Thresholder

Perry had never been all that heavy into videogames. He’d mostly played one or two AAA titles that came out, whatever was getting game of the year buzz, and one or two indie darlings that kept getting mentioned by different people. He’d played board games often enough, and was a part of a group at the college that met every now and then for what was much more a social hour than about the games, at least for him.

Bar trivia though? That he took seriously.

“All I’m saying is, there are things that you should know,” said Perry. “You obviously can’t go all-in on rote memorization, but you should be able to list off state capitals, every president, countries of the world, famous scientists in every field, Best Picture winners, —”

“Really?” asked Garth. “I think if bar trivia ever asked me for the capital of Nebraska I would stop coming.”

“Lincoln,” said Nance and Perry at the same time.

“Look,” said Perry. “The point is, there’s a relatively short list of things that you can memorize pretty easily that will give a huge increase in your ability to come up with correct answers. There’s stock knowledge. It’s like knowing all the two letter words in Scrabble, takes ten minutes to learn, and improves your score by twenty percent.”

“Eh,” said Garth. “I’d rather just play.”

“I think there’s a problem with what you’re saying,” said Cross, who’d been sitting back and drinking his IPA. “Even if you decide to go on this motivated tear trying to learn a bunch of stuff that you think is going to help you with trivia, you’re still going to lose out to people who are learning things because they actually enjoy them. You’ll always lose at movie trivia to a cinephile.”

“Nah,” said Perry. He tried to keep himself to a single beer at trivia, in part because he was still acquiring the taste. Undergrad had been much more about spirits, and then he’d been a bit of a wine guy. The risk, with beer, was that he would drink a lot of it because he didn’t particularly like the flavor. “It’s about effort and payoff. A cinephile would probably mop the floor with me in movie trivia, but I can get a huge boost from really pretty minimal preparation. That’s all I’m saying. It’s efficient.”

“Seems like a lot of prep work for bar trivia,” said Nat. “I’m not sure why you care. You’re always saying how you don’t like online games.”

“Yeah, because you’re playing against children who have fourteen hours a day to memorize the maps, who have incredibly fast twitch reflexes, who the game is built for in some real sense,” said Perry.

“And this is … not that?” asked Nat. They had slept together six months ago, and had a lack of sexual compatibility that was almost startling. There had been no suggestion that they would hook up again, and things hadn’t been quite right between them since, though they only saw each other at trivia. She was nice enough. Perry had no problems with her.

“There’s this huge world, right?” asked Perry. “There are ten billion people or whatever, and at absolutely anything, there are going to be people who aren’t just better, they’re out-of-your-league better. This though? Bar trivia? At this specific time? Localized entirely within a couple hundred square meters? It’s a place where I can actually win, and have that win feel like it means something, rather than like I’m just pissing away my time or grinding to get better.”

“You were saying that you ground out the Scrabble two letter word list,” said Cross.

“Well, yeah,” said Perry. “That’s just sensible. As is the low-hanging fruit of trivia, even if part of what you’re doing is being able to make good guesses.” He set his beer down. “But I’m not good at grinding it out. There are loads of people who are leading that grindset life, who actually succeed at things because they were willing to push their nose right up against the grindstone until there was nothing but bone left.”

“The nose is mostly cartilage,” said Nance.

“I know,” said Perry. “That’s … that’s the metaphor, right? You keep going until you touch the nasal bone?”

“I’m just saying,” replied Nance. She was the most uptight about trivia, even more than Perry tended to be. She was getting her PhD in political science, and treated Perry more like a colleague than a friend.

The next round of questions came, and then it was business time, with some arguments about the answers.

“Look,” said Cross. “I don’t know birds. But I’m just saying that you don’t know birds either. When was the last time you saw a bird? And I don’t mean that there was a bird in your field of view, but an actual bird that you spent some time looking at?”

“You’re saying that I should touch grass?” asked Perry.

“Focus on the questions,” said Nance.

