 
Undercover Truths / Undercover Lies

A Novella by Stephen H. King (TOSK)

*******

Published by the author,

Copyright 2012 Stephen H. King (TOSK)

Smashwords Edition

Discover other titles at http://www.TheOtherStephenKing.com

*******

Undercover Truths

Undercover Lies

A Message from the Author

Excerpt from CATACLYSM: Return of the Gods (Volume 1)

Excerpt from PROPHECY: Elf Queen of Kiirajanna (Volume 1)

*******

This novella is written to be enjoyed as a standalone work, but it also tells the back story for some of the major characters in my Return of the Gods series. The novels in the Return of the Gods series are available in both ebook and print book format. Additionally, an excerpt from Cataclysm is included at the end of this novella.

All three novels in the trilogy are also available under the title Married to Mars, an electronic boxed set available at online retailers everywhere. For links to all options, visit the author's web site at http://www.TheOtherStephenKing.com.

*******

I wish to again thank my daughter, Jessalyn Perry, for granting me use of her artwork to make the cover of this book. See more of her work on my site: http://www.TheOtherStephenKing.com

*******

# Undercover Truths

I almost didn't get on the elevator. Sometimes, even now, I wonder why I decided to go ahead and step in. Granted, I had to step onto one of them, since I wasn't going to walk the five flights of stairs down from the command center to the meeting room level, but there were other lifts I could've taken. The advantage of taking one of the others was that it likely wouldn't have contained him.

The disadvantage? I was already late for the damn meeting, and waiting for another lift at that time of the morning would have made me even later. Besides, you didn't walk into a meeting after the Governor.

I'm really not sure why the thought of riding the elevator with the Governor turned my stomach. I sat in his council meetings every week, after all. As the technician who ran the primary reactor center in the colony, in fact, I ranked a seat at the main table. Matter of fact, I was a direct report. There was never anything particularly negative said at the meetings, but of course there was never anything particularly positive said either. He wasn't offensive so much as just a single-dimensional man, the one dimension of his personality being arrogance.

As the elevator doors closed to begin the descent, I couldn't help but check for my blaster at my hip. Of course, I snuck a glance to check whether the Governor was following protocol also. He was; his energy gun rested in a sleek black holster. Mark, the director of security, had decreed that no one could so much as leave his or her office without their sidearm, what with all the threats and terrorism going on in the world. I'd thought he was nuts; the station seemed pretty much invulnerable. Still, he'd decreed it, and the Governor himself had signed off on it.

"Mornin', Governor," I said, my smile wrapping its way from one cheek to the other without bothering to infect my eyes. Luckily I wasn't expecting more than a nod and a grunt in reply. If I had, I would have been disappointed. Geez, what arrogance. His office was housed in my building, for crying out loud. The entire sprawling reactor complex that also served as the Colony of America headquarters was mine to command. He could at least have acknowledged one of his direct subordinates.

Hell, I didn't even know my own boss's name. Nobody did. In the old days—a funny thing for a twenty-seven year old technology prodigy to say, but still—this colony was a sovereign country with elected leadership. Nobody would've been elected without people knowing their name. Hell, nobody as arrogant as the Governor would've been elected at all, or at least I hope that was the case. I remember watching as a teenager, though, as an international council disbanded all sovereign governments for the sake of peace. Peace, hell; it was to prevent nuclear holocausts, a concern that became crucial once every nation on the planet had mastered the trick of splitting atoms. The treaty centralized all power generation in one area, stripped all nuclear equipment out of every other nation-turned-colony, and set up a system of rule by oligarchy. The Governor played a significant part in the negotiations and the later constructions and deconstructions, and in reward for his efforts the leadership of the large, wealthy power generation colony, America, was bestowed upon him. We met not much later when I took over the main station.

Wait. You're probably wondering what a twenty-seven-year-old anything was doing running the biggest nuclear station on the whole damn planet. Aren't you?

I was good. Still am. Anyway, I finished high school math back in tenth grade. All of it. Took a year off from math my junior year to learn the three primary languages of robotics. Senior year, my physics teacher signed off on an independent study class on integral calculus with some partial differentiation. I finished the book and then went for more, and along the way learned the theories behind nuclear fission.

College was pretty damn boring after that. At least, it was academically boring. Technically, I majored in nuclear physics and minored in mathematics, graduating summa cum laude. Unofficially, I majored in love—no, not falling in it like many of my poor sappy girlfriends did. I mastered the art of manipulating it. It's easy enough; boys have three distinct disadvantages in this arena. First, very few of them spend more than a laughably small percentage of their childhoods looking away from sports on the vid screen long enough to seriously consider what makes us girls tick. Second, the male psyche is set up to always assume that it's in charge, that we simpering, fragile little songbirds are too stupid or frail, or both, to lead them on. Third—boobs. Mine may not be the largest, but I have them, and they don't, and that simple difference turns even the smartest man into a hormonal dumpling.

I chose the thesis option for grad school, thinking I could just get the damn thing out of the way quickly. I was right. I continued my other, more important, studies, of course. The male grad students were all too busy trying to solve the technical problems in life to think about me as anything more than one of them, so I turned my efforts to the faculty. Most of them were bored of their lives in academia, anyway, so it turned out to be pretty easy. It got me a little more time in the labs than the other grad students, which in turn helped me finish even faster.

I'll bet you can figure out the rest of the story on your own, yes? It's amazing how much a girl can accomplish in a short time with a fair amount of technical brilliance as well as a pair of breasts. Amazing.

Not with him, though. You were thinking that, right? That the only way for a girl to be second in charge to the Governor is to sleep with him? I might think that too if I didn't know the secret about how station directors are chosen. But no, the guild chooses. The Governor has to accept whoever the guild puts up to the task. At least, I think he does. He never gave me any indication of whether he thought I was right or wrong for the task, honestly. Doesn't matter, the guild leaders picked me as the best candidate to direct the newly-connected main power station. Something about my brilliance, and my energetic youth. And no, I didn't even sleep with all that many of them.

Let's move on, though. My studies aren't what this story is about.

The elevator had just started down when the cell at my hip sprang violently to life. I'd programmed every system in the reactor to send exception reports, either primary or copied, to my cell, which in turn was programmed to buzz once per report. Right then, the cell felt like it was trying to buzz its way through its holster. I snatched the small rectangle of high-tech gadgetry out of the nylon pouch that held it, moving quickly because I'd never felt that many reports coming through before. Well, okay—really, it was because the constant buzzing was driving me crazy.

I scrolled through as quickly as I could, but the reports were being added quicker than I could scroll back through the previous ones. After a couple of seconds my breath caught as I saw the pattern; they were nearly all security notifications: "breach in A-2e, breach in B-5c, breach in A-1p, breach in D-9b,...." I was vaguely aware that the alarm klaxons were sounding, but the readout of the cell demanded my full attention just to keep up.

Suddenly it all went silent. The cell stopped buzzing, stopped scrolling notices. The klaxons also stopped, which would have been a relief had I not been picking myself up off of the floor. The elevator, too, had stopped, and its normally well-lit interior had gone dark. A hand gripped my upper arm in the darkness and helped me to my feet.

Thank God I'm not alone, I thought, even if it is him. Aloud, I asked, "What the hell's going on?"

"We seem to be under attack," the Governor's voice rumbled out of the darkness. The voice was calm, almost relaxed. He'd stated the obvious, but I guess my question had been just as useless as his answer.

"Are you all right, Stacy?" he asked. So he did know my name!

"Fine. Bruised my palm a little catching myself, but it'll be okay." I groped along the wall till I found the intercom button. "Command, this is Allen. Give me a sit rep. Now. Are you there? Dammit, are you there? Come on!" I shouted the last, beating on the wall where the speaker must be.

"All comms have apparently been severed," the Governor said, his voice still amazingly relaxed. "Your cell is as dead as mine is, yes? We'd be hearing announcements if the intercom were up. Something has struck our comm infrastructure entirely down."

"How—how can you be so calm?" I asked, pretty shaken myself.

"As opposed to what?"

"Something—anything. My station, which is the core of your colony, is being attacked by somebody we don't know who has hit us harder than we thought possible. And yet here we stand, doing nothing. We don't know what they're here for. We don't even know if they're coming after you as our governor. We should be doing something!" I felt the pitch of my voice rising as the rant developed, but at that point I really didn't care if I sounded as hysterical as I was feeling. This wasn't—shouldn't—couldn't be happening. Not on my watch, dammit!

"Stacy, we're stuck in an elevator."

"Yes, but...." I looked frantically around in the dark, hoping to see something, anything, that would give me a clue on how to get out.

"But once we get out, we can worry about the next step. Till then, we can't get out. Meanwhile, the bad guys, whoever or wherever they are, can't get in either. Relax, dear."

For the first time in my life I felt myself going out of control.

The Governor said, "Ah, there it is." A loud screeching noise of metal on metal sounded somewhere above us, and I picked up the vague sense of motion as the Governor's arms pressed the doors away from each other. As they separated, the emergency lights from the hall filled the top half of the elevator with a dim red glow. A pair of legs stood on the floor onto which the top half of the elevator now opened, but I didn't have time to examine them as the Governor's hands grasped my waist and heaved me up and out. He followed, lightly springing up onto his feet beside where I now sprawled in the heap I'd been tossed into.

I started picking myself up off the floor for the second instance in a frustratingly short period of time when a hand thrust under my arm and hauled me up.

"Thank y—" I said, voice trailing off as I saw my helper. She was—amazing. Not only did she present a flawless example of a muscular woman's physique, her corded arms and legs bursting from a strangely plain tunic and short trousers, but she also had perfectly rounded breasts and hips as well as beautiful high cheekbones and a soft chin. I hated her immediately.

"Stacy, meet Sorscha. Sorscha, Stacy. I'd spend more time on introductions, but we just don't have it," the Governor said.

Apparently he knew this Sorscha. Well, that made sense. I had made a hobby of knowing every pretty girl on my station, and somehow I'd never met this one, had never even seen her name flicker across the payroll reports. She could only be some sort of super-secret personal assistant, then, to the Governor, or to the planetary council.

But we were being attacked, and so I looked around, trying to regain my equilibrium. I could worry about Sorscha and where she had come from later; I had an attack to deal with. "We need to get up to the central comm room," I said. "Sorscha, what floor did you rescue us onto?"

The Governor replied. "We're on the ninth floor. I don't agree on our next destination, though."

"Why not?" I knew I was breaching protocol with the question, but I was still too freaked out to care.

The Governor didn't seem to mind; his response sounded more like a lecture. "If you were to attack a nuclear power plant, would your objective be the comm room? If you're planning to do something nasty to the reactors, you can only do that using the controls at the reactors themselves."

"Oh, my God," I said, the Governor's words bringing a jolt of panic. "We need to get down there, don't we?"

"Yes, I think that's smartest," the Governor said, his voice still calm. "But are you ready for what we may run into?"

"I qualified expert on all three rounds of the blaster course just last month."

"Yes, you did," the Governor said, looked like he had more to say, and then appeared to hold his tongue. "Let's go, then."

We took off down the nearby stairs. I somehow fell behind, despite my constant efforts in working out, which was when I noticed that Sorscha lacked anything resembling a holster swinging from those damn apple-shaped hips. "Are you carrying a weapon, Sorscha?" I called after them.

"Sorscha doesn't need a weapon," the Governor stated.

Who was this Sorscha? Even personal attendants had to abide by the rules. The Governor's job was to approve the rules and then ensure they were enforced, not give out personal exceptions. I filed the argument neatly away to be held later, once the station was safe.

For that matter, who didn't need a weapon?

Granted, I had thought the requirement stupid, myself. But that was before the station was attacked. Now that we were running into a hostile situation, I was quite glad, thank you very much, that I had a blaster strapped to my side, and....

"Hey, slow down, you two!"

Despite my attempt at keeping my voice quiet, I was horrified to hear my words echo down the halls. I winced. The Governor and Sorscha stopped their run, turned, and glared, hands on their hips.

Ah, well. I ignored their smoldering expressions and caught up.

"Why Reactor B?" I asked in a barely-audible whisper, curious why the boss had picked the connector hall we were in.

"Closest. If there are attacks at all reactors we'll stop the one there soonest. If not, we'll find out there first. Now, mind if we get back on our way?"

The question had clearly been rhetorical; the two apparent marathon runners were already moving again. This time it was a straight hall and they were being a little cautious, so I kept fairly close. I glanced to the side as we passed the connector hallway to the living quarters for the men and women who worked at Reactor B. Bodies lay in clumps spaced several yards apart. The blue uniforms of the B techs and the red of station security identified the members of the piles. The air smelled funny, but there wasn't time to investigate.

We covered the rest of the distance to the main reactor door in seconds, the strange smell dissipating. The Governor pulled his blaster and I copied the motion. He pushed me heavily back against the wall behind him and pointed Sorscha to the opposite side.

He was just going to open the door! As his hand wavered I had a brief moment to consider the lunacy of the situation. He was the top government official on the entire continent. I, in turn, was the top official of the station under attack, second only to the top government official on the entire continent. Sorscha was—well, hell, she was an unarmed pretty blonde girl. Or was it silver hair? I couldn't tell in the light. Didn't matter; whoever was inside those doors had taken out over a dozen trained techs and security police back down the hall. We—the three of us—were a little outnumbered. What the hell was the Governor thinking?

He wasn't, apparently. He turned his head toward me as I started to raise the objection, stopping me short. His face was hiked up in an expression of—glee? Battle lust? Whatever it was, he was obviously ready to run in with gun blazing.

"Ready, Stacy?"

I swear to you now on my grandmother's grave that I didn't say yes, but that was pretty much irrelevant. One hand holding his blaster, the Governor's other hand rapidly keyed in the override combination. The doors slid open, their quiet hiss the only sound I could hear for the moment.

It was as dark inside the control center as it was everywhere else, but I saw lanterns at several of the consoles. Three or four men's faces, all heavily bearded—enviros!—turned to face the door. I could hear quiet whispers and shuffling inside, and then a barrage of blaster fire erupted from inside the room.

The Governor tapped the wall behind him, a move I gladly interpreted as "stay here." He and Sorscha both bent at the waist and at their knees and ran in as a pair, the Governor to the right and Sorscha to the left.

On one hand, staying outside sounded pretty good if all the bad guys were in the control room. On the other hand that occurred to me as soon as I watched the boss run in, I didn't know if they were all in there or not. I decided I wasn't going to be left out on the other hand by myself, so I followed to the inner security door. It didn't seem to matter, anyway; I could still hear blaster shots but now there weren't any coming through the entrance. Clearly the Governor and his sidekick were the greater perceived threats to the attacking environmentalists.

Inside the double sets of doors was Control B, the direct controls for the B reactor, one of the four alpha-class, which meant huge, reactors managed by the station. Control B was configured in large concentric circles; around the outer wall were all of the charts and diagrams and electronic indicator screens that were needed in order for the room's occupants to know anything at all about the reactor at a glance. A hand rail separated the six-foot-wide walkway around the perimeter from the center, and inside the hand rail were a dozen consoles, each of which was responsible for a different system. It was extremely efficient; in a pinch a single tech could move from console to console managing inputs while still being able to observe readouts on every other console and around the walls.

One of the bearded men in the middle of all that planned efficiency saw me and rose from his crouch over the main console. He wasn't fast enough, though; I'd trained for this. I brought my blaster up and fired, scoring a perfect hit dead center of his chest. As he went down, the other enviros still up at the consoles started moving, but the center of the round control area was open and an easy shot from the door. It was like the second round of the blaster qualifying course. Only—in the qualifying course, nobody shot back. I ducked as a blaster was leveled and fired. It missed, but my hand was trembling so much as I got back up that my own blaster's response missed wildly also.

