Benny’s Chevy shook like it was threatening to throw itself apart as he raced down the dirt roads leading back to Camp Cottonwood. His foot was flat on the accelerator, his hands strangling the bouncing steering wheel, the radio off. He slammed the car around another hairpin turn, absently worried that he might roll the old junker.

  Stupid. He berated himself. Stupid stupid stupid. Fell for the oldest trick in the book.

  He was glad, at least, that his mother was fine. That the call from the police insisting that she’d been killed in a car crash, the request for him to come identify the body, had been fake. It had been a relief to rush to the station, only to be met by confused looks from the officers, before rushing, slightly less hastily, to his mother’s home, where he’d found her eating lunch, perfectly un-murdered.

  That relief had lasted exactly half a second before he processed why someone might want to trick him into leaving camp.

  He’d made it months without abandoning his post. Weeks of minimal, staggered sleep, of constant perimeter checks, pen tests, of doubling and redoubling his online security. He had the camp wired up to the gills with FLIR cameras, remote alarms, new fencing.

  And all it’d taken to bring his castle toppling over had been a single spoof call. Stupid.

  He skidded to a stop just outside camp, threw the car into park, launched out, huffing already, sprinting for his little shack on the camp’s perimeter. His stomach dropped at the sight of its door hanging ajar, of the thin remnants of the gas grenades he’d rigged the shack with creeping out of the doorway in an oozing carpet.

  He covered his mouth with the collar of his shirt, not taking a moment to consider that whoever had broken in might be waiting around a corner to kill him the instant he entered, and charged inside.

  The woman sitting at his desk chair didn’t even glance his way as he crashed into the room. What looked like a very high-tech gas mask hid the bottom half of her face, but her hair and eyes were uncovered. She waved at him, cordial, eyes darting from one monitor to the other as she devoured information from several of his personal documents.

  “Hello, Benjamin,” the woman said. She had a rich, refined, comforting sort of voice, the kind you’d expect to hear explaining the side effects of a cancer drug or giving an audio tour at the museum. “Sorry about the text.”

  “How-” Benny wheezed. A dozen questions flitted through his brain, several probably more pertinent than the one he ended up landing on. “Those’re password protected. How’d you-”

  The woman held up a manicured hand and, surprising himself, Benny fell quiet. She swiveled in his chair to face him. He felt suddenly naked, too known, as if in that one glance the woman had managed to deduce some dark secret of his. “Oh, I know all your passwords. You’ve done an admirable job at security, Benjamin, especially for a layman. Really, far better than could have been expected of you. Unfortunately, when you’re going up against the full might of the modern surveillance apparatus, that’s never going to be close to enough.”

  “You’re with the government?”

  The woman pressed a button on the rear of her mask, and it popped off with a neat pneumatic hiss. Her mouth was tweaked in a thin, amused smile. “The government’s with us. Please, sit, I promise this will be quick.”

  Again, Benny found himself following her instructions before he realized it. He lowered himself onto the footstool he kept by his desk. “You’re gonna kill me, aren’t you?”

  The woman frowned. “Do you think I’d be here in person if we wanted you dead?”

  “I have no idea who you are.”

  “Do I look like a hitman?”

  “Well, shit, no.” Benny reddened a shade. “But your kind tend to be nastier than you look.”

  “You’re not wrong there,” the woman said. “I assure you though, while I am, technically, a contractor for Ms. Rai, I am in no way one of her Murderers.”

  Benny slumped. This was worse than the government. “You’re with M Corp?”

  The woman waved her hand, yes-and-no. “Again, independent contractor. My name is Gabriela Maldonado. You’ve probably heard of me before.”

  Benny nodded, the name rang a bell. It took him a second to place it: Marco had name-dropped her on the forum a few times, one of his many “connections” he liked to crow about. She tended to be invoked, like an academic source, when Marco threw out a prediction or theory about Fields, or, more recently, the Aurapocalypse. “You’re Marco’s number-cruncher friend. One of ‘em, at least.”

