Anya could have kissed Immonen right there.

Granted, she wouldn’t have minded doing that anyway, but especially after he and Gary’s robot had shown up. Her weakened, almost non-existent regeneration had exploded as soon as Immonen touched her. His healing skill plus her own ability had combined to super-charge the process and knit her back together in moments.

Her arm had healed in much the same way as any of her other previous wounds. Her Sun’s Heart had been different, though. There had been a moment where it sparked and stuttered, as if uncertain to grow back at all.

Then it had surged and burned her insides as it flared and regrew all at once. She thought it might be about to explode, that it would fry her from the inside out and then take Immonen with it.

The beating was stronger than before, more insistent. As she healed she felt the Sun’s Heart pull on not only Immonen’s healing energies, but his body heat. She shut that off at once and tried to rein her second fiery heart in. It had never been an issue before but now it felt a bit like trying to steady a wild horse. And when she tried to control the Sun’s Heart, it flared again inside her and made her chest burn.

“God that fucking hurts,” Anya said and winced. She took the Star’s Breath crystal she had tried to use earlier. She wasn’t at full health yet but she was stable enough to have her powers back, and she didn’t want to risk draining Immonen any more. “I think I got it from here, Doc.”

Anya drew on the powerful heat sources contained within the alien crystal’s core and used it to fuel the rest of her healing. Her chest sealed up and she still had quite a bit of heat remaining within the crystal so she pocketed it. Gary’s robot popped out of the ceiling above and slammed its wide metal feet onto the hypnotizing rug alien.

Anya’s temper, and her eyes, flared as she focused on the rug. The cheap-ass bastard alien had distracted her and almost gotten her killed. It writhed beneath the beetle-bot and Anya snarled as she leapt for it and summoned fire to her hands.

“Ugly ass rug!” she said and her hands ignited the rug’s hypnotic hair as soon as they made contact. The rug thrashed as she burned away its swirling patterns. She increased her heat and cooked the rug’s raw, flat brain matter, pumping fire through the fleshy coils until they charred and blackened.

She didn’t need to rein her Sun’s Heart in for this. This is what it was made for, after all. Or maybe what she had been made for.

Burn.

Consume.

Shine bright.

Brighter.

Brightest.

A pink beam of light shot past her and Anya spun around. How had she forgotten about the toilet? It had been what hurt her, after all. Her head cleared as she saw Immonen staring at her, his eyes wide and glassy. He looked paler than usual, like he’d lost a week’s worth of sleep. Had she done that when he had healed her?

Whatever. He wasn't, and never had been, in a condition to fight. He would only get hurt if he stayed.

“Robot! Get the doc outta here!” Anya shouted at the robot. The rug alien was dead. It wasn’t just dead, it was dust and charcoal. Just the toilet in front of her now, and then she could help the others.

She blasted herself like a human missile at the toilet. Fighting it at a distance was better for it than her. She needed to be close, right up in its bowl.

It tried to aim two of its beam-hands at her but she grabbed each by the wrist and held tight as she turned her palms into white hot manacles. The third beam-hand lashed out to the side and she stomped on it and then heated her entire body and the air around her into a hellish inferno. The robo-beetle charged at the toilet, firing its guns and tiny missiles. The toilet blocked what shots it could, but this meant using its three shield-hands for defense instead of punching Anya.

Its remaining three healing hands were overtaxed by the immense heat and were having their efforts further impeded by keeping themselves from melting. The beam and shield-hands were frying, their flesh running like tallow, bones becoming visible and charring black.

The beetle-bot slammed a heavy metal fist into one of the healing hands and snapped it in half. Its metal began to warp and bend in the heat Anya was emanating and she growled at it.

“Back off! I got this! Go help the others!” she said and the robot fell back as one of its armor panels began to melt. The toilet immediately took the reprieve to pummel Anya with its shield-hands. It hurt, and Anya felt her bones crack under the assault, but it was better than the pink energy beams.