Off to the left the blaster fire ended abruptly. My peripheral vision registered jerky movements in the dark. Sorscha's clothes had been dark-colored but her hair had been dyed in the new metallic fashion going around; as the woman kicked, spun, and dispatched the last enviro, the gleam of her hair was almost hypnotic. Of course, I thought, a martial artist. Who else would the Governor retain in his personal retinue?

My thoughts and eyes were both pulled back to task as the final enviro in the middle of the room stood and took aim at me. I—well, I remember thinking that I should move, should shoot, should do something—but I couldn't. An overwhelming fear held me in place as effectively as if someone has poured cement around my ankles. I was close enough to see the enviro's lips curl up into a leering grin, his blaster perched to shoot.

Sorscha's silvery hair flashed in the glow of several lanterns as she came to my rescue. One hand on the railing, she vaulted over the console, stuck the landing like a gymnast, and a moment later nailed a roundhouse kick on the back of the enviro's head. He crumpled, and my fear released just as quickly. I jerked my own blaster up, firing shot after shot at the prone body.

"Enough, Stacy. He's dead," the Governor's voice sounded in my ear. The familiar voice brought me back to my senses, and my finger stopped closing on the contact. Everything went quiet again.

The Governor's hand caressed my shoulder. "Nice shooting, Stacy," his calm voice sounded again in my ears. Suddenly I couldn't help it. The adrenaline was gone, leaving in its place a huge hole that all of the terror I had pushed away rushed back into. Without a conscious thought, I spun and wrapped myself around him.

As conscious reasoning power slowly returned, I found myself crushed into the much-reviled Governor, sobs wracking my body as my face buried itself in his chest, pressing hard against it as if to somehow go deeper, hide, get away from the panic. His arms were around me, and I was vaguely aware of his voice speaking in soothing syllables.

"Master." The urgency in Sorscha's voice cut through. Who the hell calls anybody Master these days? "The readings on this console indicate that the rods are being lifted out of the reactor core. It's heating up."

A new mode of panic seized me. Oh my god, that's what they were after? The enviros always said they were out to save the planet, not destroy it. Melting this reactor core down would have made this area uninhabitable by anyone for centuries, quite the opposite of saving the planet. Bastards!

I pulled out of the entanglement of the Governor's arms. Was he really hugging me? Was I really enjoying it? Ah, well, I'll sort that out later. I sprinted to the main console and, fingers moving rapidly, punched in the commands to reverse the movement of the rods, bring extra coolants on line temporarily, and prevent a meltdown. The Governor was speaking, but I really didn't have the time to listen.

Last command entered, I checked to make sure the sequences were being carried out, exhaled in relief, and looked around. The Governor was over at the communications console, talking into the microphone. I ran to him and tugged his arm toward the door, oblivious to what he was saying into the set.

"Come on, we have to save the other reactors," I urged, struggling against his strength.

He turned and smiled, hands outstretched. "Relax. Security teams are on their way to the other reactors. They know what's going on, and what to do in response."

"What—who were you talking to?" I asked, looking at the communication set that tied the four reactors together.

"Security. Whoever planned the attack knew how to shut down our station-wide comms but they left the reactor-to-reactor comms open, probably to make doing their own job easier. What they didn't know is that since the two systems run over the same cabling, there's a back door from one to the other. While you were saving our lives here, I linked the comms back up."

It immediately proved true as I realized that my little friendly cell had sprung back to life, buzzing my hip off once again. Dammit.

"So it's done?"

"No, we should still go around and make sure everything's safe. I think the panic stage is done now, though."

We did as he said, jogging around from one reactor down a set of halls to the next. At each reactor's control room I was relieved to find red-uniformed security teams in charge over a set of shaggy enviros' bodies while technical personnel in the color specific to that reactor's team worked the consoles feverishly to reverse the near-meltdown at each.

The station's reactors finally secure, I followed the pair as they walked more slowly back to the central elevators. As the door closed us all in, I turned to begin asking the questions that were bugging me. "Governor?"

"Matthew."

I stood in silence for a moment, baffled.

"What?" I asked.

The Governor reached over and pressed the button to halt the elevator, then turned to meet my eyes.

"My name," he said, "it's Matthew. Somebody here at the station ought to use it every so often. Not in public, of course." His eyes were blue, I saw, now that the lights were back on. They were a vibrant, intense blue that I'd somehow never noticed before.

"Matthew, then. It's a nice name. Why don't you use it more often?"

"I'm not here to make friends, Stacy. The use of a personal name implies a personal connection, a friendship at a certain level, and I'm more effective in my job if I ignore that and just be the hard, cold, arrogant Governor."

"So why use it now?"

The Governor—Matthew—answered by gently lifting my chin and kissing my lips. Of course I let him; I was in shock, and hey, what else was I supposed to do? It was a gentle, chaste kiss, but it still sent bolts of electricity coursing through my body. In spite of myself, I moaned.

"Because." That didn't qualify as an answer, but—damn. Here I was, the girl who had controlled all my previous romantic encounters, being controlled by one. Just a single enigmatic kiss, too! My heart trilled a damn love song in my chest. My eyelashes fluttered. My tongue refused to cooperate, but that was probably best because my brain was at the moment incapable of determining what best to say. I was turning into a damned joke. Worse, I'd never felt this way before. Worst, I actually found myself liking it.

I looked at his sideways grin, and on impulse turned my head. Sorscha's face was unreadable, but her eyes were heated. I turned my head back.

"Should—you—we...." My question trailed off. I had no idea what question to ask, or even whom to ask it of. I only knew how I'd feel if someone discussed me in third person in front of me.

"I don't need Sorscha's permission. Do I?" The Governor addressed the last over my shoulder.

"No, Master," Sorscha said, her voice dry and level.

"Master? Is she—your slave?" I asked, the question sounding funnier than it was really meant to be. Slaves were a thing of the past, now that the planetary government had taken over, but—well, she had called him Master.

Matthew snorted. "Slave? No, not even close. Long-time companion, yes. Protector. Friend. Servant, sometimes. But no, Sorscha is no slave."

"Well, good. I—ah, this is really awkward." And strange, but I wasn't going to explain that to him. Despite all my years of learning the gentle art of flirtation, I felt like a young and silly girl in front of him.

"Indeed. I'm sure we're needed up in the command center, anyway. People might take our absence as a sign that we require replacement." He flipped the button back out. The elevator smoothly regained its pace toward the top floor.

"So why would the enviros want to commit a suicide attack and wipe out half of the continent in so doing?" I asked, pleased to be getting back into more tangible business. That question had been bothering me; the environmental movement had been protesting against reactors for years, despite how safe modern science had made them, and they had fought tooth and nail against the creation of the "nuke pit" as they called this headquarters, but I couldn't recall them ever doing anything of a violent nature.

"What makes you think those were environmentalists?"

"Well, they looked like enviros." Yes, I said that. Yes, it sounded silly to me when I said it. I know what you're thinking; bite me.

The Governor—I was going to have a hard time thinking of him as Matthew—shrugged and said, "It's a mystery we still have to solve. Don't assume that things are as they appear, though. It's awfully easy to grow a beard and buy the olive drab clothes that the environmentalist cult members are so fond of. Besides, you're right that it's completely out of the group's nature to violently attack and kill people and then try to melt down a station."

The elevator dinged its arrival and the door opened to the control room.

"Let's talk more over dinner tonight," the Governor said as he strode by me projecting supreme confidence and, well, earlier I'd've called it arrogance. A kiss changes things sometimes, I guess. His tone was no different from the one he'd used earlier to give his orders, yet now it sounded to me like a gentle request.

I shook off the emotion with some effort, hoping that nobody in the control room had seen any sign of it on my face, and followed him out of the lift. The station control room was configured similarly to the ones in the reactors below. The circular wall contained a map of the complex with little blinking dots that showed the locations of all exception reports (there were a lot of those at the moment, but nobody seemed to care) as well as plenty of other charts and status screens. The consoles around the inner circle controlled various systems in and around the complex, including communications and security in addition to the less exciting transportation and climate control installations. Unlike below, doors in between the charts and maps along the circular wall opened to the offices of the various directors who helped me run the place.

All the familiar techs were at their stations looking supremely spooked yet functional. Also present were far more than the usual number of security force members, including the captain of the guard himself, who was engaged in a one-way, rapid-fire information dump directed at the Governor. The Governor, meanwhile, seemed to only barely be hearing the old veteran, his attention focused instead on the corpse that lay near the middle of the room.

I recognized the body. My God, I didn't want to, but I did. I rushed over, ignoring the techs who acknowledged my presence somberly as I passed. I knelt down opposite the Governor, both of us paying silent homage to Stephen, my director of information systems.

Mark, the director of security, kneeled close by, trembling slightly. "I—I had to, Ms. Allen," he stuttered, his voice sounding far away. "When the attacks started, he was the only director who wasn't down in the conference room. I ran up the stairs as fast as I could to try and regain control from whatever it was, and I found everyone but him down. He was rushing around in his gas mask, turning off systems as he went. I pulled the mask out of the stairwell emergency kit, told everybody there to stay back, and rushed in. I shouted for him to stop, but he turned and pointed his blaster at me. I—I shot him before he could shoot me. I'm sorry. I know how much you liked him."

Have you ever heard a story that should've made perfect sense, yet it didn't really make any sense at all? Stephen was the only one who had the codes to shut down the entire comm system at once, it was true. Beside him lay a gas mask that had apparently been removed by someone else for identification purposes. His blaster was still gripped by his cold right hand. But—well, hell, the shock was getting to me. It just really didn't make any sense at all. Stephen had been in charge of IS since before I took over the station. From the day I'd introduced myself as his new boss, we'd had a wonderfully friendly working relationship. Days when it got tough—reports were due, projects lagging behind schedule—had always been made brighter by Stephen's radiant smiles. I'd looked up to him, for his ability to keep a smile going in the most stressful times, for his expertise in the communications systems that did his bidding, and for the steady romance he'd kept going with his wife for over thirty years. I'd spent my adult life using love; he'd spent his living it.

And now he was dead. A terrorist, apparently. It didn't make any sense.

Matthew rolled Stephen's body onto its side. Checking for pulse? I didn't know. With the new blasters, weapons that used energy to do their damage, it was impossible without medical lab equipment to tell where someone had been shot. My eyes met Matthew's for a moment. It apparently didn't make any sense to him, either.

I noticed it then, the faint aroma that reminded me of the hallway downstairs. I hadn't smelled it at first; maybe the movement of Stephen's corpse or clothes had released some. It was sweet, though, and just a little bit irritated my throat. I coughed twice. Ugh.

"What is that smell?"

"Sleeping gas, Doctor Allen," the captain of the guard told me. He started a lecture on the types of ethers being used for the purpose of knocking people out, how this one had been dispersed using an aerosol-like canister that had been seen extensively in the southern colonies, how it required a heat source to make it into a vapor. After about ten seconds of his lecture I had an urge to punch him in the face, which was really not like me. He just kept going on and on about useless crap, ignoring that one of my favorite co-workers was lying dead in front of me.

"That's enough," the Governor said, coming to my rescue. He stood.

"Station Director Allen, I'm sure you have personnel and systems to check up on. Brief me in half an hour. Captain, I want a briefing from you in fifteen minutes. Get the morgue up here to remove the body. They need to hold it for investigation, and you should have your men guard it well. He may not have been the only one involved, and if that's the case someone may try to remove the body. That will be all, Doctor Allen. Your briefing is now due in twenty-nine minutes." He had cut me off coldly when I'd started to object, but surely he couldn't believe that Stephen had been involved. "Everyone else, I'm sure you have something that needs doing." He rose, entered an empty elevator, and punched a button as the lift doors closed.

Empty? I looked around. Where had Sorscha gotten away to?

Twenty-eight minutes later, I exited the lift on the Governor's level. His office and apartment combination took up the entire top floor, and parts of it, it was rumored, had glassed ceilings that allowed the only clear view of the night sky in the entire station. The captain of the guard had exited the same lift I was getting on, a grim expression on his face after his briefing with the Governor. I couldn't help my own grim countenance. For one thing, I had some bad news; the systems were all back up, but some of the people would never be so lucky. For another, I had no idea what I was going to say regarding what had happened in the elevator. Would he bring it up? Part of me hoped so, and the other part, didn't. I was used to being the one in control, and now I wasn't, and I just didn't know how to deal with that.

"Good morning, Governor," I said, standing outside his open door as protocol dictated.

"Good afternoon, Doctor Allen," he corrected me. Damn, how could I mess up on the easy part? Mistakes like that weren't normal for me at all.

Suppressing a grimace, I walked in and gave my report. He was as outwardly pleased as he ever was that all systems were up and running normally, which is to say only barely. He asked pointed questions about some of the more obscure systems in the plant; I was surprised that he knew about them, and he did seem pleased in return that I was able to report on them. Hey, I'm very thorough.

The loss of manpower didn't faze him as much as I'd expected. No, that's not exactly true. It fazed him as little as I'd expected, but not as much as I'd hoped. Earlier he'd proven that he had a glimmer of humanity, but it seemed to be turned off as I told him the names of the technicians and security personnel who'd fallen. Some had been shot with blasters to allow the invaders initial entry, while others had died from asphyxiation where the sleeping gas had been too concentrated. All totaled, I had close to two hundred technicians and crew members who worked under me on that shift, and I'd lost twenty-one of them in the attack. Not a huge loss, to be certain, if you weren't counting a single human life to be a huge loss. I was, though.

When I finished my report, he sat and held me with his gaze for several long moments. Finally, he broke the spell by asking, "Do you think Stephen was responsible for the attack?"

"No."

He sat forward, eyes narrowing. "Why not?"

I took a moment to inhale a deep breath and then slowly exhale it. The Governor sat patiently, unmoving and unblinking, his blue eyes locked onto mine. Finally I thought I had my thoughts organized enough to make a coherent argument, and so I started. "First, there's the personality issue. I knew Stephen. I know his wife. Neither of them has any sort of violent tendency. I find it...."

"Inconceivable that he could have done such a dastardly thing?" the Governor cut me off, his expression never changing. "Jeff said the same thing. But many of the greatest crimes of the past few centuries have involved betrayal of some sort, and betrayal never happens when it's conceivable. Give me something you know, Stacy, not something you think you know." His switch to my first name didn't go unnoticed; suddenly I was struck by a terribly unexplainable desire to melt into his arms again.

Get a grip on yourself, Stacy Allen, I told myself, and continued with my other points. "Stephen knew the access codes for the comm system, but others could have known them also. What he didn't know were the locations and times when security was at its weakest."

The Governor shrugged. "He could have found that out, right? Is that all you have?"

"No, there's one other thing." I was pretty proud of what I had up my sleeve, and so I waited.

After a few long moments, he rose to the bait. "And that one other thing is?"

"The reason he was late to the meeting. He's never late to meetings, as you must know. He was complaining this morning of a stomach ache, and there are three people who say he was in the restroom at the time of the attack."

"They could be lying."

"Could be, but I don't see why."

"He could have started the attack using his cell, right?"

Now I knew he was testing me; he had to know better than that.

"No," I said, "His cell could send and receive informational messages, but not control signals. Our comm system uses an out of band control system, which means you can't send shut-down commands in the same channel you send texts through. The shut-down commands had to have originated from the comm console."

"So who tossed the gas canister in?"

"No one saw. It came flipping in spewing its gas, and by the time people thought to look around, they were already going down. One significant point, though, is that it came from the direction of the stairs, not the restrooms."

The Governor nodded. "Thank you. That confirms everything Jeff said. So who did it, do you think, if not your IS director?"

I hated to admit ignorance, but it was the only honest thing to do, and somehow honesty seemed to be the way to go. "I don't really know," I said. "I could make guesses, some of which would be based partly on evidence, but they're still just guesses."

