So here’s a summary of what apparently happened to bring us to this point, minus the details we just couldn’t accurately recall because of Felicity’s altered memories and Cassy’s trouble accessing them fully.

  Chord had had a little empire of sorts going on, and a pn in motion, long before I came to Gresham.

  He’d partnered with Fate Vine to do it, with Fate Vine controlling human affairs and slowly spreading its subtle political influences across the state, and with eyes on the country. Very long term goals kind of thing, from a human perspective, though. And while Fate Vine worked on that, Chord kept other emanants off its back, by hunting them down and turning them into his agents when he didn’t just outright eat them for sustenance.

  Before Felicity had arrived, and she’d arrived before me, he had poputed Gresham with emanants that could reproduce. Which normally would have caught the eyes of his neighbors, and brought a massive feeding frenzy down on the city, except that he took turns with Sewer Teeth (Croc-face) in culling them. These emanants were essentially altered livestock meant to be docile and to keep Gresham looking like it was fully poputed despite having several Supraliminals present. Also, it helped Chord keep control over the city.

  Sewer Teeth really did most of the culling, because Chord fed on the pain of his special livestock at home, which he tortured personally, but he did make his own rounds occasionally, just to keep an eye on things.

  This is all stuff that I actually just knew from having consumed Fate Vine. Consuming Fate Vine had been a major blow to Chord, and I should have been way more cautious about my use of that knowledge. Because, he’d already been ying a trap for me, and altered how it functioned right after my big storm quieted down. Or, at least, that’s what we figured.

  We don’t really know just what happened when Felicity showed up, how she was caught, when she was caught, and what she had been like before that. Fate Vine wasn’t privy to those details, which told us something about Chord’s sense of trust. And Felicity’s memories of that were probably wrong.

  But she was already working for Chord when I arrived two years ago. And I did not arrive unnoticed, because my presence did scare away a lot of the liminals.

  He altered Felicity again when she reported my presence in town, specifically to set up a trap for me. And a pretty eborate trap that could be sprung at multiple points, hopefully without tipping me off that it was still dangerous.

  The fiasco at the movie theater happened the way it did because Felicity had suddenly altered her usual tactics without informing Sewer Teeth or Chord. And Sewer Teeth was instructed to prune the part of her that had done that. Fate Vine was party to that decision. And Sewer Teeth had learned why she’d changed her tactics by eating that part of her.

  Also, Sewer Teeth’s brazen public appearances were to both harry Felicity into behaving properly and to make me panic and fearful of a potential feeding frenzy that never came. Which put me into a manipuble frame of mind.

  Anyway, Milk had eaten Sewer Teeth just prior to my attack on Chord’s farm. And while that’s getting ahead of ourselves in this story, that’s how we learned that the reason Felicity had altered her tactics was because she’d seen something in me that gave her hope.

  Hope of having a partner instead of a master. Hope that she might find a way to end Chord’s hold over her. Hope of being free.

  With that hope removed, she was still drawn to me as per the pn, and developed it all over again, if under a different set of feelings and reactions.

  But, she still hadn’t trusted me fully, because she didn’t trust herself, or what I’d do if I learned that she was working for Chord.

  And that led to her becoming my parasite when we tried to reenact her feeding pn at the convention in Portnd. Felix had just been a hapless teratovore that took the bait. But Felicity’s ravenous hunger and Amber’s panic and growing awareness of what was happening to her had thrown Felicity off, and we all know how that turned out.

  Her being in a carefully controlled parasitic retionship with me was deeply unsettling for us both. Except that she also loved it. She’d just kept how much she loved it from me, because she was ashamed of her feelings and still scared that I’d destroy her when I found out what she was supposed to be doing.

  She was supposed to be working for Chord, still. But inside of me, she was shielded from him. Nobody knew she still existed until she started poking her head out into other hosts. And, that, of course, was her downfall.

  When we were mucking about in City Hall and the police headquarters, trying to keep them off of Amber and Josephine’s backs, she lied to me about how much she knew about Fate Vine, because she’d tipped her hand to Fate Vine, and thus to Chord, and had received threats that I didn’t know about.

  Then I just went off and confronted Fate Vine myself, and when Felicity jumped ship it was because she thought I was done for and losing, even if we’d both managed to cmp our jaws on it without her sabotaging that attempt. Of course, she’d lied about not being able to escape my system.

  And I’ve basically already told how the rest of it went down, and why. Except for the bit about how we disentangled ourselves from each other when we were in a threeway fight with Fate Vine. I still didn’t fully understand what happened there. It was almost as if we’d needed Milk involved in order to sort our memories out and separate us.

  Milk didn’t speak up about it at all.

  In any case, when Felicity had found refuge in Cassy, she’d thought she was finally safe. Cassy’s ability to almost totally camoufge herself made her the perfect hiding pce. And so she started to feel like herself again and visibly cheered up, offering real help for the first time.

  But I was rash, and charged off after Chord on my own. And while I was doing that, Greg had said a thing, and it made her realize a bunch of things and relive some really difficult emotions, and she couldn’t bear it.

  And so she’d sacrificed herself to Cassy.

  And now, after nearly two weeks since my untimely demise, we’d given Chord plenty of time to recuperate and start rebuilding his little empire.

  We’d decimated his work. Taken him almost back to square one. So, he’d be working hard to regain control fast. He might even take a couple of his livestock and make new lieutenants out of them.

