If I’d had the ability to instantly return to Haden, I’d have used it. Unfortunately, my only way home was in the hands of the woman who brought me here, and Glory wasn’t feeling hasty. After they’d burst in, Liara took me out into the hall they’d entered from before leading me to an adjoining room. Apparently the discussion wasn’t for everyone, though I was having a hard time feeling more resentful than restless. It wasn’t any of my business what they wanted to discuss. I’d do whatever was necessary to get back to Haden as quickly as possible.

I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even notice what sort of room I was being led into until Liara guided me to a low stone bench, motioning briskly for me to sit.

It looked vaguely like a locker room. Rows of featureless storage compartments reached floor to ceiling, alternating with six-foot wide aisles marked by stone benches. Liara tapped a finger on the outside of one of the compartments, and a strange symbol appeared in the air beneath her finger. It looked like a stylized 'S' with a few extra markings, and it turned from a pale blue to a bright green as the woman remained touching it.

The door to the compartment disappeared, and I noted wryly that I had been expecting it to slide away with a pneumatic hiss, like in a sci-fi movie. Everything else about them seemed like it existed at the intersection between high-science and mystery, but there were apparently more efficient ways to deal with things than were imagined in Mundane science fiction.

Liara reached into the compartment and removed a crimson uniform, the same kind that the Vengeants who’d come investigating the Clubhouse had worn. It was lighter than it appeared, judging from the way the cloth swayed with the motion of being withdrawn from the locker. The tunic was covered in armor plating, a deeper blood red than the cloth beneath it, that covered vital areas while leaving joints free to flex and move.

At first I thought the woman was going to change into the uniform, but closer examination saw that she was already dressed in armor of a similar style beneath the red shawl she wore. A touch lighter on the armor plating, a few more pouches and loops in the waist of the form-fitting pants.

She held the uniform out to me.

“We’re headed to a warzone, Ms. Browman,” Liara said, a touch sadly. “We need you to be prepared.”

“You think I’ll be in that much danger?” I asked, taking the uniform from her. It was even lighter than I’d expected. It barely weighed more than the sweatshirt I was wearing. I turned my back before beginning to disrobe. If they wanted me to wear the armor, then we wouldn’t move out if I wasn’t wearing it, and I wasn’t about to let something so trivial delay us even a second beyond what Glory felt necessary.

“It will be dangerous, yes,” Liara said. “But that was not the extent of my meaning.”

My fists involuntarily clenched, gripping the shoulders of the tunic like I was trying to twist them out of shape.

“I’ve seen carnage before,” I said quietly.

I unconsciously shifted over as Liara sat on the bench next to me, facing the opposite direction. A quick glance told me she had her wand out, long, thin fingers tracing the unadorned wood absently as her eyes closed with a sigh.

“Maybe that’s true,” she said, eyes still closed. “It stays with you, right? You never really get free from it.”

It struck me as odd that she was making such a display of her vulnerability, but I was learning a lot about the authorities of the Rainbow Nation today. It made me slightly uncomfortable, seeing how truly ordinary they all seemed, beneath their robes and glowing eyes and admittedly world-bending magic. It was easy to forget that a woman like Liara had been my age probably only a handful of years before, full of her own worries and traumas and dreams for the future.

“I grew up hearing about the White City’s attacks,” Liara continued. “They rarely went more than a year without finding some way to strike, be it at some border village or the heart of the capitol. It wasn’t until my first year as a Familiar, apprenticed under Lord Red, that I saw one firsthand. I was fifteen.”

She paused for a long moment, during which I pulled the tunic on over my undershirt. It felt bulky, in a way that I suspected most kinds of armor felt. Still, I tested my range of movement and found the material flexible and light, even as the armor panels felt hard enough to stop a knife. It stretched with me as I breathed, and though it had felt slightly too large for me when I initially put it on, after I stopped twisting about I discovered that it had tightened. It now fit me snugly without being restrictive; just a constant, comfortable pressure like thermal exercise gear.

“They paved the streets with the bodies,” she said eventually. “For miles. Every building along the High Street of Olympus was covered with the crucified dead. The jewel of the Rainbow Nations, brought low in a single evening. The mountain had to be abandoned, because the torment of those who died there is still etched throughout. The only things that still inhabit Olympus are revenants, or worse.”