“Nice try shit-can!” Anya said and laughed as she opened her mouth wide. Her Sun’s Heart hammered in her chest, a tempo so fast that it was hard to tell the individual beats apart. Its heat welled up inside her and demanded release. Light bloomed in the back of her throat and a searing beam of fire exploded from her mouth and engulfed the toilet, aimed at the junction of all its arms in the center of the bowl.

The arms flailed and their punches became weak slaps that barely registered with Anya. She would have laughed if she could, but it felt better to keep roasting the alien until its bouquet of twisting limbs were just a bundle of charred, crispy sticks.

“Hah!” Anya finally shouted with glee as she slammed her remaining gauntlet across the roasted arms and crushed them to ashes. She tried to crush the bowl as well but it was too sturdy, made out of something far stronger than procelain.

With her enemy dead and dusty, the Sun’s Heart finally began to slow. Anya took a deep breath when it settled and glanced around her as if coming out of a dream. The office was trashed, of course. The area she had been fighting the toilet in looked like it had been subjected to the inside of a volcano: everything was scorched black, and the concrete itself had cracked and even partially melted in a few places.

That was when she noticed the wind.

Although “Wind” was a tame word for the elemental force howling outside. How had she not noticed it before? It was ripping pieces of the structurally weak building off in front of her and sending them spinning up into the cold night sky.

“Felix? What’s going on? Where are the other aliens and hosts?” Anya asked as she withdrew the partially-used Star’s Breath from her pouch. She drained the rest of its heat and topped herself off as she approached the edge of the destroyed line of windows. The wind, more of a tornado really, sat in the center of the plaza in front of the building and was expanding more and more.

“There’s only one alien left and its in the center of that tornado!” Felix said. “All the other hosts nearby are alive! Pan and Samaira are in the eye of the tornado, Immonen is below us, and Gary is across the street.”

“Thank god for that,” Anya said and jumped down to the sidewalk. Gary waved at her, then pointed inside the tornado and held up two fingers, probably for Pan and Samaira. Anya jerked a thumb at the tornado to indicate she was going in and Gary gave her a quick salute and a thumbs-up.

“This is gonna hurt,” Anya muttered and then blasted herself forward into the wall of wind.

She was immediately swept to the side and pelted with chucks of concrete and metal and glass. Her armor and kinetic absorption skills were able to handle those things without much difficulty, but the wind itself was pulling her to the side, away from the eye and up into the twisting reaches. She lost all sense of direction almost at once and had to rely on Felix orienting her on Pan and Samaira’s signals before she used her rocket flight move to blast through the tornado and into the eye.

A standing floor fan sat at the center of the tornado, surrounded by multiple rings of whirling silver light. A single huge eye glared at Pan, Chandrali, and Samaira from the center of the fan. A crab robot and the beetle-bot from earlier were there as well, firing at the fan when they could, but the spinning silver rings around it deflected their attacks, and the few that did make it through the outer rings were deflected by the inner one. Another three robots lay in pieces around the edges of the eye of the tornado.

Pan had summoned six golems out of the exposed earth and they kept themselves between the fan and the others. Whenever the eye looked at one of the golems, it crumpled inward, crushed by an unseen force. However, when it looked away, the balls of dirt reformed into their previous golem shapes and trudged toward the fan.

Anya had a very good view of the battlefield below, as she had blasted out of the tornado almost thirty stories up. She fell, and the fan’s eye caught her movement and glared upward to look at her. She immediately felt something yank her forward toward the spinning silver circles that she now saw were gleaming blades. Even as the force yanked her down, it closed around her like a fist and she had to struggle to push her arms and legs out. She used her limited flight ability and an explosion to knock herself back away from the deadly cutting rings and again to ease her fall to the earth. A wall of dirt and stone rose up in front of her and broke line-of-sight with the fan and the ferocious pressure around her immediately ceased.

Samaira hid behind a golem next to Anya and popped out behind it to shoot arrows from all directions at the fan. The winds blew many of them off target, and the rings caught the rest. Pan rolled around the battle field, notably not digging himself a hole, and spun and wheeled away from the occasional fan blade that swiped at him. He stopped beside Anya and gave her a weak smile.

