I came to my senses in a painful shock of sudden awareness. I was on a dance mat in the center of the gym. Maddy was curled up on the floor next to me, unconscious. I couldn’t quite reach her hand. Jordon sat in an office chair nearby, completely freaked out. I tried to sit up and the pain was so sharp I blacked out again.
Coming to my senses one more time, I was back in the gym. You couldn’t take me to an emergency room right now because for starters, my skin was glittersteel, impervious to medical instrumentation. But there was a huge amount of damage to the glittersteel, like the killing blows had all been deflected but I’d been cooked in my skin in the process, which felt to me like I had subcutaneous third-degree burns all over most of my body.
Meanwhile I started to realize—Maddy had suffered some kind of injury when the truck crashed, and had still expended enough willpower to teleport three entire people out of that situation, and now her stamina just seemed zeroed out for the time being. I couldn’t look at her without losing my shit, so I closed my eyes and tried to reorient myself to my life.
Because I couldn’t understand my life right then, didn’t have the right hooks to get back into inhabiting it like a person. After a certain number of transmutations, you couldn’t really just revert back to what you were, as though some perfectly preserved original template of yourself existed out there somewhere for reference. You could reconstruct your former state based on every available memory fragment and hope for the best. How much degradation could you withstand before you just had to accept that you were not the same person at all as when you started down this road? I suddenly remembered what it was like to play Sparkle Dungeon for the first time, when I was nine years younger and full of silly enthusiasm. You couldn’t just transmute back into innocence.
Something sparked against my fingertips. I opened my eyes. Maddy had inched close enough to me to brush her hand against mine. She was awake.
“Are we going to live?” I asked her in a hoarse whisper.
“Don’t sound so disappointed about it,” she whispered back.
Maddy sat up, which got Jordon’s attention. I felt so relieved that Maddy was back that I suddenly blacked out again, like I could just release myself for now, knowing she was there.
I woke up again with Jordon trying to get me to drink a glass of water. Maddy had painkillers she wanted me to try, a stash of oxycodone she’d saved for an emergency. It would take something like fifteen minutes before I maybe started feeling some relief. Maddy kept trying to talk to me, and I couldn’t keep the thread straight in my head. I was extremely frightened that I wasn’t going to find my way back at all, and they’d just have to leave me somewhere. Irrational, frightening shit.
But she was a genius, and once she felt like she had me stabilized a little, she and Jordon started discussing Sparkle Dungeon, which seemed so surreal to me that I got a little blissed out for a couple seconds about it. I realized I really wanted to hear the questions Maddy was asking Jordon about the game. Maddy was still pretty new to the game world, and SD5 was actually a resource-starved game compared to the rest of the series; there was a lot she hadn’t experienced yet. How the fuck, she wanted to know, did anyone recover from shit like this in the game? Jordon seemed startled by the question—was Maddy literally unfamiliar with the concept of healing spells? To which Maddy replied, “Do you fucking know any?”
And suddenly a warmth filled my veins because I finally remembered and understood that I knew twenty different healing spells if I could just get my head straight enough to actually cast one.
It took me an entire five minutes to succeed at casting a first-level heal that helped me stop losing consciousness semifrequently from the pain. That was the first hook. I’d never used healing on myself like this. In the game you just waved your hands and your hit points got magically refreshed. It was pleasingly unspecific and you didn’t have to work for it. Right now I had to piece myself back together in stages. I was sufficiently communicative that they trusted me to work through it. I got myself to a place where I could anesthetize myself enough to sink into sleep as opposed to just blacking out. I asked them to wake me up once an hour and make me try another spell if I wasn’t too exhausted.
Eventually, I could sit up, and look around the room, and feel safe.
Once I was finally coherent for a long enough stretch, they brought a cot into the gym to get me up off the dance mat and make me more comfortable. And then Maddy wanted to show me some video she’d recorded while I was zonked out. She’d gotten her shit together enough to start paying attention to the spyware we had on Cameron Kelly’s LAN. I was surprised he’d never found it, then surprised again to learn that Cameron actually did notice it eventually, but left it running—he seemed to have a soft spot for us.
Maybe two hours after I’d killed Lonso Drake, Violet pulled the surviving members of the cabal together on a video call.
“Lonso’s been murdered,” Violet said, seething with rage. “I discovered this because the National Guard was summoned to investigate a violent incursion at the Church. Someone apparently got inside the compound, killed Lonso and three of his ministers, kidnapped Jordon Connelly, and got away clean. It’s been two hours and the Church hasn’t yet released any internal surveillance to me. They have another hour, and then I’m sending in the army to quarantine the premises and start torturing people for answers.”
She let that sink in for quite a while.
“Clearly Isobel and Maddy are alive,” she said. “And clearly that needs to change.”
“I don’t understand this at all,” Cameron said. “What the hell’s so important about Jordon Connelly that they would risk coming out of hiding to grab her?”
