“Are there any kind of warning signs I should be aware of?” Anna asked. “Some kind of indication that you or your familiars are about to go off like a p?”

  “Yes,” Jason said calmly, then sipped at his fruit juice blend. “Some humans, in a dispy of idiocy so grand I have aphor to pare it, are trying to DESTROY THE PLAHAT THEY ARE STANDING ON!”

  His outburst was mirrored by the nd around them as the ge was rocked by a tremor that shook leaves from the trees. Thunder pealed in the sky as lighting dahrough dark clouds. Anna was sent stumbling back as Jason’s aura took on physical force, pushing out of him like a wave.

  Anna had made multiple visits to Jason’s astral kingdom. She had seen its wonders and witnessed his power, but it was only in that moment that she truly uood. This pce had a god, and that god was angry.

  Suddenly struck with the urge to escape, she found a portal opeo her and hurried through without further sideration. Oher side was the tral hub of Asano Vilge, bustling with diplomatic staffers from across the globe. Portal travel was retively ongst them, but they all reised the portals belonging to Jason. They also knew Anna, and watg her emerge, wide-eyed and trembling, had many stopping to gawp. She stood up straight, tugged a couple of adjustments to her suit and took a deep breath, letting it out long and slow.

  “That bad, huh?” Farrah asked. Anna turned around, finding her leaning casually against aric buggy. It was one of a fleet of busses and buggies that, along with an underground tram system, ected the disparate locations within Asano Vilge. Farrah took a swig from a bottle of iced tea, sold from a vending mae beside the buggy depot entrance.

  “He’s not happy,” Anna said. “What exactly did you tell him?”

  “The same thing I’m here to tell you. More or less. We’ll o meet some people after, so let’s do it on the road.”

  Farrah got behind the wheel of the buggy, basically a juiced-up electric golf cart, and Anna sat beside her. The private roads of the vilge were well-maintained asphalt, and they took ohat soohem into bushnd. The sun was warm and the air filled with the st of eucalypts. Farrah tapped a button on the sole and the fabric top of the buggy folded back.

  “Lovely day,” she said.

  “It’s very nice,” Anna replied, her tone less enthusiastic than her words.

  “Shame how the people of this p decided to take all this away from Jason’s family.”

  Anna’s lips pressed tightly together.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “He’s angry at the people of your world. Again.”

  “I noticed.”

  “I’m not without my own e, you know. Do you recall how I spent my first weeks on this p?”

  “You were held and tortured.”

  “By?”

  “A rogue—”

  “Who?” Farrah interrupted, her tone a warning.

  “Members of the work,” Anna admitted.

  “And when I escaped, they moved me to an astral spaot one of the proto-spaces you had back then, but a fully developed one. From which I was in the process of esg again when Jason found me.”

  “This, while iing, is not new. I thought you were going to brief me, Ms Hurin.”

  “Oh, Ms Hurin, is it? Are we not friends anymore, Anna?”

  “You’ve been gone a long time, Farrah,” Anna said, then her expression turned awkward. “Susan did tell me to invite you to dinner.”

  Farrah grinned.

  “And how is she?”

  “She’s been spearheading a project to retrieve art from abandoned European cities. She’s stockpiled a colle of works she’d be lucky to allowed in the same room as, ba the day. She’s happy, although seeing cities in what amounts to a post-apocalyptic state has uled her.”

  “The stakes are high. Something that humanity still has trouble grasping, it turns out. That’s why Jason is angry. I’m angry too, I just don’t have a universe to shake. I have to make do with being pissy at old friends.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “Anna, do you recall the man who perpetrated my incarceration, here oh?”

  “Adrien Barbou.”

  “He was one of yours. A work man.”

  “He was a traitor, not a true—”

  “Don’t,” Farrah said. “You o retire the ‘it wasn’t us, it was a bad apple gue,’ speech, Anna. I won’t tolerate it. And if you try it on Jason, you’ll regret surviving what I do to you. He vented his rage on you, and I’m guessing the sky. A few earthquakes in unoccupied parts of his mai. Maybe a tsunami or two. Which is healthy.”

  “That’s healthy?”

  “pared to roaming the Earth, killing anyone who displeases him? Yes. Instead of that, he’s having a therapy session with Arabelle Remore. But I saw it when I told him, Anna. He had the old eyes, from the st time we were here. It was just for a moment, but you don’t want that. Not with the power he has now.”

