The cave was... well, it was a cave.

There were about two miles worth of walking after we had clambered over a collapsed section of the castle's stone walls, following beneath the shadow of the still intact parts and then bearing left into some woods. Emma had obviously taken the lead; I had no idea where we were after the ruins of the castle disappeared behind the thickness of the trees, and although I had a fairly good idea of which direction we were headed in, the route to get to the cave was a complete mystery. There didn't even seem to be any sort of logic to how she was directing us there; no worn tracks, no partings between the bushes, nothing that could ever be said to be an obvious path; she just knew the way. More accurately, she seemed to know exactly where we were, both in relation to the devastated castle - with its vanishing pillars of smoke - and to our destination, so maybe there was a path somewhere, just not here, and whatever senses or memories she was using to get us where we needed to go didn't rely on any sort of proper trail to get us there.

The lack of a path, however, was, in my opinion, a good thing. I couldn't even begin to count how many Praetorians had been killed during my little outburst at the castle, more than a few hundred, at least, but I was under no illusions that it had been all of them. Don't get me wrong, everyone inside the castle grounds had been slaughtered, but there had been plenty more outside its walls. They had retreated as the inferno started; maybe "bravely ran away" would be a better term, but either way, they had escaped. It wasn't a huge stretch of the imagination to think that they hadn't run away far enough to stop them from watching the castle, though. That meant they could have seen our own exodus and then tried to follow us. With no path for them to trace, though, the chances of them picking up our tail - with the random turns and outwardly aimless directions Emma was leading us in - seemed extraordinarily unlikely.

There were other things around, though. Things that I shouldn't have been as surprised about as I was. There was no sign of Charlotte, Jerry, or Fiona, but that was to be expected, none of them were stupid enough to let their blocks down so close to a very obvious enemy presence. I had no idea how much of the battle they had seen or if they had any idea about what had happened to the castle and its attackers after they left, all I knew was that they were getting out when my connection to Jerry was lost. What I didn't expect to find, however, was five other non-blocking Evos, apparently having escaped the castle and were currently a few miles away, heading west at about the speed of a car sticking to posted traffic notices.

I had frozen for a moment when I first felt them, thinking that maybe they were retreating Praetorians or random passers-by, people I could either use, avoid, or would need to eliminate. But not only were they heading away from Emma and me, it only took a few seconds of focus to realize who they actually were. One of them was Rachael, Charlotte's 'sister' from the Sect, and the other four blips on my radar were her friends. But there had been six traitors in the Sect, and one was missing. Who that was and what had happened to them, I had no idea. It was a question that could be put off until later. That raised the question about the hundred or so Inquisitors that had been taken in Ukraine, then rescued and returned here after the battle in the compound. The idea had been to slowly treat and undo the conditioning inflicted on them by the Praetorians, but that process hadn't even started before the attack. Had they been killed during the invasion? Had they been liberated from their holding area by their new friends? Had they joined in the massacre of Bob and his people? Had they fallen to the flames I had used to scour the area clean? I just didn't know.

For now, at least, it seemed we were free and clear.

Not that it helped us in any way. Both of us were running on empty. Emma, having had her entire life and her perception of the world around her blown to pieces in only a few hours, was emotionally drained. There was a whole world of pain in her very near future, but for the time being, she seemed to be just numb. I knew what that felt like; I knew how deep it went. I remembered describing the pain after losing Becky as prolonged periods of pure numb despair punctuated by moments of indescribable agony; she hadn't gotten that far yet, but it would come. In the meantime, there was just a haunted, hollowed look on her face, one that perfectly illustrated the toll the morning had taken on her. Her world was gone. The place she had grown up in had been burned to the ground and reduced to rubble, not only by the attacking Praetorians but by me. More than that, the foundation of that world - her parents - were gone too. One had been evacuated to safety, or at least we hoped so. The other was...

I swallowed hard. That was a pain for later. It would come, just like hers: nowhere near as agonizing, nowhere near as deep or acute, but it would come nonetheless.

Emma had been hollowed out in a way that only the loss of the fundamental support structure of life could bring, and her face was showing it. She hadn't said much more than a few words since we had left the castle. Just a few "this ways" and "watch your steps," but her voice had seemed-empty. Like the life had been pulled from her, which, I guess, in a very real way, is exactly what had happened.