My mouth went dry. “And you think this could be happening in Haden? Right now?”

Liara shook her head. “It’s unlikely. The Fall of Olympus was the single most devastating attack ever perpetrated by the White City, and much of it was the result of an unusually lethal combination of powers. The bloodmages who had those powers are dead now, and they haven’t managed to luck into anything quite as potent. I just wanted to prepare you for what you might see. What you might have to do, to keep the people you care about safe.”

Oh, don’t worry about that, I thought darkly. There wasn’t an atrocity in the world I wasn’t capable of if it meant keeping my friends and family safe.

Liara passed me a pair of pants, similarly armored, and I slipped them on. I briefly worried about the cold back in Colorado, before realizing how unlikely it was that the Rainbow Nations had yet to conquer temperature. Finally, I was handed another piece of armored cloth, shaped like a skirt, which Liara showed me how to fasten around my waist. It was ringed with pouches, so I transferred the contents of my pockets into them before putting it on.

“Are you ready?” Liara asked, the words carrying more than their surface meaning.

I looked her in the eye, steady and strong, and nodded.

The two of us exited the locker room and headed back to where I had originally been interrogated. The others were in the hallway already, though I saw now that a small crowd had formed around Lord Red and Glory. What looked like most of the Prism Council was gathered, though I didn’t see the young Lady Violet among them. A man in an ornate orange robe was speaking to William in a hushed tone when we arrived.

“-some kind of large-scale interference,” Lord Orange was saying. He had a clean, dignified appearance, his hair immaculately styled and his back rigidly straight. I noted with amusement that, with angular eyebrows set over sharp, narrowed eyes and a goatee, he looked more like a T.V. villain than any wizard I’d met so far. “Comms went down following O’Sullivan’s initial transmission. Whatever they’re after, the assault seems more prepared than any we’ve seen from them so far.”

William nodded grimly. “Very well. Any word from Lily?”

Lady Green stepped forward, worry looking incredibly natural on her motherly face.

“Lady Violet shut down her Connection,” she said, “shortly after we lost contact with Robin. She said they were tracking her magic somehow and she...requested that we proceed with all haste.”

“And what did she actually say?”

Heidi turned slightly red, and cleared her throat uncomfortably.

“She said, ‘Get a fucking move on, idiots’.”

Lord Red snorted and Orange shook his head, but both men were smiling. I had a hard time believing they were talking about the same girl who’d come to speak with us at the clubhouse. The Lady Violet I’d met was nearly robotic in her speech, so deadpan that I’d originally suspected she was some kind of magical robot. Golem? Some sort of construct, anyway. There hadn’t been enough personality in her to fill a thimble.

Then again, I was getting a very familiar vibe from the way the Prism Council interacted with each other. The way the unbelievably gigantic Lord Yellow was elbowing the gaunt, withdrawn Lord Blue in the ribs, the former grinning widely at some joke that the latter was stoically ignoring. The way Lord Indigo stayed in the background, watching longingly until William noticed his exclusion and motioned him into the group. These were more than just colleagues. They were friends, bound by stronger ties than legislative responsibility could ever hope to surpass.

They went through hell together, I thought, and came out the other side, still with each other.

There must have been something odd about my expression, because Liara chuckled knowingly at my side.

“I was there when they killed him,” Liara said. I glanced at her, and she clarified, “The Rainbow Mage. I was still Lord Red’s Familiar at the time. We’d fought for ten years, to get to that last battlefield, and we didn’t all start on the same side. But now, four years after it all ended, we’re still a family. A loud, obnoxious, inordinately powerful family.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, a smile coming unbidden to my lips as I thought about my family. More than just my Dad and Tyler. More than the mother I’d lost. I had Jay and Marika, and Roman, and Cheri now, too.

“I thought you might,” she answered. “I just wanted to make sure, because she’s likely too proud to ever apologize to you...There isn’t a person in this hallway right now that doesn’t treat Cheri like their very own daughter. It led some of us to make...hasty decisions.”