The Governor nodded and sat back.

"Southcentral melted down," he said, his face still expressionless.

Somehow I found a chair to sag into as my heart skipped a beat. "Did they get out?" I asked with barely enough breath to make the question audible.

"Some did. Most of the families in the dorms. Some techs. Most of the folks upstairs did. A couple hundred didn't, though. They didn't have a station director who was smart and brave enough to assault head-on and take out the attackers."

That would've been cute, if I'd been in the mood for cute. As it was, horror filled my gut as I thought of the scope of disaster that a power plant the size of Southcentral melting down represented. The area within several hundred miles wouldn't be inhabitable for hundreds of years. That plant actually still had a couple of wooded areas in its zone, so wildlife would have perished as well. The Governor was right, I think, about not automatically dumping this on the environmentalists.

"The other plants?" I finally found the strength to ask.

"All were hit in the same manner we were. Only the attack on Southcentral was successful, if you're defining success as a meltdown. The attack on the reactor in Europe was probably the least successful, as the attackers failed to even shut down its comms. I guess they assumed that all of the reactors used the same protocols for their systems, which strikes me as silly. Amateurish, even."

"Hold on. I didn't know there was a reactor in Europe."

"Of course you didn't. You still don't, technically. It's a secret known to just a very few, a case of the council putting an egg or two in a different basket, as it were."

"If it's known to just a very few, how did the attackers find out about it?"

"If I knew that, we wouldn't be sitting here still having this conversation," he said, a wry smile on his face.

"Guess not," I said. Now that he had kissed me in the elevator and shared a state secret with me, I figured I could get away with a little flippancy, and I was still both horrified and angry enough inside to want to try it.

"Of course, some might say that the trails of circumstance lead back to you."

"Some might," he agreed, nodding gravely. "Do you?"

"I don't know what to say at this point. You do seem to know a lot about the attacks."

"Of course I do; I'm on the International Council. You can do better than that. Do you think I might be behind the attacks?"

I thought back over the events of the day. If anyone could have orchestrated the attack, it was him—him and his strange metallic-haired sidekick. She'd been in the right place at the right time to help. He'd known where to go and what to do. He certainly knew enough of the security codes to have orchestrated the whole charade. But there was one problem: I didn't believe he'd done it. I'd seen the flash of anger in his eyes as he'd readied himself to attack. I'd heard his voice, though I hadn't realized what he was saying, when he was alerting security. Some things men can fake; the intensity of the Governor's reaction to the attack wasn't one of them.

"No," I said, confident in my answer. "I don't think you're behind the attacks. I also don't think you have any idea who is."

"You're right. I don't," he said.

I've become pretty good at reading men over the years, and at that moment I could tell the Governor was honestly innocent. There's always a tell when they're admitting that they don't know something, since it's an activity that is seldom practiced by the male half of the species. It's kind of an apologetic eyebrow thing. Tough to explain, but I know it when I see it, and I saw it then.

"Well, if you're clueless, and I'm clueless, where does that leave us?" I asked, still feeling saucy.

His lips and eyebrows quirked up the tiniest bit at that. It would've been barely enough to measure, but I saw it. That fraction of an inch of movement changed his expression completely, though, as he morphed from the supreme bastion of governmental authority into a man, a mere mortal, who found something mildly humorous and romantic at the same time. "It leaves us," he said, "with some theories and some investigation still to do. It leaves us with plenty to do before dinnertime. You will join me, I hope?"

"You're my boss," I objected. Yes, it was weak as hell, but I had to come up with something, as raw as my emotions still were. From the look in his eyes he was pretty much set on having dinner with me tonight, and I—I have to admit, I was intrigued by the idea. Here he was, one of the most powerful men in the world, and an enigma to boot. Both made him irresistibly sexy.

The abrupt change in my attitude toward him surprised me till I realized that he hadn't been an enigma before. I'd understood him and his motivations quite well, I had thought, up until the moment our lips met, and then all my certainty about him had flown out of a window.

Yes, I was going to have dinner with him. I just wasn't going to make it that easy.

I came out of my thoughts to see that he was still sitting, staring at me mutely, the quizzical expression perched on his face. I cracked.

"What? You are!" I said, knowing as I allowed my mouth to open and gush out words that I was handing him the win. Dammit! I knew this game too well to give in this quickly!

"So? You know as well as I that I have no disciplinary authority over you; that leash belongs to your guild. Besides, the regulation regarding dating the chain of command is mine to enforce or not."

"But will the council...?"

"My brethren on the council have long understood that since everyone on the planet qualifies as a subordinate, any rule against involving ourselves with our subordinates would lead to a long sentence of being alone. I've been there for some time, myself, and it's really not any fun."

"Oh," I said, my voice soft. I understood, or at least I thought I did. "So, when and where for dinner, boss?"

"Eighteen hundred, and here. I have a dining room in this apartment that will be nice to finally put to use, and besides, I have a façade to manage. Were your colleagues to see us dining together, they would either change their opinion of me or of you, and most likely it would be my reputation to be shattered. By the way, what cuisine do you prefer?"

"I'm used to enjoying whatever cuisine the mess hall is glopping onto our plates," I said. It wasn't exactly true; we had a good mess hall, and the chef always made sure I had the best food. Rank has its privileges and all that stuff, you know. "What's your preference?"

If he minded the deflection, he didn't show it. "I don't really have a preference either. I don't usually eat an actual meal at dinner, in fact. How about if I just ask the chef to bring me up two plates of his most delicious surprise and a nice bottle of bubbly to go with it?"

I had other questions, lots of them, having to do with the man-made disaster that had happened just an hour before. I'll be damned if I could remember any of them, though. "Okay, that sounds wonderful, G—Matthew." I couldn't believe I actually stuttered like a schoolgirl on his name. It was absolutely foreign to me after the years of referring to him by title only. Well, that was my story, anyway.

His expression turned up into one of the first warm smiles I'd ever seen on his face. "Stacy? I'm—well, I'm pleased that you'll be joining me for dinner, more than you probably realize. But before you go, a little business. I took the liberty of putting a copy of the communication system log files into your home directory on the server and locking them down. The password to unlock them is your first name, capitalized, followed by the year you took over this station, followed by your last name, also capitalized. Analyze them to determine exactly what command sequence was used to take the systems down, and when, where, and how it was issued. Also, find Jeff, the captain of the guard. I trust him completely, and he and you are the only two I'd say that of. He knows how to unlock the copies of the log files for the security access system. Help him sketch out the exact sequence for the breach of our perimeter, and correlate that to the communication systems commands. Look for patterns and synchronized events. Don't tell anyone else what you're doing. I want a report from you, and you alone, by seventeen forty-five in this office."

"Yes, sir!" I said, unable to resist a little more banter. I playfully snapped what I thought was a fairly respectable about face, and then stopped and turned back around.

"Wait. Why are we believing that the log files went unmodified by whomever did this?"

"I figured—hoped—you'd think of asking that. Whoever cut off access to the communication system also prevented himself access to the log files. He probably expected them to be destroyed in a catastrophic meltdown, and if the attack didn't succeed I'd assume he was prepared to yank the files away as soon as the link was fixed. What he didn't expect was my re-establishment of the link from Reactor B, and the subsequent copy of the log files to safe directories. He didn't expect it, and I'd like to believe that doesn't know it, because I left the original log files there. Might be interesting to see how they've changed recently, incidentally, but only after you're done with the first investigation."

I left then, serious thoughts in my head once again as I walked down to the main control room. I was impressed. It must've taken a pretty awesome feat of programming to have linked into the main comms through the reactors' comms system. I wasn't sure I could've done it. The Governor had some skills, apparently.

I exited the stairs at the same time the elevator doors opened and expelled the captain of the guard. "Ah, you're back down," he said. "I presumed you'd want to talk, so I hurried my rounds up a bit. All is well downstairs. Shall we convene in your office?"

I nodded. Idly, I wondered why the Governor had such unquestionable faith in either of us, but of all the people on the station to be stuck in an office for hours with poring over data and reports, I was glad it was him. As captain of the guard, he was the chief law enforcement officer for the entire station and its surrounding support systems—in civilian terms, a city of nearly a hundred million people. He was also one of the few people at the station who reported directly to the Governor instead of to me, since his authority extended beyond the immediate reactor facilities and the two hundred personnel who worked on them. Most important, he was a grizzled but level-headed veteran who was always easy to talk to. He was my father's age, but that was the only characteristic he shared with my dad, a neuroscience professor who moved from university medical center to university medical center every few years and who had been devastated that his only daughter hadn't followed him into medicine. What my dad had never realized was that as much as he liked to control those around him, his only daughter wouldn't have followed him into anything. If he'd been a nuclear engineer, I'd've probably gone into—well, not medicine, but something else. Whatever, just nothing close to him.

My father, the vaunted neurological researcher who sneered at anyone who failed to use at least one four-syllable word in each sentence. Jeff, the captain of the guard who rarely if ever used words that were any longer than they needed to be. My father, who at one point was so taken by himself that he told me to call him Doctor Allen. Jeff, the captain of the guard who commanded more good men than my father had ever even met, who liked to be called just Jeff. My father, who went off the handle if his tea were the wrong temperature. Jeff, who was calm even now as we began the investigation into the attempted murder of hundreds of millions of people.

Well, of course I preferred to be around Jeff. What sane person wouldn't? Yes, it pissed my father off that I'd stuck around the station on holidays, sometimes allowing myself to be folded in with Jeff, his wife, his kids, and his grandkids, instead of buying transport to whatever city my father lived in since mom passed. Screw him. He's my father. I love him. I don't like him, though.

Whatever. I had a mystery to solve, and no more time to think about my father.

"So," I said, once the door was securely closed and locked. As the station director, I rated one of the few lockable office doors. "Can you make sure my office is secure?"

Jeff snorted. "Are you suggesting that I'm an amateur, young lady?"

"No, Jeff. I'd be too scared you might turn me over your knee and spank me for it," I said, flirting gently with him as usual. I wasn't sexually attracted to him in the slightest, and I was willing to bet pretty much anything that the lack of attraction was mutual. He and his wife were one of those epic pairs that you couldn't even consider separated, and—no, I wasn't even willing to think of him that way. Eww. No. But the safety was what made the flirting that much more fun.

Regardless, I'd never suggest that he was an amateur, either jokingly or seriously. Not him. He'd been doing security since before I was born. He was the most competent man I knew, and I respected him a great deal for the manner in which he'd gotten there. My father had gotten into his field by obtaining a scholarship to the best pre-medicine school in the world. Jeff, meanwhile, had gotten into his field as a basic warehouse security guard, and had risen to prominence over the years by doing his job well while not being killed in the line of duty. My own direct report, my director of security, had gone to college for the post, had learned about the social implications of the prison system and how crime and the economy fluctuated together. Jeff had survived a great many fluctuations of the economy and had lived to tell me the story.

To say that I respected the man really was an understatement. I still wasn't certain what it was about him that made the Governor trust Jeff so much, but hell, I felt the same way.

There were two terminals in my office by my own request; sometimes I got a bit impatient when one terminal bogged down on code. Two terminals proved useful, though, as Jeff logged into one and I the other, and as a quiet but coordinated pair we began accessing stored log files, comparing entries, and coming to conclusions.

At seventeen forty-four hours precisely, I knocked on the Governor's office door on his level in the tower. It wouldn't do to be late.

"Come in!" he looked up and called through the open door. The formality was unnecessary; the Governor always maintained an open door. That said, everyone was so scared of him that even an open door presented a barrier.

I entered and closed the door behind me.

"Found something interesting?" he asked. I nodded, and he grinned.

The satchel I'd been carrying was full of reports and sketchpads. I slowly and deliberately laid each document in front of him while building the case verbally as Jeff and I had created it. It was slow going, being that methodical, but we hadn't seen any way otherwise to ensure that the Governor would come to the same conclusion we had.

Evidence laid out neatly entirely across his desk, the Governor watched as I delivered the coup de grace in the form of a few logged messages sent outside the station. I held half of my attention to the delivery of the conclusion, and the other half on his face, hoping to see some approval of our results.

"Hmm," he said. He crossed his arms and stared at the pages I'd spread in front of him. Once, then twice, he sat forward and pointed to notes we'd taken, only to read them and then fall back to his position of contemplation.

"This is a pretty serious accusation," he said, finally meeting my eyes.

"I know."

"Are you sure?"

"I am."

"Well, then I don't have much choice but to accept it, too." The Governor frowned at the data in front of him once more, and then looked at me and smiled. "First thing tomorrow, then. Are you ready for dinner, Stacy?"

It took me a second to recover; I was startled. In the thrill of discovery, I'd completely forgotten about our date.

"Didn't change your mind, did you?" he asked, his voice teasing.

"No, no. I just wasn't ready for the abrupt shift in topic."

"Attempted murder of hundreds of millions, to steak. Yes, I can see that. We can continue talking about this if you'd like, sort of wind down the topic slowly, but I heard the food arrive moments ago. Your steak will get cold."

"Steak? Real steak?"

He nodded. My goodness, he was going all out. A history teacher had once explained to my class that we'd once had herds of meat creatures even here, on this continent, but as the population of the world had blossomed, the available land for ranching had shrunk. We'd all found that as hard to believe as the dinosaur claims, honestly. Most "meat" was now produced in factories, with man-made protein structures bound to man-made edible polymer fibers and flavored with man-made chemical combinations. The result sufficed. Real steak, though, from an actual—what was it called, a cow?—was exceedingly rare to find and usually cost more than my annual salary, per gram. I'd never had one, nor did I know anyone who had.

Matthew led me into his dining room. It was larger than I'd have imagined, but I guessed he might need the space to entertain any number of visitors from anywhere. Of the fourteen places at the long table, only two places were set, both together at the end farthest from the entry. He held my chair out for me, a gesture I hadn't seen before. After I sat he walked to the side wall, opened a sliding compartment, and brought back two plates to the table. He set a plate for each of us, poured each a glass of wine, and then sat down at the table's head.

The plate he sat in front of me was mostly foreign. I recognized the potato, of course. I'd even had one baked in the same manner before. In our dining facilities, though, we tended to get the crushed, then dried, and later reconstituted version. The long white spears I had never seen before; he called them asparagus. Apparently they were difficult to grow in a lab environment and so I was enjoying yet another rare treat from one of the very few remaining old-style farms.

The steak was strange. At first I was put off by the reddish-clear liquid that oozed when I cut it, but Matthew assured me it was to be expected. After, of course, he got his chuckle at my expense. But the texture was—oh, I don't know how best to put it. Normal steak, or at least the steak I had thought of as normal to that point, has a consistently chewy, sort of rubbery texture. I would never have guessed that real steak isn't consistent at all. It's not really all that chewy, either. I mean, some is. The parts around the outside, the kind of clear parts, were chewy, and Matthew told me not to eat them after I'd chewed on one for a bit. But the rest was firm and fibrous in a way that the normal steak wasn't, and instead of a single note of lab-created flavor it left an amazing, robust sensation rolling around my taste buds.

I savored every bite. The wine helped, but wasn't necessary.

I really don't recall what we talked about while we ate. I think at some point Matthew told me something of the farm where the strange vegetable had been grown. I recall also learning that different parts of the cow were made of different types of steaks with different textures and flavors, of all the strange things. It was a weird conversation, I guess, but not any more weird than the talk of who might be interested in melting down nuclear reactors, and there was far less at stake too.

As Matthew cleared the table, I risked a sensitive query. "So is Sorscha off duty for the night?"

He didn't seem fazed in the slightest as he dumped the plates into the same compartment from which he'd taken them and then walked back.

