After that first raid, time ramped up into a blur of never-ending motion. During the daylight tides, I played bodyguard to Warcry. He kept winning, even though the competition was getting tighter. The more he won, the bigger his fan crowds got, both outside the kokugikan and on the steps of the Black Pearl. Paparazzi bots and live, in-person reporters were everywhere vying for his attention, to the point where the hotel hired extra security just to keep them out.

  Meanwhile, the other candidates were celebrating Warcry’s wins by sending more frequent and insidious attacks on him. I even had to start taste-testing his food after he got a bad bout of intestinal mega-parasites from a boobytrapped room service meal. Luckily, Warcry had an ability, similar to my Corpse Fire, called Purifying Blaze that could burn off most poisons and parasites.

  Kest rocketed up the candidate rankings, too, and not just because of her champion’s popularity. In what she considered a surprise, and what I figured just went to prove that there was a reason people always said, “be yourself,” the more Metal she let show in public, the more the voters warmed up to her. It got to where she was neck and neck in the polls with heavy hitters like the Scarlet Titan and the Quiet Storm. People even started calling Kest “the Metal Head.” The ones who liked her said it as a compliment, and the ones who didn’t like her spat it like an insult, but either way, Kest was down for it.

  “It’s accurate,” she told me, shrugging. “I am a Metal Head.”

  While all this was going on, Kest explored her home planet. She went out with the Icy Twins to the mall one evening, and then to a tea shop and the picture show with them another.

  “They get exhausting after a while,” she admitted when I asked, “but it’s interesting to be around other girls for once. Like when you test out a new brand of welding rods and observe all these minor variances in functionality. I can see how Emma and Ashley would be more useful in certain circumstances, while you guys are more useful in others.”

  “Like, if you needed to knock some heads together, me and Warcry,” I said.

  “Without a doubt.”

  “And if you needed someone to get a manicure with, the Icy Twins.”

  Kest grinned and held up her flesh and bone hand so I could see the metallic fingernail paint.

  “I didn’t think you noticed. It’s amazing, right? I assumed manicures were just stupid wastes of time, but they’re actually kind of incredible. This is real alloy.”

  Hyla hung around the edges of our group, playing the interested IFC peer during Warcry’s fights and taking care of Bodhi. She seemed like a pretty good mom when she didn’t think anyone was looking. I even caught her smiling a couple times when Warcry was holding or playing with the baby, but the second she realized she was being observed, she slammed the hard-as-nails walls back down.

  She trained with us on the off-days between tournament rounds, which was like training with two Warcrys, except one was taller, prettier, and a more vicious grappler. Hyla didn’t have the raw strength Warcry had, but she had crazy agility, and her Spirit web made it impossible to surprise her. I tried to disrupt its warning six ways from Sunday, and she still had me wrapped up and tapping out every time.

  “Strong whiff, Death cultivator. I felt the wind on that one.”

  It didn’t take long sparring with Hyla to see how Warcry had gotten so frustrated trying to keep up with her that he’d overcultivated and nearly burned his house down. She could make you insane, taunting you, barely slipping your shots, then taking you down and locking you up.

  On the upside, though, she forced me to work on grappling, which I seemed to be facing a lot since coming to Selk. Groundwork was something Warcry and I had never focused on, since his style revolved around kicking. He could wrangle on floor if he had to, but he always did it with the intention of getting back up and knocking you out.

  Hyla was the opposite. She was a top-tier kicker and puncher, but she was looking to finish the fight by submission, and her Spirit reflected that. Along with her early warning web system, she had a takedown ability that tripped you up, another that made it almost impossible to break her grip, and she could clamber around you like a spider on a web and lock on a choke or a joint lock from any angle. Even though Hyla’s holds were never out of control, I always felt like she knew exactly how far she could go before she caused permanent damage, and if I didn’t tap, she would cross that line.

  Like Warcry had said, she got inside your head with stuff like that.

  In spite of their constant sniping at each other and their required minimum of one major blow-up per day, having Hyla around made Warcry weirdly even keeled. It was like she focused him into a precision weapon honed for cage fighting. On the days between fights, he acted eager to hurry up and get to the training center and reluctant to call it quits for the night.