I, on the other hand, was drained in a much more physical way. I didn't really have a well in my mind's eternal city; I had power plants. They filled the same role, in terms of an Evo's power, but by a vastly different method. Wells would refill over time, replenishing an Evo's strength while they slept, but while they were awake, it just acted as a reservoir, holding their power until it was needed. My power plants, on the other hand, could generate enormous amounts of energy as and when I needed it. I did have a reservoir; it held a tremendous amount more power than the average Evo's well, but it wasn't limitless. The difference between my system and that of everyone else's was that I could draw power directly from my plants to use my abilities, bypassing the drain on the reservoir completely. Under normal circumstances, when I was using less power than the plants were able to generate, that wasn't a problem; it meant that I could use my abilities almost indefinitely. But the last few hours hadn't been normal by any stretch of the imagination.

I had, without really being able to explain how, an innate internal system that not only monitored how much power I was using - compared to the amount my plants were able to produce - but it told me how full or empty my reservoir was and how much longer I could go on before that ran dry. During the worst of the fight-with my powers being used in a manner more extreme, by far, than anything I had used before-I had understood that I only had a few more hours left before I would run dry. That last little outburst had essentially wiped me out. In the forty-five minutes or so since then, however, with my powers being limited to little more than a vague scanning of the immediate area for any more of those voids - nowhere near the full measure of my power plants' output - my reservoir had started to refill.

Don't get me wrong, it wouldn't be full any time soon. Pumping water into a hole would eventually fill it. Still, the time that would take would depend on the size of the hole as much as the volume of water trying to fill it, and mine was a very, very large hole that would take a long time to fill despite the massive amounts of water - or power - being pumped into it. In physical terms, that left me feeling like what a normal human would feel like after not having eaten or slept in a couple of days. Everything felt heavy, everything felt slow, and just thinking seemed to be an extraordinarily difficult feat. I felt lethargic, and a tiredness that seemed to suck the strength right out of my bones pervaded my entire body. I had been tired before, everyone has, but this was something different: this was a physical exhaustion that was marrow-deep.

On top of all that was a similar, albeit lessened version of that same mental anguish that Emma was dealing with. Bob was dead; I had watched him die. Rhodri was dead, and I had felt every single moment of that as if it had happened to my own body in savage slow motion. Jerry, Charlotte, and Fiona had, by the last check-in, escaped, and I could only hope that they'd made it to safety after they had gotten out of the castle. Isabelle, perhaps my strongest ally in all of this, was missing. Those friendly guards had said the rest of her entourage had evacuated her, but, as with my group, that in no way meant that she had made it to safety once she was out. More than that, I had no way of contacting any of them. My phone was still safely tucked away in my pocket, but, according to Jeeves - who was using my untraceable phone to track the others - none of the others' phones had come back online since the battle. They could have been damaged in the fighting, they could have been left behind, their batteries could have died, or they simply could not have been turned back on by their owners yet, all of whom would have been concerned about the possibility of them being tracked.

Speculation, it would seem, was an unwinnable sport.

But it meant that I had no answers, not for myself or Emma, and that uncertainty was yet another weight on my already-loaded shoulders. There was simply too much to think about and nowhere near enough energy to do all of that thinking in any sort of coherent or effective way. For now, all I could do was follow Emma. It was barely seven in the evening, and the sun was starting to set, but otherwise, it was - by usual standards - pretty early in the day to be thinking about sleep, but sleep was the only thing on my tired mind.

"How do you know about this place?" I asked, trying to make some sort of attempt at conversation but still keeping my voice low.

"We used to play here," she answered just as quietly after a little bit of a pause.

"We?" I regretted asking the question as soon as it left my lips. The way her shoulders hunched up, the way her pain seemed to break through that numbness.

"My... My Dad used to bring us here when we were younger," she replied after a hard swallow. "Me, Jamie, Raj, and a few of the other guards' children who were about my age. That's how we all became friends. It was like a big family outing. Playing hide-and-seek in the caves while all the adults relaxed. Hardly anyone outside of the family knows about them, the caves, I mean. They're not on any maps, and you have to know exactly where they are to find them. We used to call them our little secret." She lifted a hand to wipe away a tear that was already rolling down her cheek.

I just nodded. Jamie and Raj were the two men we had found at the top of that stairwell; they had both been gunned down while defending the castle, and Rhodri and I had given her a little more time to say goodbye before we were forced to continue our rush toward Bob. If I had known that those men were as close friends as I was starting to suspect, I would have given her longer. "I'm sorry," I finally said. My voice, already quiet, was now barely above a whisper.

