99 Gods: War

“After taking breath at Puteoli, the sage” Appollonius “resumed his travels and revisted Greece, Asia Minor, etc. At Ephesus he established his celebrated school, and then, once more returning to Crete, happened to give his old friends, the Cretans, great offence, and was shut up in the temple Dictymna to be devoured by famished dogs ; but the next morning was found perfectly unharmed in the midst of the docile animals, who had already made considerable progress in the Pythagorean philosophy, and were gathered around the philosopher, seated on their hind legs, with open mouths and lolling tongues, intently listening to him while he lectured them in the canine tongue. So devoted had they become to their eloquent instructor, and so enraged were they at the interruption when the Cretans re-opened the temple, that they rushed out upon the latter and made a breakfast of a few of the leading men.” – P.T. Barnum, Humbugs of the World

  “Remember your lessons! Stay conscious!”

  50. (Atlanta)

  “You’re going to die, you useless sack of shit, unless you surrender,” Atlanta said.

  Atlanta didn’t know who or what was home over in Miami’s body, if anyone. He certainly didn’t answer, and he certainly didn’t give up the attack.

  Her abdomen, in the area hit by Miami’s last Red and Gold Helix attack, now showed mottled silver. She had lost the use of her left hand. Hell, she had lost her left hand. One of her mental tracks located her lost hand on the ground, somewhere back near the ruins of Portland’s estate. She would retrieve her hand later. Or not, if things continued to go wrong. Of course, in that scenario…

  She didn’t have much left but that scenario.

  Miami’s problems started in his head and ended there. Miami’s only wounds, if one could call them wounds, were at neck level and above. She had cut his throat a dozen times, and his throat gaped open, oozing silver. She had stuck knives through both eyes. She had skewered the remains of his brain. She had blown away about two thirds of Miami’s head.

  Miami still pummeled her. He still flamed her. She had tried to cut off his hands, but he kept stronger protections on his hands, his primary weapons, than on his head.

  Telling.

  Miami hadn’t said a word since the first head blow. Atlanta hadn’t experimented with head blows on herself, needless to say, and didn’t know if Miami suffered any mental damage. She didn’t know how much head, if any, a Territorial God needed to be able to think. By Miami’s example, two thirds of a missing head wasn’t sufficient to stop a Territorial’s attacks.

  Celebrity certainly didn’t even need a body to think. Vastly unfair. However, she also paid a price for her flexibility, as Celebrity had less power than the top two or three Telepaths in this fight. Her tricks did have their uses, though. The fact Celebrity had survived what she put herself through gave Atlanta hope for the success of her own last ditch plan.

  Miami’s Golden Fire attacks ended and he changed the pattern of his gestures. White Lightning hit her once. Then twice. Then twice more. Each bolt packed more punch than a Golden Fire attack, but each White Lightning lasted only an instant, and Miami took longer to gather himself for the next. The hesitation allowed Atlanta to press Miami back toward the white elephant, which Dana and Velma trundled, still invisible, toward the fight.

  Several times during the fight Atlanta had wished for some of the energy expended getting the white elephant to the fight, but in (short) retrospect, all the energy would have done would be to enable her to fight futilely for longer. Eventually, without this gambit, Miami would win. Not that eventually, either. She frayed at all her edges, bleeding away silvery vapor.

  Miami would win soon, head or no head.

  “Ground it,” Atlanta said, sending her voice to Dana. She had covered this part of the plan earlier with Dana, and Dana did so, wedging the white elephant down into the topsoil between two now flattened suburban homes. “Trigger the supports. Velma, keep Dana going!” Dana powered the supports herself, and the need nearly depleted her. Dr. Horton corralled Dana in her arms, and pushed divine regeneration into Dana. Mortal human bodies weren’t made to live through the energies coursing through her Chief of Staff, and without Velma’s help, the effort would fry Dana, perhaps killing her. Atlanta wasn’t sure what long term effects this would have on Dana, and hoped they wouldn’t be too severe.