Like kidnapping and torturing a Mundane teenager on a guess? I couldn’t exactly condemn Glory for what she did, nor could I call myself fond of her. She evoked the image of a tigress, deadly and fiercely protective of her cub, but the way she went about it and the general lack of recalcitrance in the face of her mistake left a bad taste in my mouth. There was an entitlement to her, one vaguely reminiscent of the natural arrogance I’d glimpsed in Cheri.

“We can worry about that later,” I said. “There are more important things going on right now.”

“Well said, Miss Browman,” Lord Red said. His deep voice cut through the chatter, and the assembled wizards turned their attention to him. “There is a city under attack. We’ve all been through White City attacks before, so everyone knows what they’re doing. Casper, Warwick, I expect the two of you will be done before anyone else. Once the entry point is closed, regroup with Heidi and Igor if they haven’t tracked down Lily by then.”

“We’ll be following the trail of bodies,” the yellow-robed giant said cheerfully, his accent thick. Beside him, the Lady Green sighed, a look of resigned dread on her face.

“What…”I asked, trailing off as every head in the hallway turned to me. I cleared my throat as I flushed bright red beneath the scrutiny of the most powerful wizards in the world. “What will I be doing?”

“You,” Glory started, though I noted that she wasn’t looking directly at me as she spoke, “will be taking us to my daughter. Wherever she’s hiding.”

Well, how’s that for a please and thank you, I thought bitterly. My hands curled into fists at my side, but I kept the anger out of my voice as I continued.

“We’ll need to stop by my house first,” I said firmly. I could see Glory’s jaw clench at the words, so I hurried on. “My dad-”

“Is of no importance to this mission!” Glory snapped. “The consequences that the world will face should these monsters get their hands on my daughter trivialize the lives of any one of us, any thousand of us. I understand your worry, but we can’t afford to prioritize anything else. You’ve never seen one of these attacks, Emily, but trust those of us who’ve spent our entire lives fighting these monsters. The consequences of even a moment of time wasted is a hundred lives. We need to move now.”

My temper flared. “You’re the one wasting time,” I shot back. “I don’t know where Cheri is hiding. We established that already. Remember, when you had me strapped to a table earlier? The torturing?”

A few of the Prism Council turned their heads to where Glory stood. William put a hand on her shoulder, which seemed like it took some of the tension out of her, but she still looked like a wound-up spring. Her jaw was still clenched and her nostrils flared with each breath, her mouth pressed into a thin line.

 “If the city is under attack,” I continued, “then my friends are reacting the way we’ve trained. They’ll be protecting as many people as they can, getting to a place we know that we could survive for weeks if need be. But my brother won’t. Tyler’s going straight to wherever Cheri is hiding, and my dad is the only other person who might know where that place is.”

William leaned in and whispered something in Glory’s ear, which prompted her to look sharply at him, then shake her head. He whispered again, more urgently, and Glory shot me a glare.

“It’s nothing personal, kid. I just don’t think we can count on you. Sorry,” she said eventually. It was something like the least sincere apology I’d ever heard, but I understood where it was coming from. If anything, it was seeing her deliver that profoundly unapologetic sentiment through grit teeth that saw my anger dissipating.

“I told you about what happened,” I said quietly. “At the bus stop, before you took me.”

As though it were a sympathetic response to my temper receding, Glory relaxed as well. She swept her curtain of shimmering hair over one shoulder, meeting my gaze with tired, worried eyes. She reminded me so strongly of Cheri that my voice temporarily left me.

I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I know that it might sound stupid to you, considering how short her time with us was, but Cheri is one of us. Family. And I will never again,” I said, snarling the words, “stand by and let my family suffer for my failures. Not while I have a life to spend to protect them.”

I crossed the hallway to where she stood, looking up into her violet eyes.

“You can count on that.”

“Well said!” Lord Yellow said, his voice just barely under yelling volume. I was beginning to understand that to be his normal speaking voice. He laughed, loud and boisterous, before clapping a goliath hand on my shoulder. My knees nearly buckled, though I thankfully managed to stay upright.

Glory huffed out a breath, dropping my gaze as she started to work one shoulder, rotating the arm in the socket.

“We’ll see, then,” she said, though she sounded more thoughtful than dismissive.

