Her briefcase floated up and settled beside her. Its weight crushed chalky gravel to powder. The deal lay within, a few printed pages bearing her signature and Altemoc’s.

She removed her shoes. Crossed her legs. Tried to still her mind, and failed.

Back on the east coast, the team of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao must have spent the day wrestling with Daphne, and with Ramp, defending Kos. Abelard and the church would marshal faith, liturgy, and song in their support. Blacksuits patrolled in case of riots or opportunistic crime. They held. She hoped.

She would know if Seril was dead.

She breathed out.

She’d worked for the goddess since last year. But that was a clear relationship, services rendered for a salary. What she was about to do transcended contract.

She remembered sprinting, ten years old, through cornfields in a rainstorm as deadly winds spun overhead, her arms outstretched, her body thrown so far forward she was less running than catching her falling self with every step—flying, only with feet between her and the ground. She chased the joy of power, the glory of taking without asking, of forcing the world to dance. She knit her will into the world. There was no drug sweeter than control. Few orgasms compared.

You do not love what you cannot use.

And while she hated Alexander Denovo, while she had dreamed of killing him only to make him wake and die again, sometimes in dark nights she wondered what had been the greater horror: to have her will subverted, or her dream of control turned against her?

Not that it mattered.

She was not trained for prayer, but prayer was needed now.

Wind swayed trees. The writer Gefjon spent summers in a mountain retreat watching forests for fires. Gefjon’s woods might have looked like this from a height. She was in the right country, more or less.

Tara’s mind spun. Power let the mental loop close too soon: desire collapsed into reality and freed itself to seek further satisfaction. She had chased the freedom power offered from Edgemont cornfields to the Hidden Schools and Alt Coulumb. She’d freed herself from everything but her need.

She had asked Altemoc—Caleb—to help. She had no leverage over him, no carrot to offer, no stick to force compliance. She asked, and he gave it to her.

She focused on the forest, but it was too big to see all at once. On the trees. On one tree. On a branch of the tallest trunk, waving in a stiff breeze.

Shale lay entombed beneath her. She sat atop him, as when they flew through Alt Coulumb’s skies.

When she touched the stone, it felt like his skin.

All stone was stone, a doorway for the Goddess.

She asked for Her by name, and felt the answer through her flesh.

Took you long enough.

The situation here was more complicated than I thought. Shale—

We will come back for him.