No one seemed to have a complete understanding of the situation. Katherine was the first one to push ahead, probably because of the way she was. Or something. "I need your help to get Max. He's still alive, just..."

  I blinked. I'd kind of forgotten about that guy. I realized I was supposed to protect him when Katherine ran off to have her little hero moment, but that hadn't really worked out. Even if I hadn't gotten carried away with eating the other Anathema, I didn't think any regular human could have survived the pressure and lack of air. And that's if I didn't accidentally eat him myself. Fifty-fifty odds I ended up taking a bite out of part of him. Naturally, there were only two options. It either happened or it didn't.

  "Wait." Dad held up his hand. "Slow down. Are you saying there's someone else nearby?"

  Knowing the way he tended to communicate, I cut Katherine off. "There's a guy suffocating to death somewhere in that pile of Anathema you pulled me out of."

  "Oh, okay. That's potentially fixable." He craned his head in the direction I presumed we'd all come from. "Non-zero chance." Then he flickered away into the trees.

  Katherine and I stared after him. Even without cutting portals in the air, he could move ridiculously fast. I'd long suspected it was some kind of distance warping, not purely physical speed, but he'd never bothered to explain the details of his abilities to me. I still had a hard time believing the dude wasn't already dead. I didn't doubt Katherine's ability to sense living things nearby—what I did doubt was her mental state. She didn't look like she was having a great time.

  It wasn't as bad as when I found her cradling her head on the ground at the start of the incursion, but I doubted whatever was happening inside was much better. It's kind of neat. I feel like I'm witnessing the formation of a future trauma disorder in real time. "Come on. Let's go follow him."

  She didn't say anything as I walked past her after my dad. I heard her start walking a few seconds later, though, so at least she wasn't completely out of it. Not knowing the exact way back to our previous location—or even how far it might be—I figured the best strategy was to climb down the ravine and walk along the bottom. We'd get there eventually.

  Now that the incursion was over, I took the moment to appreciate the forest. It was quite nice. It was back to looking like it had just a half hour or so ago, back when I'd first woken up and Rambo—Max—kicked down the door and ripped open my cage. So much had happened in that time. It felt way longer than it logically could have been, and I found myself thinking back to the time before we'd escaped over the fence and Katherine and I experienced the attention of that immense, alien presence. That was another thing I needed to grill my dad about.

  I wonder what happened to Jeff and Rambo 2? I doubted either of them had survived. Things were dire enough before a real incursion started. Even if they'd both survived that long, they were almost certainly devoured once a breach formed. It was also possible that one of them had become a regular Guardian. Honestly, I'm still surprised that didn't happen to Max. Like, why did Katherine get the Star Core? It totally should have been him. He was the one with the massive main character energy.

  And also capability. And going out of his way to help everyone. Katherine also sort of did that, near the end, but that was pretty much the only part where she stood equal. Wait, no—she also blew up that skinner with the stump remover. I seemed to keep forgetting that she wasn't useless.

  It didn't take us long to reach the spot where it all went down. Dad hadn't teleported me far at all, which meant we arrived soon enough to see him helping Max out of a pile of dissolving Anathema corpses. He was getting gross shit all over my dad's polo shirt, which would have left me quietly seething if I were in his place. Also, damn. Katherine was right. How the hell did he survive all of that? His survival certainly hadn't come without a cost. Like me, he'd lost an arm. Unlike me, it was almost the whole thing, and I doubted there was a piece lying around that we could stick back. Anathema probably ate it.

  I wondered again if it might have been me.

  His remaining arm was clutching his stomach, pressed tight like he was holding his own guts in. Walking closer, I realized that was close to being the case. There was a real nasty gash—and while it probably wasn't enough to make his intestines literally flop out, it was clear his body was still telling him not to give it over to gravity. Okay, seriously. How are you even standing?

  Even if he hadn't miraculously survived the Anathema death pile, surely anyone with such severe injuries should be borderline immobile. Frankly, I felt like it was venturing well past the point of ridiculousness. I had a new suspicion. Stepping closer, I tried to get a better look at things and see if I might be right.

  Yup. He hadn't bled out from the massive wound where his arm used to be because the surface had already scarred over. Mangled, desiccated, and crusted over with all kinds of foul junk—just, ew. It was truly the mother of all scabs. I also started to notice numerous red gashes all over his body, as well as some nasty bruises. I couldn't tell if anywhere were visibly fading, but you didn't get closed cuts like that in just a couple of minutes. Compared to me, the regeneration was kind of pathetic—but it was there.

  Turning my face away, I flicked out the tip of my tongue. Hmm. Having a Tier 8 Star Guardian right next to him was a bit overpowering, but not enough to overwhelm my senses entirely. Definitely has a little something that wasn't there before—and definitely closer to Dad or Katherine. Even compared to Katherine, it was super watered down, though. It was all evidence pointing to the same thing—that he was in the process of becoming a standard Guardian.

  It made sense. Everything he'd done up to this point screamed Guardian origin story. He basically just got overshadowed by me and Katherine for no good reason, but that didn't stop the basic result. We'd even brought him all the way to the breach itself. That's where the special Guardian juice leaked through in the first place, if the conventional wisdom was to be believed—if anything, it was about time.

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  Katherine joined me a few seconds later. She took one look at Max before turning around and emptying the entire contents of her stomach. I doubted she'd eaten anything in at least eight hours, so it was probably just bile. I didn't know for sure, since I didn't bother looking. Sucks to be her, I guess. I myself soon looked away for the opposite reason. The sight wasn't doing good things for my new Anathema desires.

  "Hey." His voice was thin and weak. "You two doing alright?"