The question was which bird could only eat when its head was upside down, and Perry didn’t particularly feel like going outside to ‘touch grass’ would help with that kind of thing. The answer turned out to be ‘flamingos’, which was obvious when you thought about it, since the first thing you thought of when you thought of a flamingo was them in the water with their head dipped down. Perry had added it to his list of known flamingo facts, alongside ‘flamingos are only pink because of the shrimp they eat’ and ‘flamingos have a gland in their nose that excretes excess salt from the briny waters they spend their lives in’.

What Cross had said stuck with Perry though, even after a second and third beer at the end of a disappointing night of trivia.

Perry didn’t think that going outside for a walk through the woods was going to make him a better person, nor a better trivia player. Maybe he thought that getting in touch with nature was worth something, that it would slot in the missing puzzle piece that browsing Wikipedia, dunking on people on Twitter, and school wasn’t filling. Maybe he had read one too many think pieces on being mindful, or maybe he wasn’t getting enough vitamin D, but he’d decided to go for a short hike through Chambers Creek Park.

That was where he came across the portal.

~~~~

Perry wasn’t a particularly stealthy individual, but the suit offered an unparalleled ability to see through walls, and if he moved using the sword, floating after it, he could be quiet as a whisper, not needing to worry about the sounds of his footsteps.

He had waited for a foggy night to go into the castle. There were guards all over, but Temmie had a man inside the castle, and an out-of-the-way window had been left unlocked.

When the castle had been built, it had been with the idea that being up on a huge hill would protect it during all but the worst sieges, and with an eye towards thick walls to stop artillery barrages and other weapons of war. The upper levels were thought to be safe when the thing had been built, since no one was going to be able to enter a fifth story window that was situated over a steep drop. They’d been thinking about gunpowder and cannons, not flying magical creatures. The king surely knew now that the castle was difficult to defend, but there was only so much that could be done about that.

Temmie’s man had given Perry a best guess about where the night guards would be, and from there, it was up to Perry to make sure that he didn’t stumble across anyone else. If he got caught, the plan was to kill his way through the trouble and make a noisy exit, hoping that he couldn’t get hit by a cannon again as he made his escape. He was hoping that it wouldn’t come to that.

Perry found the window easily enough, helped by March’s enhancements to his vision. There was a ribbon hanging down from the window, only a brief six inch strip, unassuming, invisible from the ground, but it was proof that Temmie’s inside man wasn’t a phantom. Perry still waited below the window for a moment, worried that it might be a trap.

Once Perry was in, his heart started beating a lot faster. He’d had March give him ‘vision’ into other rooms, which was almost entirely based on sound rather than infrared or anything like that, and on top of that, he’d also had March produce a minimap that gave a high contrast visual representation of the space around them. The drone had been affixed to the outside of the window that Perry had come in through, so that March could have more data and make sure the exit stayed clear.

Even with all that, Perry was as anxious as he’d ever been in a battle. There was something about the possibility of getting caught, what felt like the inevitability, that was getting to him. He kept checking the mini-map, nervous, and held his breath a few times so as not to make any noise. It didn’t help matters that March wasn’t entirely trustworthy, working on heartbeats and breathing as heard through walls. An exceptionally silent person would be invisible to March, and thus invisible to Perry, which would mean that the whole thing could turn sideways with no warning.

Perry held the sword tight and floating like a ghost through the hallways, opening doors only when absolutely necessary, which it mostly wasn’t. The castle was a relatively new construction, not something that had been built over the course of hundreds of years by people allergic to sensible designs, but it was still a large, complicated place.

Temmie’s man had made a map, and Perry followed it, drifting through the quiet castle, taking the long way, where possible, to avoid guards, though almost all of the guards were facing outward rather than patrolling through the corridors, down on the ground floor or up on the roof looking outward.

