Ida shook her head, a signal for Agent Liam Hatcher to pause the video he had playing on the tablet he was holding, an overly-cautious six feet away from her.

  The agent tapped the screen, freezing an image in place: startlingly high-quality spy satellite footage of a young Asian man in a tattered jumpsuit, halfway through tearing a swath through a small army of armed men.

  “Thoughts, observations, advice?” Liam asked, with the same overly-casual affect that had started as moderately annoying at their first meeting, back during her hostage-taking gambit, but had evolved into nails-on-a-chalkboard grating at this point. He wasn’t taking this seriously.

  “Be happy to offer some,” Ida said. “If you’d take this ridiculous thing off of me.”

  Ida wriggled in her restraints. Her legs were shackled together, her arms pinned to her torso by a garment that was something like a Kevlar straight jacket.

  “No can do, lady,” Liam said, shrugging. “Protocol. I’m just following orders.”

  “Wow, that excuse really rolls off the tongue for you, huh. You’d have done great in Nuremberg.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

  “It’s unnecessary,” Ida tried to keep a note of pleading from her voice. She’d been in this dark, heavily padded, completely unelectrified cell for over 24 hours now, as far as she could tell. She’d had the vest on for over 36. She was beginning to feel more than a little claustrophobic. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. You’ve already got your bargaining chip with my daughter. The vest isn’t doing shit but chafing me.”

  “I don’t know about that. We take the vest off, leave you to your own devices, maybe you start punching walls, building up kinetic energy, storing enough until you can blow a hole through the wall. Then we have to throw men at you until you calm down, and we’d rather not waste good manpower. All the bereavement packages add up.”

  “The energy would leak out of my Aura faster than I could add it, if I tried that. I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to bank enough to blow through a foot of concrete.”

  Liam shrugged again. Ida wanted to rip those stupid fucking shoulders from his torso. “Maybe, maybe not. We like redundancy here.”

  “Fine. I’m not cooperating.”

  “I thought you wanted to save lives?” Liam played the video again. The jumpsuit-clad man exploded out from inside what appeared to be an airport and cut a swath through the gunmen outside. A tongue of blue flame swept from his outstretched hands and sent another dozen men scrambling. A bomb, seemingly hidden beneath one of the armored cars parked outside, detonated when the attacker approached, catching him in the blast.

  The angle switched to a bodycam: the man, smiling drunkenly, emerged from a cloud of debris, an infantile, squirming arm protruding from the new crater in the side of his torso. Within seconds, his arm had grown back to full size, and he wasted no time putting his fresh fist through the side of another truck.

  “He’s another one of the Demigods, and he’s heading our way,” Liam said. “He’s held up in North Carolina, right now, for some reason, and we have an opportunity to launch an ambush. But if we don’t stop him- Well. What was it you said? More than five Demigods in the city and the world ends?”

  Ida glowered at him. He beamed back. She growled. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to tell you about this guy; the regeneration thing, I’ve never seen that before. Until yesterday, I assumed that was a myth.”

  “We’re not expecting a cheat code from you, here. Just feedback. How about this: I throw out some of our initial ideas, and you condescend to me about why they would never work.”

  “I’ll do it, if you trade,” Ida said. “I answer one of yours, you answer one of mine.”

  “Fair enough. If it’s information within my power to divulge.” Liam looked at his tablet, pulled up a list. “Okay, ideas for killing a God, in order from most to least consideration for civilian casualties: shooting depleted uranium tankbuster bullets from high-powered long-range rifles.”

  “Nope. Unless those bullets are the size of cannonballs, any rinky-dink Sensitive with a handle on their powers is going to have no issue catching a bullet.” Out of instinct, Ida moved to raise her hands, to illustrate her point, and sighed when they caught in her restraints. “When it comes to stopping physical objects, we do it by converting kinetic energy into another form and storing it, either in a medium like a battery or in our Field itself. The bigger the object, and the more continuously it’s applying pressure on our Field, the more energy leaks through. Tiny objects, even ones moving incredibly quickly, are child’s play to stop.”

  “Figured. We tried something like that one on you anyway. Next-”

  “Ah, no. My turn.”

  Liam caught himself, did little a faux-conciliatory bow. “Where are my manners.”

  “How’s my daughter?”

  Liam grinned, as if the question had been cute. “She’s fine. Sleepover went well. At her dad’s place now, last I heard. Still very much living inside one of our scopes.”

  “Yeah, yeah, last part wasn’t necessary, you fucking psychopath,” Ida grumbled. Still, she was glad to know she was probably oblivious to the danger she was in. If Ida played her cards well enough, she might never know. “Okay. Hit me with another.”

  “Idea 2: we hit him with a wide-beam, extremely-high-temperature laser.”

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  “Didn’t know that was a thing you could do. Nope. Would work on a lower-level, probably not on me, definitely not on a Demi. Here’s a blanket answer that’ll probably apply to lots of your ideas: if you’re only hitting a Demigod with one kind of energy, unless you’re outputting enough of that energy to, I don’t know, boil a small sea or level a mountain, it’s not going to leave a mark. You need to hit them with multiple kinds at once. Kinetic AND electric AND thermal AND sonic, etcetera. Converting two types of energy simultaneously is hard, and each additional kind gets exponentially trickier. You get more leakage through their defenses.”