"Sorscha's never off duty," he said. "But she doesn't hang out here, if that's what you meant. She can be here very quickly if I need her, though."

"Probably taking some back pathway that even I don't know, right?"

"Pretty much," he said. "She knows how to get around quickly if needed."

As interesting as the thought was that there were halls I didn't know about as station director, I decided it was time to get to the main point.

"She doesn't like me much, does she?"

He chuckled and said, "Not much, no. Does that bother you?"

"I don't know. I'm honestly not sure whether to be concerned or not. I guess I don't know where I stand in the Matthew, Sorscha, Stacy triangle."

Shrugging, Matthew replied, "Well, it's complicated, but most of that triangle is mutually exclusive. Matthew and Sorscha is a long-term protective relationship. She's had my back more times than you'd believe. We've built up a solid friendship over the years, but it's one that is not at all romantic. Matthew and Stacy is a new idea, and hopefully a romantic one, that I'd like to explore more. Sorscha and Stacy, meanwhile, may not ever be on friendly terms, but then again they don't really need to be."

That sort of made sense. He liked having his silver-hared ninja around to karate chop any attackers, and he wanted me to sleep with him. The only problem was that I had no interest in being the Governor's girl-toy. I was doing just fine on my own, thank you. No official patronage needed.

I must've let my thoughts show on my face; hopefully it was the wine that caused me to slip like that. Whatever caused it, he somehow caught on to what I was thinking. He reached across the corner of the table and rested his hand tenderly on mine. "I'm not looking for a casual sexual encounter, Stacy," he said, his eyes fixed intently on mine.

"What are you looking for, then?" I asked. It was the wine. It had to be. My head was spinning, and no man's gaze had ever had that effect on me. It was an absurd question, asked in an absurd manner—who would ever answer it honestly?—but it was the best I could do in my besotted state.

"You, I think," he said. "Look, I'm not much of an expert at this romance game. But as I've watched you in your leadership of the station, I've grown more and more attracted to you. To call you smart is an understatement, right? The tech just comes to you, second nature. I've never met someone who is so complex, so interesting. I'm taken with you, Stacy. I want to get to know more about you. It may work, or it may not, between us. You have my word that if it doesn't work, your job will be protected. I just—I just have to try. You're too intoxicating not to at least attempt it."

I hadn't been called intoxicating in a long, long time. Back then, it was the fanciest word that the love-starved college kid could come up with in the hopes of getting in my pants. Now, coming as it did from the foremost, and most handsome, bachelor in the agency that ruled the entire planet, it made my knees weak.

I tried one last defense. "Aren't you old enough to be my father?" Again, it was clumsy, but I was running out of options, and the damned wine was—well, just damned. Dammit.

"How old do you think I am?" It sure didn't take him long to turn it around on me.

"Early forties, I think." Men like to be thought in their early forties; older, and they're old men, younger, and they're just kids. I had absolutely no idea, since the Governor had no age creases in his face or anything else to clue me in and I'd never been given access to his personnel files. Lacking reasonable evidence to the contrary, why not pick the age range that best suited me?

In response he snorted and sat back, a neutral expression on his face. Gods, I hoped I never had to play poker against him.

"Let's see," he said. "You're twenty-seven. An early forties man would have fathered you awfully early in his own life, yes?"

I shrugged. "Math was never my strong suit," I said, hoping he would let me out of it.

He didn't. Chuckling, he replied, "Right. Nearly every day I meet nuclear engineers who never really got that whole math thing."

I tried to be indignant and failed at it. That was funny, dammit. I chuckled, and then I guffawed. Matthew's laughter intensified, too. It didn't take long till we were laughing together, a pair of drunken sots who'd just eaten a once-in-a-lifetime dinner and who were rapidly and completely falling for each other. At some point—I have no idea when, and it really doesn't matter anyway—we laughed our way into another room with a music player, and we continued laughing as we danced, and danced, and danced some more. Of course he was an excellent dancer, but at that point I didn't give a damn. Other things were on my mind.

Damn the wine. I woke up the next morning expecting some degree of fuzziness in my brain, but there was none. Damn, damn, damn. How could I blame the blasted wine for my actions when I didn't wake up with a hangover? I actually wanted a hangover, dammit! Ah, well. I wrestled with my conundrum quietly as I walked back toward the bedroom door picking up my clothes off of the floor, hoping he wouldn't wake up.

He did.

"Slipping out quietly, I see," Matthew's voice filled his bedroom, a royal-sized chamber containing a regal four-poster bed.

I'd had a few more or less successful attempts at sneaking out of a man's room back in college. This attempt definitely fell into the less successful bucket, so I did what any naked girl would do when caught sneaking out of a man's room. I froze.

Matthew's gentle chuckle filled the room once again with his voice. He said, "By standing still and not looking at me, you're thinking that your beautiful naked body will fade out of my eyesight, yes?"

I was too damn old to play the game, and so I turned and glared at him. When the glare proved ineffectual, I said, "Look. You got what you wanted, right? Let me at least...."

He cut me off, his voice still resonant but now carrying a sharp undertone. "Stacy. I told you last night what I was after. I'm honored that you graced me with a night of lovemaking, but that wasn't what I intended to happen."

I couldn't think of anything to be angry about, so I intensified my glare and kept searching. Nope. I really did remember how we had ended up in bed. While he hadn't objected, he certainly hadn't forced me there. He had everything I'd always wanted: a well-defined physique draped by an intellect that challenged my own and decorated with a sense of humor and gracefulness that had brought several smiles to my face the previous day. All that, and he was rich and extremely powerful to boot. He was everything any girl ever living had ever wanted. Why on earth did I want to lash out at him and storm back down the stairs to my own room, never to cast a shadow in his room again?

His voice cut into the silence between us. "You've been running away from relationships your whole life, haven't you?" Well, damn. How did he know?

"How do you read my mind?"

"I'm reading your face, actually. And, I confess, I've read your personnel file, just as I've read the files of every senior official at this station and the others. Not a lot of personal information in yours, but what is there points to some pretty obvious conclusions. Look," he said, rising and walking around the bed to me, "I want you in my life, but only if you want it too."

Alarm bells sounded loudly in my head. Way too many besotted men who could never have coped with me long-term had invited me into their lives with no idea what that meant.

"By 'in your life,' you don't mean...."

"No. Sorry, bad phrase to use. I want to get to know you more, but I don't think either of us is ready to jump at anything—um, long term. I'll be happy to jump elsewhere in the meantime, though," he said, his tender smile turning into a lustful leer, his gaze going suggestively to the bed.

"I probably ought to get to...." I'd been just about to say 'work' when a buzzer on the nightstand sounded, ripping Matthew's attention away.

"Ah, Mike's coming for a visit." He correctly read my face once again and explained away my confusion. "Michael is one of my favorite colleagues on the council. That he's come this far instead of just calling probably isn't good news, though. Get dressed; I'll introduce you."

That I was just about to meet another member of the planetary ruling council unnerved me more than I cared to admit. The Thirteen had stepped in as a group and incredibly saved the world from itself a couple decades ago as nations that had been sovereign at the time stood on the brink of mutual destruction. They had literally walked into the chamber and stood in the middle of the saber-rattling, genocide-threatening mass of idiot rulers and presidents and appointed themselves all-powerful leaders, answering to none but each other. I mean, literally, right there on the world news vid channel. Immediately after, they had abolished all other governmental bodies and split the world up into thirteen colonies. All without a single drop of bloodshed. Some day I'd have to ask Matthew how that had been possible, though I suspected the chance of him answering truthfully was small.

I dressed and then walked out into the antechamber where Matthew was standing talking quietly to another man. As I entered the room, the conversation halted and the newcomer turned to leer at me, his dark eyes seeming to follow every curve on my body.

"Well, well, Matthew," he said. "I see you've gone native."

Matthew snorted, the only indication that he'd heard his companion's insult. "Michael, may I introduce this station's director and nuclear energy prodigy, Dr. Stacy Allen. Stacy, meet my somewhat churlish colleague Michael. He doesn't get out of his uncivilized colony much, so you'll have to forgive him for forgetting his manners."

I wasn't a protocol expert, but I knew enough to realize that he'd paid me a grand compliment, and his colleague an insult, by the order of his introduction. It was getting interesting. I smiled and bobbed my head politely, content to let these two godlike men fight it out as they might. They faced off in the center of the room. Matthew was the tall and stocky one, his red hair done just so as to radiate his trademark arrogance. Michael was even taller than Matthew, the black hair on his head reaching somewhat about six and a half feet above the floor, but he was thin. Gaunt, even. His eyes were truly black and deep-set; they peered around his sharp nose and gave him an unmistakable resemblance to a raven.

His thin lips curled just at their tips into what was almost, but not quite, a smile as he said, "Pleased to meet you, Doctor Allen. Nuclear technology, then?"

I nodded, inexplicably nervous that the man might be about to quiz me on atomic theory. I knew my stuff, certainly, but he gave off an air of intellectualism that I suddenly didn't feel quite up to. He spared me, though, instead turning back to Matthew with a dismissive grunt.

"You were saying, old chum, that Benny was implicated in your research?" Michael said. Matthew nodded, and Michael pursed his lips. "How best should we address that, do you think?"

As they continued their discussion it became even more obvious that they were out of my league. In the log files there had been a ciphered transmission out to a place on the opposite side of the world. I was proud of myself for recalling my study of Riknik, a computer language used in the writing of code-making and code-breaking programs, and I'd had the cipher broken pretty quickly. It was to someone named Ben'thra, and carried the message It is done. Matthew had recognized the name immediately but hadn't told me anything. I assumed at the time that meant it was another of the thirteen, and the commentary on which I felt I was eavesdropping now confirmed that.

There was no point involving myself further, so I slipped quietly toward the door while the two titans of the ruling class excluded me from their planning session. Michael stopped me in my tracks, though, with a sharply-phrased command.

"Stay, child."

I turned, furious, and snarled, "I am not a child." Okay, that sucked. Hey, it was the best I could do on short notice and on a shorter fuse.

Michael sneered. "No, I can see that from the curves your body displays in quite unremarkable quantity," he said. That made me even madder; I'd always been sensitive to the fact that my breasts and hips had never won any awards.

"Stacy," Matthew said, his voice level, his eyes locked on Michael's face, "stop letting Michael push your buttons. You do need to stay here, because you're still one of the few humans here that I trust, and because it was your work that uncovered all of this, and, finally, because at some point we're going to have to talk about what to do next, a topic that will include you. But please, just have a seat over there and ignore Michael for the time being."

"What...."

"Don't interrupt us again, child," Michael said, cutting through the question I'd been about to ask.

"Michael," Matthew corrected his colleague, the one word conveying more toward sticking up for me than any other men's speeches I'd ever heard. I was pleased, but—what had he meant when he'd said "humans" in that differentiating tone?

"What?" Michael asked as he returned Matthew's glare defiantly, his challenging tone making it clear that the question was rhetorical.

Realizing that the interplay might become entertaining after all, I sat where Matthew had indicated. I wasn't being docilely compliant; I was being curious, I kept telling myself.

"Stacy is my station director. She's not one of us, but she still deserves the respect due her position as a direct report to the governor. While you're in my land, you will keep a civil tongue toward her and toward all of my—employees."

As much as I appreciated the boss's sticking up for me, my attention was drawn away by the realization that the air in the room was getting a little heated. Not the temperature, exactly—it felt more like electricity was building all around us, and the feeling reminded me of a camping trip back in my childhood—the only time I ever saw Dad venture outside of the protected areas of the stations and the conveyances in between.

He'd taken us "old school camping," as he'd referred to it, and we'd even had to unfold a disastrous little sleeping compartment that he'd called a "tent." It had taken a couple of hours of fighting with little connected rods and metal stakes before he gave up and brought out the nice, modern emergency shelter that went up at the touch of a button. Even that, though, hadn't protected us fully from the storm that night.

I'd never seen a real storm, and haven't since, thanks to our domes. The one that night was beautiful, though. Sexy, even. The sensation of standing there feeling the wind whip around my body from side to side, the rain soaking me instantly and then continuing to pound my skin with its huge raindrops—larger drops than any of the vids had ever led me to believe were possible—was incredible.

The lightning is still what I remember the clearest, though. It set my skin on fire with tingly electrical sensations, and then the world went from black to blazingly bright as a massive bolt of energy struck a hilltop a few dozen meters from me. I read, later, that the lightning was most likely striking something on the hilltop—a tree, probably. I couldn't tell. The sensations went by too fast to gather any useful data. My skin came alive, and then the world turned white, and then a sonic crack sounded like it had split the very earth on which I stood. It was in that order, I know, but it all happened in the same microsecond. Then my dad's hands grabbed my shoulders and pulled me back into the shelter, and I don't remember much of anything until my vision returned several minutes later and my pulse stopped racing.

It was the most awesome thing I've ever felt. In that one microsecond I felt more alive than I'd ever felt before and have ever felt since. And as I came back to the present, in the room watching the two council members face off silently, the air felt just like it had back then before the world had gone white. Part of my mind—probably the smarter part—was screaming silently at the rest of me to flee, but I couldn't. I sat, riveted.

Then it was gone. Just like that, the electricity disappeared. I'd say dissipated, but it wasn't gradual in the slightest. It was there, and then it wasn't. Matthew relaxed, smiled, and gestured toward a chair.

"Shall we sit and continue our discussion, Mike?" he said.

I realized that I'd been holding my breath. I let it out slowly, quietly, but not quietly enough. Both pairs of eyes turned toward me from the middle of the room, Michael's gaze bearing down while Matthew's stare appraised me with a good-humored glint. After a moment, both pairs of eyes turned back toward each other, a soft grunt of disapproval from Mr. Hawk-nose the only sound for several long moments.

The rest of the conversation passed without serious incident. I was even included in a great deal of it, to my surprise and pleasure. I learned a few things, had a couple of my hunches confirmed, and got to be the principal plotter in what I'll call, for lack of a more official title, Operation Stacy's Vengeance.

But I get ahead of myself. It's not surprising, as much as I wanted to see the jerk who'd murdered one of my best friends put down, but I should start at the top.

First, this Ben'thra fellow was the ringleader. What was most surprising to me in that revelation was that it didn't seem to surprise either of the two men. Michael, who was, it turned out, the governor of the other continent that had been attacked, had also intercepted some transmissions, similar to but more detailed than the one I'd found addressed to Ben'thra. That pretty much clinched the case against him in their books as well as mine, but it left me wondering why a member of the council would do such a thing.

I expressed the question, and Matthew answered by outlining his theory, Michael nodding agreement. The Council, as they simply called themselves, was not the unanimous ruling body that they so often presented to the world, but was instead made up of members who squabbled as much as any group. Benny, as Matthew referred to Ben'thra, had a mischievous streak a mile wide. He acted in concert with his fellows most of the time, but he liked to play pranks, and setting the world against the enviros must have seemed a grand prank to him. Michael joined in the discussion then, explaining that in his colony the enviros had been gaining ground in the public sympathy arena. Their message of a better life through a return to nature resonated in a land where natural spaces no longer existed, as the population over there had increased to the point of completely obliterating anything that wasn't man-made. "Nature-camps" and "nature-vacations" were the new thing, growing to a multi-billion-credit industry in a short couple of years. That movement, of course, led to a backlash from the techies who insisted that "tree hugging" (whatever that meant) would lead to a regression from the prosperously self-sustaining science-based lifestyle we'd come to enjoy. The population in Europe Colony, Michael concluded, was about ready to turn inward on itself.

That all made sense. I tended to ignore the news, but I'd seen glimmers of the nature expeditions here, and we had some of the same simmering arguments. Our governor, though—the man I'd slept with last night, I reminded myself—had so far kept a lid on the pot, preventing the mutual distrust from boiling over. At least, he had managed to keep a lid on it until yesterday.