When Perry found the room he’d been making his way toward, he stayed outside it for a moment, pressing his hand against the wall, hoping that March would be able to get a better read on whether anyone was inside. No one was. The door was locked, but Temmie’s man had a key, and Perry had a copy of it. The copy wasn’t perfect, and the key had to be jiggled a bit before it would go in, but then Perry was through.

A lot had been riding on Temmie’s man. Perry didn’t know his name, didn’t know how he’d been induced into helping, whether it was love, sex, money, blackmail, or something else. Perry didn’t have a lot of trust in Temmie, mostly because she was a spy, but her man had come through on his promises.

The room was chilled with large blocks of ice. Perry couldn’t feel the cold through his power armor, but he shivered nonetheless. It was shockingly primitive cooling, but the castle wasn’t even fully electrified, so Perry wasn’t sure why he’d have expected more.

The blood was in metal tanks, which hid the red from view, making it look like a brewery to Perry’s eyes, though at a smaller scale. There was, apparently, two weeks’ supply of blood in those tanks, enough for all the varcoli in the castle and most of those outside of it, a central repository that the king had ultimate control over. Anyone who wanted blood needed a ration provided by the kingdom, which was a way of controlling the troops, ensuring that they stayed loyal. It wasn’t guarded at night, not unless you counted all the guards everywhere else in the castle and the lock on the door.

Perry took a pouch from the small bag that hung over his shoulder and emptied an eighth of the powder into the first of the eight tanks. The tanks were large, containing the mixed blood of dozens of people, which was apparently better for being able to do tests, control temperature, and adulterate the mixture with anticoagulants and other materials. Perry was fairly sure that modern practices never had any blood mixed together, but they had done it for some reason, separating them by blood groups, at least according to the labels.

The powder that Perry was putting into the tanks was pure silver, which was apparently deadly to the varcoli, inducing a slow, creeping sickness that would hit something like twelve hours after they had ingested the blood. Perry had at first thought that it might be something like food poisoning, but Flora had explained that it was more dire than that, a sickness that was invariably fatal over the course of a few days. The idea wasn’t just to kill them, it was to make a move in the ongoing war, forcing them to put more resources toward making sure that their blood supply was fresh and clean. They would have to post guards around their blood tanks, after replacing everything that Perry had poisoned. Perry wasn’t sure how many people this would end up killing, since he didn’t know the feeding schedule. Varcoli didn’t need blood every single day, but that was what they preferred, a sort of drip feeding.

Perry had finished the last of them and was in the middle of putting everything back in place when the March chirped.

“Sir, there’s someone coming down the hall,” he said.

Perry looked at the mini-map, and even as he was doing that, he was using the sword to rise up. The ceiling was high, almost fifteen feet, and the room was almost completely dark for someone without any kind of vision enhancement. Perry felt his heart beating hard. It was a single person, not necessarily going into this room, a dot on the minimap, a ghostly shimmer when ‘seen’ through stone walls. The whole plan hinged on doing this quietly, because if there was a commotion, they would go to check on the blood. That might ultimately have the same result of increasing the number of guards and shifting their people toward defense rather than the pure offense they were on now, but it wasn’t what Perry wanted.

Perry held his breath as the man came into the room. The man was gray-haired, wearing a heavy white lab coat, with a lantern held in one hand. He was inspecting the door, playing with the handle, and it was clear from his expression that he was trying to figure out how and why the door was unlocked. He was human, at least according to the criteria that Perry had sloppily programmed into March, but that wasn’t even close to perfect. Perry’s eyes went to the tanks, where he saw the last one of them was slightly opened. He’d been in the midst of finishing.

There was a risk that this interloper would go get a guard, wake someone up, introduce other people to the mix.

Perry dropped down, less silently than he’d hoped. In the same motion, he grabbed the man from behind. He’d done a rear naked chokehold a few times before, with friends when he’d gone through a jock phase in high school, but he was both out of practice and wearing the power armor. The neck crunched as the full power of the armor was brought to bear, and the scientist — or whoever he was — died almost instantly, before he could say a word. He got out a ‘puh’ sound, maybe the start of ‘please’.

