“Ashtoreth has a request,” Frost said.

  He stood in Matthews’ office at headquarters, having come alone. At that moment, Ashtoreth was in a lab somewhere.

  “All right.”

  “It’s not very serious.”

  Matthews’ mouth quirked in amusement. “You don’t say.”

  “She said that because I’m much closer to a human bossman than she is, maybe I’d have more success than she would.”

  “Success at what, exactly?”

  “She wanted me to come here and play you Meet Me Halfway by the Black Eyed Peas. She said she was sure you’d understand.”

  Matthews blinked. “An interesting approach,” he said. “Because I most definitely don’t understand. Not at all.”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  “You have any idea what she’s trying to get at?”

  “Presumably that she wants you to meet her halfway.”

  Matthews raised his eyebrows at Frost.

  “That girl has gone as far as she can possibly go in proving that she’s an ally to humanity,” said Frost. “And you know it. If she’d wanted to fight for Hell to turn Earth into her own personal kingdom, she could have. She probably wouldn’t even have had to spend her antithesis shard to make it happen. Instead, she bucked a lifetime of conditioning to betray everything she knew and put herself at the top of her father’s most wanted list for all eternity. All for us.”

  Matthews looked entirely unmoved. “Let’s not pretend it was entirely selfless.”

  “All right, fine,” said Frost. “But there is absolutely nobody on our side—not me, not you, not the President—no one who has gone as far to prove their loyalty to our cause as she has. And you know it. So at least have the decency to tell her why she’s being kept in the dark. You aren’t seriously just going to toss her aside, now?”

  “If we were going to toss her aside, we’d be asking her to let some of the high-tier elves in,” Matthews said. “Get one of them to replace her.”

  “And as soon as you asked, she’d know exactly what you were doing.”

  “Yes. And how do you think she’d react?”

  Frost glowered at him. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “Really? Because the Eldunari who read her mind seem to have a fairly good idea. Ashtoreth will cooperate with us, and has—as much as she’s been able to, as you’re right to point out. But that cooperation has a limit, and that limit is the moment that someone tries to take away the crown that the system gave to her.”

  “Of course it is,” said Frost. “The only way to do that is by killing her.”

  “And if it wasn’t?”

  Frost glared at him. “Isn’t it?”

  Matthews was quiet a moment. “Just suppose, for the moment, that there were a way to trigger another election without killing her,” he said slowly. “Do you really think she’d be okay with giving it up to a better fighter that high command trusts more?”

  “A better fighter?” Frost asked dubiously.

  “Some of the elves have been doing this for a very, very long time,” said Matthews.

  “I’ve fought centuries-old elves before just like I’ve fought centuries-old devils before. Most of them aren’t shit.”

  “The Eldunari have been fighting Hell for longer than we’ve been alive,” said Matthews. “And some of their monarchs are most definitely shit.” He frowned, then added, “You get what I mean.”

  “Hell has been conquering outer worlds as they initialize for millenia,” Frost said. “Ashtoreth is the best ever out of the soldiers they make to do exactly that. She was made to take monarchies and defend them. Here, look: find the best elf available who could fill her place. Level her until she matches them. Give her a month—a single month—to train herself in fighting at her new power level. Then let them duel.”

  Matthews cocked his head, staring at Frost with disbelief plain on his face. “You really think she’d win…” he said, the sentence half-accusation, half-realization.

  “Yes. But more importantly, I’d think she’d cede the monarchy if she lost, provided that’s possible. She wants what’s best for us. She’ll die for us, for fuck’s sake—and you’re shutting her out because of… what, her ego? You’re a general in the US Army.”

  “The Earth Defense Alliance, now.”

  “—You’re really going to tell me that the army’s never seen a functional general with a head the size of Jupiter?”

  Matthews frowned, seeming to suppress a sudden outburst. “It’s not just that,” he said. “You’ve got to see the full picture, here. We didn’t stop Hitler with not-Satan’s teenaged daughter.”

  “We didn’t stop Hitler, period. Stalin did.”

  Matthews let out an exasperated sigh. “I meant humanity, not America. I know my history, for fuck’s sake. And do you think you’re making a point for, or against your argument? Is Ashtoreth your Stalin? Because that doesn’t bode well for the people who follow her, during or after the war.”

  “Hell if I know,” Frost said, shrugging. “Analogies are dysfunctional in almost every argument where they’re used. Are you shutting her out because you’re worried what she’ll do if she can consolidate power around the monarchy and what that will mean?”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “No,” Matthews said. He shook his head. “Not quite. Look… just… you’ve got to understand.”

  “Okay,” Frost said, waiting.

  “From the perspective of the leadership, there are zero winning moves when it comes to Ashtoreth. Everything we do could go terribly wrong.”

  “Then let me make a suggestion,” said Frost. “She wants people to love her. Use that. Manipulate her with it, if you have to. Make her famous in a way that you can control and take away. She’ll see what you’re doing… but she won’t mind, not at all. She’ll understand it. She won’t have any problem with being your asset, as long as you let her breathe a little. You can keep her healthy and functional, but still call all the shots.”

  But Matthews was already shaking his head. “I wish it were that easy,” he said.

  “And why isn’t it?”