This Benny had a particular enmity build up toward Matthew, Michael explained, a result of a long-standing feud of some sort. Add to that his nature as a trickster, and the evidence reached critical mass.

"So what are we going to do about him?" I asked, expecting to be involved in the application of retribution. Both men fixed me with stares that made it clear I was wrong.

"We?" Michael said, his haughty voice dripping with sarcasm. "Matthew, your toy is so cute when she's angry. She actually thinks she can take one of us down."

Matthew's expression of amusement turned to one of disgust. "Mikey? Stuff it, asshole." Again he glared at his counterpart on my behalf, an expression I tried to imitate.

Several seconds later, Matthew turned back to me and, his voice tender and soothing, said, "Stacy, dealing with Ben'thra truly is a matter best left to Michael and me and the rest of the council. I need you to focus on your counterpart here who, I think we all agree, must have been Benny's right hand man in planning this."

I nodded, mollified for the moment. Matthew was right, and as much as it pained me to admit, so was Michael. I was a station director, high on the local hierarchy but nothing compared to a member of the world's ruling council.

"You know, as much as I hate to say I told you so, I told you so," Matthew said to Michael. "Of course it's irrelevant to the matter at hand, but it needed pointing out. When we decided to abolish sovereign governments and create a single planetary oligarchy, didn't I tell you all that the removal of wars over land would just lead to people fighting amongst themselves over even sillier things? That international wars cause people to come together as a cultural entity against an outward foe, while the lack of such strife then allows the same groups to splinter and fight amongst themselves? Benny is, in a way, just helping to prove me right. Granted, it's something I'd have never actually wanted validated."

Michael aimed a derisive grunt toward Matthew. "Yeah," he said. "You were right. Good job. Woo hoo! Do we need to call a council meeting so we can all pat you on the back?"

"Oh, stuff it. We do need to call a meeting to address what Benny has done."

"Indeed," Michael said. He turned toward me. "Now, let's talk about your part in this operation. I'm given to understand that you lost a dear friend in the attack."

I nodded. "He was shot to death in the control room, in the middle of trying to make the comms system work, I suspect."

"And we know who shot him."

I nodded again.

"And we are all in agreement that the evidence amply identifies who was behind the attack."

I nodded a third time.

"Well, then, since the man who murdered your friend is the same man who was primarily behind the attack, I think that the right to vengeance belongs to you," Michael concluded. "Tell us what you need to effect such delightful reprisal, and I, for one, will be pleased to assist."

We'd satisfied ourselves that it was Mark, the director of security, behind the attack. The entry points for the attackers had been too cleverly chosen, laid out as though the planner knew the station's security design well but had decided to put in a couple of bad choices to make it look a little less like his handiwork. The bad points, of course, were scheduled to be breached just after the others, and they'd only been attacked by a couple of enviros—no! they weren't enviros, I reminded myself—each. Jeff, the captain of the guard, had taken one look at the incident map and immediately decided upon Mark's guilt. I hadn't been willing to call it till we'd seen the logins under Mark's codes, as well as nuclear plant security codes that not even Jeff had known used to bring systems to a halt. The comms codes had been Stephen's, true, but Jeff's search of his office had revealed an easily-accessible notepad containing all of the special codes. Stephen, then, was quite guilty of a breach of station security protocol, but nothing else.

Mark, on the other hand? Mark needed to pay for the murder of a friend. And both Michael and Matthew were agreeing to help me make sure he did pay.

"Timing is important," Matthew said. "I don't believe either Ben'thra or Mark is aware that we know who was behind the attacks. As soon as either of them know, both of them will know. Ben'thra cannot escape the other twelve of us, so I'm not worried about him, but Mark will undoubtedly run for the hills and make your part harder. We need to strike simultaneously."

"No disagreement here," Michael said. "So tell me, Station Director Allen, what evil retribution scheme you have planned for Mark. I love hearing plans for pain, and in my experience women come up with the best ones."

Michael's purring voice brought me up short. I hadn't thought that far ahead, honestly. I knew I wanted to cause Mark a great deal of pain, but I certainly hadn't planned it.

Michael's voice cut into my thoughts. "Well? Haven't you planned your revenge out in great and gory detail? Or are you somehow not really a woman?"

His insults were finding far less purchase in my skin, thanks to Matthew's continued defense on my behalf. I grinned at Michael and countered, "Oh, I'm really a woman. I'm sure your buddy Matthew will confirm that."

Matthew nodded, an amused grin on his face as he agreed. "The only part of that I'll contest is your reference to me as his buddy. Colleague, perhaps, but never buddy."

"So, my plan," I said. It hadn't taken me that long to come up with something once I'd put my mind to it, and the joking had covered just enough time. I outlined what I was thinking, and by the time I was done both men wore smiles. Granted, Matthew's smile was broad and happy while Michael's was thin-lipped and vindictive, but I was pleased that I'd gotten both of them to smile at the same time regardless. They added a few points, and Matthew insisted that I involve Captain Jeff in the activity. I wasn't sure, figuring that the grizzled veteran wouldn't inflict pain if he didn't have to, but Matthew assured me that he would bring Jeff into the fold personally when the time arose.

My biggest concern still rested in the why. We knew Mark had done it, and we knew how. We knew where and when. I just didn't understand what could possibly turn a security professional against his own to the point that he was willing to murder one of his own colleagues in cold blood, much less risk the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Hopefully the interview phase of my little plan for retribution would bring answers.

Conference over, Michael bid us both farewell—surprisingly polite to me for a change—and left. Matthew and I sat quietly looking out the window as a single-seat transport containing Michael dipped down to point its nose into Matthew's apartment, wiggled its wings, and then shot up and away. I looked down and was pleased to find Matthew's hand grasping my own as we sat on the couch together. The stress of the encounter we'd just been through washed over me, and somehow sitting on his couch holding his hand was the perfect thing to do.

"One of your favorites on the council, you said?" I asked.

"Yeah," Matthew said. "Michael is. Why do you ask?"

"If you call your favorite friend an asshole, I wonder what you call your least favorite colleague."

Matthew chuckled. "We of the council have unusual relationships with each other. Mike and I have spent so long working closely together that our jocularity is second nature. I admit that he did piss me off with the insults he hurled your way, but I also know him well enough to understand that they were rooted in jealousy rather than disdain."

"Jealousy? He's a governor, too. Can't he have anybody he wants?"

"Sure he can. So can I. But that which is easily accessible rapidly becomes undesirable, dear. We both want the same thing. I found it. He hasn't."

"What is this 'it' then, besides a crude reference to me?"

"A reference to you, indeed. You're an exceptionally rare woman, Stacy. Very few people in the world have such an intuitive grasp for the forces that lie behind our technology. Both nuclear theory and electrical engineering came naturally to you, didn't they?"

"Sure, but...."

"But nothing. There might be one in a hundred million people on this planet with that ability. Add to it the fact that you're a very pretty and pleasant young woman, and you have a combination that—well, that inspires me. It inspires Mike, too, apparently."

"Oh. I've never really thought of myself that way."

"I know."

"I've always run with the knowledge that guys are only after breasts, and since I don't have much of those I have to secretly supplement with my brains."

"Still focused on physical beauty, I see."

"That's all that matters."

"Not to me."

I looked at him sideways, trying to judge his sincerity. His words were awfully tough to accept. Every man I'd ever known had really only been interested in a physical relationship. Some had said they weren't, but those men had been liars. I'd always dreamed of being stunningly beautiful, but you know how dreams are. Dream in one hand, spit in the other, and see which one fills up faster, right? I'd just learned to use what I had.

Not finding anything in his face to hint at deceit, I steered us another direction. "How old are you?"

"Why do you want to know?" He turned and met my eyes.

I decided on a hunch to play the round with honesty. "I guess I don't, really. I mean, age doesn't matter all that much in the scheme of things. But there were some comments earlier that led me to wonder who you and the other council members are, and where you're from. You said the word 'humans' like a guy says 'girls.' Are you one? A human, I mean?"

Matthew looked at me for a long, long period, his face still and composed, his eyes searching my face from top to bottom and back up, repeating the cycle several times. Finally he took a deep breath and answered with a single word.

"No."

"Some super-powerful race from the stars that has come to take over the planet, then? A dolphin that looks like a man?"

"Heh. No. Funny, though."

"A god, then?"

"An immortal. It may be accurate to call me a god. I and my brethren were around when the planet was created. We've been content to sit around and mostly just watch, but with the multiple threats of nuclear annihilation of the entire planet going around we decided to step in and use our powers for good. You heard my comment about how successful I thought we've been."

"Is Sorscha an immortal, a goddess?" I couldn't get the silver-haired beauty and the resultant pang of jealousy to leave my head.

"No. She's not human, though. Her race was created to be servants to the gods."

"A race of kung fu masters as servants? Impressive."

Matthew snorted. "Actually, a race of dragons who shape-shift into humanoid form, which is probably harder for you to accept than a race of kung fu masters. Besides, she's strong and fast enough that she doesn't need much kung fu. Her race is also immune to energy weapons."

"Oh. Of course. I thought I saw a blaster beam hit her, but I dismissed that as impossible."

Matt shrugged and asked, "So, any more questions?"

"Plenty, but you've got my brain spinning enough for now. I always supposed there had to be some sort of supreme higher power omni-whatever immortal types, but I never figured I'd get to sleep with one. I think I need to absorb all of this before I ask anything else for fear of making my head explode."

"Probably true. And now, Stacy, you hold a precious secret in your hands. I feel like I really haven't done you a favor in the revelation, since you can never tell anyone what you know. But you do deserve the truth, and, frankly, I'm impressed that you haven't dismissed me as crazy."

Crazy? The entire previous twenty four hours had been crazy. I'd been stuck on an elevator in the dark, shot at, and kissed by my boss. I'd killed people, shot them with my own blaster fired by my own hand. I'd seen a good friend murdered and a colleague lying to get away with it. I'd eaten steak, real steak, with real cow juices running out of it. I'd slept with my boss. And he expected me to blink over a revelation that he was an immortal who had a pet dragon? Bah.

I snickered. I don't think I've ever snickered before, but I did then. It seemed the only logical thing to do. I looked at Matthew's face, and I snickered again. Hell, the second one felt even better than the first had, so I snickered a third time.

I couldn't help but wonder if this was what going insane felt like.

Matthew joined me. He didn't snicker, exactly; he guffawed. At the sound of his laugh, though, I took a turn at actually laughing, and my laugh made his stronger, and then vice versa, and soon we were both convulsing in laughter, tears flowing freely.

The laughter attack dwindled, leaving us staring into each others' tear-streaked faces. I did the only thing that was reasonable at the moment. I reached for him, pulled him to me, and we shared a long, deep kiss.

"You should change clothes," Matthew said, several minutes later. The kiss had been explosively passionate, but we were both too wound up for it to go any further. "Come back when you're done, and I'll summon Jeff. Then we can get the dirty work out of the way."

I took the stairs down; my own apartment was on the floor right below the control room, and two stories was an easy jog. Besides, I really didn't want to risk the elevator door opening at the control room. Nobody would likely have the guts to ask why I was coming down from the boss's level in the same outfit I'd worn last night, but there wasn't any point starting rumors, founded or no. Besides, no one ever ran the stairs except for Jeff and me.

Several minutes later I was back, sitting in Matthew's top-floor office, this time in a crisply pressed uniform with freshly combed hair and renewed makeup. Jeff sat in the other chair, and together we laid out the plan for confronting Mark.

It was surprising that Jeff wasn't as opposed to the brutality of the plan as I'd thought he would be.

"I know how you felt toward Stephen, Stacy," Jeff said. "It's one thing to lose a friend in the line of duty, but to have him murdered in cold blood is a whole new level of miserable. We owe it to Stephen to deal with his murderer, and we also have to find out if there's a chance he had co-conspirators. I don't enjoy dirty work like this, but it won't be the first time I've had to do it. When do we start?"

Matthew left to get into his own transport pod while the two of us called Mark into Jeff's office, my own office being too difficult to get into or out of should anything go awry. Matthew assured us he could adapt to whatever timing we needed; Jeff didn't question where the boss was going or how he could get there at any speed he wished, and I was just about done being surprised by the Governor—the man—the god—whatever!—for the day.

Mark came immediately to Jeff's request for a conference. It wasn't surprising; all that the station's director of security really had to do all day was run background checks on technicians, write policies, and publish reports on the meaningless data that a few dozen access points into a nuclear reactor facility generated throughout a twenty-four hour window.

Mark walked into Jeff's office, saw me, and froze. His face lit up with panic and his hand twitched toward his holster. Jeff stopped Mark with a quick shake of his head, a slight motion with the blaster that he held leveled at his Mark's chest, and a single word: "Don't."

"Why don't you close the door and have a seat?" Jeff asked, his voice switching to light and casual. I had no idea how he kept his composure, but I was glad he did. I don't know if it was fear, or anger, or just pure adrenaline that caused my own hands to shake behind my back. Jeff had suggested I stand with them held there so that I would have a single-motion pull of my blaster to make if needed, but he must have known my hands would be shaking and dripping sweat. Better to hide that from Mark, obviously.

Mark crossed the few feet to the chairs warily and started to sit, but Jeff stopped him.

"Take out your blaster slowly and put it on my desk over there, please," he said, motioning with his head to the corner closest to me. Mark did as he was told and then sat down. I managed to slow the trembling in my hand just long enough to slide the blaster to a spot out of Mark's reach, and then my offending extremity went right back to where it couldn't be seen.

"So, it's obvious that you know why you're here," Jeff said. "Why don't you tell us what happened?"

Mark shrugged. "You're just going to kill me anyway, aren't you? Why should I bother?"

"Actually, we don't murder people in cold blood. Give us a chance, why don't you?"

"Look," Mark said, sweat beading his brow. "I didn't intend to kill Stephen. He was supposed to be downstairs in the meeting room. You all were. But when he started darting around trying to fix things—he knew. All our plans, everything we set in motion, it all would have been for nothing if he'd let people know what was really happening."

"Our?" I started to ask, but Jeff spoke over me. "Why did you want us to think the environmentalists had attacked us?"

"They are attacking us! If not this time, then there are plenty of other attacks they're planning. We must be rid of them, and the only way the people will ever rise up and be strong is if they are angry. Don't you see? They're pushing all this tree-hugging, 'let's get back to basics' crap. It spits in the face of progress. Besides, there's documented proof out there that they're plotting to overthrow the council, end our peaceful life. They're the terrorists, not us."

As Mark's rant wound down, Jeff asked, "How long have you felt this way?"

"Always. I've always felt this way. I've just learned more of the truth over the years, with the growth of the green movement, those filthy long-haired freaks. I've heard more of what they do, more of what the media covers up that's really going on. The master says...."

"The master? Who is that?" Jeff said, interjecting in a sharp voice.

"I—I can't say. But he's powerful. He's as powerful as the Governor. Way high up there in the ruling council. I won't tell you who it is, though. No, the work must go on. The plan must proceed. It must!"

"What's the next part of the plan, Mark?"

Mark's laughter pealed as he said, "You don't really believe I'm going to tell you that, do you?"

"No, I presume the Governor is going to have to find out when he and the rest of the council pay their visit to Ben'thra."

As the name passed through Jeff's lips, Mark's face turned white. His mouth worked strangely and I heard the sound of glass grinding. I'd seen enough crime thriller vids to know what a suicide pill is. Shrieking, I leaped forward, abandoning all thought of defensive posture in the hopes of holding his jaws apart.

It was too late. His eyes turned up in his head, and his body convulsed. As I stood, trying to hold his head upright, Jeff's strong arms reached around me and pulled me away.

"Stacy, there's nothing we can do," he said.