Perry slowly lowered the body to the ground and stared at it, then checked his minimap and did a scan of what March could ‘see’ through the walls.

“What now?” asked Perry as he closed the eighth tank. Everything in the room looked like it had when Perry came in, minus the corpse.

“I don’t believe I have the faculties necessary to make that determination, sir,” said Marchand.

“It was more directed at myself,” said Perry. He let out a shaky breath. The lantern had fallen to the ground, making some noise, but it didn’t seem like anyone else was coming, and thankfully, the lantern hadn’t broken.

There was only one thing to do, which was salvage the mission.

Perry looked over the tanks, again making sure that they were as he’d left them, snuffed out the flame of the lantern, then hefted that, and the body. The power armor could easily carry the weight, but it was awkward, and Perry was very conscious of the sound, and the fact that someone else might come at any moment. He had no idea who this person was, why he had come in the middle of the night, or anything else, he just had a body that needed to be taken away.

Perry locked the room behind him. He had to force it a bit, and was worried that the key would snap off in the lock. The body lay behind him as he was doing that, and as soon as the lock was in place, Perry returned the key to his pouch and lifted the body up again.

He was startlingly aware that he wasn’t cut out for spy work like this. Infiltration was giving him what felt like (but probably weren’t) heart palpitations. It would have been a relief, in a way, to get loud, to be in a fight for his life rather than this halfway state of possibly being thrust into a fight at any moment. He was watching the minimap carefully, looking through the walls, but still had a feeling like he was missing something.

“Sir,” said Marchand, and Perry startled, making noise in the process. The corpse’s head smacked against a door, and Perry worried that anyone awake would come running. “There appear to be corpses in the castle.”

Perry was dead silent, looking in all directions. The castle had thick stone, but the acoustics felt unpredictable, as though there were certain places he’d be able to hear a conversation from even though he was a hundred feet away. That might have been paranoia.

“Corpses?” Perry finally asked.

“There’s a makeshift morgue, sir,” said March. He changed something in the map, to show its location. “At first I thought that people were simply sleeping in a pile, but after some recalibration using spare cycles, I determined that they were too orderly for that.”

“Is this important?” asked Perry.

“I don’t know, sir,” said March. “I was bringing it to your attention so you could make an evaluation.”

Perry thought about it for a moment, conscious that every moment spent in this godforsaken castle ran the risk of a wild escalation that might result in his death. If there was a morgue, it was because the king was killing people, and if they were being stored here, then it was probably in order to feed his troops. The blood must have come from somewhere, and while it was possible to take only a pint from volunteers, it would be easier to hang someone upside down and then slit their throat. That would get you all kinds of things to eat for all your various vampires. As to where those people came from … this was a world with a number of prisons and a king who ruled with nearly absolute authority, which was one option. There were also the poor and downtrodden, immigrants and vagrants, who could be taken in without raising too many hackles.

The poisoning had been directed at the varcoli, but the king had fresh osten as well, and nothing could be done to poison the bones. They could, however, be destroyed.

Perry hesitated.

This had all been his idea. They’d been talking about the ways in which the castle was permeable, what an assault would even look like, how many people they would need, and Perry had said ‘I could just go in and poison their blood supply’. It had only worked because of Temmie’s man, who had gotten the key and opened up the window, as well as checking to see whether there was some actual gap in where the guards were positioned.

Flora had been against it. She thought it was too much risk for too little gain. They hadn’t been able to find out the feeding schedule, but it was possible that if they were doing a long stagger, they might catch as little as a single vampire with the poisoning. The best case scenario was that a large number of the king’s men would die, but the worst case was that Perry would die. Not only did Perry not want to die, he was an important piece of the chessboard, the one who was helping to construct the tower, and even an injury might reduce his capabilities. He was a werewolf now, had mostly healed back from what they’d done to his arm, but they were clearly capable of doing damage to the suit.