William cleared his throat. “We’ve a heading, it seems. Casper?”

“Sixty-eight percent chance we retake the city without a casualty among our number,” Lord Blue said. “Probability of an event as heinous as the Fall of Olympus is very low.”

My eyebrows raised. He could tell the probabilities of events happening just by thinking about them? The implications of that had my mind reeling. So many financial institutions of the Mundane world revolved around odds. Casinos, lottery tickets, the stock market...There wasn’t a part of my world that this man couldn’t conquer with a few well-placed questions and some surgical investments. I was growing to understand the need for integration more and more, with each new revelation. 

Still, something about the thin man’s statements bugged me. I was about to ask William, who had stepped up beside me while the rest of the group formed a loose circle in the hallway, but the words died on my lips as Glory raised both her hands above her head. A deep blue light flickered in her eyes, the glow flaring then blazing, before traveling up her arms to her hands.

I had the feeling I knew what was coming, and I shuffled uncomfortably in anticipation of being teleported again. I didn’t remember much of what had happened last time, only that it was extremely disorienting.

“Any tips for this part?” I murmured to William.

“Hold your breath!” Lord Yellow said from my other side, far too loud for my liking.

Lady Green shot him an alarmed glance from her position on Lord Yellow’s other side.

“No,” she began, “it’s don’t-”

I had just enough time to force my deep breath from my lungs before the world around me dissolved into a riot of brilliant colors. When the ground had disappeared beneath my feet, it gave me the impression that I was falling, but without a static reference in the kaleidoscopic space around me, I didn’t feel much vertigo. After an initial bit of disorientation, I was just left with a vague feeling of...awe. There was so much about the world of magic that I didn’t know. I’d been so focused on the local element, on how the wizards of the exchange were affecting me. It was rapidly becoming clear how shallow my understanding actually was, even with all my research and practice.

By the time my feet touched concrete and the swirling colors had been replaced by the familiar sight of cookie-cutter suburbs, thoughts of magic and wizards had all but vanished from my mind.

I could smell smoke in the air. It was hard to tell exactly how long it had been since I was kidnapped, but the sun had yet to begin lightening the horizon. It had been around eight o’ clock when I’d left the house, which likely put it somewhere between midnight and four in the morning. Even with the way the festivities at the city fair tended to go on until the very last willing participants passed out, there shouldn’t be too many people in this part of the city awake and about at this hour.

Which made the veritable stampede of people on the road all the more concerning.

Few, if any, were dressed for the weather, that sharp breathtaking cold that autumn twilight was capable of. Pajamas, nightgowns, with the occasional winter jacket thrown on over the top. Some people weren’t even wearing shoes. I saw families clustered together, and I saw children plodding along on their own, empty eyes listlessly searching the crowd for parents that they’d given up on finding. There were wounds on some of these people, some bandaged with scraps of clothing, but most simply left open. Ugly, swollen bruises and open gashes that still wept blood onto the asphalt. 

They all seemed to be heading east, towards the outskirts of town. A person looking at the situation without context might have thought they were heading away from the center of the city, but if that were the case there would be better routes to use, better destinations. No, the attack these people were fleeing was closer. Haden High, on the very southern edge of what would be called central Haden. The downtown shopping district. The Bridgebury residential area.

My house.

I started down the road, moving against the flow of the mass exodus. I could feel panic gripping me, and I took deep steady breaths to fight it down. Losing my edge wouldn’t do anyone any favors. Still, considering what I’d seen wizards do, what I could imagine them doing, the thought of my brother, father, and friends alone in the city, on the receiving end of those horrors…

It spoke to how unsettled I was, that I didn’t hear William approaching me until he caught me by the wrist. My head snapped around as my body tensed to react to an attack, but as I realized who I was facing, saw the sad, knowing look on his face, I felt the panic begin to bleed out of me.

The rest of the Prism Council seemed to have dispersed while I was trying to process the carnage taking place elsewhere in my hometown. Glory, Liara, and William were the only members of the strike force from Avalon that were still standing on the street with me. Liara and Glory were standing a short distance away, the former scrawling glowing letters onto the air in front of her while the latter prodded at them and commented in a low voice. 