  She risked both their lives with this. If another hostile God appeared, Miami miraculously recovered, or another squad of hostile enhanced mortals appeared, Dana and Velma would end up as dead as the heroic Melvin, as what Atlanta asked of them depleted them far too much. Melvin had died an honorable death, but a damned wasteful one. Portland needed to improve at combat or she herself would be just as dead someday soon.

  If not today.

  Atlanta’s mind flashed back to years ago, in the Anime Café, soon after the place opened and just after her mother let her explore around Athens on her own. Back when all she knew of anime and manga was Fruits Basket, she had been little more than spark and sparkle, along with nerdy curiosity about everything. She recalled her first conversation with Lara, looking as old as she did today: ‘There’s something strange about you, kid. I’d swear you were one of us.’ She hadn’t been, and the Indigo had never figured out what was strange about her, and lost interest. However, being one of a few beloved minority kids in a mostly Anglo group of crazies into anime, manga, and British and American science fiction and fantasy media had been tremendous fun for her.

  Until Apotheosis, she never suspected the insane stories the Indigo crazies told her had been real.

  Now, it all ended.

  Dana’s supports, a partial kinetic energy reversal, were necessary to keep the white elephant from destroying itself after they triggered it. Atlanta had designed this trick herself. She basked in pride for a microsecond before shouting “Now!” To Dana.

  The decision to keep the trigger in Dana’s hands had been a gamble, but a correct one. Miami’s attacks would have fried the trigger, a normal mechanical device, in the first seconds of the battle. Dana, limp in Velma’s arms as she dragged Dana away, flicked the switch. The electronic signal went out, and Atlanta grabbed hold of Miami with the last of her personal power, a divine confinement, three feet above the pavement of a destruction littered suburban street. The trick wouldn’t have held Miami earlier, and her trick wouldn’t hold him long now, even weakened as he was.

  The Delta SRB ignited with Miami fifteen feet from the rocket’s exhaust cone. The thrust tugged at Atlanta’s divine confinement holding Miami in place, but the confinement did its job and didn’t shatter. Tiny bits of Miami abraded into the air from the heat and force of the thrust, the world becoming Miami’s scream. Two of these white elephants had enough thrust to launch a Delta II rocket into orbit, if helped by the Delta II’s main engine. One solid rocket booster should be enough to abrade the fight-weakened Miami into oblivion, Atlanta hoped.

  Only if Atlanta could hold on to Miami, though. His last panicked throes strained her near the point of final exhaustion. To hold on she had to inch closer and closer to the SRB exhaust plume.

  Which she did, exactly as she needed for her secret last-ditch scenario.

  With no great worry, she entered the SRB exhaust to join Miami, hoping her work with Celebrity would pay off.

  Miami died.

  Atlanta was no more.

  51. (John)

  Boise doubled over and groaned. Inventor wailed, Singularity sank to his knees, and Freedom swore under his breath and didn’t stop.

  John looked up from his scry bowl, fearing the worst, expecting to see Phoenix or Dubuque in the room with them. Nothing. He motioned with his eyes to Reed, who concentrated.

  “We’ve got dead Gods,” Reed said.

  Dead Gods. Dear God!

  John hadn’t expected dead Gods. He did a quick scan of the room. “Atlanta’s projection is missing, and so is Dr. Horton’s,” he said. Reed nodded.

  “Dammit,” John said, and looked
back at his scry bowl. With his allied Gods discombobulated, this would be the perfect time for an enemy charge. However, the enemy, or at least the enemies John had been able to identify, chose this instant to pull back. Several winked off entirely, which meant they had lost their divine support. John took a deep breath and watched. Pinkus, the least senior of John’s apprentice magicians, detonated two attack spells at one of the fleeing targets. Line of sight didn’t matter, as they were able to target anyone visible in the scry bowl. In but a moment, the last of the enemies vanished from the bowl, ending the fight.

