Almost a dozen hours later, Ashtoreth hovered down to rest on a featureless metal ledge of the inner ring. Icon, the archival spirit, had claimed they’d killed the last of the outsider presence.

  Better still, the Five Realms system had agreed.

  {Alert: the Diadem Realm is free of all detectable outsider presence}

  She sighed, then looked around at the strange, blocky architecture around her, its purpose impossible to tell just from its appearance, and wondered if the bastions that Hell built to invade other worlds had actually been based on this place. Thinking back on them, they were essentially the same, but with some added architectural flare that had come from fiendish and diabolic architecture—and with metal that was a bit more black.

  “If only there were a trustworthy source I could use to obtain information,” she lamented.

  As if on cue, Icon appeared before her. “You!” she cried, fixing Ashtoreth with a wounded, angry expression.

  “Have I offended you, somehow?” she asked tiredly.

  “Offended?” she asked. “Offended? It is not mere offense that justifies the intensity of my frustration!”

  Ashtoreth rose, then stretched. “I thought that when you stopped complaining after the first hour and most of the novas, it was because you were warming up to me.”

  After the first few novas had set the tone, Ashtoreth had hunted most of the outsiders with a fully-charged nova tucked away in her gauntlet. The outsiders had been damned if they engaged her and damned if they didn’t: their tactics were simple, and it took too many of them to threaten her in normal combat. Swarming her while she didn’t have a novaheart out just gave her the chance to kill them en masse with another giant explosion.

  Thinking about it, she made a lazy sound of satisfaction. She’d collected almost nine thousand cores. She reminded herself to thank Hunter for not underestimating her—he’d left to rejoin Sadie and the others once they’d finished.

  “My gradual descent into silence was the product of my own internal resignation!” Icon said. “Not some growing sense of trust. You are a fiend—”

  Ashtoreth cracked her tail in the air, loud enough to give Icon a start. “Archfiend!” she said. “And I know, okay? Believe me, you’re not the first person to have a problem with it.”

  “I don’t know how you managed to become a [Pinnacle Curator] and circumvent the securities set in place to protect humanity—”

  “By becoming human, that’s how.”

  “That’s wildly implausible.”

  “I generally am.”

  “Getting past the human-exclusive requirement doesn’t make you human!”

  “Debatable,” Ashtoreth said, glaring at her. “If your definition of human is genetic or cultural and you want to exclude me from it, go ahead. But your definition means nothing to me. When it comes to both the system and the humans who I care about? I am human.”

  But Icon seemed to dismiss all of this with a shake of her head. “I knew something was wrong when Hunter Wolfhard made it clear that you’d found some of the weaponry left on Core, but never tried to contact me through one of the [Archive Consults]. Why wouldn’t you contact me except that you feared what might happen if an entity from ancient humanity got wind of the fact that you, you had stolen the mantle of a [Pinnacle Curator]!”

  “Maybe that was his plan,” Ashtoreth said.

  “Whose plan?”

  “The King of Hell. The Lightbringer. My Father.”

  The spirit’s expression shifted, becoming both more intrigued and more guarded.

  “Even among archfiends, I have special qualities,” Ashtoreth said. “The current best guess as to how I was offered a human racial transformation is that it came as a result of those qualities.” She shrugged. “The [Pinnacle Curator] and its human-exclusive status, along with the layout of the Five Realms, function as an added layer of protection for humanity that works even if the Cradle Realm should fall to invasion. From there, it’s not at all unreasonable to assume that my father engineered me and a few of my sisters as workarounds—that we were built to become human to circumvent this system and seize the Five Realms.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me want to help you?”

  “Whatever the truth is, I betrayed Hell to fight for humanity before the invasion even began. That’s the part that should make you want to help me.”

  Icon’s mouth was a hard line. “Implausible—utterly implausible! Far more likely is that you became the monarch of the Cradle realm because you conquered it using your power to burn one army of enemies, then use their life force to fuel the spell that burns another!”

  Ashtoreth arched an eyebrow. “And that’s why my most trusted scout, the one I keep at the same level as myself, is a human?”

  Icon scoffed. “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to? I manage a thorough repository of all of humanity’s history. You think that I don’t know how treacherous some humans can be? You think I don’t know that it’s possible to conquer someone and pretend that you’re doing them a favor? Everything that you and your Hunter have told me could be true, and you might still be exactly the invader that I think you are.”

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Ashtoreth frowned. “Okay, look—you’re not being unreasonable.”

  “I’m generally not.”

  “Humanity needs you.”

  She fixed Ashtoreth with a flat look. “I agree.”

  Ashtoreth suppressed a frustrated twitch. Her initial read on Icon hadn’t made her think that this would be so difficult.

  “Please listen to me, Icon—humanity is in a place right now where building any kind of connection to the past they’re discovering could mean a lot to a lot of people. And you’re obviously a crucial part of that, whatever that narrative ends up being.”