“Sorry I couldn’t get a wall up faster,” Pan said.

“It’s fine. You did great. What was that pressure?” she asked. She had to shout over the wind.

“Telekinesis maybe, or some kind of gravity control according to Boo. Could be other things too but she thinks those are the most probable,” Samaira said. The edge of one of the spinning rings sliced the golem in front of Samaira in two. It cleaved through Anya’s wall a second later and Pan raised more dirt, rock, and another golem up at once. He was panting, and he was missing a large number of his protective scales. Samaira looked pretty beat-up too: her gloves were burned off at the fingertips, and the glowing light from her multiple gemstones and the sparkles in her hair were dull.

“Only if it looks at you, right?” Anya guessed after seeing Samaira and Pan in cover and feeling the pressure abate as soon as Pan’s wall concealed her.

“Yeah, whatever it’s doing it comes out of the eye,” Samaira said as Chandrali crouched beside her. The cat was in its smaller form, and looked about ready to pass out. “I’ve tried to blind it with flash arrows but it just knocks them away or uses its blades to form a shield in front of it like a shell.”

Anya glanced out from behind her temporary cover at the fan. Gary’s remaining robots were distracting it and giving them a few precious moments to confer. The fan was encircled by three rings of spinning blades: one tight, short ring immediately around it; a second, wider ring about ten feet from it; and a third ring that was triple that in its circumference.

The third ring was so wide that it actually had a few visible gaps in between the blades even at the rate they were spinning. The second and first rings were almost solid looking from their speed. The third and second rings would contract and expand as needed to slice at Gary’s robots or Pan’s golems, but the first ring never moved unless it was to defend. The various blades formed an overlapping shell around the fan that reminded Anya of the ancient Egyptian sarcophagi in its basic shape.

One of Pan’s golems slipped past the outer ring, got within the middle ring, and then the fan’s eye glared at it and crushed it into a golfball-sized chunk of mud and shot it away into the surrounding tornado.

“Pan, why haven’t you tried digging under it?” Anya asked.

“It pulls me out by my tail before I can get underground and tries to throw me around and smash me!” Pan cried. “No matter what!”

A robot that looked like a giant eagle dodged the middle ring of blades, but was halted in mid-air as the eye caught it in its glare. It was turned into a ball of scrap in seconds and tossed aside like the golem. The remaining beetle-bot fired its energy cannons and the inner ring of blades closed inward and once more protected the fan from top to bottom.

But maybe not underneath.

The fan adjusted its outer rings and focused them on the attacking bot, and diced it to pieces before emerging from safety.

The fan didn’t budge an inch during any of the attacks. At best, it merely turned in place. Anya and the others were running out of disposable targets. Gary’s robots were scrap and Pan looked like he couldn’t keep making golems forever. They had seconds at most before the fan focused on them once more.

“I have an idea,” Anya said. “Pan, if me, Samaira, Chandrali, and the golems can get that thing’s attention, can you dig under it, try to tip it over?”

“I’ll do my best,” Pan said. “Just gotta dig and make golems. No fighting, right?”

“No fighting,” Anya promised. “Just give it a good shove with some earth or something and then get out of there.”

“And Bee-Eff will tell me exactly where the alien is while I’m underground,” Pan said.

“We’ll keep it from moving too much. Just have your AI mark it on the map now. When I send you a signal, shove it, okay?” Anya asked.

“O-okay. Here I go,” Pan said and made a few golems to replace the ones he had lost. When Anya had watched him make the golems before, they all but jumped out of the earth. Now they slowly, gradually formed, and Pan grunted from the effort.

“You know what you’re doing?” Samaira asked.

“Just gotta keep it distracted until Pan tips it over. Then it’ll be just like the fridge in Chicago. I hope,” Anya said. “You gonna make it?”

