hotel had been calling the auras surrounding them) and dispel their effects, and had apparently already freed Peter from Phoenix once before. But instead of instantly and easily pulling Sylvia out from the man's spell, as had happened with her brother, she'd instead lapsed rapidly into a restless, uneasy comatose state. True, the coma was slightly less disturbing than the rabid thrashing and raving she'd been doing before, but only slightly. Three days had passed since their attempt at a cure, and she'd shown little sign of improvement.

  Pema had tried, initially, to gaze into Sylvia, to use his limited omniscience to figure out what the issue was, but he'd been repelled. Something about Phoenix's mind, wrapped up as it was in Sylvia's, made the signals he read from her spotty and chaotic, to a degree that seemed to physically hurt the old man. Pema had given up on trying to make sense of the inscrutable chaos he read whenever he peered too deeply into her, and had taken to making halfhearted assurances that she would come out of it soon, that there was no way Phoenix would be powerful enough to keep his control over her for long, with the link between the two tethered. He figured that the coma was a good sign, a product of her newly freed body reclaiming the rest that she'd been denied under his control, and that she'd wake up soon.

  And here they were, three days in, and the poor girl looked worse than ever.

  Gloria heard footsteps approaching in the hallway and turned to peek back past the open door. Pema was approaching, looking as weary as she'd ever seen him, helping a portly, bearded man limp along.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  "Another guest?" Gloria asked as they approached. Pema released the man, who slumped against a wall, panting. He looked strained, as if trying to conceal some grave internal injury.

  "I found two, in fact," Pema said. "The first is a young woman with a very particular affliction. I can fill you in on her later, as she'll require very specific care. She's sleeping in 1009 down the hall."

  "And you might be?" Gloria smiled at the bearded man. "I'm Gloria."

  "Benny," he wheezed, pressing a balled fist into his ribs. "Ah, God, pardon, I've got a stitch something fierce."

  "Wait," Shiv stood, wandered over to join the others in the hallway. Peter lingered behind her. "You're not…"

  "I'm afraid I am," Benny smiled, almost apologetic. "I reckon you were on the forum, back in the day?"

  "God, feels like a lifetime ago, but yeah. Sylvia and I owe a ton to you. If it hadn't been for the work you and Victor were doing on Fields, we'd never have made it half as far as we did." Benny tensed a little at the mention of Victor, and Shiv sighed. "I'm sorry, by the way. I heard what happened to him. And the kids."

  "Thanks. I've been telling myself- well, ya know. At least they weren't around to see this." He gestured past Shiv, toward the window, its pulled shutters concealing a view into the blasted wasteland of the city. "I know 'all hell broke loose' is, like, a cliche, but fuck me, it's like hell literally broke loose out there. There's still- God, I saw, there are still people, out in the rubble. You know that? Some people still alive. Most left the city, I bet, and the rest are full dead, but there's- there's sick people, burned people. I saw-"

  Suddenly, Benny retched, and stumbled past Shiv to vomit into the suite's trash can. Pema shot Gloria a saddened look. "He has radiation poisoning."

  Shiv frowned, took a closer look at Benny, then gasped. "Oh shit. You don't have a Field."

  "What?" Peter drew closer. Gloria's eyes widened in horror.

  "This whole time, you weren't a Manipulator?" Shiv asked.

  "Nah. Just good buddies with one." Benny wiped a fleck of vomit from his mouth, winced. "I've got a good eye for them, though. It's how I got into this mess."

  "What were you even doing out there? Where'd you come from?"

  "I… Listen." Benny's expression darkened as he paused to formulate his response. "I was with Rai. Or, more specifically, I got poached by Gloria Maldonado, Rai's deeply spooky secret right-hand lady. She's a Manipulator with some sort of intelligence-amplifying Knack and she's running fuckin' circles around Rai with it."

  Sylvia glanced back over her shoulder, toward where Shiv was sleeping. "Okay. And I'm guessing she wouldn't like that you're here?"

  "Hah. Not a bit. She hadn't slept in, I think, close to a week until a few hours ago, and I flew the coop the instant I was sure she was out. She'll figure it out soon, though, if she hasn't already.

  But I had to get out of there, I couldn't- The things she was planning, the things she was convincin' Rai to do, I couldn't sit there and be a part of them anymore."