  “What did you tell him, Farrah? What set him off like this? You keep talking around it. I thought rambling, taial expnations were how he worked, not you.”

  Farrah snorted a ugh.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “My expnation had gotten as far as Adrien Barbou.”

  “My information was that he died in the Saint-étieransformation zone, along with Jack Gerling, Mr North and most of the vampire lords who went with them. Only Jason and the vampire queen emerged, until Gerliurn in his current unfortuate. How does Jason feel about that?”

  “There are a number of topics he intends to raise with Elizabeth. But Jason did bring Barbou out of the transformation zone alive.”

  “Barbou is still alive?”

  “I didn’t say that, Anna. Mr North asked Jason to make Barbou’s death quid . Jason told him that it to me, since I was the one he held and tortured.”

  “And did you?”

  “There’s a lot of different trag magic out there. Rituals, items, essence abilities. A lot of familiar powers. There’s a whole sub-branch focused on different ways to find corpses, which makes disposing of a body you don’t want found rather borious. You use magical termeasures to hide it, but for every ward, there’s a way circumvent it. Only ohing sistently foils most methods of trag a body. You have to break the corpse down. Very extreme dismembering work, like putting it through a woodchipper, although burning it to ash is better.”

  Farrah gnced briefly from the road ahead to give Anna a smile.

  “plete liquification is best,” Farrah tinued. “You need an alchemist who’ll give you the right supplies aheir mouth shut, though. Any experieracker will check the alchemists for anyone buying the right supplies for body disposal. Whichever way you go, though, the trick is to scatter what’s left of the corpse over as wide an area as you . A fast-moving waterway is good.”

  “Farrah—”

  “A good tip is that they don’t have to be dead when you start rendering them down. It does make it easier, but easy isn’t always the point, is it?”

  “So, ‘Barbou isn’t alive’ is what you’re saying.”

  “As I recall, it was quite a troversy, disc the astral space he’d been hiding away for the loetwork.”

  “It wasn’t the—”

  “What did I say about bming bad apples, Anna? I’m not going to warn you again.”

  Farrah’s light smile as she drove the buggy in the sunshine was ingruous with the sudden, heavy silence.

  “It was a rge troversy, yes,” Anna said. “They were hiding things from the rger work unity. Which was still one group back then, although it was already shaky. It had been clear for a while that the days of magic remaining a secret were numbered. Everyone ositioning themselves for what came after. You and Jason dropped into that pond like a bomb, but the ripples of schism were already shaking the waters.”

  “Barbou and his people had been masking grid activity. Hiding the astral space from grid operators elsewhere in the world.”

  “Why the history lesson, Farrah? I was there.”

  “So was I, Anna. In a crete room, with a shackle around my neck.”

  The buggy followed the road along the top of a ridge by the coast, giving them an impressive view of the Pacific O. Farrah pulled over at a lookout spot with a small gravel parking area. A wooden bench offered a pce to sit and look out over the water.

  “What are we stopping for?” Anna asked. Farrah got out of the buggy, walked over to the bend sat down. An out a sigh and then followed.

  “I liked living here,” Farrah said. “I liked having a part in building it. Jason’s family was very weling to me, a stranger from another world. Helping them establish this pce felt like putting down roots. How long was Jason gone before the people of this world pulled out those roots?”

  “Farrah—”

  “That’s all we’ve ever seen from this world, Anna. People taking because they could. It happens in my world too, don’t get me wrong, but things are simpler there. When someoakes just because they , they don’t have a list of justifications. They don’t bme bad apples they knew were in the barrel the whole time. They say ‘this is mine, because I have the strength to take it.’ It’s not good, but it’s ho. As is the solution. Every time you expin away some shady deed, all you’re saying is that you’re allowed to do things to people, and they aren’t allowed to do things back.”

  “Farrah—”

  “I’m talking, Anna, and you will listen until I’m done.”

  Unlike most essence users of Earth, the elite adventurers of Pallimustus did not leak their auras. There was no i intimidation through rank, simply by their presehat was a testament to their trol, but also meant that when hey could use their aura a to make a point to those around them. Farrah gave Anna a brief but firm reminder of who and what she was.

  “Anna, I’m not sure you uand the degree to which Jason is bending over backwards to not do the things he very much wants to do. He’s sensitive to his more dangerous proclivities, and that if he lets this world trigger them, he will a ways he ultimately es tret. That is why we recruited you, Anna. To help him take the plicated optiohe simple one would be so much easier. He doesn’t want to break the world in the process of doing what o be done.”