  John waved his hands and attracted the attention of his magicians. “Cease fire. We’re not going to risk going after them. We haven’t been doing anything more than annoying them, anyway.” He had learned enough, though, about the Godly defenses to construct much more efficient battle spells, ones tuned to Gods and God supported normals, for the next fight.

  Boise came out of his crouch and looked up at John with strained eyes. “We’ve lost Atlanta,” he said. “She killed Miami.”

  “You’re certain of this?” John said. In his wildest dreams he hadn’t imagined the Gods could be killed by anything except normal humans, based on what the Gods told him. So, then, where were the normals able to kill or even harm Gods? The Telepaths didn’t appear to have the power. His magicians might eventually have the power, but by the time they did, they would no longer count as normal humans.

  Had the Host fed the Gods a lie?

  “They’re both gone, leaving behind great aching gaps in the minds of all the Gods,” Boise said.

  Reed had wandered over to the couch, where Dana’s projection lay, and touched her with his hands, enabling him to read her emotions through the linkage. “Dana’s having a mental breakdown and I think she over-extended herself using her divine support; Dr. Horton’s alive and conscious, but she’s lost her divine support. I think the Portland battlefield’s a charnel house,” Reed said. “The only functional combatant left standing is… Nessa? Her? That twit? How?”

  Nessa had successfully walked through the valley of the shadow of death. John laughed, a painful chuckle at Reed’s mortal offense at Nessa’s capabilities. “Despite her flakiness, she is one of the top five Telepaths on the planet, Reed. She’s well trained and has mental reserves none of us can imagine.” He had seen her do the terrifyingly impossible far too many times. “Boise, how fast can you get us to Portland?”

  “I must recover,” Boise said.

  “Recover later.”

  “You forget yourself, Lorenzi. You aren’t my boss.”

  “I don’t want to be your boss,” John said. At least not right this instant; he didn’t have the right leverage now. “I’m talking necessity. We can’t stand around studying our navels while we have wounded allies and…”

  “Be quiet,” Boise said, and closed his eyes. A moment later, three God projections appeared in the cabin’s great room: Akron, Worcester and Montreal. Boise waved his hands. “Now you know what I know. Choose your sides carefully. What happened today to Miami and Atlanta will happen to you if you continue on your paths. How long will it be before Dubuque calls upon you to do what he called on Phoenix and Miami to do? Hear my voice for once.”

  John shivered as he realized what Boise did. They hadn’t had time to work out a defense against Dubuque’s control trick, but Boise had enough time to duplicate it. Bastard. If John had known Boise knew the trick, he would have worked the battle differently.

  Worcester flung up a barrier around her projection and winked out. Montreal shook her head for a moment, knelt and put her head in her hands. Akron stood firm and shook her head.

  “You should have stuck to logic,” Akron said. This was the first time John had seen Akron, and she looked the picture of a modern American well-to-do burgher housewife. Hair too short, body too thin, and slacks. And what was the point of jewelry if it didn’t involve gems or precious metals?

  “I was countering Dubuque’s control.”

  “I’d already thrown off Dubuque’s so-called control,” Akron said. “For a self-named prophet of God, you don’t know half as much as you think you do.”

  “I apologize then. I am not perfect.” Boise flicked flies and looked abashed.

  Akron’s projection looked around John’s safe house. Her severe face took on a look of disapproval. “This fighting is ridiculous. Madness. This cannot be what we were put on the Earth for. Miami sinned, and so have you.”

  “Phoenix besieged us; we struck back only after Miami attacked Atlanta. However, we couldn’t do anything more than keep them from destroying us,” John said. “I’m not sure we even scratched or scorched a one of them.”

  “I hear and understand. I’m not joining your group or following your orders, though,” Akron said. “If you come up with someone more reasonable to lead the defense against Dubuque’s insanity than you two losers, contact me then. Until then, don’t bother.”

  Her projection vanished.