“Who knows what they were thinking,” Violet said. “Lonso was in Sacramento when the incursion started. He was well informed enough to teleport back to the Church in time to summon a support squad of elite ministers to help him confront them on their way out of the driveway. We know this much exclusively because of National Guard interviews on the ground with ministers who were too stunned to resist arrest.
“Do you know why I can’t get surveillance footage from the Church tonight? Because Lonso was a weird, distrustful bastard, who structured his entire organization around the premise that he personally was an immortally reincarnating scion, consequently he never bothered grooming a second in command. Seriously, the org structure for the Church of Gorvod is: Exalted Scion at the top, and the next level down is literally hundreds of peer ministers who all theoretically report directly to Lonso. And none of those people feel they owe any loyalty to the Crown. They’re functionally restructured at their core to believe in Gorvod above all else, and to believe in Lonso as Gorvod’s messenger.
“So now we’re looking at close to a hundred branches of the Church in California, each with as many as several hundred ministers reporting in, all of whom are heavily armed, many of whom are skilled with power morphemes, and none of whom give a fuck about us.”
“So can’t you just … arrest them?” Olivia asked, unfamiliar with the encroaching notion that the Empress of California actually did have physical limits to what she could accomplish in a rational fashion.
“No, Olivia, they’re an arcane paramilitary organization within our borders, and as of now, their religion is forbidden. I have a window of approximately two hours in which to finish lining up lightning strikes that will destroy these branches while they’re all still in bed.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Cameron said. “These people helped you enforce order in the streets after the relocation.”
“Spare me your sudden collegiate exploration of the concept of loyalty,” Violet snapped. “Even if I let the Church survive, there’s one highly problematic passage in the holy book of Gorvod, whatever it’s called—the Gorvodomicon or something. Lonso went to the trouble of identifying a tier of believers he called the Devoted Scions. He meant this to be an exclusive club for asshole billionaires to buy into. In the book, the Devoted Scions are pseudo-angelic, immortal servitors of the Exalted Scion.
“And that arrogant fuck went to the trouble of describing the whole process of a Devoted Scion transitioning from one incarnation to the next, with Watchful Eyes gently narrating the transition to keep your identity moving forward in time. There’s a passage that describes what happens when the Exalted Scion himself experiences this transition. The Church falls temporarily to the Devoted Scions to rule until the Exalted Scion resumes his rightful place.
“Let me give you one fucking guess—who’s the only person Lonso ever singled out as a true Devoted Scion?
“Jordon fucking Connelly.
“Technically it’s her Church now. So no, we aren’t arresting anyone whose loyalties could later be roused to the cause of a woman who is now firmly in the hands of MOTHERFUCKING ANARCHISTS! No, these people die tonight.”
“So, that’s taken care of,” Bradford said firmly. “Meanwhile, Isobel and Maddy have Jordon for interrogation. Worst-case scenario—what could Jordon reveal to them that would impact us directly?”
The silence in response to that question was educational for all of them. They had absolutely no idea what Lonso told his trophy girlfriend about the inner workings of the cabal.
“I want the timetable for launch accelerated,” Violet commanded. “I want us in the air in seven days.”
Cameron said slowly, “You will not have everything we agreed to in seven days, Violet.”
“What will I have, Cameron?”
“You’ll have some of it. The simpler stuff. You will definitely not have the singularity cannon.”
“I think we’ll learn to get by with our incomplete complement of weapons systems, Cameron. How about you, Bradford?”
“I will be ready. I suggest we continue expending focus on the scout mission. Launch it at day three. Expect the mission to fail, and perhaps we’ll be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t.”
“Agreed. Olivia?”
Olivia was too shocked to speak at first. Violet prompted her again.
And Olivia said, “You’re proposing another relocation event in seven days?”
“Olivia, who did you think we were building this for, just the five of us? Like, this would be a private little cruise liner?”
“I just thought we would have—months at least—to figure out how to store all these people!”
“I thought we had already figured this out, Olivia! Aren’t we storing people in the goddamn battery?”
“Those people aren’t getting out, Violet. The constraints are very different for how you keep them alive, when your only goal is to extract their energetic value. You want to ensure that thirty million people survive relocation without all of them immediately melting down from shock and horror? That is not a seven-day problem, Violet.”
A respectful pause followed, in which Violet silently allowed that she’d been schooled just now.
“Fine, then scale it back down,” she said firmly. “Just tell me how many people you can keep safe with seven days to plan, and that’s how many we relocate.”
Olivia just shook her head in frustration, unwilling to explain to Violet that this problem wasn’t going to slice itself down on such a conveniently arithmetic basis.
“Let me make this clear,” Violet said. “We are not going to sit by waiting for them to dream up another once-in-a-lifetime strike against us. You have seven days, people.”
She terminated the call.