“Liara...told me about the talk you two had,” William said. “That you might have been through something similar before. She was worried.”

I frowned, more at the apparent concern than the breach of confidence. I thought I’d been clear with her, when she brought it up before. I opened my mouth to respond, but William released my wrist, holding his hand up to silence me.

“Please, Emily. Let me give you a warning, from a man who’s spent most of his adult life one weak sword swing away from death: You have to go into a battlefield ready to do everything that you can. But you have to know where that line is. If you go into this thinking that you’ll be saving everyone you see, you’ll save a lot less than I believe you’re capable of standing. If you think you can take on any foe, then you’ll be dead as soon as you encounter one that you can’t.”

William clapped a hand on my shoulder, his glowing crimson eyes boring deep into mine.

“I don’t know what you did in the past,” he said, “and I don’t need to. What I need to know is that you have your head on right. Liara and Glory both seem to think that what you’re really seeking here is some kind of redemption. I’ve seen the look in your eye before.”

“I couldn’t care less about redemption,” I said, meeting William’s gaze with a confidence I wasn’t sure I felt. “I don’t believe in it. This is about Cheri. It’s about Tyler, and my dad, and my home.”

“It’s about you, too,” he said quietly. “It’s about all of us. We can do this, if we’re all together on it. We’re strongest when we’re united.”

William’s words resonated with me, drawing up memories of an evening spent in the Clubhouse. A frightened young girl, triumphing over her fear as she turned to her friends for help. A family, mercilessly planning their vengeance. A declaration of war.

How had it come to this?

The bitterness and worry left me feeling nauseous. I chewed my lower lip as I watched Liara and Glory continue their magic

scribbling.

“Lord Blue,” I said suddenly. “He sees probabilities, doesn’t he? The odds that things will happen?”

William frowned. “Something like that. When we were young, he described it as ‘asking himself questions’.”

I didn’t feel any better, having that theory confirmed. “So why didn’t he tell us the chances that we’d rescue Cheri?”

“Worrying about the odds seldom improves them,” William said, and for the second time that night I felt a tug at my memory. Cheri had said those exact same words, when we were trying to steal Julia’s Ledger. It had rung as wisdom repeated, then, though I hadn’t expected her to have had such a visible example in her life. Still, Cheri had turned out to be such a total mystery, it felt like a weight removed every time I learned another truth about the odd girl.

Despite myself, I began to chuckle. It hadn’t actually been a bad impression, all in all.

“She looks up to you,” I said with a sigh. “I guess they all do, huh? They must.”

“I can’t imagine it’s much different for you, from the reports we received.”

My eyes roved the faces in the crowd as it continued past us. Each face that wasn’t one of the Tryhards made me feel more worried, more impatient.

“Yeah,” I said bitterly. “Two peas in a pod, we are. Local teenage screwup and legendary god-slaying king of wizards.”

“Oh no, is that how they see you?”

Glory and Liara rejoined the two of us, apparently finished with whatever they’d been working on. It was the former who had spoken, a smirk about her full lips.

“And here I thought you were just some guy who had to cheat to get his weapons certification,” Glory said, flicking William on the forehead as she walked by. “Don’t let her give you a big head.”

Liara passed the two of us, her expression half scandalized and half delighted. William gave a sigh, more resigned than melancholy. He shrugged at me, then headed on after the two women.

I swept my vision across the street once more, something nagging at me. There had been no change in the crowd, no shift in the air, but...something wasn’t right. I didn’t stop the others, mostly because I didn’t know what I’d tell them if they asked me why. Instinct? Why would they trust my instincts over their own?

I slapped myself lightly with both hands, trying to shake off the odd fugue. I needed to focus right now, not get tied up in idle fantasies. I was with adults that were both personally skilled and highly familiar with the threat we were facing. I attributed the notion that they needed me keeping an eye on them to the large part of my subconscious mind that was dominated by worrying about the Tryhard Club.

My eyes raised to the city skyline to the north. I knew I had no right to hope. Even still, I prayed they were okay. I tore my vision away from the rooftops and-

I froze.