  John looked over to Boise, who had lifted Montreal to her feet. “I’m embarrassed,” Montreal said, in her lusty Quebecker accent. Her body, unlike Akron’s, carried enough weight to look healthy and attractive, though he wished she wouldn’t show quite so much cleavage. “I can’t figure out for the life of me why I’m so vulnerable to mental takeover. Sure, I’ll ally with you now, but based on previous experience, the next time a God grabs me and does this trick to me I’ll just switch sides again. What a cock-up!”

  “We’re working on a defense for Dubuque’s control,” Boise said. “Stay with us. As soon as we finalize it, we’ll give it to you.”

  “Free me?” She continued to hold Boise’s hand even after she stood.

  “Yes,” Boise said. “I have no desire to control anyone on a permanent basis or build any empires.”

  “What if I stalk off?”

  “Then you stalk off,” Boise said. “Better to have you as an angry neutral than as Dubuque’s slave.”

  “Okay, I guess,” Montreal said. “Why did Miami and Atlanta do what they did? It’s ‘orrible!”

  “Miami attacked Atlanta, and we don’t know why,” Boise said, patting Montreal’s shoulder in comfort. “Atlanta was hurting, even before the fight. Dubuque’s political attacks on her had shredded her Mission and frayed her hold on her territory. Worse, actual fighting between two Territorial Gods turns out to be bad in general; each blow thrown hurt the thrower as much as it hurt the defender. We Territorial Gods have the power to fight each other, but the Host made us in such a way as to be socially incapable of such a fight, thank God Almighty. I don’t believe she saw any other choice but to die at the end.” Boise paused and took a deep breath. “This was inevitable, but an important lesson to all of us as well. Because of what was done today, we’ll never again see an all-out personal Territorial God versus Territorial God fight.”

  “Fuck,” Montreal said, her bedroom eyes now wide in surprise. “They’ve ruined my Integrity!”

  Boise turned to John and Reed, who had walked over from Dana’s immobile and unoccupied projection to join them. “The fight shattered the Integrity of all the Gods, especially all the Territorial Gods. Dubuque lost more than a supporter by arranging this fight: he’s cratered his own cause, perhaps fatally. I can’t tell. In any event, as the prime mover behind this fight, he lost more than any other surviving God. He’s going to need to start over to rebuild his Integrity, and in the meantime, his City of God plots and plans are on hold. If we’re lucky, he’ll never be able to recover, but I doubt we’ll be so lucky.”

  John cleared his throat, and Boise nodded. “Yes, yes. I’m pompous and long winded. Live with it. However, my pomposity gave me enough time to recover. Now we can go to Portland and heal the fallen.” Boise paused. “But do us all a favor and leave your apprentice magicians behind. I still say they’re wrong and they shouldn’t exist.”

  “If you wish,” John said, chewing
his lower lip and worrying about how many funerals he would end up attending because of this disaster.

  52. (Nessa)

  Nessa stood and grabbed a mostly crushed chocolate bar from Ken’s back pocket on the way up. She opened the wrapper. Powder. She lapped up the chocolate powder anyway.

  Ken had only suffered a few wounds, but he still hadn’t recovered from the rest stop ambush, and the last shared mental attack had taken the last of what he had left to offer. He opened one eye half open and gave her a plaintive ‘please’ to let him rest. He had done so much during the fight, perhaps too much. Her love needed his rest. Nessa couldn’t, for many reasons.

  For a moment, her hand touched his, almost wedding band to wedding band, and the touch brought a smile to her face. They had come so far, in so short a time. Their improbable joining helped her so much, so unlike her real church approved wedding and marriage, all tied up in societal expectations and good rough sex. This was real love, and the crazy backwards marriage had found a way to open up her unconscious mind and bushwhack a path through her Telepath-standard I-am-aloneness brambles. And Ken’s. Such a beautiful thing!