“I’ve channeled a lot of aether tonight. I can’t go much longer, but I’ll be okay,” she replied as she readied her bow and took a breath. Anya nodded at her to indicate she was ready.

Samaira nodded and broke cover from behind a golem. She fired a hailstorm of small arrows at both the fan at its various spinning rings. The arrows she aimed at the outer ring didn’t explode, but latched onto the whiling blades and extended into the ground. Glowing blue lines of light tethered the blades into the street, but only for a heartbeat. The momentum, force, and cutting power of the spinning weapons was too powerful to be delayed by Samaira’s magic tethers for long. It was enough for Anya to fire a number of lasers past them and a pair of golems to run forward, however.

The second ring of blades tilted on its axis and deflected some of Anya’s fiery beams, but not all. A handful of the blades left their orbit to attack the encroaching golems which opened a few precious gaps in the fan’s defense. The inner ring ceased spinning and formed the defensive sarcophagus around the fan again before Anya’s attacks could hit. Anya didn’t know if the sarcophagus completely blinded the alien, but it cut off that weird crushing gaze it had.

“Go!” Anya snapped and Pan dove into the earth. The outer ring of blades had spun up again and now between it and the second ring, none of Samaira’s or Anya’s long-range attacks were getting through. Anya knew trying to get within melee range would be suicide. She’d seen enough of Pan’s golems get diced to bits or crushed by the eye’s gaze to bother with that. The golems that had gone forward were turned to dust and blown away by the winds, and they only had three of the earthen guardians around them now.

Anya could have tried superheating the air, but the distance between her and the eye was too much. And besides, the wind it was whipping up would have either just dispersed the heat or spread it to other targets Anya didn’t want to fry.

“C’mon little guy,” Anya said. The metal segments of the sarcophagus slid down and whirled back into their deadly circuit once more. The eye in the center of the fan swept back and forth around the center of the tornado, and Anya was pleased to see it widen and its pupil expand with possible realization that one of the hosts wasn’t there anymore.

“One more time!” Anya said and she, Samaira, and the golems repeated their attack from before: tether, move in, fire, force the fan to defend. The golems were once again turned to dust as soon as they approached the second ring of blades, and the fan closed itself within its protective sarcophagus as Anya and Samaira attacked it.

“Message ready!” Felix told her.

“Now, Pan!” Anya shouted.

The ground directly beneath the fan bulged upwards and then a column of rock jutted out of the ground. The column struck the underside of the fan’s base at an angle and sent it tilting to one side. For half a second, all of its whirling storm of blades faltered in their lethal orbits. The howling wind of the tornado wavered as all of the blades turned inward, toward Anya and Chandrali as they charged.

Pan’s rocky shove had opened up a tiny dark gap between the bottom of the fan’s sarcophagus and the street. Less than an inch.

Anya was as close as she was going to get before the faltering, realigning blades behind her closed in and minced her and the big cat to chunks. But the wind of the tornado had died down enough and she had closed enough distance that she was confident her fire wouldn’t get blown too far off.

She ignited the air between herself and the tiny open edge between the fan and the street. A white trail of fire snaked the last few yards between Anya and the fan and exploded upward. The inside of the sarcophagus rattled with the sound and immediately began to glow from within like a crucible. The tornado suddenly stopped and the sarcophagus opened at once in an attempt to disperse the heat.

One of the blades from the sarcophagus flew past Anya and she ducked to the side. The body of the fan was twisting like rubber, the eye rolling wildly in its socket. Samaira screamed behind her and Anya saw that the blades, while no longer aimed directly at them, had begun zooming erratically through the air. Chandrali yowled as one sliced open her side and Anya barely slid under one that would have bisected her.

The eye of the fan locked onto her movement and held her in place. Pressure sank on her and crushed her flat against the street. A dozen gleaming blades honed in on her from high above and began to fall. The fan was dying, but not soon enough.