Perry looked out the nearby window, unfortunately not one of those that opened. The moon was waxing gibbous, and he could feel it. There was a current of aggression to everything that he did, and maybe that was why he was so on edge while sneaking around. While in the suit, or indoors with blackout curtains, the feeling was muted, the mind-affecting aspects barely noticeable, but he was worried that it had seeped into his brain somehow. He had never been on steroids, but it was how he imagined roid rage.

But there was information to be gleaned, information about where those bodies were coming from, who the king was killing in order to fuel his new vampiric army.

“Chart a path to the morgue,” said Perry at a whisper.

It wasn’t far, assuming that March’s map was correct. It was down two staircases which were close by.

Perry went to the window that was to be his exit, in a meeting room that no one would be using at this time of night. He laid the body there, setting it down gently so as not to make a sound or create more evidence. The body was probably starting to stink already, but the suit kept Perry from experiencing it. There had been a clink of metal when the body hit the floor, and Perry patted it down in order to find the keys he’d suspected were there.

Then Perry was floating through the castle like a ghost, down the staircases, through the corridors, trying not to think too hard about how close he was passing to bedrooms and offices. There were still figures in some of them, laying down, either soldiers or servants, and if any of them woke up, there would be trouble in a hurry. The guards were one thing, but they didn’t even seem to do regular patrols. A whole castle full of these people though, especially osten and varcoli along with whatever else the king had acquired … Perry would be lucky to leave alive.

The morgue wasn’t guarded, but it was locked. Perry tried four keys before he got the right one.

There were tables for the bodies, but the tables were full, and beside those tables were more bodies that had been stacked against one wall. Perry had gotten used to death, used to the look and smell of it, but there was something about seeing all those feet that got to him. His stomach churned and he looked away.

“Full scan, save everything,” said Perry.

“Right away, sir,” said March. Death didn’t matter to Marchand. The AI was custom to the suit, but it had some knowledge of the ways of war.

“Point me at any files,” said Perry.

“Over there, sir,” said March. The voice was too chipper, too ready to do what needed to be done. Richter hadn’t programmed the AI to be somber and subdued at a time like this.

It was the little feet that bothered Perry most, the feet of children mixed in with the adults. Some of them might have been children that had died young, died in hospitals from some wasting sickness, but it felt like there were too many for that to be true. But if the king wanted people who wouldn’t be missed … there were some children like that, especially in this semi-historical context, street urchins, orphans.

Perry leafed through the files that sat on one desk, going fast enough that he couldn’t read them, but slow enough that the camera would capture everything for later. The very moment that was done, he put everything back where it was and left, locking the door behind him.

The truth was, he’d almost fallen for Cosme’s sanctimonious bullshit. All the talk of being on the right side of things, wanting to lend his strength to rebels and revolutionaries, and here he was, helping the king to kidnap and kill children for their blood and bones. Cosme must know, must have seen it. Cosme had even said that he was tired of losing, that he was going to focus on winning more rather than scraping by. Morality had gone out the window, it seemed, in the interests of winning.

The anger was boiling. Cosme was probably somewhere in the castle. If not for the fear of fighting off dozens of varcoli, Perry might have sought him out.

“Are we clear?” asked Perry as he approached the window. There had been no disturbances along the way, and if there had been, Perry would have felt relief at getting to end someone. He was angry, and felt as though he had every right to be.

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “I’ve been feeding information into the HUD, sir.”

Perry took in a deep breath, as though his breathing could be heard from outside the suit anyway, gathered up the body, and slipped out the window. He’d taken looks around to see what he could of the floors above and below, aided by the drone that he’d left in place, but there was no one watching, the fog making it pointless.