  “I didn’t pay much attention in my physics class, so excuse me if this is silly, but aren’t sonic and thermal energy also kinda kinetic?”

  “It’s not based on hard science. It’s, well-” Ida frowned, looked for a clear answer. “Field stuff, it seems scientific on its surface, but it’s really mostly vibes-based.”

  “Vibes-based.” Liam crooked an eyebrow.

  “It conforms more to what an uneducated person intuitively thinks about energy, than how energy actually works. Think more like the classical four elements, or the humors, or whatever, instead of the periodic table and micronutrients. At least, that’s how the experts seem to describe it. I also flunked out of science.”

  “Enlightening. Your turn.”

  “How many people are dead already? From what’s happening in the cities.”

  Liam paged through his tablet. “From what I can tell, maybe a few dozen so far, mostly from Manipulator infighting. Hasn’t really kicked off yet. A Denny’s exploded. Okay, another idea: a series of drone-guided bioweapon missiles. Drop a few clouds of nerve gas or super-smallpox on him.”

  “Sounds like it’d get a lot of people killed.”

  “As many as the end of the world?”

  Ida scowled. “Might work. We still need to breathe. This guy, though, I’m not lying when I say I have absolutely no fucking idea how he’s growing limbs back. Maybe he can regenerate faster than your poison can hurt him. Are you evacuating anyone yet?”

  “Classified.”

  “No, fuck you. Are you evacuating?”

  “Can’t tell you that.”

  “Can’t, or don’t want to, because you know how I’ll react?”

  “Don’t wanna. There, that’s your question answered. My turn: what about a nuke.”

  “An evacuation is the only way-” Ida shook her head, absorbing what he’d said a beat late. “I’m sorry, did you just suggest a fucking nuclear bomb?”

  Liam broke out another of his detestable little shrugs. “Small-yield, guided warheads. Kilotons, not megatons.”

  “Still insane. Insane. In the cities? Without an evacuation?”

  “I didn’t say it was on the table. We’re just curious about what you think would happen.”

  “You’d kill a half-million people is what would happen.”

  “Would our friend in the jumpsuit be among that number?”

  Ida balked, in disbelief. They couldn’t possibly be serious. “Maybe? It’s a lot of energy, coming at him all at once, in multiple forms. He’d have to be flexible enough to block the shockwave, the heat blast, the radiation, the light and sound, strong enough to handle the huge volume of all of those. If he was close to the blast- fuck. Maybe. But it wouldn’t be worth it.”

  “If it’s innocent lives you’re worried about-”

  “Not just that. If he survived the blast, he’d be carrying around his own nuke’s worth of energy, and it would take maybe an hour or so for all of it to drain out. He’d immediately make it your problem.” Ida stared a hole in Liam’s head. “If you need an actual reason, other than, you know, a small genocide, not to do it, it’d be that. He’d turn the tables.”

  “If he survived.”

  “You’re fucking crazy.”

  Liam turned off his tablet and wheeled around to leave. “That’s all I wanted to cover for today. I’ll see you-”

  “Take my restraints off.”

  “For the last time, no. We aren’t stupid.”

  “Liam, listen to me.” Ida poured the microscopic fraction of energy she was carrying into her voice, hoping to lend it some steel. Liam paused. “You’re going about this wrong.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “This hostility, toward me, someone who offered herself up to help you, if it’s indicative of your overall strategy, you’re going to lose.”

  “The Pentagon likes our chances. I’ll take their word over yours.”

  “And that’s exactly why,” Ida allowed herself a nasty smile. “You’re not considering that there are elements you’re not prepared for. And worse, you’re tossing away potential advantages, not because it makes sense to do it, but because you can’t, even for a second, drop the scary military hegemon silverback gorilla shtick. If you’d treated me with even an ounce of respect-”

  “You’re stuck in our bunker, begging me to take off your scratchy coat,” Liam chuckled. “You’re not in a position to threaten us.”

  “If you’d listened to me,” Ida continued, “if you’d kept my daughter out of this, you might have been okay. But if things go the way you seem to be making them go, if you fuck this up so bad that America, or the hemisphere, or the world takes the hit, then you’ll have lost your one bargaining chip against me.”

  “What, your daughter?” Liam laughed again. “Listen, Ida, I know you’re a deadbeat, but I can’t imagine you’d sacrifice your own kid just to, what, punch the mean men? You’re that heartless?”

  “If you let this get bad enough, she’s as good as dead.” Ida was furious to find she was crying. “And if I get even a whiff that you’ve let it get to that point, then I’ll break out, and I’ll kill you. The restraints, the bunker, the gas, it won’t be enough to stop me.”

  Liam’s countenance flickered for just a second. That near-instantaneous wilting and then correction of his smirk filled Ida with a sick satisfaction. “You know, if I was trying to get my captors to treat me better, I wouldn’t threaten to eat them alive. They might decide it’s more prudent to put me down.”

  “You won’t. You need me. You know that, and your dead-eyed puppet of a boss knows it too. And even if you tried,” Ida straightened, lifted herself to her feet. The shackles strained as she drew to her full height, glowered down at Liam. “You wouldn’t be able to. Not without giving me an opening to kill you first.”

  Liam scoffed, then sidled out of the room.

  “Enjoy your amenities, Ida. We’ll be in touch tomorrow.”

  And he closed the door. Maybe Ida was imagining it, but she thought she saw a tremor in his hand when he reached for the handle.