  When I wasn’t training with the champ and his babymama, blocking assassination and incapacitation attempts, or shadowing Warcry and Kest to tournament publicity events, I was following Donnie’s latest location marker to our next target. We hit Technol dens every single night, rapid firing off our attacks in effort to cut out the cancer from the hub before anyone put together what was happening and retaliated.

  After the arguable success of that first raid, two more agents joined the team, eager to throw off their slimy Technol shackles. Both were members of the CPA’s version of SWAT, the Special Response and Tactical Unit. They called themselves S-Rats.

  With the S-Rats on the team, our second raid went a lot smoother. From taking on hordes of high-tech, gang-supplied, badge-cocky warriors by myself to fighting alongside a cohesive tag team of highly pissed, CPA-trained beasts ready to take their hub back with guns blazing.

  The S-Rats were as disgusted about working with a Big Five hitman as Squib was, but I didn’t catch any friendly fire in the back, and they didn’t let me get overrun while the bullets, bombs, and Spirit attacks were flying, either. We cleared the place in half the time it took me to clear that brownstone, even though there were twice as many people in this one. Half of them were indentures crazy to earn their place with the Technols, but the S-Rats were a thousand times more experienced with nonlethal tactics for “incidentals” like that than I was.

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  Weirdly, I wasn’t as psyched about sharing the workload as I should have been. Part of me didn’t think anybody else should be allowed to decide who lived and who died. My whole mission in this life was to drag evildoers to the pits of hell. I could look into someone’s eyes and know without a doubt that they deserved Damnation. The S-Rats were just going on their gut and what they knew of the hostiles from around the hub.

  That came to a head during our fourth night of raids, when the S-Rats captured a Technol who surrendered peacefully. I caught sight of the guy’s Judgment as they loaded him onto the transport headed for IGT custody and tore out his life point.

  Not surprisingly, agents with tons of experience don’t like having their decisions overridden by some punk teenager. One of the S-Rats threatened to cram the scythe down my throat, and since I was half amped out of my mind on life points, I summoned it and told him to come and take it. Luckily, Donnie smoothed that over before anybody got hurt, and sent everybody home early.

  “Early” being relative. Kest and Warcry were both out cold when I got back to the hotel.

  Even after I condensed that night, I couldn’t come down enough to rest. Obviously it wasn’t being overcultivated that was the problem right then. The weight of everything I’d done and everything I was trying to do was starting to stack up so far over my head that it was getting precarious. And the thing was, I hadn’t even scratched the surface. Maybe I could clean up Selk’s CPA, but that was one tiny piece of one planet. There would still be sickos and monsters on every planet in every universe committing unthinkably heinous acts.

  I knew there was no way I could stop all evil everywhere, but thinking about all those people I wasn’t saving and all the evildoers getting away scot-free made me sick enough to curl up in a ball and give up. Or it would have if I could’ve stopped pacing long enough. I was tired in every way imaginable, but I couldn’t hold still. I ended up doing pushups and sit-ups and taiji until gray tide when Warcry got up raring to go train.

  The next night, I made an offhand joke about it to Donnie that must not have been as offhand as I thought, because the Digital Architect immediately pulled me aside.

  “Listen, Death cultivator, this job gets to everybody, but you can’t let it get inside you like that. Yeah, there’s always going to be more bad guys. Yeah, we’re always reacting after they’ve hurt someone. But you have to focus on the moment, on the difference you’re making here, now. You take one bad guy off the street, who knows how many people you’re protecting? More than if you stand around thinking about all the bad guys you can’t get to. Saving the universe isn’t your responsibility. I mean, hell, you’re just a kid.”

  As soon as Donnie said that, he stopped and really zeroed in on my face, looking at me like he’d never actually seen me before.

  “You’re just a kid,” he repeated.

  “Old enough for a one-way trip to Van Diemann—if I make it there. From what I heard, your CPA buddies don’t like agent-killers,” I said, throwing his words back at him like a joke because I didn’t want the guys on the raid team to know I was getting choked up just from someone saying one thing wasn’t my responsibility. He was wrong, anyway.