  Farrah reached out with her arm and made an upward motion with her fingers. Out to sea, an obsidian spire, the size of a building, rose from the water like an a sea monster. Dispced water sent waves crashing into the shore. Anna watched as Farrah casually created a new ndmark with a terrifyingly dismissive demonstration of power.

  “How long do you think it will take the o to wear it down?” Farrah absently wondered as she stared at her creation. “Ten thousand years? A huhousand? I’m not Jason, Anna. Our friends are not Jason. We only care about your world because Jason cares, and if we decide to reshape it, we and we will. Your job is to guide Jason away from going too far in one dire. Ours is to stop him from going too far iher. If the people of this world keep ag the same way, we’re going to stop doing our job and things will bee a lot simpler. But not nicer.”

  “What are you even talking about? What as have affronted you to the point of taki into the woods and threatening me?”

  “Years ago, Jason and I oold you that the people of Earth o stop harvestiy cores from transformation zones. You told us that the work couldn’t afford to step back from the arms race over them.”

  “That was when you stopped w with the work altogether. Are you suggesting that someone has found a way to make new zones?”

  “Not suggesting, Anna. When I was destroying the devices pced to modify the grid in Sindh, I didn’t have to destroy them all to shut it down. A few remained for more delicate extra and ter examination. I’ve been using them, along with the readings we took during the event, to reverse engineer what happened. Someone used the grid to feed magito the active maion. It should have created a transformation zone, but Jason did one of his ridiculous Jason things. Grabbed the torn edges of the universe ahem together with not much more than stubbornness and a smug expression.”

  Anna had been briefed on what happened in Pakistan, so she khat Farrah’s description of Jason’s part in it was colourful but essentially accurate. The information about transformation zones was o her, and horrifying in its ramifications. Jason broke ties with powers of Earth over reality cores once, and now he had the power to break the Earth entirely.

  “Do you knoas behind it?” she asked.

  “During the monster wave crisis, I led a group of work researchers in repairing the sabotaged grid. The magic we found in Pakistan was based on that work. Most troubling was that it had been refined.”

  “Refined?”

  “It showed signs of iteration. Solutions to fws that would only have been revealed through previous testing. It was not an experiment, but a developed and workable process. Whover did this has do before, at least several times.”

  “You ’t just make transformation zones. Not without aig. Even if you masked their presen the grid, which is what I assume you’ve been leading up to, a transformation zone is a glowing dome the size of a small town.”

  “Yes. You would need a rge region where no one goes. No one, perhaps, but vampires.”

  “Europe,” Anna realised. “If you could mask the presen the grid, and were able to manipute the satellite ce…”

  She stood up and paced, her mind gaming out the idea.

  “The presen the grid, and the satellites. Both could be aplished by a retively small number of people, if they held the right positions in the right anisations. You’d need people on the ground to actually do the thing; you wouldn’t trust it to the vampires. Why would the vamps even…”

  She turo look at Farrah with eyes widened by realisation.

  “Harvestiy cores,” Anna said. “That’s what would get the vampires onboard. That’s what would make participation worth if for ahe stockpiles from the old transformation zones were depleted years ago. Maybe there are a few still stashed around, but they haveed in any practical fashion in almost a decade.”

  She plonked back down on the bench.

  “That’s why Jason was so angry,” she said. “The thing that made him break ties when multiple betrayals didn’t. And now, people are doing it again.”

  “Anna, this is the time for the powers of Earth to stand up. To their own house. Because if they don’t, we will. And our approach will be a simple one.”

  “Simple solutions to plex problems always have sequences.”

  “Yes, but we have the power to hahem if we must. Again, Anna, the entire reason Jason pulled you into this is that if we do things our way, it won’t be us paying the price. The st time we were here, we saved the world. Now, it’s your turn to save the world from us.”

  “The Ameris attempted to make aure.”

  “We’re aware, and we’re open to it. I hope that it’s a good start. But make no mistake, Anna; we set the pace, a the terms. If the Ameris want friendship, they o earn it.”

  “You don’t earn friendship, Farrah.”

  Farrah grinned, stood up, and spped a hand on Anna’s shoulder.

  “Now yetting it. e on, we’re off to see some of the people I worked with ba the day. See if we ’t figure out where this spiracy got its hands on the magic we developed.”