  Exhausted, her mental discipline faltered, and her mind whirled from self to other. Could she find a way to duplicate the backwards marriage, and share such beauty with the world? Yes, she could. She could put a telepathic whammy on the rings, and when they gave them up to the person or two who haunted Ken’s mind, she would be able to give them a backwards marriage as well. Yum. Scheme! With two, there would be a pattern, and in the minds of those receptive, not only including the Telepaths, but also the Psychics, the Mindbound and those few who thought in the same way as Telepaths, the pattern would take hold and duplicate whenever appropriate. Without her interference. This is what Opartuth had done with his crazy believe in the UFOs trick. Normally, she couldn’t even think of such things, but now, with her telepathy exhausted, she knew how. Of course, exhausted, she couldn’t do anything now, but she would remember. She never forgot her schemes, unless she willed them out of her mind.

  Heh.

  Nessa walked out from her place of concealment, the brick fireplace, and looked around. Nobody else moved, at least nobody she could see through the smoke or sense with her mind. She still controlled six Miami thugs, and the voices in her mind, her two socks, cheered her on for being able to maintain her focus on the control during the entirety of the battle. The distant ones were gone. Out there somewhere, a man knelt near the back edge of the battlefield outside of Portland’s wrecked estate, the one who had surrendered on his own. She ignored the screwy Mindbound for the moment, although the fact he alone still possessed Miami’s divine enhancements did puzzle her. The loudest noise she heard were Dana and the other’s howls, from far outside the estate. Dana’s mind had hit the wall, unable to take the carnage, and taken her physician companion with her into insanity. Strangely, Dana also still possessed her divine enhancements. Oh, right. Portland still supported Dana.

  Dana didn’t know enough to suck it up until later, as Nessa did. Eventually Nessa would pay, she knew, but later. Not now.

  She continued her search on foot.

  The first person she found was one of Portland’s enhanced servants, one of the ones that Portland called her Wise Shepherds. A miracle worker. No, scratch that, a dead miracle worker. In fact, this Wise Shepherd had died in the first moments of the attack when Miami’s thugs blasted through the large windows at the back of the estate house. She, the Wise Shepherd, lay half-buried under glass shards, bricks, boards and other rubble.

  What a waste of a life. Nessa still retained a bit of the floating-on-air stunned disbelief at the unprovoked attack by the flunkies of a God. Nessa didn’t think much of these so-called Gods any more. Devils, more likely. Demons. Monsters.

  Evil-doers, mos def, she thought. Dey da bad guys. Not us.

  Clarified things nicely, that.

  “I’ve been here before,” Nessa said, to nobody in particular. “Only when Ken took out Lorenzi’s beach house rental back when we were dumb-shit kids, he didn’t do anywhere near this much damage.” Ken had done about a quarter of the damage to Portland’s estate house. When the place had started to creak and fail around them, he had telekinetically lifted the entire second story and roof of the place and slid it away from the battle, where the rubble now sat in a heap in the former front yard and ornate circular driveway of the estate.

  Not much of a loss, in Nessa’s opinion. All sorts of four-wheeled gas guzzling pollution machines had died under that heap.

  Nessa found Mary totally buried under some rubble. “Ken, a little lift, please?” Nessa asked. No response. She reached toward him with her mind and spoke her request into his head. Her telepathy was weak, as if she had been screaming for hours, long enough to leave her throat raw. Ken responded, a distant ‘yes’ from the bottom of a well, and the rubble over Mary shifted enough for Nessa to drag the rangy bodyguard out, minus denim jacket, much of a sweatshirt, patches of blue jeans, several knives, a couple of pistols, one boot, and a considerable amount of tattooed skin. And a lot of blood. Nessa winced when she realized how much of Mary stayed behind.

  “Nessa,” Mary said, almost inaudible. “What’s wrong?”

  “Rest,” Nessa said. “Don’t think about anything.” Mary had a few more minutes to live, but without some miraculous divine healing, that was all. Nessa had to block what she saw out of her mind or she would have fallen over on the spot.

  Nessa’s words carried enough of her mental tricks with them to work on Mary, whose mind faded into unconsciousness. Part of Nessa wanted to go there as well, but she wouldn’t allow herself the rest. She had her own wounds to think about, as well as the fact that if she let herself go under, her control over Miami’s thugs would fade. Their divine support might have vanished, but they still had their AKs.