  Donnie frowned. “Don’t you have friends you can talk to about this stuff? You’ve got to have somebody, a support system, something. The guys who don’t have that don’t make it very long in this job.”

  Opposing views on embracing society and technology aside, I got the weird feeling Donnie Four-Eyes and Rali would have gotten along pretty well.

  “I’m not in ‘this job,’ remember?” I pointed from him to me. “You’re the CPA agent, I’m the Death cultivator who kills people for money. Big difference. Anyway, let’s get this raid over with.”

  You could tell that Donnie didn’t like dropping it, but you can’t stand outside a Technol den all night having long, drawn-out conversations about psychology.

  Besides, raids were simple compared to everything else. Even with the occasional headbutting outside of combat, when we were in it, our team operated like a well-oiled machine. I did my part and took out the evil targets I could confirm. The S-Rats made their split-second calls for the targets they encountered. Donnie and Squib ran tech support and cleanup, respectively, and then transported the survivors to IGT custody. We emptied Technol den after Technol den.

  As Donnie started discreetly showing around that his crazy strategy was getting results, more good agents decided we were the real deal and it was safe to come over to our side. With the expanded group, we started hitting two and three locations a night.

  Thanks to all the extracurricular activities, I was down to about half an hour or less on my own per night while everybody else was in bed. I spent that in the Crucible Casket, pulling in undersea temple Miasma, condensing, and stretching the tiny amount of sleep I was getting as far as it would go.

  Great for my Spirit reserve. Not great for bulking up. I kept dropping pounds even though I was eating every opportunity I got.

  Name: Grady Andrew Hake

  Spirit: Cursed Death

  Height: 5'11"

  Weight: 156 lbs

  Age: 16 Selken years (Current Location), 14.7 Universal years

  Blood Type: O

  Spirit Reserve: 891,163

  If I flexed, you could see the muscle fibers under my skin. I didn’t even know that was possible until then. It looked like if somebody punched me, they’d cut their knuckles open. If I lost much more, I’d probably be able to play Find the Lunar Scythe under my skin. At twenty-nine pounds, the immortal weapon was basically the only thing keeping my weight in the healthy-sounding range.

  The good news was Donnie thought we only had a few more nights’ worth of raids before he could seize control of the hub and keep it. I kept telling myself when the electoral tournament and the CPA clean-up was over, everything would go back to normal. Kest and I would hang out, I could lay around and be lazy and even try some of those protein supplements Warcry was always harping on. Then I could finally relax.

  But every time I thought about how great it was going to be after things calmed down, the warning from the ghost in that first Technol basement popped into my head. The time I thought I had, I didn’t, and the enemy I thought I needed to prep for was apparently not going to be anything compared to this mysterious other thing that was coming.

  Instead of helping me get my head on straight, all the warning did was create a creeping dread that never completely went away. I kept racking up Spirit in my reserve, condensing spirals, and training, but I had no idea what I’d be up against. Just some vague future threat—which was apparently closer than I thought—and the knowledge that all my plans would go down the drain when it showed up.

  Pour a few cans of Coffee Drank a day on top of that, and you’ve got a perfect storm of caffeine angst and paranoia.

  It got to where I saw that fluttering out of the corner of my eye constantly whenever I was outside. I considered keeping Wrathblade out and on patrol around the clock, but that wasn’t sustainable. Even with the expanded team carrying more and more of the weight on these raids, I was still racking up ten-plus kills a night. Dozens of new whispers joined the angry dead hissing at me whenever I pulled Wrathblade. The constant whispering was as distracting if not more than the random fluttering movements I could never pinpoint the source of, so I gave up on that as an option.

  With everything going on, I could tell that I was getting less than bearable to be around, so I stayed wrapped in oblivion most of the time. Both for my sake, and so I didn’t drive away the only two friends I had.

  Kest and Warcry didn’t notice that I spent all my time in Last Light, Last Breath. But they had a lot going on, too.

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