  Maldonado smiled. “You know, I’m something of an admirer of yours, actually. I’ve been keeping an eye on your forum for a while now. You and Victor and the rest of your cadre have collected some very enlightening experimental data.”

  “So y’all know about the forum,” Benny said, hands tapping a nervous tattoo on the side of the footstool.

  Maldonado laughed, melodic and rich. “Oh, Benjamin, of course. It’s an online forum. Sure, you went through the trouble of keeping it on the dark web, but those waters have been well and truly charted for years now. No, I, my employer, and several nations’ intelligence agencies have been lurking on your little grassroots Sensitive support group for a long time.”

  Benny shrugged. “You know, I kinda figured. Web stuff’s never really been my strong suit. I worked in-”

  “Private security, I know. Please, going forward, just assume that if you want to mention a personal detail more public than, let’s say, your childhood memories, that it’s something I already know.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “So, if we’re such an open book and all, why aren’t Victor and the kids all strapped up to generators in Area 51 or whatever? Why aren’t I dead or in prison?”

  Maldonado shrugged. “Honestly? I’m not sure myself. I’m connected, but not so connected that the Pentagon’s sending me their Zoom invites. My hunches are that there are a very small handful of people on the planet with the clearance to know about your site, an even smaller number who have any sort of decision-making authority, and those people are too tied up with tracking the Demigods and stomping out national security threats to worry about a comparatively harmless band of Rocky Mountain hippies doing DIY science and homeschooling dead children.”

  Despite himself, Benny let out a chortle. “When you put it like that, it does make us seem kinda small-fry.”

  “Now that Victor’s bringing his little found family out into Ground Zero, though, I have a feeling they’re going to be bumped up a few steps in the government’s estimations,” Maldonado said. “They’re aware, by the way. About the Twin Cities, the gathering that’s happening. And they intend to stamp it out, with prejudice if required. Victor’s putting those children in danger.”

  Benny hardened a little. “Victor knows what he’s doing.”

  Maldonado crooked an eyebrow. “You know, I always found your group’s rabid sort of loyalty to Victor quite-”

  “‘Naive?’ I’ve heard that plenty.”

  “I was going to say ‘refreshingly unamerican.” Maldonado said. “His odds aren’t as great as you think. Ms. Rai is already en route. I’m sure Victor’s highly competent, and his motivations are undeniably altruistic, but all the good intentions in the world won’t stop a Demi from squashing him like a bug.”

  “The gap between him and your boss isn’t as wide as y’all think,” Victor muttered.

  “Well, no actually. In fact, that’s what I’m here about.” With a deft keystroke, Maldonado pulled a folder up on Benny’s main monitor: several .txt files of notes and a small compilation of videos and images, all under the filename “Demi_Spont_Regen_Theory.”

  “That’s what you’re here for?” Benny frowned. “That’s nothing. A few empty leads. Barely made any headway on it.”

  “Unfortunately for you, it was enough.” Maldonado’s eyes were on the screen. She opened one of his saved videos, a hazy security camera rip of the fight in Singapore, taken moments before the calamity struck: a tall man in ragged makeshift armor, standing in a ruined city street. The man was looking at his hands, heaving with breath, leaking blood from a massive wound in his stomach that was steadily, inexplicably, knitting itself closed. “I’m impressed. I’ve no idea how you got your hands on this before Rai’s techs wiped it from the internet.”

  “One of my web trawlers got lucky, I guess.”

  Maldonado tapped the screen. “There are, by my estimations, a couple thousand active Sensitives on the planet, and maybe a hundred more non-Sensitives that understand the fundamentals of how Fields work. But only about a dozen people on the planet can explain what’s going on here, in this video.”

  “Hope you’re not fixin’ to count me in that group, because I’m stumped,” Benny said. He pointed at the man on the screen. “I know that is, or, uh, was, Imran Bhatt, and I know most folks with an opinion worth hearing considered him a Demi. There’s documentation here and there of Demis seeming to break the rules, pullin’ energy outta nowhere. But I’ve never seen them… Well. Grow a new liver in a couple seconds. Doesn’t seem like the kinda thing a Field usually lets you do.”