A mechanical roar sounded to Anya’s left and the blades diverted towards it. Something huge and bulky zoomed in front of Anya and slammed into the fan at full-speed, and the crushing pressure on her abated. All of the remaining blades in the air clattered to the ground in a deadly hail, and Anya had to tuck into a ball and roll to the side and back again as the weapons sliced into the street.

Gary’s truck continued to speed past, the thin melting body of the fan stuck in its grill. Gary slammed on the brakes and the fan was flung forward into the street. Gary ran over it, and Anya saw the tires were covered in a kind of flexible, spiked, armored plating. He backed over the alien, then ran forward again, then put the truck in park and spun his spiked rear tires over its flaming body until it was reduced to so many flaming chunks.

His truck bristled with blades that had cut deep into the body of the vehicle, but not all the way through. Gary stepped out of the truck and eyed it with a frown.

“Sorry girl. We’ll get you back in order soon enough,” he said.

“Holy shit,” Anya said as she got to her feet. Chandrali lay in the street beside her, bleeding openly and looking up at Anya with hooded eyes, like she was going to sleep. Her white fur was an alarming shade of red and Anya saw the curved lines of her ribs showing. “Samaira!”

“I’m coming,” Samaira said as she limped forward. The hands of her gloves had been burned off entirely and the tips of her fingers were cracked and bloody.

Chandrali yowled weakly as Samaira knelt beside her and laid her wounded hands on the cat. Weak blue light glowed from her palms, flickered, and went out. Samaira swayed on her knees, then fell beside her cat. The wound in the cat’s side had only healed a little.

“Oh fuck,” Anya said. “Felix! Anything from the RAC store that can cure them! Stabilize them! Whatever! Doc! Immonen!”

“Bio-gel,” Felix said. “Confirm pur——”

“Yes!” Anya snapped. Something that looked like a large hot-glue gun made of steel and with a glowing pale orange tube in it appeared in front of Anya. She snatched it out of the air and then looked at Felix.

“Do I just point and shoot or what?” she demanded.

“Along the wounded area,” Felix said. Anya pointed the device at Chandrali and squeezed the trigger. A kind of soapy, gooey foam spurted out of the end of it and clung to the big cat’s side. The pale orange foam turned pink and then red as it absorbed blood, and began to spread out and around the laceration. The wound was sealed in seconds, but Chandrali didn’t stir.

“What about Samaira?” Anya said as she knelt beside her. Gary jogged up behind Anya and cursed as he saw the scene. Pan poked his head up from beneath the street and glanced around.

“Did we win?” he asked.

“I’ll find Immonen,” Gary said and brought up his contacts list.

“Menu readings say she’s alive,” Felix said. Immonen emerged from the building and Gary shouted and waved at him. Immonen ran forward in a weak, shambling gait.

“Is she gonna be okay?” Pan asked.

“Let me see,” Immonen panted and touched her forehead with his hand. He sighed, then nodded and gave Anya a weak smile. “She’s exhausted, but all her vitals are steady. It’s magic, and I’m not entirely sure I understand how it affects her, but for now, she’s okay.”

“Thank god. And Chandrali?” Anya asked. Immonen touched her next and frowned.

“Alive, but barely. Dangerous blood loss, erratic heartbeat. I’m trying to heal her but I’m a bit tapped out. I can stabilize her, but that’s it for now.”

“All the aliens are dead. At least all the ones in Manhattan,” Anya said.

“No, there was a sixth, out in the ocean, heading straight for the city,” Immonen said and Anya’s stomach dropped. Samaira, Pan, Chandrali, and Immonen were out of any fight for a while. Gary was out of robots and his truck looked like it might fall apart if somebody gave it a good enough kick.

“Felix?” Anya asked.

“I didn’t want to interrupt earlier, but all of the aliens data streams have been acquired as they died and transmitted. The stream from the fan shows an alien approaching the city, then making a U-turn and heading back out to the Atlantic. At the time of the fan alien’s death, it was ten miles out to sea and increasing its speed away from the mainland.”

“Thank god for that,” Gary said and his mustache fluttered as he heaved out a breath.

