Finally, she decided to cede ground. To look for the answer why. Though the silver woman couldn’t reach her, couldn’t see her, a smile crept over the silver face, and wings stretched wider. She had somehow sensed the surrender.

We began this fight when you broke, child, the Titan Fortuna thought, trying to communicate to the battered kernel of human consciousness within herself.

She began this two years ago, when Gold Morning occurred. It doesn’t matter that we have a hundred times her strength. She’s within paces of the finish line, and she’s no stupid rabbit racing a tortise. Nearly every action she could take brings her closer to a checkmate.

That kernel of consciousness dwelt on how it had killed one of the closest things it had to a friend. It was hard to discern whether the ‘it’ that had done the killing was the kernel or the Titan, because that little seed of humanity deep inside her didn’t know for certain.

The Titan Fortuna reached out to the child Fortuna deep within herself, and spoke with a certainty the child knew well. If they did not win here, now, they would be enslaved.

The child refused to be a slave again. The Titan refused to be a slave for other reasons. But they were able to think and act in concert.

A path. One that most likely ended in a desirable outcome. To investigate too much would leave it on the table long enough for the silver woman to get silver fingerprints on it.

New cracks threatened to spread.

New Titans threatened to emerge.

Humans assaulted the Firmament. The center of power, the core of all things Power.

As if sensing the resolution, the silver woman turned and levitated herself away. Ceding the battle, or taking her own initial steps.

Step one: hold the cracks back, until the right moment, the Titan Fortuna and the child Fortuna thought in concert.

Infrared 19.1

I wanted to say we’d kicked the hornet’s nest, with a whole mess of Titans abruptly shifting their behavior in a response to our behavior, but the reality was that we were the hornets, and they were the comparatively huge figures who we could only nip at and sting.

They were the ones with the tools to answer us, disarm us, to protect themselves.

Our sole advantage was that the Wardens had picked our battlefield well. We were distant from the other Titans, with only Titan Skadi as our immediate threat and signifier that we were doing something right. The camera in my eye was displaying some of the data about the incoming Titans. Ophion coming from the East. Nemean from the West.

The Stranger Titan from the Northeast, with a vague marker that showed the likely area and a guess at the distance.