  “Come on. You want to put her in front of a camera? She’s got personality and presence, I’ll give her that. But what happens when she makes a quip about how delicious the belly fat of demon children is? Or let’s slip that she roasted a half-dozen civilians alive because the cold calculus of war dictated it was the right thing to do to get one of the bad guys?”

  “She wouldn’t.”

  But Matthews was raising his voice, now. “She practically enslaved you for a year, damn it!”

  “And she was right to!”

  “That’s the problem!” said Matthews. “She was born for war—she knows the value of being able to do the math, but not the value of the civilian government that steps in to insist that just running the numbers and condemning innocents to die when the function calls for it is too inhumane to consider!”

  “And that’s why she’s done everything you told her to, is it?”

  “That’s why she gets her orders from me, a general, and not from a secretary!” he countered. “She doesn’t know how to cater to the everyman morality—people need a war machine that they can set themselves apart from. When the math gets ugly, they need to know that it was some evil man in uniform who sent a smart bomb down the ventilation shaft of a bomb shelter, not something that they had anything to do with.”

  “Maybe,” said Frost. “Or maybe that’s what people used to need—until the fucking demons came out of the skies.”

  “This is getting too heated.”

  Now it was Frost’s turn to heave out an exasperated sigh.

  “You want a productive conversation, right?” Matthews asked, noticeably trying to keep his voice calm. “Then please try to see my point of view. If we give Ashtoreth to the press, it could be a disaster.”

  Frost raised a hand in frustration. “So coach her. Give her softball interviews. If the political parties can make their candidates look appealing, the archfiend bred to conquer us should be easy mode.”

  Matthews scowled, then opened his mouth to say something and wound up trying to stifle a laugh. He failed. “God damnit,” he said through frustrated snickering.

  “Look, my point stands,” said Frost.

  “Not quite,” said Matthews, shaking his head again. “Listen: do you remember Greta Thunberg?”

  “The global warming kid with autism?”

  “We call it climate change, now, but I see she might not have left as much of an impression. Do you remember Britney Spears?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how the media treated her?”

  “A little?”

  “Endless paparazzi. Both tabloids and more legitimate news sources doing everything they could to character her as crazy. As an addict. As a whore. As a manipulator. As a bad mother. You want Ashtoreth to go through all that? Because with her, it will be worse. People have lost their loved ones. They want someone to hate.”

  “She can take it.”

  “Are you sure?” Matthews said. “Because if you’d asked me, I’d say that having a stable family life, a good upbringing, parents who raised you right—those are things that help a kid cope with that kind of onslaught. And at the age that Ashtoreth should have been getting into Harry Potter? She was caving her sister’s skull in with a fucking rock!”

  Silence filled the room. Frost opened his mouth to say something, but found he couldn’t speak.

  Eventually, Matthews sighed and looked away. “Maybe I shouldn’t have been so blunt,” he said. “But she’s… vulnerable. Whether you see that or not, we sure do. And at the end of the day… all that’s practically academic. It’s meaningless.”

  “What are you talking about?” Frost asked tiredly.

  “If you’re Earth’s enemy,” Matthews said quietly. “Not Hell, just a hypothetical enemy… you’d zero in on Ashtoreth as our obvious weak point. All you’d have to do is know about her, and you’d see that manipulating her could be your easy ticket in.”

  “Good luck with manipulating her.”

  Matthews shook his head. “Has it never occurred to you, Officer Frost, that the Lightbringer must have plans for what to do if his daughters betray him? That this—everything that has happened so far—is probably something that a millenia-old immortal conquerer who has laid low every single challenger to his position has most definitely prepared for?”

  Frost was silent.

  “If you fear him, then you fear Ashtoreth. It’s that simple.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  But Matthews was shaking his head. “That girl deserves better than what she’s getting,” he said. “You know it. I know it. She’s more of a hero than most of the people we teach our kids to look up to… and it doesn’t matter. Maybe one day we reach a future where the dust has settled and Ashtoreth gets to be the most famous person on Earth, but what people deserve is irrelevant next to what will work. You tell her that and I’ll bet she’ll understand it.”

  “Nothing, then,” Frost said, seething. “Not even a gesture.”

  “Ashtoreth does not have clearance to know what high command knows,” said Matthews. “And it’s staying that way. She’s not authorized to get in front of a camera and relate to the public, either—and it’s staying that way.” He sighed. “Would it help at all if we gave her a medal? Would she care?”

  “You’re making a mistake,” said Frost.

  Matthews shut his eyes momentarily. “Please,” he said. “Please, Frost, get out of here before you say anything that could even remotely be construed as a threat. Nobody wants the shitshow that comes after that.”

  Are you sure? he almost asked. Because I know one person who always seems to come out on top of a given shitshow.

  Instead, all he said was, “I see.” He drew in a deep breath, then nodded. “I won’t trouble you about this any more, General.”

  Hours later, he landed on the rooftop of Ashtoreth’s house to look out over the Grand Canyon. Next to him, Ashtoreth sat watching a video on a tablet.

  “No dice,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I kinda figured.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  She shrugged. “Dunno. I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

  He frowned, then peered at her as he saw the video she was watching. “Is that… are you watching Charlie Chaplin movies? You don’t find him a little old fashioned?”

  Ashtoreth shook her head. “Speeches, actually,” she said, flashing him a smile. “I’m watching speeches.”