“Amen,” Immonen agreed and put both his hands on Chandrali. The cat twitched and then opened one eye. Immonen leaned back on his hands and groaned.

“I know you’re not back to perfect health, but that’s all from me, kisu,” Immonen said. Anya picked Samaira up, one hand supporting her back and the other under her knees. She glanced up and noticed for the first time that the entire city was dark. Every lamp, street light, window, and sign was entirely black. With the clouds overhead still covering the sky and sprinkling snow over the city, there wasn’t even moon or starlight to be had. The only light came from car headlights and emergency lights, and the distant flashing of police cars and ambulances.

“What the hell happened to the city?” Anya asked.

“I had to borrow some power to give my truck a jump,” Gary said.

“But the hospitals!” Immonen said.

“They got back-up generators, and I didn’t take that much. Should be back on in a few minutes,” Gary said. But for now, there was only the dark, the eerie circle of quiet where the fight had happened, and the distant wail of sirens.

“Did we do good?” Pan asked. His tiny chest was heaving as he panted, little clouds coming out of his mouth.

“We did,” Anya said, but looking around, she felt otherwise. So many people must have died inside the Fed’s building. The entire block and streets around 26 Federal Plaza looked like they had been ground zero for a week’s worth of hurricanes. The whole city must have seen the tornado. There was no hiding this or waving it off as just a terrorist attack.

“I’m gonna sleep now,” Pan said and yawned. He curled into a ball next to Chandrali, holding his broad tail in his claws, and began to breathe evenly.

Anya stood in the middle of the destruction holding Samaira and stared ahead. Flashlights bobbed in the darkness along with lights from phones and LED keychains as people ran toward them. Anya picked up half a dozen heat sources: just normal humans.

“Ms. Nowicki? You okay over there?” Agent Riley asked. A few other agents stood with him, guns drawn.

“Fine as we can be,” Gary said. “Little worse for wear but alive.”

“Jesus Christ is that a tiger?” one of the agents said and raised his gun. Chandrali growled and bared her huge fangs but couldn’t move otherwise.

“Easy, easy. The tiger’s fine where it is,” Riley said and pushed the other agent’s gun down with his hand.

“My god. The building is just…ruined. The whole top of it is gone. What happened? What was all that light? And the tornado?” a female agent asked. Anya glanced past Riley and the others as a squad of armored SWAT officers with rifles ran forward. Ambulances and firetrucks screeched to a halt behind the black SWAT vans, and news vans and civilians with their cameras out weren’t far behind. Patrol officers covered in dust and scrapes and grime were already waving people back and setting up a perimeter. Cameras flashed and the once quiet, dark plaza was now flooded with lights, sounds, and voices.

“Hey,” Riley said as he approached Anya, “This is about to turn into a circus. Just stick with me and don’t piss off the cops, okay?”

Anya snorted and gave Riley a smirk.

“I’ll do my best,” she said.

Riley held up his badge as SWAT officers approached them. He and the other agents helped convince the SWAT team that Chandrali and Pan and Anya were not a threat. Gary and Immonen looked normal enough to be ignored, and Samaira was still unconscious in Anya’s arms. The SWAT team hurried past the strange gathering and into what remained of 26 Federal Plaza.

“Now what?” Anya asked Riley. She had a few ideas, but they all involved running somewhere safe and having a nap.

“Where’s your little rose-headed computer guy? He can follow the aliens right?” Riley asked.

“Felix,” Anya said and the AI appeared between her and Riley.

“Here I am! Congratulations on your victory! You leveled up a bunch!” Felix said and his rose-head fully blossomed and he glowed a brighter orange than before.

“As exciting as that is, it’ll have to wait,” Anya said.

“Right! Aliens!” Felix said and turned to Riley. “I can’t follow them, but here’s the map of their most recent locations as of the death of that fan alien.”

Felix confirmed the nearest aliens were miles away and retreating quickly. Riley was focused on anything around Manhattan but Anya studied the rest of the global map and frowned.

