UNCOMFORTABLY CLOSE, AND THEN GONE. USUALLY DEAD.

The sun hadn’t changed. The wind was freezing, but the sun was hot, though the overall temperature wasn’t nearly what I remembered. I’d been in Chengara only a short time; I must have missed the winter out here, which was almost fucking pleasant.

Grisha didn’t agree. For about the thousandth time he straightened up from where he’d been sweating and wheezing over a tiny black box he’d half buried in the sand, and squinted up at the sun, cigarette dangling from his lower lip. “Fucking sun,” he groused.

I rubbed my damp head, the rough fuzz of hair warm to the touch. “We could be underground in the shadows, but you insisted we had to walk the perimeter and check the security systems.” I scanned the flat, almost featureless horizon. Spread out around the old prison were small groups of Grisha’s people, all of them huddled over similar spots, fussing with wires and boxes. “What is this shit, anyway?”

“Motion sensors,” he grunted, leaning down again. “Self-charging, though the cells are getting saturated and only hold a three-fourth charge at best. There are not many of these types of cells left.”

I nodded absently. “You think motion sensors will keep Orel out?”

“No, Avery, I think they will warn us when he arrives. That is all.” He flicked open a tiny little handheld that began buzzing and chirping as he passed it over the box. “Unless you are a fan of having your throat slit in the night.”

I shrugged, letting my eyes roam the bright, cold landscape. “Not usually, but there have been times when it probably wasn’t the most horrifying option.”

He snorted. “Of course, we are still going to be dealing with a… creature that can affect objects with its mind, dominate your will, Travel into your body, and shoot at you. I have brought as many Psionic-related security devices as I could, but we have no way of effectively fighting Orel, if he does come.”

I nodded. “He’s coming.”

He snorted again, and then paused. “Avery,” he said, and I looked down at him. “Do not tell Mr. Marko this. He is terrified as it is.” He looked away suddenly. “I would… protect him. If it were possible.”

I studied Grisha. I’d never considered anything personal about him; partly because the time I’d spent with him had generally been bullet riddled and terrifying, and partly because it had never occurred to me that there was anything personal about Grisha. He was a machine.

After a moment, I nodded, grinning and looking away again. I wondered if I shouldn’t cut Marko loose, give him a dozen N-tabs and a canteen and send him on his way. He’d been useful during the trip and getting us set up at the prison, but keeping him around now seemed fucking cruel. Marko had never actively tried to fuck with me, and I couldn’t hold his general air of physical incompetence against him Besides, Marko and Grisha were the closest things to friends I had left.

I wondered about Adora, what she was up to. We’d been cooped up in a ship’s belly for weeks, in the dark, our noses up each other’s ass, and then she was gone. It seemed as if everyone I’d known was like that—there for a while, uncomfortably close, and then gone. Usually dead.

Something on the edge of the world caught my eye. My augments, wheezing and chugging, zoomed my vision as much as they could manage, and I stood there staring out into the desert for a while.

“I don’t think we’re gonna need this shit, Grish.”

Grisha cursed unintelligibly, all consonants and spit. “And why is that, Avery? Has Orel the power to dissolve into mist now?” He sighed. “I would not be surprised, honestly.”

“Nope,” I said, pointing at the tiny dots approaching from the distance. “Someone’s coming.”

“You’ve got a fucking organization,” Marko said. “You’ve got people. Why do we have, like, a dozen fucking people in the middle of fucking nowhere? We should have a battalion here.”

“All that would be is ammunition for Orel,” Grisha said testily. “He had dozens, hundreds Pushed simultaneously in Split. If we had a battalion here, it would quickly turn into the Fighting Orels.” He shook his head. “We tried it the way the cops wanted, and it did not work. This is our way.”

I snorted. “My way is usually me tricked into committing suicide. I didn’t know there was another way.”

We were watching the group approaching, about a dozen people in long black coats and sober suits that must have been hot in the sun despite the cool air. They were walking, and since there was no indication otherwise I was assuming that they’d walked across the fucking desert. If that was true, chances were they were going to drop dead the second they stopped walking, so I chose not to worry too much about them.

“What about us?” Marko demanded. “Won’t Orel just control us?”

“You, yes,” Grisha said, smiling faintly. “Avery’s brain is damaged beyond use. My own brain is made of steel.”

I turned and scanned our little camp one last time. Grisha’s mopes stood directly behind us in a ragged line, looking tired and slightly pissed off, their single-action rifles slung over their shoulders. We’d disconnected the avatar head and hidden it away; we didn’t need Orel shouting things at inappropriate moments, and I didn’t need people knowing more about me and my situation than necessary. Though I suspected that people locating you in the middle of a fucking desert, on foot, indicated that your personal security measures were, perhaps, not quite up to snuff.