  She had to stay conscious.

  So she did.

  Nessa walked slowly among the rubble, unsteady, attempting to avoid things to trip over, and searching for Portland. She next found Javier and Prep, Javier barely conscious on top of Prep’s dead body and the rubble that covered him. Prep had taken a rocket propelled grenade to the torso in the first moments of the fight, and what remained of him…well, Nessa couldn’t do anything for now, anyway. Javier’s left side was a tarry charred mess, burned from at least two separate attacks, and he had gunfire stitches across his chest. Blood and ash stained his beard and the left side of it was gone completely, burned away in the same attacks that charred his side.

  “Remember your lessons! Stay conscious!” Nessa said. The fully functional Telepath hadn’t forgotten Nessa’s lesson that she learned in the incident back when she had been a kid: when you’ve been badly wounded you needed to stay conscious at all costs.

  Javier sent.

  He hadn’t mastered his nerves, which would be fatal in a situation like this. Nessa knelt and put her hand on Javier’s head, reached inside him, and made him numb all over. The effort felt like she drew a knife through her guts, and warmth trickled from her nose. Blood. From an ultra-high blood-pressure spike. Bad, very bad. She would need a gallon or so of water, soon, to wash the poisons out of her body.

  She ignored her physical problems and kept scanning. Javier had already closed the worst of his bullet wounds, his self-healing far stronger than Nessa’s. Fluid loss would be the killer, though. His burns were bad, and Nessa didn’t have water with her for either her or Javier. Nessa turned away when she realized he had lost one of his eyes. She started to shake again. She didn’t want to witness what had happened to her people.

  But she must.

  Javier sent.

  “I’m not that badly wounded.”

  “How’d that happen?” She hadn’t noticed. On the other hand, she had shut down her pain nerves so long ago she had lost the memory of pain. A necessity, or when her compatriots took their wounds, her empathy would make her suffe
r them as well. Besides, the twins were okay. Things would be fine.

  Javier paused.

  “Good,” Nessa said. “Nuke?”

  Nessa looked. About five feet farther toward where Portland, Melvin and Portland’s people once huddled, the nature of the rubble changed. Beyond that point, a melt sheen covered the rubble, where it wasn’t charred and still smoldering. The partly melted rubble continued all the way beyond the house.

  “Well, okay, it might have been some sort of small nuke. I remember a white-hot beam, though, not a missile.”

  “No it fucking isn’t alright to die if you die on me I’m going to piss on your grave and feed you to the fucking maggots if you do anything so stupid!” Nessa stopped, unsure which part of her said that. “Sorry.”

  The blast edge looked knife-edged and bent around where the Telepaths had stood and fought, the sign of Ken’s telekinetic shell. Nessa worked numbers, figuring the retreat distance from the explosion point to the hold edge to be about a hundred and twenty feet. Yes, this had been a powerful explosion. When the grenades had exploded in the back of the tour bus, Ken’s telekinetic shell held after only fifteen feet of retreat. Throw in an inverse cubed volume of the explosion versus inverse squared proportion of Ken’s telekinetic shell and the effect was linear… The explosion that took out the far end of the house hadn’t been too much larger than the explosion that took out the bus. A mini-micro-nuke? Something else entirely? Hellishly hot, though.

  Nessa moved on, willing her body to move despite the shakes. She came to Giselle’s body, and found it hard to look at the mess. She had died alone, Nessa realized. Not instantly, either. Giselle had lost consciousness and her own body did her in. For a Telepath, this had to be the worst way to go. Giselle first went down because of glass shrapnel. Later, after a minor recovery, the bullet wounds got to her. Then the mini-micro-nuke’s rubble buried her, and she survived even that. She had died, though, while Nessa and Ken had been recovering from the shared mental attack.

  “I should have been there for her,” Nessa said. The part of her that rejected lies noted that if she had not done the group mental attack with Ken, neither she nor Ken would likely be alive, and Giselle would have died anyway. Cold comfort, but truth rarely comforted, and was always cold, the reason people lied to themselves.