It wasn’t until Perry had retrieved the drone that he felt any relief, but the anger was still bubbling up like indigestion. He was out into the fog quickly enough, trailing after the sword, and soon he was invisible to anyone who might have been watching.

That left the question of what to do with the body.

Perry flew out away from the city, taking his time. He was feeling impatient, but that might cause a mistake, so he stilled his mind and kept going. The sword was practically glacial by the standards of motor vehicles, and slower than running with the suit, but it could move swiftly and silently through the clouds. A person’s eyes wouldn’t have been able to see anything in the fog, but March came through, making a map that showed where they were.

The time in the air gave Perry’s anger time to cool. Maybe it wasn’t that he was a werewolf under a waxing gibbous moon. Maybe he was just angry about the dead children. Or maybe he was angry, and using that as an excuse for his rage.

When Perry was a mile out over the water, he stopped and looked at the corpse. They were far from land, and a corpse would sink, but he worried that corpses also floated.

“March, why do corpses float?” asked Perry. “Something about gasses from bacteria, right?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry waited for a moment, but March didn’t elaborate.

“How do I keep it from floating?” Perry asked. It was a grizzly question. His thought was that it was the build up of gasses in the abdomen, which would mean that a corpse which had its stomach and lungs eviscerated wouldn’t rise to the surface, but he also recalled something about feet floating to shore on their own.

“Rocks placed in his pockets would be how I would do it, sir,” said Marchand.

“Rocks,” said Perry. He was above the water, which was deep and dark. They were a mile from land.

“Rocks under the water, sir,” said Marchand. “We could dive down.”

“The repairs will hold?” asked Perry.

“Repairs, sir?” asked Marchand.

“To the arm,” said Perry. “The suit is watertight?”

“Just a moment,” said March.

Perry waited.

“Running calculations, sir, thank you for your patience,” said March.

Perry let out a sigh. “Nevermind, we’re not going to risk it.”

“Fluid simulations are terribly complicated, sir,” said Marchand. “I’m sorry I’ve failed you in this matter.”

“I’m going to tear the body into pieces and hope that’s enough,” said Perry. “Hopefully the body isn’t found until it’s nearly unrecognizable.”

“Very good sir,” replied Marchand. He seemed a bit too happy about it, or maybe just happy that he could stop the fluid sims.

It was grim and grisly work that made Perry queasy, though he’d done his share of dumping bodies in the river of late. Here, he was tearing it apart, limb from limb. For good measure, he used the strength of the suit to crush the head, which would be the most identifiable piece of the corpse.

When Perry was done, the pieces of the body drifting down to the bottom of the ocean, he flew back to the city. He was feeling better about the whole thing, about the scientist he’d killed, and if they found out about the poison before anyone was actually poisoned … well, that wasn’t ideal, but there wasn’t anything that they could do about it. The castle had no cameras to be caught on, Perry had left no evidence, and if they caught on, well, so what?

“March, any conversations recorded?” asked Perry. “It was mostly the guards awake, did the drone pick up anything?”

“A few, sir,” said Marchand. “I didn’t relay them at the time, as I thought that you would prefer silence.”

“Give it to me,” said Perry.

Marchand played them in sequence. Audio processing was one of the AI’s major strengths, but with the recent damage to the suit, Perry wasn’t sure that he could trust the reconstructions, which had all kinds of supplemental work put into them and some obvious places where March was making some guesses. Much of it was inane, but there were a few bits and pieces that made Perry’s eyebrows raise.

“It’s not the blood of innocents,” said one of them.

“It’s blood all the same,” said the other. “How many of us are they going to make? He needs soldiers, these monsters need to be rooted out, but the prisons are being emptied. What’s going to happen?”

“Faith,” said the first, as though that was an answer.

“We’re to stay like this for the rest of our lives,” the other one replied. There was no visual to go along with the conversation, but Perry could practically see the man looking at his own body, the blood that pumped through his veins.

“Mind your post,” said the first. “Enough chatter.”