On the slanted roof of the house at the end of the road, what I’d mistaken in the gloom for a chimney shifted. I blinked, straining my eyes to see in the twilight. If I wasn’t mistaken, it was a person. Covered head to toe in a black robe, they remained fairly still outside of the occasional shuffle. It wasn’t until Liara, Glory, and William began to pass in front of the house on which he perched that he rose from his crouch. 

Panic surged through me as the man’s arms came up. Before I’d sent any conscious instructions to my body, I was already mid-sprint, arms over my head, an inarticulate shout of warning on my lips.

I cursed my thoughtless actions a second later, as all three of the wizards turned to look at me, unable to parse the nature of the threat from my unintelligible hollering. As soon as William made the connection, turning in the direction my flailing indicated the threat was coming from, they struck.

The clamor of the street died away in an instant, like some divine spectator had tapped the mute button on the world. In the same moment, the crowd around us, the rows of houses, and the starry sky above us disappeared. Even the sight of the three wizards I’d arrived with vanished from my eyes.

I was half a second away from crying out that I’d gone blind when light flared in my vision again. I could just barely make out Liara, Glory, and William by the dim glow of Liara’s wand, where a golden symbol was flickering in the darkness.

“What’s going on?” I asked, moving closer to the three adults. I crossed my arms over my chest as a shiver ran through me, despite the armor doing more than enough to fight away the chill of the autumn night. It felt like I was standing in a strong, cold wind while soaked through, despite knowing I was totally dry and the air was almost supernaturally still.

“We’re...in trouble,” Liara said, flicking her wrist as she finished penning a series of large glowing letters in the air. “Whatever containment magic this is, it’s serious business. It’s draining our magic to sustain its form, and I’m pretty sure it’s draining our life energy to sustain the caster.”

William and Glory exchanged glances.

“Think you can break out?” William asked his wife.

Glory held up one of her gauntleted hands. As she clenched it into a fist, swirling red light drew into it, appearing from the darkness like she was drawing it from the air itself. She planted a heel and drove a fist into the featureless blackness, scattering it like it was a cloud of steam.

I breathed a sigh of relief, but the night had other plans for us. We got a glimpse of the world outside the bubble for the briefest of moments before the darkness reformed. I had no doubt that someone like Glory could make it out in that short window, but the rest of us were probably screwed. She followed it up with two more strikes, each opening up a small aperture, but it seemed less effective with each attempt.

Glory glared at her fist, as if the fault lay in the hand itself. When the extremity showed no sign of recalcitrance, she sighed, relaxing the hand and letting her arm fall to her side. She met William’s gaze and shook her head.

“It’s drawing too much as I gather energy,” she said, an accusing tone to her voice like she was faulting the magic containment for its strategy. “I might be able to hit the creator, if he’s close-by, but I’ve only got one or two more shots at this rate. Think the others might come back?”

Will shook his head. “Unfortunately, I imagine they’ll all be equally occupied. Casper won’t be checking the group odds again for a while. It’s likely the first chance for us to be noticed here would be after the group finds Lily and she feels comfortable throwing her Connection up again.”

Without warning, Glory sank to her knees, drew her arms over her head, and slammed both gauntlets into the pavement. I half expected the asphalt to shatter, but all that accompanied the action was the sharp clang of metal on stone. William crouched down next to her, putting an arm around her shoulder. It a tender, private, human gesture, which she reciprocated by leaning in and burying her face in his neck. I guiltily looked away from the pair when I realized I was staring.

“So Glory can’t maintain enough energy to deal a decisive blow,” Liara mused, “there’s no way I’d have enough time to get a decent array going, and Will, I assume you’re still worried about the Mantle?”

Will glanced at me sidelong, like he wished I wasn’t there to hear that, but nodded all the same. “Especially if they’re drawing energy from us. Tapping into that magic could bring about the worst-case scenario.”

Liara grimaced. “I thought this might happen. I’d hoped that it wouldn’t, but…”

Will nodded sadly, though Glory straightened back up with a fresh glint of hope in her eyes.

“It’s Solomon’s Gamble, then?” Glory said.

“Solomon’s Gamble,” William agreed.

All three of the wizards turned to me, and it didn’t feel like they were about to ask me for advice.