  The reason why mature Telepaths were insane, by normal standards.

  Nessa found Nicole half buried by rubble and unconscious. Luckily her wounds weren’t life threatening, just bumps, contusions and flash-burns from the mini-micro-nuke or whatever. She must have already been rubble-buried when it detonated. She would keep. Nessa found Phil buried under rubble a yard away from Nicole, semi-conscious and hardly wounded at all. She couldn’t penetrate his mental shields and he didn’t respond when she spoke. She would have to get Ken to dig him out soon, though, or he might suffocate.

  For now, though, he would keep as well.

  Nessa wandered into the nuked part of the house. “Portland, Portland?” Nessa said, a whispered dog call, in an attempt to register any echo thoughts or lure any response from the God. Nothing. Nessa continued her shuffling until she found a mottled silver mess, roughly body sized and shaped, that had oozed down to the bottom of the rubble.

  Portland. She put her hands on the God and reached out her senses. Portland’s mind still twitched, thankfully, just not functional. “Figures that a massive physical attack would cronk their godly minds, the same way a massive mental attack melts their bodies. No healing from her any time soon,” Nessa said, writing off Mary unless Lorenzi’s crew of divine dumbfucks showed up first. Melvin, Portland’s bodyguard and hopped-up mortal, had stood beside Portland when the attack hit. Nessa couldn’t find anything left of him.

  She marched back. Only Alt and Celebrity remained missing. Nessa guessed she would find Celebrity out with the enemy combatants. “Alt?” Nessa said, her voice a bare croak.

  Nessa caught a mild echo-thought response, a little ways back of her first amble across the rubble. She walked toward the spot and found Alt. He had fallen under the remains of a giant flatscreen, wounded and immobile, curled up into a fetal ball. She focused on his mind and found him conscious, fighting his own fears about his wounds and horrified by the battle. Alt and death, Nessa decided, really didn’t get along. His wounds looked no worse than hers. Only his mind had folded.

  She felt recognition, and love. Damnation. She cut the link and went back to Ken. He opened one eye and gave her a tiny smile. “Hang in there, hun,” he said.

  “You too.” She took a moment to look again at Ken’s broken leg, hit by a flying piece of rubble. The leg would need to be set, but the break didn’t threaten his life. She rummaged through his pack until she found the bag of plastic restraints she suspected he carried.

  “Once a private investigator, always a private investigator,” she said in a sing-song voice, and skipped off to bind the mind controlled thugs, toe-dancing lightly through the rubble. If she bound the thugs, she could relax, at least a little. Javier was right, though. She needed to keep herself conscious.

  Consciousness would take work, but what didn’t take work?

  Somewhere in the distance, down near that crazy rocket Atlanta had used as a weapon, Dana still howled loud enough for Nessa to hear. A thin plume of exhaust from the rocket wafted straight up into the sky, and several hundred feet up veered off in a J shape.

  Dana needed an intense session from Portland. She might be smart as a whip and strong as an ox with her borrowed willpower, but she took to fighting about as well as Alt did. That is: not.

  Nessa saved the final thug, the one who had surrendered, for last.

  “So, why’d you surrender?” she said, when she got to him. The big black man knelt in fear before her, trembling and near panic, no threat to Nessa at all.

  “I saw Portland,” he said, in a weak and broken voice. “I knew then my God was in the wrong. I had to surrender.”

  Interesting. Nessa knelt down and looked into the man’s eyes, ready to read his mind. His words held a subtle untruth in them, but she saw no hostility. “I’m not sure I believe you. I need to check your mind to see if you’re a traitor.”

  “Go ahead, ma’am, I can’t stop you,” he said, his voice sounding as if he might piss himself.

  Nessa peered down and saw his eyes: flat and steady, hard as ice. Nothing like the rest of his trembling body. Nessa recognized the fearless eyes, not panicked at all. Behind the man’s eyes she found exquisite mental shields. Well, they needed to be exquisite, she realized, to pull off this trick.