  And that was such a creepy thought.

  Chord had figured out how to sidestep the reproduction problem, while also preparing to take advantage of reproduction en masse for himself. And he did it by altering emanants in his own image, to work for him.

  It wasn’t perfect when it came to other Supraliminals, like Felicity. So, he also had to rely on threats and social leverage, sticks and carrots, with them. Fate Vine and Sewer Teeth had been retively easy, because they already had motives that paralleled his. They were excited about their partnerships with him. Felicity had been the loose canon, not in small part because she spent a lot of time in different people’s heads, feeling and thinking all sorts of different things second hand.

  Like me, she had tended to gain new perspectives over time. Even after Chord had had his way with her. If he’d taken that adaptation away from her, she wouldn’t have been of use to him.

  I personally doubted he’d make another one of her, though. She’d proved too duplicitous. Too dangerous.

  But his engine of control had been so carefully tuned and efficiently constructed that when he was finally ready to strike, sometime well into the future, he might have been able to take control of half a continent before anyone else could react. He would try to recreate that.

  Milk and I had been over that part already, and it was why I’d agreed to try to take down Chord.

  I didn’t like that potential future. I didn’t want to exist in it. And I didn’t want to cease existing. So, my only option was to derail it completely.

  And then when we’d worked this out with everyone else around and expined it to them, they were all on board, despite any misgivings, because it felt like something they could actually do while the rest of the world seemed to be falling apart.

  Greg and Ayden both wanted to y low, for the most part, but were very willing to drive Cassy around, and also eager to stay in touch just enough to protect her and learn more about all this emanant stuff. They’d finally gotten over their horror and shock of learning the first things about it, and now their self preservation instincts took over and drove their human curiosity something fierce.

  And Cassy? Well.

  I knew that she was hoping she wouldn’t have to participate in human society anymore if she threw herself headlong into monster politics.

  Which, in the short term, wasn’t true at all. But in the shorter term, she had some time to learn that.

  And this would be a crash course in what she needed to know to survive as an emanant, and I was learning stuff right along with her.

  Because, no matter how long you exist, there’s always something you’re missing. Especially if you tend to superfocus like I do.

  Maybe, in a way, I was autistic by emanant standards.

  Cassy and I had a lot to talk about and bond over when I made that observation. A lot of weird specution on what autism actually might be. And it was a nice distraction from our more deadly business whenever we needed it.

  Even if I could never technically be autistic by human definitions, we really did have so much in common with our personal experiences that it didn’t matter in the end.

  Oh, Cassy thought, as Greg’s truck was caught in the backup of cars being redirected away from the City Hall area. She said, “We must have missed this because none of us wanted to go near here, even to search for Synthia. And we’ve been avoiding the news or talking to other people.”

  “Yup,” Greg said. “Also, I just kind of figured. I knew the MAX stop was closed, at least. Do you think we’re going to get close enough anyway?”

  It had been just about two weeks, and City Hall was cordoned off in a radius of about two blocks. Though, the streets didn’t really divide lots up by regur blocks there. From the looks of it, there were more than just police and construction workers involved. There were government vehicles that looked vaguely military, and some unmarked bck SUVs as well. She guessed that an investigation had stalled the construction work. And she imagined if she looked up news about it, terrorism would be mentioned, among a bunch of other specution.

  How did they miss this? Had they really been that focused on half-assed job hunting and moping about Synthia?

  Now that she thought about it, she was almost surprised there weren’t government issued counselors accompanied by FBI agents or something creepy like that going door to door. The whole city had seen, heard, and felt Synthia’s nightmare storm. And you didn’t necessarily have to be right in the middle of it to have ended up talking about it for days afterward.

  She felt baffled by her own obliviousness enough that it took her a few moments to answer Greg, but he waited patiently. They weren’t actually going anywhere.

  “I can already tell there’s no Supraliminal at City Hall,” she said. “But I’m curious what kind of liminals might be hanging around the traffic officers at the detour.”

  “Fair enough,” Greg said. “We’re going by there in a little while anyway, whether we like it or not.”

  There was nowhere to turn where they were at.

  They’d chosen this as the first pce to scout because it had actually been the center of operations for Chord’s emanant empire before, with Fate Vine stationed there. Also, they’d wanted to see how repairs to the City Hall grounds were going. And now they knew.

  Cassy watched as a military helicopter flew in to nd behind the government buildings. It was rge, and they had had to have cleared a significant space for it. She wanted to call it a Bck Hawk, but she had no idea. It was just a helicopter name used in movies and shows a lot.

  “Fuck, they’re taking this seriously,” Greg muttered.

  “I guess I’m going to check my social media for the first time this month,” Cassy said, pulling out her phone. “I hope it doesn’t suck.”

  Greg scoffed, “Oh, just do a search for ‘Gresham news’ and skip the other bullshit.”

  “Right. Doing it.”

  And, after gncing at the headlines she realized she wasn’t in an emotional state to handle how the whole country was reacting to what had happened in Gresham. She’d underestimated the impact, and was even more baffled that things hadn’t been more obvious locally.

  “It’s bad,” she reported to Greg.

  “Yeah?”

  “One headline was about how 34 is bragging and threatening to address the event specially in his inauguration,” she said.

  “Jesus fuck.”

  “I didn’t read any more, and I really don’t want to,” she told him.

  “I don’t bme you.”

  theInmara