  I rolled my eyes. I wasn't looking at him anymore so it was okay. I also wasn't sure what the response to that was supposed to be—honestly, I just couldn't be arsed to try playing nurse anymore. Katherine was too busy trying to keep her own insides where she belonged, and my dad—well, I was surprised my dad hadn't already told him to 'walk it off' or something equally ridiculous. I'm pretty sure he forgot how to be a human being at least four decades ago.

  We were closely linked opposites, in a way. While I was, at heart, an abnormality, I took great care in shaping myself into various images that reflected a person with a more ordinary psychology. Contrast that with my dad—a well-adjusted, pleasant man at heart—but one who'd strayed so far from the bounds of normal human experience that he'd almost become an alien. The final twist that made it equal parts funny, sad, and bizarre was that—to this day—he didn't even know it.

  A lot of his strange, incongruent behaviors started to make a lot more sense when you recontextualized it that way. I imagined it would be similar to having everything I wanted to say machine translated into a foreign language and then back to English, entirely without my own knowledge.

  Caught up in my own thoughts, it took me a bit to notice the arrival of four newcomers. In that time, Dad started talking to someone over his phone. It sounded like boring stuff. Reporting on the state of the incursion, saying he had a new Guardian in critical condition, something or other about cultists—none of it was at all interesting or relevant to me personally, so I ended up tuning most of it out. Katherine seemed like she'd gone back to tuning everything out—and that left me as the only one there to handle the four young Guardians approaching us.

  A surreptitious use of my newly discovered tongue trick indicated that they were regular Guardians, and none of them were very strong. Okay, I wasn't entirely sure about any of that. I was reasonably confident, though, and they definitely weren't just some random kids who'd wandered over. They were, but they were also Guardians of some kind.

  Let's see. With Dad on the phone, Katherine processing the first stages of her developing trauma, and Max about to pass out, I took it upon myself to walk over to the assembled group. I also whipped out a full set of monikers for each of them, because I doubted I would need to remember their actual names for any real amount of time. Two guys, two girls, two white, one black, and one Hispanic. I tended to avoid ethnically based nicknames, though, because I felt like it was a bad habit to form. It usually wasn't something I wanted for any of the images I tended to embody.

  The black guy had a real stern look about him. He had that straight-back, firmly planted posture I associated with people who took everything seriously. Somewhat incongruently, he was wearing a slick, leather jacket with unusual furry cuffs. It was like the person who designed it had tried to combine the badass motorcyclist look with an actual winter coat. Despite doing its best to look like normal outerwear, I could tell it was Guardian equipment. That wasn't unusual, as a sizable proportion of Guardians wanted their fatigues to be able to pass as modern, civilian clothing.

  Hmm. How about 'Mr. Agent?' He did give me a 'CIA operative in a mostly implausible action movie' kind of vibe.

  The other guy was pretty much his opposite in every conceivable way. From skin tone, to posture, to outfit, he was a total inverse. There was another sizable contingent of Guardians who elected to style their fatigues in the most outrageous, attention-grabbing ways, and this guy was one of the ones who leaned into it. He'd essentially made himself look like a fantasy wizard, wearing what was a weirdly effective cross between a magic robe, a trench coat, and whatever you called the stereotypical martial arts outfit. The inner part of the outfit was a lovely indigo color, while the outer part of the robe-slash-coat was a royal blue. The whole thing was embroidered with mystic, silver symbols.

  It was also really high quality. It had to have been expensive, but that was a necessity for any Guardian who wanted to succeed in pulling off the more outlandish style. Even if it was silly, the right designer and manufacturer could make that shit look good. Skimp out, though, and you ended up looking like a lame trick-or-treater.

  I was just going to call him 'Wizard Boy.'

  Then there were the two girls. One of them, the short one, looked like she could be Wizard Boy's sister. She was almost as tall as I was—so not very—and she had a similar robed style going on. Hers were black and green, though, and they were generally tighter, shorter, and generally less ostentatious. The whole aesthetic her outfit created seemed like it was intended to present the image of an assassin. Even the color scheme evoked a poison theme. There was simply no way that wasn't deliberate. Sustained damage specialist. She has to be.

  I'm going to call you... 'Little Toxic.'

  That left only one. The last Guardian in the group fell into the third major camp of Guardian fashion—that is, no fashion. Absolutely zero thought had gone into style or subtlety. It was all boots, belts, straps, pouches, and high visibility, wear resistant fabrics. The high visibility thing was common among the pure practicality crowd. While camouflage wasn't entirely ineffective against Anathema, the general understanding was that you were usually better off standing out. The idea was that it reduced the chance of friendly fire and made search and rescue easier. The military of the United States took this exact position, using highly visible fatigues for fighting Anathema and keeping the camo for more human conflicts.

  I couldn't think of any wacky name for her, so I decided to just call her 'Boots.'

  I finished my little assessment just as I stopped in front of them. I didn't start with any particular plan for how to introduce myself, but that didn't really matter. You usually just had to stick out your name, say something simple like 'Hi, my name is Alex,' and then you'd both do a lame little dance of exchanging the most banal form of pleasantries. If you were lucky, you might even get a sliver of useful information out of it. Unfortunately, Dad chose that exact moment to obnoxiously clap his hands.

  "So. Now that we've got that taken care of, I have a proposal." I was proud of myself for not groaning. Turning around, I saw that Max had disappeared—maybe they shoved him through one of Dad's portals? That would make sense—they could get him to the nearest medical team way faster that way. Frankly, most of my attention was taken up by the building dread at hearing my dad say he had a 'proposal.'

  "I think it's been a while since most of us have eaten anything—" Oh come on. Is he implying what I think he is? "—and we're definitely all pretty hungry." Yep, he's one hundred percent messing with me right now. I did my best not to scowl, even when he fucking smirked at me. "So I was thinking—who's in the mood for some tacos?"

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