I wasn't convinced. "We never found out who the 'we' was."

Jeff forcibly turned me around to face away from the still-convulsing man and looked me in the eyes as he spoke slowly and calmly. "I'm fairly sure that his 'we' consisted of himself and Ben'thra, and maybe others like him at other stations. Did you see Mark's eyes as he talked of the enviros? He was crazy. I don't know if there was something Ben'thra did to unhinge him or if it was something else. I do know that crazy men don't gather teams. Mark figured he could pull this off all by himself. It's why he didn't have a plan for if somebody was in the restroom. A sane and careful man would've planned the attack for the middle of the meeting, not the first couple of minutes, but in Mark's head he was better than all of us. No, I'll bet my pension on him being the only one."

"If you're wrong?" I asked.

"If I'm wrong, the Governor will find out. Relax, Stacy. It's over."

"But I thought...."

"That we were going to torture him? I know. But I also knew that the director of security might have access to a suicide pill."

"You knew this would go down this way?" I asked, incredulous.

"Knew is a strong term. Let's just say I suspected it, based on a long life of battling crime. Stacy, I know you were looking forward to angrily avenging your friend, and trust me, I understand why you wanted it. But that wouldn't have done Stephen any good. We know what happened, and those who did it have paid the price. It's time to move on. Let's get past it right now. Okay?"

I raised my hand to wipe the tears I hadn't realized were falling. It's sad how, when all is said and done, the relief just washes away into emptiness. The corpse in Jeff's office was testament to the fact that the person behind the attack on my station had suffered vengeance. And—that was it. It was done. It was, as Jeff said, time to move on.

*******

I tendered my resignation directly to Matthew when he returned from his meeting with Ben'thra. The loss, the pain, was bad enough; I figured the guild could get me a nice safe job somewhere else doing, well, something else. Anything else, really. Maybe I could go teach, live a life of transience just like my father.

He refused to accept it, as I knew he would. "Quit if you must," he said, "but you're staying right here. I'm not going to find a once-in-a-lifetime woman only to have her run off and teach or empty trash cans for a living. Sorry, Stacy."

He finished with one of those half-smiles that I've come to know means that he really isn't sorry in the slightest.

Oh, we married, of course. The surprising part was that nobody—none of my fellow mortals, anyway—seemed to mind the breach of chain-of-command etiquette. I guess my reputation had followed me to the station after all, and so everybody there was happy to see me finally settle down. At the same time, while as far as I could see the Governor didn't change in the slightest, in taking a wife he became much more approachable, accessible, and downright normal to everyone else.

Sorscha was at the wedding. She glared at me the entire time. She, apparently, minded. Oh, well.

Also at the wedding were the other twelve members of the council, and them only; apparently the gods prefer their private ceremonies to remain private.

Ben'thra was there. He avoided me. Poor fool. Someday, somehow, I'll get him back.

Some day.

# Undercover Lies

Renna stood her post, scanning the horizon for flying shapes with wings and tails. A sigh escaped her lips. She'd been a borderlands guard for several months, and the promise of action and adventure had only been satisfied if you called cooking over an open campfire an adventure. It wasn't, to her way of seeing things, at least so long as anyone other than Mitchie was cooking. If the young boy from central Cenna, the capital city of Amiotria, was cooking on an open flame then all bets were off, which was why the company didn't let him do that anymore.

Renna snorted—city folk and their reliance on magic. Stupid, all of it. Yes, their nation boasted some of the most powerful mages in the world, but that was no reason to pretend the old ways didn't exist. The gods, curse them all, had provided metal to make weapons and flint to make fire. Besides, out on the borders it was especially important to do things by hand because a single flow of elemental power woven in the vicinity of the guard shacks Renna and her fellows manned would set alarms ringing throughout a system connected all the way back into the core of the Amiotrites' intelligence office.

Renna had no idea when or why the war with the gods had started. She doubted that anyone did. It had been going for ten long years, though, with no end in sight. The dragons were tough enough to deal with, their fire and claws having taken a number of lives including those of Renna's parents. They were somehow immune to the magical flows of energy but not to grappling hooks, nets, and spears, which was why Renna always kept a net and a few spears close by. She'd lost her parents to dragons, yes, but she would avenge their death.

The dragon flights, then, were the reason the human sentries stood guard beside the magic detectors. The alarms could be surrounded by an entire flight of dragons and never peep, but let a rider cast a single spell and they'd be instantly pinpointed. A whole company of mages would pour from the keep's portal ready to overwhelm the dragon rider before he caused serious damage. It worked; she'd participated in a defense once a few months ago. A dragon dove out of the sun, surprising the sentry who'd been on duty for a bit too long. As the dragon, a glistening green drake, had closed in on the kill its rider had fashioned what might have been a mighty fireball, and that had been the pair's undoing. Instantly the entire complex had been alerted, and a dozen trained battle mages had taken the boy down from the dragon's back and given him a heroic death while Renna and the rest of the guards had attempted to net the dragon. They'd failed, but the dragon had flown away with one of Renna's spears dangling from its side, keening in what Renna had assumed was intense pain.

That spear throw had earned her a mark that she wore proudly.

She was ready for another attack by dragons and dragon riders. They were solid opponents, tough but capable of being beaten. It was the Green Witch that she feared, even more than the gods themselves. They all did, Amiotrite mages and foot soldiers alike. The witch was said to ride a green-scaled dragon, verdant robes and auburn hair flowing in the wind behind. She wasn't one of the gods, the mages were convinced, but she was every bit as powerful. The chief difference, according to the legends, was that when the gods attacked they would kill you if you stood in their way. The witch, on the other hand, would kill you for the sheer joy of it. If she had time, she'd kill you painfully, drinking in every scream as she consumed your soul.

Renna snorted again. She didn't believe all that. She was sure that the witch was powerful. She was certain that the witch had wreaked havoc. But to possess the power of the gods? To drink souls on purpose? Renna doubted it.

Her eyes swept the horizon again. She was due another vacation; her new stripes afforded her that much. Where to take it, though? That was the problem. The war had cut the Amiotrite lands off from all of the fabled tropical spots. Her parents were long gone now, and so there wasn't any draw back to her home village of Snatholm. She supposed that she could go drink in the main garrison in Cenna, but....

The sound of a cleared throat behind her interrupted Renna's mental vacation planning; she spun around. The tower's top floor was open except for the magic detector that rested on a table in the middle. A man lowered his hood to reveal metallic green hair and leaned against the table while a redheaded woman walked toward Renna.

"I was told this was where my guard duty was to be," the woman was saying. "Is that true?" Her walk was sinuous, her smile disarming. Renna felt terror rush through her chest, but couldn't immediately determine why.

The woman moved the yards between them at a pace that seemed impossibly fast. It dawned on Renna, moments too late, what the metallic sparkle in the woman's companion's hair meant. He was a dragon, in humanoid form. A green dragon, then, with a red-haired companion, which could only mean that it was none other than the Green Witch who was in the process of smoothly inserted her dagger into Renna's chest and slicing sideways, her hand over Renna's mouth to ensure that the murder happened in total silence. Renna felt her heart flutter its final failing beats as she slid to the floor.

"It's done," the witch said, Renna's vision fading as she wished she'd taken one of the new alert buttons. "Let's take it and be gone." The witch plucked the detector off the table and teleported out, vanishing as her green-haired companion also disappeared. Renna heard quiet pops of teleportation as the battle mages, who would normally be her cavalry, arrived to answer the alarm, but Renna knew none of them possessed either the healing power to save her life or the tracking power to follow the witch to her lair. It was indeed done, in more ways than one.

*******

Stacy's red hair whipped about as Mikhail played in the wind, climbing and then diving and then taking the pair through a barrel roll that brought Stacy's heart to her throat. He made it look easy. No surprise there; Mikhail had been one of the nimblest thrakkoni in Matthew's retinue. Her husband's drake, Sorscha, was the largest and mightiest of the bunch, but when he'd offered to give her a drake of her own, Stacy had chosen a light, agile specimen who just happened to come in her favorite color.

Sorscha hadn't liked her. She'd never liked her. Stacy thought back briefly to the moment they'd met, a moment when Stacy had still thought she was on top of the world. She did, after all, serve as a direct report to the Governor, a man she'd learned was actually a god. A man who'd tossed her out of the elevator to land in a lump at Sorscha's feet. Sorscha had just seemed jealous at first, but much later—well after the time Matt, her husband, had explained that Sorscha was actually a thrakkon, or dragon, an idea Stacy had laughed at, at first—Matt had explained that Sorscha was incapable of being jealous. She and the rest of her race were created without sex organs, without the hormones that caused humans to stalk each other like rutting dogs sometimes. No, jealousy it wasn't. Sorscha, it turned out, just hadn't liked her.

Well, too bad for her.

The sunlight sparkling off of Mikhail's green metallic scales always took her breath away, but did so especially when he was running through a flight pattern of consecutive loops, a maneuver he was exalting in at the moment. The brilliant sparkles flashing all around her had been enrapturing at first. Her head was starting to hurt, though.

Mikhail, stop, she said, her telepathic link to the thrakkon transmitting not just the words but also an image of what she might do to him if he didn't. It was empty bluff, they both knew; the thrakkon was easily ten times stronger and faster than she, and he bore his race's immunity to her spells arrogantly. Still, they had developed a fondness for each other, a mutual respect and admiration that came from having each watched the other put his or her powers to terrible use.

The drake followed her command and smoothed out his flight. It was time, anyway. He transmitted his own sight back to Stacy, and in the distance his sharp eyes could just make out the spires of Cenna. The pair would need to put on at least a touch of stealth to carry out the raid she had planned.

The magic sensor she'd stolen from the tower had been a triumph in its own right. Michael, her husband's friend and the most competent of the gods at working with the flows of elemental power, had quickly reverse-engineered it and created something that fit in her pocket and prevented anything around her from picking up her magic use. She wasn't certain she could say how either the sensor or its opponent worked; both used ka, the underlying elemental force behind the various flows of magical power, to do their work. That she could sense ka had surprised Michael, and it was a secret she had kept from her husband. It was the province of the gods, they said, and Michael wouldn't tell her who they were. But only they could use it, could shape it. Or so they said.

If only she could use it, Stacy thought she, too, might rank a spot among them. Her husband Matthew was a god; why not her?

She pushed Mikhail down to land; the watchtowers of Cenna must have seen their approach already. The Amiotrite commanders would know who was flying toward them on a green dragon and send their best troops out to meet her. She smiled as she thought of their surprise when, relying on their magic sensors as they must be, they discovered her behind them in their city wreaking havoc. She would only have a few moments in Cenna, but she planned to teleport into the main governmental building, smash a few things, and teleport back out, along the way hopefully discovering which god was helping the Amiotrites.

One of them had to be; Michael had pronounced that on his initial inspection of the magic sensor. To base its function on ka it must be of divine manufacture, he explained. There were no arcane signatures available in works of ka, unfortunately; he couldn't probe the flows and determine who had laid them onto the small globe. When she'd prompted, he had suggested the weaving was intricate enough to have been of his own work, but of course it wasn't. It certainly hadn't been her husband; his weaves, though the most powerful, were also heavy-handed and ponderous. Michael's work was like the nuclear resonance torches they had used during the technology age that could strip a single layer of atoms away from a surface, while Matthew's was more like a sledgehammer. The flows powering the device in question ranked somewhere in between, and Stacy wanted to know whose work it was.

Stacy thought back once again to the nuclear resonance torches. Works of art, those were, in their sheer technical prowess. Now they were hunks of junk—not just the torches, but every bit of technology she'd come to know besides. Matthew and Michael had both explained in their own separate ways how it was for the best, that humans learned too much, became too powerful for their own good. The cataclysmic cycles, they'd decided two thousand years before Stacy had come around, were the only ways to keep humanity's destructive powers in check. For two thousand years technology would rule the planet, with mankind free to discover and learn to tame the electrons to their hearts' content. An abrupt switch in Gaia's programming, though, and electrons no longer existed, replaced by waves and flows of elemental power. Humans could control those as well, of course, but not till they figured them out.

Stacy's mind shocked back to the present as Mikhail landed and transformed back into his humanoid form. He was quite pleasing to look at naked, despite his race's lack of sexual organs. The gods had, after all, created the thrakkoni to be servants, Matthew had explained. They were meant to be crafted for specific use rather than born into genetic experiment, Michael had explained.

Whatever. It was a waste of a fine manly specimen, Stacy felt.

She had expected her hunger for men to decline after her grand marriage ceremony to Matthew. It hadn't. Prior to that, the woman in her early twenties had become expert at using men, bartering love in return for whatever she wanted. Oh, she had earned her doctorate in nuclear engineering on her own tremendous intellectual merits, but her classmates' surprise at how often her name was placed above theirs for access to the lab equipment had made her smile. Similarly, her selection as station director at such an early age was called luck by those who failed to realize that fortune had nothing to do with it.

Surprisingly, it was the game she missed the most as a married woman. Matthew was incredible in bed. Now that he had magical flows to tease, caress, and engage her body with, sex with him was amazing, but he'd even kept her satisfied without magic at the station, which was a good thing considering how closed in it was; everybody knew everything that happened there and rumors started before the events actually went down, so to speak.

None of her co-workers had realized her husband was a god till the day the cataclysm had arrived. She, herself, had only half believed it. There had been one instance where she'd seen his power, when he and Michael had held a staring match through a lightning storm they'd created. Otherwise, he had been his normal self, the Governor, the ruler of the continent on which they lived. She was his young wife, the beautiful and smart concubine his station guaranteed him.

Only she hadn't been beautiful, she corrected herself. She'd been pretty average, really. Her breasts barely filled out an average bra, and her buttocks were flat enough to have been made from sheets of titanium.

The cataclysm had been her salvation in that regard. She'd quickly, thanks to Michael's tutelage, found ways to use healing energy to enhance her otherwise drab features. Now she was a knockout in all ways. Matt had questioned where she'd learned the magic, of course, and she'd panicked and just told him the truth. Surprisingly, he had bought her explanation that she was just going to Michael's estate to improve her knowledge of magic.

Well, it had been true, at least at first. She hadn't liked Michael at all, arrogant jerk that he was. He clearly hadn't liked her much either. But as time had passed, and they'd gained a healthy respect for each other, well....

But they'd never, ever, crossed that line. Stacy enjoyed flirting with Michael, the undisputed god of magic, and she was certain that he in turn enjoyed flirting with her. There was nothing wrong with flirting, was there? But she was a married woman, and he was....

...anyway, the cataclysm had been pretty neutral for her in other ways. Hundreds of millions of people had died as electricity across the world had just stopped, causing nuclear plants to melt down and cities' protecting atmospheric bubbles to fail. Part of her felt that she should have mourned the dead. Matt was a little surprised that she hadn't. But she really couldn't force herself to.

As the cataclysm had spun its disasters out of control, Matt had stood in the central control room and calmly explained what was happening to the chief station personnel. Then he opened a portal to his estate. Everyone she knew who was important to her had stepped through the dark rectangle into the gleaming sun of the meadow in front of his colossal manor home. Everyone else? No big loss, really.

Stacy wished that the Amiotrites had been among the 'everyone else' she wasn't mourning. The inhabitants of that nation-state were strange; they had been brought through the cataclysm with the help of one of the deities—likely the same one who was still helping them—and right after coming through they had set up a city-state and declared themselves downright anti-god. No deities allowed here, their signs had proclaimed. Matt had chuckled and shrugged, but it had angered Stacy enough that over the years she had picked it out into a personal fight.

They will be here soon, Mikhail's mental voice sounded, shaking her from her reverie. Indeed, the image he transmitted through the link from his incredibly-sharp vision showed an actual army on its way to stop her. Stacy was impressed; they had never moved on her with such a display of force before. They were moving faster than should have been possible on some sort of disks that flew a mere foot or two above the ground on pillows of elemental air energy.