  This was worth a giggle, as good as one of her better schemes, though Nessa didn’t react a bit. “You pass my mental inspection, Leo,” she said, using the name that matched the physical body. “The eyes are a dead giveaway, though.”

  The eyes changed to match the rest of the thug’s appearance. “Thank you,” the former Miami thug said, with a lilt that spoke of the British Virgin Islands. “I guess there’s no fooling you.”

  “No, there’s not,” Nessa said.

  “I would like to serve you and your mission,” the man said. “It’s the morally correct thing to do.”

  “Of course,” Nessa said, repressing a giggle. “After this fight, you have no other choice, now do you?”

  Nessa didn’t have any choices either. To make everything work, she would have to hide this dainty morsel of information inside the locked compartments deep in her mind, where right sock held sway and protected her subconscious and all her other don’t-remember-it-too-often knowledge from intruders. Nessa stood and smiled, remembering her mother’s rule one: say nothing about what you did that was strange.

  So many secrets, so little time, Nessa thought. Trah lah trah ley.

  Celebrity walked toward her, unsteady but back on her feet, silvery still.

  “You okay?” Nessa said. Celebrity looked a bit underweight. “Or, should I ask, how ba
d are you hurt?”

  “Bad enough,” Celebrity said. “Let’s merge.”

  Reason number one why Nessa needed to hide her just-gained information.

  “Good idea,” Nessa said. Celebrity flowed up to Nessa, as Celebrity had been oozing along the ground, not walking, and vanished into Nessa’s body. “Ummmm,” Nessa said. Love. Decadence. “Feel free to heal me.”

  “I’ll try,” Celebrity said. “Healing’s part of my Ideology now, but I’ve still got a ways to go.”

  “I can sense your work,” Nessa said. “Feels good. It might even keep me from having too bad a breakdown once this is over.”

  “Your faith in my healing is powering it,” Celebrity said, using Nessa’s own voice.

  “Me? Faith? I have no faith. I’m an agnostic.”

  The former Miami thug boomed laughter and sank back to the ground. Every few seconds he would sneak another peek at Nessa and laugh again.

  Nessa didn’t think her comment had been that humorous.

  “I can’t believe you’re still functional,” Celebrity said. “Why aren’t you dead?”

  “Because I didn’t want to be dead?” Nessa said. Anything to keep the blood moving and the liver and kidneys functioning. “Can you conjure up a gallon of water for me? It might help in the not dying crap.” A tiny rain cloud appeared above Nessa; she gleefully tipped her head up and drank a tiny private gully washer, reveling in the feel of hard rain on her face. Yum. “Actually, ample practice might be a better answer.” She had walked away from worse, both physically and psychologically, though she still carried the scars and always would. Ten miles away Nessa sensed Lorenzi and his crew emerge from around a mountain, moving quickly. Lorenzi, the bastard, would try to take over. He always did. She always resisted. This time she suspected a whole passel of Gods would resist as well.

  “I’ve gotta take a leak.”

  “Your kidneys work quickly,” Celebrity said. “Just go. I’ll cover it up so nobody notices.”

  The giggling thug didn’t help, so Nessa moved out of his sight before she let loose.

  “I’ve got a secret we need to keep,” Celebrity said, after. Nessa’s eyes had the urge to flicker over to Miami’s former thug, but she controlled herself and they didn’t. She watched Lorenzi’s crew arrive, their first stop the remains of the rocket booster and the disconsolate Dana and the now protective Dr. Horton. Singularity picked Dana up and held her to him as Boise gathered up Dr. Horton, lifted off and flew Lorenzi’s crew over to her.

  “Okay,” Nessa said. “What’s this secret?”

  “I know who I’m going to give birth to,” Celebrity said. “A God. A replacement for Miami.”

  Nessa took a deep breath of relief. “That’s not a secret,” Nessa said. “That’s a cause for a celebration.”

  Somehow, out of all this incredible mess, they had won.

  Dammit, they had won!