  "She sounds like someone who might… You know. Come here and try to kill you."

  "That's what I figured, but our old Tibetan buddy here assured me he'd be able to handle her." Benny cocked his head toward Pema. "Thanks again for the lift. If you hadn't found me, I'd probably be puking up stomach lining in an alley ten miles from here."

  "No need for thanks. We're trying to save all who we can, at this point." Pema smiled down at him. "Not to mention, you came bearing a gift I'm especially partial to."

  "Yup. You and Maldonado, you're both thirsty little buggers when it comes to info." Benny reached into his pocket, then, and produced a portable hard drive, which he set on the suite's table, next to the groceries. "She's got intel like you wouldn't believe, on nearly everyone still in the game. Petabytes of the stuff. That there is the Greatest Hits, the most useful files I could copy over in the time I had. Hopefully it helps ya'll."

  "Helps us with what?" Peter asked.

  "Killing Rai." Benny's face was stony, now.

  "Oh." Gloria thought back to the small sliver of the demigods' battle she'd witnessed, downtown. She'd seen Rai tear two other Demigods strip to their skeletons without breaking a sweat. "That sounds, maybe, easier said than done?"

  "Somebody's gotta," Benny said. "Right now, she's out in Africa, tracking down the girl who'd absorbed Victor's essence. A fuckin', a little kid, a teenager. Once she's finished up doing infanticide overseas, she'll be coming straight back to mop the rest of us up. Then she snowballs from there, and soon Maldonado, a dangerous, conniving ass sociopath, will have the ear of a literal, actual God. If that happens, it's curtains for the human race, I'd bet anything."

  "Sure, but how do we actually accomplish that?" Shiv asked.

  "Benny surmises that, were I to kill and absorb Phoenix, I may be able to stand a chance," Pema said. "I'm inclined to agree."

  "Our odds go up even higher if we manage to get the knight or the corpse on our side," Benny added.

  "Kill Phoenix?" Shiv's voice was a mixture of hope and dread. "Would that-"

  "Do you think that'd free Sylvia?" Peter said.

  Pema shrugged. "I don't see why not. Either his death would unshackle her immediately, or I'd assume control of her after absorbing him, in which case I would simply free her myself."

  "You think you could do it? Kill the fucker?" Sylvia was sounding slightly invigorated, now.

  "I imagine it'd be reasonably easy for me to do, yes. I probably wouldn't be able to read him easily, if my attempts at looking into your friend are any indication, but overpowering him shouldn't be too difficult." Pema sighed, massaged one of his shoulders. He looked exhausted. Gloria tamped down the urge to reach forward and rub his back reassuringly. "I had already committed myself to the task of ending Phoenix myself anyway. He's far too destructive to be allowed to live. I'd been hoping to get some rest beforehand, but it sounds as if time is of the essence, here."

  "Sorry, bud, but it really, really is," Benny said. "I've got no clue when Rai's gonna get back."

  "Do we know where he is?" Peter asked. "I can't really feel him anymore, haven't been able to in about a week."

  "He's under the city, somewhere. Finding him should be little more than a quick chore on my part." Pema stood straighter, moved to exit. Gloria turned to see him off, but stopped, briefly, when her eyes trailed across Sylvia's sleeping figure in the back of the room.

  Gloria blinked, studied her closer for a moment. For a second, there, she thought the girl's eyes had been cracked open, just a fraction. But as she stared, the girl only shook and muttered, still clearly unconscious. Her Qi stayed dormant, making only the shallow, rhythmic fluctuations that accompanied sleep. Still, mistaken as she must've been, Gloria felt a shiver pass through her. "You're leaving now?" She asked.

  Pema nodded. "I'd prefer to get this over with."

  "You'll be safe?"

  Pema smiled at her, eyes twinkling a little, despite the deep fatigue behind them. "Don't waste any time worrying about me, Gloria. Why don't you help Benny get his room settled?"

  Pema stepped out into the dark of the hallway. "This promises to be a bloody chore, but a quick one."

  With that, he stepped back into the room and planted a quick kiss on Gloria's lips. Shiv let out a little "oh, shit," at that, and Benny chuckled at the room's collective surprise.

  Pema grinned at her, and Gloria felt her heart jitter in her chest. "I'll be back before you even think to miss me."