  “And?” Icon asked expectantly.

  “And what?”

  “And what do you want me to do?”

  “Okay, fine. And I need you to help us repair the reality spool so that I can access the Pinnacle realm.”

  Icon gave Ashtoreth a tilt of her head. “It’s very peculiar that you make this request only after we mutually establish that I don’t trust you, and for good reason.”

  Ashtoreth let out an exasperated sigh. “Let’s cut to the chase, then—what is it going to take to make that change?” Ashtoreth said.

  “You make curious assumptions, Ashtoreth of Hell. I’m not required to grant you my trust because you optimize your apparent trustworthiness in a given set of circumstances. Put another way: I’m not obligated to map a path to my loyalty for you simply because you want one.”

  Ashtoreth shook her head. “Not good enough. This is humanity’s fate that we’re talking about.”

  “A fact that motivates my staunch refusal to compromise.”

  “Hold up—we haven’t even explored our options, here. What if—” Ashtoreth shut her eyes for a moment and sighed. She didn’t trust someone who might figure in Dazel’s plans, but at the same time…

  “You have to have a [Mind] aspect, right? There’s no way you don’t; you’re manage a repository of pure information. Suppose I let you read my mind to verify my intentions.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  Icon cocked her head at Ashtoreth. “Would you trust that you could successfully intrude upon someone’s mind to decrypt their true intentions if they offered you the chance to do this freely?”

  “If they were desperate enough? Yeah. And if that’s not enough, then I have other solutions. You clearly know enough about infernals to not trust me.”

  “Infernals: distrust scarcely requires comprehensive knowledge.”

  Ashtoreth rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I get it. My point is that you’ll know about infernal contracts.”

  “No.” Her tone made it clear that she knew exactly what they were.

  Ashtoreth could have growled. “Ancient humanity created my species. You had to have all manner of interactions with demons. You’re telling me that in the whole of the archive, you don’t have a contract that will reliably compel me to tell you the truth?”

  “Of course I do,” said Icon. “If it were seven thousand years ago. But if you can become human in the eyes of the system, you’ve mastered the architecture of the soul in a way that I can’t predict. What’s to say you haven’t figured out how to evade an infernal contract? It would be unreasonable for me to trust your proposed method of verification, regardless of what that method is.”

  “You can’t just hold shut the doors forever,” Ashtoreth said. “There has to be something I can do, something I can show you…”

  “There does not,” said Icon. “And you must accept this. As I said before, I’m not required to grant you my trust because you optimize your apparent trustworthiness given the circumstances. It is entirely possible that the circumstances preclude trust—no matter what you do.”

  Ashtoreth stared at Icon. She was tempted, sorely tempted, to simply order Icon to do it. She was [Pinnacle Curator], after all, and there was no way that the designers of this place had left no way to control the spirit that they’d left to keep the lighthouse for thousands of years, not when that task might have driven her mad. Surely it was worth a shot?

  Ashtoreth could simply try the limits of her authority over this spirit. Push her, bend her, break her if she had to.

  But Icon was like Yama, like Freyr. She didn’t belong to Ashtoreth. She didn’t belong to anyone, and even if she did it would be all of humanity, not just her. She wasn’t even an enemy who had been defeated.

  She was a person doing what she thought was right, and for reasons that even Ashtoreth could understand.

  “No,” she whispered, not just answering Icon, but also answering the temptation to tug on her leash and learn how strong it was.

  “No?”

  “No,” Ashtoreth said, voice growing cold as she stared daggers at the spirit. “Listen well, Archival Spirit Icon, because your answer is insufficient. I have helped humanity pick up the pieces of their civilization after they bought their safety with a billion lives. I have watched mundane humans become heroes simply because they had no other choice. I have defied Heaven, killed my own sisters, and let strangers violate the sanctity of my mind.”

  Her voice grew lower, colder, more contemptuous with every single sentence.

  “So, no, Archival Spirit Icon—you don’t get to cross your arms and pout because it’s not the way you wanted it to be, because humanity’s apocalypse isn’t the fantasy you were hoping for even if you think you deserve it. You will set reasonable conditions on your trust, and then I’ll meet them, and then you’ll become a part of the team with the rest of us. Not a slave, not a subject, just another one of the helpers like me, like Hunter, like everyone. You won’t do it because I demand it, you won’t do it because you want it—you’ll do it because humanity needs it. Understand?”

  Icon eyed Ashtoreth, but her offended expression gave way to something that was more contemplative. At last she spoke.

  “I don’t know if I can ever truly trust you. But I can think of a place we can start.”

  Ashtoreth crossed her arms, conscious of the fact that she’d negotiated herself into the worst position possible. “And that would be?”

  “Remove the quarantine and show me humanity,” Icon said. “Take me to Earth.”