It was a question that set Perry’s mind to one of the consequences of the poisoning plan. He had ruined a lot of blood, many bodies worth, gallons of the stuff, and once they found out, they would have no choice but to throw it out. They would get new blood, and Perry’s assumption was that it would be a difficulty for them, but it was entirely possible he’d underestimated the king’s willingness to slaughter his own people, especially the lower classes. The prisons were being emptied of the worst of the worst, and that was one thing, but everyone else … it gave Perry second thoughts.

‘Monsters’ though, that was rich, coming from men who’d turned themselves into varcoli, who’d be drinking whatever blood the king gave to them, three steps removed from when it had been in people.

It wasn’t until two days later that Perry heard anything about the success or failure of the plan. They met with Temmie only rarely, always at different places, though those places were often love hotels after a certain time of night, the seediest possible areas where people knew to mind their own business.

“It worked,” said Temmie. “There are thirty dead.” Her lips were tight. “I lost my man on the inside.”

Perry kept his face still. “The man I ran across, the one that I dumped in the ocean,” he began.

“It wasn’t him,” said Temmie. “It was his father.”

“Ah,” said Perry. “Shit.”

“It was collateral damage,” said Flora. “We have to expect a certain level of that.”

“We lost our eyes into the castle,” said Temmie. “My man doesn’t necessarily know that it was our fault, but he suspects. His father, missing, on the same night that you came in? There’s no evidence, but this was a man I’d been courting for some time. He thought that he was working against the monsters, that he was part of some human resistance, and now … my cover is blown, at least with him.”

“I don’t know that I had another choice,” said Perry. “I could have waited, up on the ceiling, and hoped that he wouldn’t see me, wouldn’t report the open door.”

“Restraint,” said Temmie. “Knock him out, steal him away, don’t kill him and then rip the body into pieces. I’m trying to help you see this through. I’m not going to be able to do that if I have to keep changing identities. My contacts know me as this woman.” She gestured to her borrowed appearance. She let out a sigh. If she was frustrated, there was nothing that Perry could do about it now. “You’ll be happy to know that the king is apoplectic about it all. It took them time and money to vet all those people, resources to keep them satisfied, they needed to be kept away from their families … it’ll take time to replace.”

“Then I’ll contact Cosme,” said Perry. “Announce that I’m ready for the fight.”

“And if you win, you leave?” asked Temmie.

“He does,” nodded Flora.

“The tower is almost done,” said Perry. “I’d stay and continue the fight, to see you through to success, but there’s a good chance that I’m going to forget once the tower is done, even with Flora helping me reorient, even with Mellon doing his best to carve out an exception for me, or help make it so I can’t forget.”

“If the king brings his full forces, you’ll be badly outnumbered,” said Temmie. “And if we bring as many as we can to your side, it’s going to be difficult to weed out the collaborators and spies. And Cosme … he’s not the main problem. I know you have your own goals, but —”

“Cosme is a problem,” said Flora. “He’s the one that opened the barn doors, yes, but he has insights into other worlds, knows things about these technologies that are being unleashed on us. He also has a significant amount of personal power, and sees us as monsters.”

Perry wasn’t sure that was true. Cosme had never said as much, not even when it seemed like a good point, at least in terms of rhetoric. With the morgue in the castle, the king was doing worse than the vampires professed to do, with not even a veneer of being ethical about it. Cosme didn’t have a leg to stand on. But their dispute felt like it had never been about ideology. There was no world in which Cosme would have said ‘No, you’re right, I was wrong, we should team up’. Maybe Cosme had been trying to argue that he was on the side of the righteous, that Perry should throw down his sword. That wasn’t even close to working, even if Perry had felt the sting of sympathy.

“I’ll set the date for the next full moon,” said Perry. “It’s in a week. I’ll lay low until then. We’ll gather up as many people as we can. The tower should be complete by now, and if I am affected, I’ll still have an advantage. Flora and I almost killed him last time.”

But that wasn’t to be, because before Perry could get a message out, he got one from Cosme, a brief one delivered with icy purpose, suggesting that it was time to end the conflict once and for all. Cosme had set the arena as being the fairgrounds in eight days.

Perry didn’t hesitate long before accepting. That meant there were plans to make, allies to gather, and a tower that needed to be converted over to its new purpose before that time.