I watched them walking from under my own eyebrows, the sun making everything white and filled with glare. We hadn’t been idle. These were definitely Spooks coming toward us—no one else had such consistent and terrible fashion sense, and no one else walked around lookin like a dozen brothers and sisters of exactly the same fucking age. Lucky for us we’d been working hard to defend the camp from a Psionic. I tapped the switch plate under my foot lightly, making sure I was positioned correctly, and lifted one hand to shade my eyes as I checked their distance, scanning the ground for my reference point, an old ammo locker the SSF had left behind, a well-preserved green tub once filled with shredder rounds.

Spooks could fuck with you at a distance, of course, but I’d learned to rely on their tendency toward speechifying.

If you could pin people to the wall with your thoughts, you’d get used to captive audiences too, Marin whispered at me. I could almost imagine that digital bastard grinning at me.

Shut the fuck up, I thought back, still feeling ridiculous thinking at the ghosts in my head, even after all these years. I can’t have someone I liked trapped up there? All my friends, dead, and you’re still gassing at me.

You never had any friends, Avery, he said crisply, and fell silent.

“Is this shit going to work?”

Grisha grunted. “Yes, Avery. In the middle of the desert using scavenged equipment and running power from degraded cells I can absolutely guarantee success. Also, we have tested this equipment on exactly three Psionics, including the subject you brought to us. Who we could have tested further if you had not killed him.”

I smiled and started to say something back, but noted that the group had drawn up more or less even with my marker. I mashed my foot down on the switch, putting all my weight on it to be safe.

Instantly, and with a jangling, screeching noise I quickly upgraded to my least favorite noise ever, a metal cage erupted from the loose, sandy ground around the newcomers, staggering upward about ten feet before it stopped, shivering and crackling. It had caught one of the Spooks on one edge as it rose and she hung there, squawking, for a moment before overbalancing and falling inside with the rest of them.

Grisha glanced down at his handheld. “We have about five minutes,” he said. “Then batteries are flat.”

“Shit,” I muttered. “Are we sure it worked?”

“We are not in the air,” he said, looking up at me. “I am not trying to strangle you.”

“All right then,” I said, stepping forward. “That’s a good day.”

I walked out toward the cage, which looked like a bunch of hastily welded metal, junk left in the desert to be eroded one atom at a time. The men and women inside its perimeters had been talking to each other in loud whispers, gesticulating, but as I drew close they stopped suddenly, as one, and stared at me with their spooky, big round eyes. I noticed that each of them had red, rubbery scars on their necks—exactly where Angel marks would have been if they had not been burned or cut out.

I stepped up just outside of arm’s reach, primed to be flung into the air. Then I unslung the shredder from my back, toggled it active, and as the soft whine of the rifle filled the thin, dry air, I looked them over. All kids, all with clear, round faces. They all seemed to be concentrating on me very hard, trying, I figured, to do what they usually did with threats, what they’d done with threats their whole lives: take charge of them, effortlessly, with just a thought.

“We’ve got about three minutes,” I said. “When my associate back there tells me to, I’m going to kill you all. So if you’ve got something to say, say it now.”

As one they looked at the rifle, and then back at me. One girl, softly pretty with round, red cheeks and a helmet of brown hair not even the winds out here seemed able to touch, stepped forward the inch or so allowed to her. “How have you done this?”

“Fuck if I know,” I said. “My associate says that Psionic Actives broadcast a specific brainwave pattern, identical in each of you. He says that by pushing an opposite pattern into you, the waves cancel out and you are effectively neutered.” I turned my head slightly. “That about right, Grish?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

I looked back at the girl. “Okay. So there you go.” I gestured at my throat. “You were Angels.”

She nodded, squinting at me. “We were. We are schismatics.”

I nodded, pursing my lips and estimating the time remaining in my head. “The Angels were pretty easy to understand: They wanted to kill me. I’d been judged.”

She nodded again. “You are judged. But we believe you can yet be forgiven.”

Schismatics, I thought. It was fucking amazing. Even as the world wound down, going still, all the assholes in the world were hard at work making everything more complicated, and more complicated, and then even fucking more complicated.

“So you’re not here to kill me, is what I’m hearing,” I said. “That about right?”

She nodded, once, grim and still.

I looked randomly to my left and squinted at the horizon. “Assuming I believe that shit,” I said, looking back at her and cocking my head. “Okay. You’re not here to kill me. So why are you here?”

She blinked, once, placidly. “To help you kill Orel.”