  “You’re right. Coordinated cellular regeneration is a hell of a lot more intricate than the energy in, energy out, pseudo-scientific tricks Field users usually pull.”

  “Is it a Knack?”

  “Benjamin,” Maldonado said, her voice a little stern, warning. “I’m here because Rai, because all the modern Demis still interested in interacting with mere mortals, consider the kind of knowledge you’re after to be their sole property. She wanted to have you killed, because you’d even begun to look into it.”

  Benny’s blood chilled. I’m getting too used to talking to these types, he chided himself. Getting too relaxed, too quickly.

  “I talked her out of it,” Maldonado assured. “It wasn’t easy, but I have more pull with her than the average crony. I was able to convince her you’d be useful.”

  “Why?”

  Maldonado blinked, faux-offended. “It couldn’t have just been my good deed for the day?”

  “Ma’am,” Benny said, “you’ve been awful polite this whole time, and you’re real charming, but I can tell by lookin’ that you’d kill me without thinkin’ twice if you felt for a second that it’d make your life easier.”

  Maldonado’s wry grin widened into something more genuine, almost sharkish. “My, you do spend a lot of time around Sensitives.”

  “Most of you get that way, one point or another. Hell, if I could throw a minivan around like a beach ball I’d probably start feelin’ a little blasé about regular people too.” Benny shrugged. “The Victor types, the ones that still care about normal folk, I think they’re actually the weird ones, probably. Not that I don’t appreciate it.”

  Maldonado pointed at him, nodding. “That, Benjamin, is why I argued to keep you around. You’re not the most educated or connected, as far as Fields go, but you’ve got a knack for insight. Sure, you have a habit of flipping stones best left unturned, but, personally,” she reached forward to pat his knee, “there’s nothing I respect more in a person than curiosity.”

  “So, I reckon now’s when you tell me what I owe ya.”

  “I’m prepared to offer you a choice.” Maldonado held up three fingers. “A: I kill you now and the Mop I’ve got waiting on my all-clear comes, scrubs any evidence that I was here, and makes it look like a suicide.”

  “Victor wouldn’t buy it, but I’ll pass anyway.”

  “B: you stay here. We keep an even closer eye on you, and if we see any indication at all that you’ve told anyone about this visit, or, worse, decided to poke around about Demis again, we revert to A. Otherwise we call in a favor whenever we feel like you can help with intel, and you get to stay in camp.”

  “Okay. Nice relaxing life in the panopticon, forever.”

  “Or C: you come with us, meet my employer. Spend a few weeks in the Cities, in the eye of the storm, help us out with some research for the days or weeks that the proceedings will require, and then we drop you back here with a tidy reward, never to call on you again.”

  “Now why the hell would I trust that?” Benny asked. “Way I see it, y’all got no reason not to just off me before whatever bogus hush money check you send even has the chance to bounce.”

  Maldonado shrugged. “I try not to break my promises, but I understand the skepticism. You’re wrong about the reward, though. It wouldn’t be money.”

  “What, a job? No thanks. I like my current gig fine.”

  “It’d be a Field.” Maldonado’s eyes twinkled. “We’d make you into a Sensitive, Benny.”

  Benjamin’s initial instinct was to laugh, then to sneer, then to explain that he wasn’t some gullible hick. But the way the woman was staring at him, the way she’d sounded when she’d promised the impossible, it gave him pause.

  He sat for a full minute, thinking.

  “What, exactly, are we doing this research on?”

  “Not a what. A who.” Maldonado leaned back, tapped his keyboard a few more times, brought up a new file, clicked on an image. A satellite photo opened, full-screen, on the monitor: a huge mass of concrete, surrounded by thin, dying woodland. Even at this odd angle, the gaping mouth of a nuclear cooling tower was immediately recognizable. She leaned forward, hands steepled together. “What do you know about Yelena Kovalenko?”