“Felix, can you rewind this to when the aliens landed and then play it forward to now?” she asked.

“Of course!” Felix said. The alien movements sped up as Felix displayed their positions from Monday evening. When the aliens had all landed, they had been scattered individually across the globe. By Tuesday night, when Anya and the others had killed the fridge alien in Chicago, several small groups of two-three aliens had formed with a handful of larger groups.

As of the attack on Manhattan, all of the aliens were in packs of at least ten, with loners being the minority. The biggest pack was in northern India, and numbered twenty-nine.

“Jesus. Twenty-nine of them,” Anya said.

“One of the big ones is in there too,” Felix said.

“The big ones?” Riley asked. Anya explained about the two aliens who had the largest kill counts and Riley shook his head. “Where’s the second one?”

“In Southern California as of several minutes ago,” Felix said. “It’s traveling alone though. And it’s risen ahead of the one from China in terms of kills and presumably, power.”

“God,” Anya said and closed her eyes. The map showed bright clusters of aliens, all moving together toward the vague circular outlines of the hosts. The few aliens that were alone were all making bee-lines for the nearest pack.

The circles on the map that indicated the general position of a host had all gotten smaller as time went on.

“Felix, you said you were having trouble pinning the alien signals down this time. But they look like they’re getting better at finding us,” Anya said.

“Yeah, sorry about that. Their signals were a lot more…uh, wiggly? Squirmy? Hard to describe,” Felix said and shrugged their tiny shoulders.

“So they’re getting better and we’re getting worse,” Anya said.

“Maybe, but it’s not all bad,” Riley said and pointed at several locations on the map. The host-circles had begun to congregate too. A quick count showed that hundreds of hosts across the planet had begun forming their own squads. There were so many, too many to be just the hosts who had met in China.

The data stream from the fridge had shown the aliens massacring hosts in short order last night. Now it wasn’t so easy. Any time a pack of aliens met a roughly equivalent squad of hosts, the hosts usually won. Not always without casualties, but they were wins. Hosts survived, aliens died. Felix highlighted all of the hosts from the meeting in China, and saw that most of them had all been having their own fights around the time they had started theirs.

The only single alien who was victorious against multiple hosts was the one in southern California. That one worried Anya. She watched its bright dot approach a cluster of four host circles outside San Diego and extinguish all of them and then continue on toward Mexico.

“That’s going to be a problem,” Anya muttered and then had Felix close the menu. It was all too much. Her brain demanded a rest. She had been going at it almost non-stop since Monday night, facing a new crisis what felt like every hour, save for the brief, all-too-short periods when she had slept.

It was only Wednesday. It hadn’t even been a week since she had gotten the menu.

“Just one more to add to the list,” Gary said as he and Immonen approached from the side. Immonen was cradling Pan, who was snoring contentedly. “For now I think we’re gonna have something worse than aliens to deal with.”

“Like what?” Anya asked.

“Politicians,” Gary replied.

“Ugh, yeah,” Anya said as she looked around. There was no more hiding what was going on. Millions of New Yorkers had had front row seats to their fight. The map showed her that fights of similar size had been happening all over the world, and if anything, would only get bigger.

“Problems for tomorrow though,” Gary said and patted Anya’s shoulder. She nodded. Tomorrow was going to be full of problems. And the day after, and the day after that, and the coming weeks and months looked like nothing but problems all merging together into a tsunami of catastrophes. That was all assuming she survived along with the rest of the planet.

But now, tonight, she was still alive. It had been close for a minute there. She’d felt her fires dying, breaths away from being extinguished. And if her updated map data was to be believed, the hosts were starting to push back. It wasn’t just the hosts either: all around her, fire fighters, cops, federal agents, the national guard, and just people off the street were already making sense of the chaos the night had brought. Roads were being cleared, debris was being removed, wounded were being healed.

There were problems tomorrow. But maybe with everyone, they could be overcome.

A winter wind whipped past Anya, but her heart kept her warm.

ARC 01.Invasion//VOLUME 03. Gatherings//END