She nodded silently. It was time. She deployed the magical dummies that Michael had created for her. Nobody would believe that she would stand alone, or even with Mikhail, against so many troops, so she had brought several dozen slightly-off replicas of the two of them. Some would stand their ground and be destroyed in a puff of air and soil, while others would flee in a predetermined direction. It would seem to the Amiotrites that Stacy was retreating, and with luck their leaders would guess that she was leading them into a trap and thus slow down. It might be hours before they gave up and returned to their capital.

With a rush, she teleported to the spot that Michael had described to her. As a god, he could explore places without fear, but she had to be more careful and utilize his scouting reports. It wouldn't do to choose an end point in the middle of a wall or a column, after all.

Stacy heard the faint popping sound of Mikhail joining her. It was good that he was able to triangulate so easily on her location, she thought. Thrakkoni, being immune to magical flows, had their own mechanism that she still didn't quite understand for use in teleportation and telepathic communications. It didn't matter how he did it, though; he now stood beside her, his muscle matched to her magic, and if her sense of location was true they were in the Amiotrite palace in the middle of Cenna.

She heard a gasp behind and spun around. Yes, her aim had been true; standing shocked and now before her was a palace guard, alone as they often were when stationed down in the security of the basement. Mikhail moved quickly but Stacy's magic was faster as she cut off the guard's air supply, bound his hands in flows of air and earth, and stopped his heart with a flow of fire mixed with healing energy. His body crumpled to the ground in complete silence. It was funny how well that worked, pressing healing energy into the opposite effect, but she didn't have time to think on it. The throne room was three floors above.

Mikhail, grinning, quickly dragged the corpse into the circular stairwell they knew was there, and the pair started climbing steps two at a time.

Michael's directions had been perfect, she noted as the stairs ended on a landing in front of a solid wooden door three stories higher than the door they'd used to enter. This was the stairwell, Michael had explained, that the king of the Amiotrites used to move back and forth between the throne room and his chambers in the uppermost part of the castle and the offices and treasury below ground. There was also, the report had said, a secret exit from the castle down there, but the king was reputed to be nearly as powerful in magic as Stacy was, and so she doubted he'd need a special secret exit.

She looked at Mikhail and raised her eyebrows in the same question she transmitted telepathically.

Ready?

The thrakkon nodded, one hand on the doorknob. They'd rehearsed this part. Michael had said they should expect no fewer than four armed guards, and more likely eight, with two or three spell-casters in addition to the king. Of course, the number of guards could be doubled and they wouldn't be a match for Mikhail, but they had to strike quickly enough for Stacy to fell the mages before they recovered from their surprise. Any two, or possibly even four, Amiotrite magi she could easily best, but five or six at a time would cause her trouble, and she wanted none of that on this raid.

Go.

Mikhail flung the door open and stepped through it with the speed only a thrakkon could display. Stacy leaped out after him, looking toward the throne for the spell casters. She immediately found them, four robed mages arrayed near the throne. Four at a time in addition to the king would be tough, but not impossible. Working the flows rapidly she wove fire with healing elemental energy once again, driving one strand at each of the mages. She was horrified to see the flows dissipate harmlessly.

Oh, shit. Time to flee, Mikhail.

Stacy wrapped herself in the flows that would teleport her away to the safety of Michael's laboratory. Instead of the typical lurching sensation, though, she felt a knot of dread when those energies also vanished.

She glanced toward the melee and met Mikhail's furtive glance. The thrakkon had put down four of the humans quickly, but there were eight more who were well armed and armored and fighting as one. A thrakkon preferred to fight with claws and breath in the open but in a constricted space such as this, where he had to remain in humanoid form, he fought with brute speed and strength, his punches and kicks powerful enough to crush a human if they landed. These humans, though, were clearly prepared as they circled Mikhail into a corner, four men with pikes standing behind four men with narrow rapiers.

The mages couldn't hurt Mikhail, immune to the flows of power as he was. But the pikes and rapiers were another story. Several small cuts had already been made on Mikhail's body, his blood trickling out a curious dark color. Stacy roared in anger and tried to pull her own sword to lunge to his defense, but she found herself held in place by strong bands of air. She struggled in vain against them as Mikhail made a desperate attempt to get out of the corner and to her side. The thrakkon's hand snaked out with impossible speed to grab the rapier of the man between them, and then just as quickly pulled the helpless man closer, grabbed him by his armor, snapped his neck, and threw the twitching body with tremendous force at the others. Three of the pike bearers and two of the men wielding rapiers went down in the tangle, but as Mikhail regained his balance the fourth pike wielder made good with a thrust to Mikhail's chest.

Stacy screamed. The pain of the pike cutting into Mikhail's chest was for the briefest of moments transmitted to her through their telepathic link before she felt him slam the link closed. She stood, gasping from a pain that was no longer really there, pinned to the spot and unable to move, unable to cast, unable to do anything but watch her thrakkon companion die.

A flow of elemental air formed around her mouth, folding itself around until it cut out the sound that was her continued scream. It didn't stop her from screaming soundlessly, though, her eyes locked on Mikhail's lifeless body. She wanted to break the bonds that held her, run to him, will him to live, anything but stand impotently and scream into a silencing blanket of energy.

The small portion of her mind that still held to sanity felt additional flows of energy twist around her, a flow of healing mixed with one of water and one of fire. She recognized the spell as it touch her organs, but could do nothing to stop it as her consciousness blinked out.

*******

Stacy woke abruptly and sucked in a sharp breath. Her head felt like a nail had been driven into each temple; she knew it was a side effect of the spell used to knock her out, but that knowledge did nothing to reduce the pain. She began to inwardly curse herself for giving away that she was awake but stopped when she realized there was no point. Whatever god had thwarted her attack had been the one to awaken her, she was certain, and he would know she was awake no matter whether she tried to hide it or not.

Mikhail. The loss drove a stake through her heart. The green drake had been her only real friend, her only real confidant, for years. Now wasn't the time, though. Sitting up, she willed herself not to cry, not to show any emotion at all as she faced whatever she must.

She looked around; she was in a small whitewashed room that held only a bed and a chamber pot. The sole door was made of bars—a jail cell, then. She searched for the elemental flows she knew must be around her and found nothing. The lack of flows was strange. Stacy had been able to sense the elemental powers since before she really knew what they were. The void she found herself newly inhabiting was unsettling.

The door unlocked and opened, a pretty Amiotrite walking in with a tray. As she set it on the foot of the bed, Stacy looked closely. She didn't appear to be armed. Stacy moved quickly, reaching over to seize the girl's arm to gain a hostage and start getting out of this horrid place.

It didn't work as she'd hoped. An unseen force picked Stacy up as she moved and flung her back against the wall, her shoulder making contact with a thud. She blinked her eyes against the stars of fresh pain and rose, rubbing the shoulder to verify that nothing was broken.

A dry chuckle sounded from the hallway, followed by a familiar voice. "You'd think the intellectual prodigy wife of Matthew, the greatest of the gods, would know better than to attack the water girl," the voice said, its source materializing in the doorway into a face she knew all too well.

"Ben'thra," Stacy said, barely controlling the rage she felt and now focused on the god. "I should have known the traitor was you." Stacy thought back to her marriage ceremony at which she'd met all of her husband's peers, including the fool who was in front of her. He was the mastermind behind the attacks against the nuclear power stations, apparently for no real reason other than the fun of it all. That, and he held some sort of long-term animosity toward Matthew, one that her husband wouldn't explain. She'd vowed revenge on Ben'thra at the time for the attacks against her own power station, and some day, some how, she'd make good on that vow.

"Traitor? To what, my dear? Oh, never mind. You can call me all the pathetic little names that you know, and the fact will remain that you're my prisoner."

"What does a god need with a prisoner?"

"Well, nothing, of course, but Matthew wouldn't like it much if I let them kill you. I dare say you deserve it, though, with your little rampages. Do you have any idea how many of my people you've killed?"

Stacy did. She'd kept count. "They declared war against the gods."

"What do you care? You're not a god."

"I'm married to one."

"Yes, and seeing another," Ben'thra said, his voice amused. He pulled her sensor-disabling device from his pocket and tossed it up into the air to make sure she saw it. "What, don't you think I recognize Michael's work?"

"Give that back," Stacy snarled.

"Or what? This room is shielded against you touching magic, dear, in case you couldn't tell. Ah, I see from your expression that you can tell. Good. Are you planning to squirt water through your mouth at me, then?"

"He'll come for me, asshole."

"Yes, I'm sure he will. But which he will it be?"

The leer on Ben'thra's face told Stacy he was wondering the same thing she was. Matthew would notice she hadn't returned eventually, of course. She knew he could find her, and his sledge-hammer approach could easily pound its way in here, without a doubt. But Michael would notice she hadn't returned also, and probably before Matthew. He could easily slip in and rescue her, but would he?

Damn Ben'thra—it was a game, to him.

Ben'thra erupted in a ribald laugh. "I see the fear on your face, dear," he said. "This is going to be delicious."

Stacy sighed. "Look, you've made your point. You've punished me. If I promise never to attack your people again, will you let me go? Please?"

"Of course not, dear. Have fun down here in your little cell, and don't try to hurt the poor girls who bring you food and water, or you'll end up hungry and thirsty."

Ben'thra waved a lazy farewell and disappeared, leaving Stacy alone. She hadn't seen the door close during their conversation, but it didn't surprise her that it was tightly latched. She heaved at it with all her might and wasn't surprised when it didn't budge. She peered between the bars both directions and saw nothing but a long and empty hallway, a whitewashed wall taking up the entirety of the opposite side of her field of vision.

"Hello? Anybody?" she yelled. Her voice echoed back from both directions without response. She was alone, truly alone for the first time in a long while. She sat on the bed, hugging her knees to her chest as tears came to her eyes.

Mikhail was dead. She had watched him fall, powerless to aid him.

Stacy sobbed, a keening cry of mourning coming from her soul through her lips. She lost track of time as she cried, alternating between whimpers and racking sobs, eventually crying herself into exhausted sleep.

A hand on her shoulder gently shook her awake. Her eyes adjusted to the dim glow provided by the moonbeam coming through the cell door, and she sensed Michael's hawkish profile above her.

"Let's get you out of here," the lord of magic whispered and then kissed the side of her face. His breath slid over her cheek and warmed her ear. It fanned the flames of emotion back to life, all the anger and mourning of the day melting into a searing ember of passion. She pulled his face down to hers for a long, deep kiss.

"Your husband..." Michael started to object, pushing her away slightly.

"...hasn't even realized I'm missing yet," Stacy interjected. "I need you now."

She and Michael had flirted heavily before, but they had never crossed the line into betrayal of the vows Stacy had taken on her wedding day. As much as she loved the game, that was a line she'd vowed not to cross. As often as she had used love, and as much as the thought of being with Michael made her insides quiver, she could never, ever, bring herself to commit the ultimate sin.

Until now.

As the emotions coursing inside her hammered on the helplessness she felt in her captivity, her body burned white-hot. Silently, the pair relieved each other of clothing and joined their bodies together, writhing and turning as one on the small jail-cell bed. Michael used no magic to enhance the experience, but between the emotional release and the length of time Stacy had fantasized about this moment, magic couldn't have enhanced it much anyway. Her passion rose and crashed as the pair reached a climax simultaneously.

Stacy laid for several long moments in Michael's arms, breathlessly replaying the highest high.

"I suppose you won't be needing my assistance after all," Matthew's voice sounded dry and clipped from the corner.

Stacy's heart skipped a beat as she leaped out of bed, fumbling her clothes back on in the dark. "Matt," she breathed, panic filling her voice, "this wasn't...."

"Don't lie to me, Stacy," Matt said, the command cutting her off.

"Well, Matthew, old chum," Michael said, regaining his typical leering tone. "Seems we have something interesting to talk about once we're all safely away from here."

"We have nothing to talk about," Matt said. As if to punctuate his words, he turned in the moonlight, gathered a tremendous flow of air and earth elemental energies, and pressed it against the wall. The cell wall shattered like thin glass, fragments of rock and metal flying out across the hall to bounce against the other side.

"Matt, don't..." Stacy urged, unable to complete the sentence because she had no idea how far her husband's anger would take him.

"Shut. Up." Matt said, and flicked his hands, sending the soldiers who Stacy could hear coming down the hall flying, the crash and tell-tale sound of bones cracking serving as evidence that they hadn't managed the flight well.

"Master, we should go home," Crystal heard Sorcha's voice say as the silver-haired thrakkon stepped into the moon's light that was now filling the room. "It's not worth this."

"Yes. Yes, it is," Matt said, his voice calm and fluid with murderous intensity. "Go home, Sorscha. I will be there soon."

The thrakkon leveled a murderous glare at Stacy, and then vanished.

The outside wall of the keep disappeared as Matt raised another vortex of energy. Stacy was shocked; what remained was nearly a meter thick. The power required to destroy such an edifice was amazing.

"Matt, no," Stacy begged again, hot tears of frustration, shame, and guilt forming in her eyes.

The dry laughter of Ben'thra echoed through the chamber. Stacy felt Michael's hand clench at the sound. Matt screamed an obscenity toward the other god and walked through the two new openings he had created. Flame erupted from his hands as his body grew, surpassing three meters tall. The spout of red and orange snaked around, catching humans, carts, and structures ablaze. Stacy heard screams rising and joining together into a song of pain and terror.

"We should go," Michael's voice whispered into her ear.

Numbly she nodded. "Let's get a safe distance away, but I want to—have to watch to make sure he's okay," she said.

Michael chortled and said, "I'm sure Matt will be okay, dear, but—fine. You should have the opportunity to watch the destruction your actions have wrought." Stacy felt the lurch as he teleported them to a position above the city, hovering in the moonlight above a town being incinerated. Michael had chosen the distance unfortunately well, she thought—far enough away to avoid the heat and shrapnel of flying stone, yet close enough to hear the screams of dying people and the crashes of collapsing structures.

"My actions?" she said, the words coming out distractedly as she watched the carnage below. "It takes two to tango."

"Only one of that two was married to him," Michael said, his dry voice unusually somber as he watched the destruction being rained on Cenna.

"We should go stop him," Stacy said, Michael's words hitting her hard. Part of her had wanted this, had wanted to see Mikhail's death avenged, but the savage destruction of an entire city made her heart sink.

"Stop Matthew? It would be easier to stop the planet in its rotation around the sun, dear," Michael's mocking voice said. "In terms of brute force, he is the most powerful of all the gods save the mother and the father. I'm far better with finesse than he is, but as angry as he is now he'd just blow through me. No, I think you just need to stay and watch the show."

The pair floated in silence for the next hour as Matt's rage leveled the city. Wood buildings burned, fanned to drastic effect by wind gusts powered by Matt's flows of air. Stone constructions exploded or imploded, depending apparently on Matt's whim. He seemed to be saving the central keep for last, but as he turned around from the last building that had stood toward the one in the middle, the god roared and brought a wall of air and earth energy down, flattening the massive stone edifice and all its inhabitants in an instant.

Matt, who now towered nearly ten meters in height with eyes that glowed red, stood like a statue in the middle of the city he had just razed. A human—Stacy couldn't tell male from female at the distance—darted from a fallen building nearby, and the god raised his foot to stomp its life out. Slowly, Matt lowered his foot again, rage apparently spent. He turned his massive head to look directly at Stacy, eyes burning holes through her soul, and then he vanished.

"We should probably go too," Michael said, and he teleported them back to his estate.

As she adjusted to the familiar surroundings of Michael's workshop, Stacy became aware of the elemental forces surrounding her again. "I can touch the flows again," she said in relief to no one in particular.

"Yes, Ben'thra only had you shielded in that room," Michael said.

Stacy spun and looked at Michael, her mind still too numb to immediately understand what he had said. Slowly it dawned on her.

"How did he do that?"

"It's pretty easy, actually. Ka is the primal force, and with it you can shield someone against all the subordinate flows." Michael had given Stacy lessons in ka before, but she was finally coming to understand its full power.

"He, Ben'thra that is, played a dirty trick today."

"It was worse than dirty, Stacy. It pitted two gods against one another, and it ended with the destruction of an entire city-nation."

"Don't forget it got me separated from my husband."

"No," Michael said, his voice sharp. "You got you separated from your husband. Don't blame that on anyone else."

Stacy sighed and sat on a chair, the calm and cool façade she had regained slowly fading away again. "Well," she said, "it's going to be tough to talk him into taking me back, isn't it?"

Michael snorted. "Talk him into taking you back? Good luck. He's already had your belongings teleported here, and Sorscha has instructed my steward to make sure you know you're not welcome there."

Michael's words felt like knives to her stomach. Stacy tried holding her composure but failed, collapsing into sobbing spasms.

"There, there," Michael said, stroking her hair.

"At least I still have you, right?" Stacy said once she regained her ability to speak.

"Me? Whatever would you want with me? I don't do relationships, dear."

Stacy stood shakily, wondering whether she had spilled every tear she had available. While she understood what Michael was telling her, nothing about it felt real. It would probably hit her in the gut later, she knew. Later, she would have to deal with it all. Later. Till then, she was happy that her brain still worked logically. "Well," she said, wiping her eyes. "Can I at least have a room here for a while?"

"Absolutely, my dear. I'll have the steward lead you to one of the adept's quarters."

It was an insult for her to be relegated to the plain rooms of the other humans who were studying magic, but she was too drained to concern herself with the matter. Exhausted, she followed the thrakkon to her new room and her new life. As she collapsed onto her new narrow bed, she had just enough strength remaining to glare into the dark of the room around her and once again swear, "Ben'thra, someday, somehow, I'll get you back."

*******

"I claim my place among you," Stacy said, her words ringing defiantly around the great chamber of the gods. She strode, chin jutting upward, toward the chair occupied by Matthew, who in the absence of the father and the mother was the highest-ranking of the eleven deities who were assembled. Her former husband met her stare coldly, locking gazes for several long moments before nodding and searching the faces of the other deities for the approval, or at least acquiescence, that she knew must be there. She heard Michael's snort from his chair as Matt's gaze swept past it, but Stacy kept her eyes stoically locked on Matthew's.

Finally, Matthew completed the circuit and returned his cold expression to Stacy. "Fine. Take your place," he said, his voice full of steel.

"First, I claim my prize as victor," Stacy said. Folding ka around her, she vanished and then reappeared a moment later, a pair of humans at her side. Another snort, this one bearing a touch of humor, came from Michael moments before she heard the outraged "No!" she had expected from Ben'thra.

Stacy turned slowly, arrogantly meeting Ben'thra's enraged expression with a faux surprised one of her own. Coolly she said, "Do you have something to say, Benny?"

Stacy let the moment expand as long as it would allow, cherishing the feeling. As she'd trained, groveling at the feet of the current deities to learn what she needed to in order to ascend to the pantheon herself, she had also slipped in occasionally to see what Ben'thra was up to. Oh, she'd known he was aware that she was visiting, but she counted on his arrogance in assuming she was just after stealing the petty magic baubles whose hiding places she always managed to find her way nearly into.

She wasn't, though. Instead, she spent most of her visits using every trick she'd ever learned of the game she'd played her whole life to beguile the humans to whom Ben'thra was closest. Ever so slowly and extremely cautiously, she diverted the young man's attention away from his current master and into her own loving embrace, all while convincing him to maintain an appearance of loyalty. She'd promised him all sorts of stupid things, but a lifetime of experience had taught her how and when to make even the dumbest of promises so that they sounded entirely sincere.

The woman Stacy considered an even greater prize. She was Ben'thra's chief concubine. The trickster god enjoyed sexual pleasure with all sorts, including his head mage. The girl, though, was Ben'thra's favorite playmate. She had never been one to enjoy the company of other women, until Stacy had convinced her otherwise. Stacy, herself, wasn't really into women much either, but she'd found the pretending to be fun.

She stood, then, in the circular arena where she'd bested a goddess in battle, looking smugly at the god she'd just bested in another, less overt battle. "I told you I would," she said quietly, using tendrils of air to tunnel the words directly to Ben'thra.

The god snorted once in disgust and then managed to regain his composure. He looked from Stacy to the adoring expressions plastered across the faces of his former head mage and head concubine and then snorted once again. With a final snort, he vanished.

"Time to go home with the newest goddess in the universe, my pets," Stacy cooed. As she wove the flows of ka around her to take her and her mortal companions back to her new estate, she heard Matthew and Michael's voices joining together in deep, hearty laughter. Meanwhile, the other deities around the circle just looked confused.

Come to think of it, she didn't really know how much they all knew of the enmity between her and Benny.

Come to think of it, she didn't really care.

It was over. She'd gotten back at him.

*******

# A Message From the Author

Dear Reader: thank you so much for reading this story. It does me no good to write anything if people like you aren't picking it up and enjoying it. The fact that your eyes have arrived at this location in the manuscript is a gift to the spirit of my writing.

I sincerely hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

If I may ask one final favor, though—please, when you have a few moments, go to your favorite review site—Amazon, Goodreads, and/or anywhere else readers are engaged in finding good books—and leave a few notes in review of this work to tell others what you enjoyed (or what you didn't). Your honest review helps me become better as an author, and all of our reviews help each other as readers.

Again, I thank you.

*******

# Excerpt from CATACLYSM: Return of the Gods

Crystal braved a glance at the chaos that surrounded her. She was past the initial we're all going to die panic and was now curious to see if the others were experiencing the same wondrous and terrifying sensations that filled her.

To either side, and facing north also, stood John and Birch, both good friends but from different places in her life. Birch, the druidic practitioner and expert on all things mythological, she'd known for years, while John was a new acquaintance. Both men, though, appeared as she thought she must, enraptured expressions molding their faces as magical powers they'd never felt before coursed through their bodies and minds.

Crystal could barely hear the incantation the twelve people recited in unison over the wind that whipped both inside and outside the protective bubble they had created with the new-found power they wielded. The words were being supplied telepathically somehow by Matthew, in a language that had started as English but now seemed to be Latin—"seemed to be" because the conjugations and sentence structures didn't fit with what Crystal had learned in the one Latin class she'd taken. She doubted they had any meaning at all, in fact, in part because she could see that the multi-colored energy flows that melded into the protective hemisphere weren't affected at all by the chanting. Mostly, though, she knew her husband well enough to sense the ironic lilt in his telepathic compulsion.

Matt was playing with them.

While, that is, he was saving their lives, a conflict that she put aside to worry through later. For the time being, she continued wrestling with magical forces and participating mindlessly in the chant, whatever it was, while she watched the cataclysm in the form of plunging temperatures and a great tidal wave slam across the world she had known, turning structures both man-made and natural into shredded mockeries of what they had been. The raw power of the earth's forces—wave, wind, and temperature—crushed and dominated, destroying everything the people in the circle had ever known.

Everything was gone, or would be very soon.

But they were all going to live. It seemed.

It had taken so little time to upend Crystal's world. She'd been sitting calmly in her craft room just minutes ago when the lights had gone out and it had become strangely dark for the middle of a pleasant spring day. Suddenly a light, round and brilliant, had shown through a portal that opened in the center of the room. Her husband's voice called to her through it, inviting her to come to the light.

Weird, that. And it just got weirder after.

The day had started so—so normally.

*******

Crystal bustled about getting breakfast and lunches ready for the day. It was a task she'd cherished every morning of the thirteen years of her twin daughters' lives. Today, it served to take her mind briefly off of her husband's strange brooding.

"Hi, Mom!" Heidi, always the happier of the girls in the morning, said as she skipped into the kitchen. Crystal finished depositing their lunches into the insulated carriers and then closed the bags and her thoughts off. She forced a smile as Heidi and her sister Linda each took a plate and a glass of juice from the counter to the table and sat down to eat.

"Mornin', girls," Matt said from behind his cup of coffee. "Sleep well?"

The twins acknowledged their father's morning ritual with a nod. His habits, he always claimed, were what made him successful. It was an assumed personality trait rather than a natural one, Crystal knew. Back when they had met, and later on vacations and weekend excursions, Matt was charming, funny, irreverent, and sometimes downright chaotic. On work days, though, her husband seemed to toss on a cloaked disguise, switching from her fun-loving mate to Dean Vincent with the deft twist of a Windsor knot.

Dean Vincent's regularity, in fact, was what made this morning's difference noticeable, having so far run along a subtly changed script. Matt still looked the same, his copper-colored hair styled just so and his black business suit and pastel tie carefully plucked clean of the white hairs from Yuki, their Chihuahua, that tended to find their way to every article of clothing in the house. This morning, though, the normally talkative man said nothing of consequence to her when he walked in to the dining room, and he also ignored the newspaper that she had placed in its usual spot on the table. His own breakfast sandwich lay uneaten beside the mug of coffee that he was sipping.

"Is everything all right, Dad?" Linda asked. So Linda picked up on it, too, Crystal noted. Heidi laid claim to all of the youthful impishness in the twins, while Linda had been blessed with an attentiveness that belied her age.

"Fine, Linda," Matt said. "Sorry. I—I had a bad dream last night that's still bothering me. There was a disaster. You two stay close together at school today, okay?"

Heidi snorted and said, "Dad, it's been decades since there was a major earthquake here."

Matt's eyes stared at a point far away for several moments, and then snapped back to focus on each of the girls in turn. He rose and opened a cabinet door above the refrigerator, reaching in to where emergency supplies had been stocked ever since they had moved in.

"I didn't say earthquake. Even so, you're probably right, Heidi. Still, it would make me feel better if you each tossed a flashlight into your backpack for today. Please? For me?" He placed a small emergency flashlight beside each girl and then headed upstairs.

Crystal broke out of her own routine and followed him up the stairs. "A bad dream, Matt?" she asked as he brushed his teeth. "Matt, you've said that you don't have any dreams, much less bad ones. So now your first dream happens to consist of a disaster scene scary enough to inflict on the girls and me?"

"Mm hmm," Matt said around his toothbrush, shrugging as his eyes met hers. He rinsed his mouth before continuing, "Look, I can't explain it. I feel like something disastrous is likely to happen today. I can't know for certain, but I—well, I sense it coming. There's a flashlight in the cabinet for you, too. Just do me a favor and keep it close. You're not going anywhere, are you?"

"No. Ms. Evans doesn't need me to volunteer in her classroom today. I'm just dropping the girls off at school and coming home. I'd planned to spend the day cleaning up and organizing the craft room, but if we're all going down in a deadly disaster of doom, maybe I won't bother." She stuck her tongue out at him.

Chuckling, her husband flicked his towel at her. She dodged to the side, and he took advantage of her off-balance moment to dart to her, enfolding her in his arms. His eyes held hers, his expression turning playful for a moment.

"I love you, Crystal," he said. "That's why I worry. Look, I could be wrong. Everything's probably going to be fine; I'll just be a little bit embarrassed over predicting a disaster that didn't happen. Just keep the flashlight close by, okay? For me?" He kissed her and then left the bathroom.

"And with that," he called over his shoulder, "I bid you good day."

"Drive carefully!" Crystal yelled after him, watching her husband, his form still muscular despite his age, slip his suit coat back on and step purposely out of the room. She listened to his footsteps descend the stairs, and then turned to look in the mirror. She smiled to reassure herself. Crystal had never seen that look in her husband's eyes, but all this over a dream? Really, now....

Get your copy of CATACLYSM now from http://TheOtherStephenKing.com/works.html

*******

# Excerpt from PROPHECY: Elf Queen of Kiirajanna

In hindsight, I'll admit that slugging the high priestess was probably a very bad idea.

As my feet pounded down the hall toward an escape I didn't figure I was gonna make, my new elf shoes makin' a ruckus on the stone floor, two thoughts came rushing at me. First, I really wished that I had my tennies on instead of the hard-soled shoes. Second, I should've thought about what a stupid thing it would be to hit a high priestess, and that well before I let go of my temper.

Oh, and third: Dad's gonna be ticked at me for it. That was a new one; I hadn't worried about my father's opinion before. Ever.

Sprinting, I cut toward the side exit of the cathedral, my slick soles making it tough, but not impossible, to turn. The acolytes standing guard would no doubt be waiting for me, alerted by some sort of elven voodoo that I couldn't possibly know about yet. They would be ready to catch me and send me back for whatever punishment punching their spiritual leader in the nose would bring. I didn't know.

At that moment I really didn't care. Yeah, I was that angry.

As I sprinted, it occurred to me to wonder how the high priestess had possibly seen it coming. My swing was epic, but she hadn't fallen. She hadn't even really winced. It wasn't from a lack of trying; I could throw a punch with the best of them. I'd only had one fight in school, and once word of it had spread most of my classmates got much nicer. Tommy had just caught me in a corner I couldn't get out of and for no apparent reason started mouthing off about stuff that shouldn't be mouthed off about—you know, Momma, single mother, and so on. I swung a closed fist, he hit the ground with a broken nose, and everybody left me—and Momma—alone from then on.

Until I met the elves, anyway.

Thinking about all that, I missed the turn.

It was easy enough to spin back using the next pillar for leverage. Without slowing down I cupped my right hand around the back of the smooth marble, put my weight into the spin, and I was able to whirl around the column quickly. I darted the few feet back down the empty hall toward the turn I should've made in the first place.

The hall was empty, amazingly. Empty, I wondered? Why weren't the acolytes chasing me? Had I somehow outdistanced them? There'd been several elves in the room when I'd snapped, lost my temper, and lashed out with a right hook, and I bet at least half of them could probably set new world records in track and field back on Earth, if they ever cared to go there and try. So why weren't they chasing me?

You know how people always yell at teenagers to look where we're going? They always seem to yell it at me, anyway. And I should've listened then, because while my head was turned back over my shoulder, I ran right smack-dab into somebody. Bam! The collision was actually hard enough that it and the grunt of whoever I'd run into echoed off of the exit door that stood, closed and probably locked, way down at the end of the hallway.

As we both tumbled to the hard stone floor, I took in some disturbing facts in the order that they came to me. First, the guy I'd collided with—and he was a guy, I knew because my head impacted right into the middle of his muscular chest—was easily a head taller than me, which was unusual because of my own height. Every time we'd had height and weight measurement days in P.E. they'd made a show of pointing out that the top of my head cleared over the six foot mark. I'd hated standing out so much, but it made the number of guys whose chest height matched my nose height really, really tiny, even among the elves of Kiirajanna.

The second, and more disturbing, fact was that he was wearing plush purple velvet robes adorned copiously with sparkling gold thread, and only one man I'd seen in the realm of the elves wore such finery.

Third, the bright golden medallion that my nose, and then my cheek, planted itself on bore an unmistakable seal with the stag and the raven. I'm surprised I don't have a stag's horns still imprinted on one side of my face.

Only one male elf in the realm had the authority to wear the stag and the raven: the Elf King, himself.

I tried to help him up, but he was having none of that as he rose on his own and fixed me with a powerful glare. His penetrating blue eyes asked so many wordless questions that I could only think of one thing to say.

I gave the elf king my sweetest smile, brightening my own blue eyes as much as humanly possible in the hopes of making an impact.

"Hi, Daddy. I can explain," I said in my sweetest voice.

Get your copy of PROPHECY now at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IY71D70/