She turned to look at me, something of a pained smile on her lips as she did. "You were right," she said, seeming to understand what I was thinking. "They gave their lives for me, for my family, and it would have been for nothing if we didn't keep going. It's not your fault they died. It's... theirs." Of course, she didn't mean it was their fault; she meant the Praetorians, but for whatever reason, she refused to say their names. As if uttering that word aloud validated their crusade and gave them power. There was a silent strength, a subtle defiance behind not saying that word, perhaps the only amount of it she was capable of displaying, but that is what she was doing. I couldn't help but smile inwardly, though. As patronizing as it may have sounded if I had given voice to the thought, I was proud of her. She was stronger than she knew; she would get through this, whether she knew it yet or not. One day, she may look back on this as the moment when her resolve hardened, where the shock started to wear off, and she took her stand. It may not happen yet; it probably wouldn't happen for a while, even if it did, but if it happened, I was proud to say that I was there to see it.

"What?" she finally said after holding my eyes for a few more moments.

"Your Dad had that same look in his eyes when we were in Ukraine."

"What look?"

"Strength," I shrugged. "That quiet strength behind his eyes that said 'they're not going to beat us, not on my watch.'"

Emma's eyes widened for a moment; she opened her mouth, then closed it again before composing herself enough to respond. "You saw that in me? Really?"

It wasn't an indignant argument; she was genuinely asking if I really saw that. She was proud not only that someone could see that in her but also that they could see it at all. I got the impression that not many people looked at her closely enough to see anything, let alone translate one of her looks.

I nodded. "Really. He was a good man, a strong man, and I can see that in you too. He would have been proud of you."

She smiled. Perhaps the first real smile I had seen on her all day. Her face seemed to light up as if someone had finally parted the clouds and let the sun shine onto it. "I... I don't know what to say," she smiled demurely, looking down to the ground for a moment before looking back up at me. "Thank you. I can see why they follow you."

"Follow me? Who?" I asked, puzzled.

"Everyone," she shrugged. "Your friends, my family, The Conclave, The Sect, even the Inquisition. They all follow you, and I can see why."

"Do they?" I scrunched up my face. "I always kind of felt like I was just running blindly from one mess to another. I didn't think people were following me."

She chuckled softly. "I thought you'd say that. At first, I thought it was arrogance or bravado. You knew you were the most powerful being of all of us, and you enjoyed the attention. You led because you were the strongest, and anything less would be a challenge to you, and you just acted so casually about it so it wouldn't seem that way. But now I see I was wrong. I don't think you see it at all, the way the others defer to you, the way you lead, the way others look to you, not for protection, but for support and for that leadership. You see your strength as a burden, not as a right to be in charge. It's... surprisingly noble in an endearing sort of way, and it gives people the strength they need when they need it the most."

I blinked at her. I had never really thought of myself as a leader; it had never occurred to me that someone like Bob, or even like Jerry or Fiona, would ever have looked to me for leadership. Even Charlotte only ever seemed to be tagging along so she wasn't left behind. Only Evie ever seemed to look to me for something like that, and even then, only because she was in so woefully over her head. If she had understood what the world was really like, I had always assumed she would have gone her own way.

That blink turned into a frown.

"And there it is," she chuckled again.

"What?"

"You don't want to be a leader. You think that there are other, better-qualified people for the job."

"Don't you?"

"Nope." She shook her head. "Some people want power, they want authority, and they will often do whatever it takes to get it and then keep it. Which means that those are the sorts of people who should never be allowed to have any. The best type of leader is the one who sees the people below them as not only important but - to them, at least - more important than they are. You would never do anything to intentionally risk the lives of me or your friends; you would take that risk on yourself, no matter how dangerous. People follow you because they trust you, they respect you, and they see that you care. The only regret I have about following you in the castle is that I didn't see that side of you sooner."

"I... hmmm..." my frown deepened. "I don't know how to feel about that."

"Unfortunately, how you feel doesn't matter, not to you anyway," she shrugged again. "You'll keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep leading, and you'll keep putting yourself in harm's way just so nobody else has to do it instead. It's like you said this morning. You are the animal, so people like me don't need to be. I took that as an attack, like you were criticizing me for not doing my part, but that wasn't it at all. It was just a fact. If you didn't do the fighting, either someone else would have to, or the fight would be lost, and because you are a leader, neither of those were options, so you do it yourself. Partly to protect people like me, and partly because you can't imagine a world where someone fights on your behalf while you sit back and do nothing. That's what makes you a leader that people want to follow."

My frown grew a little deeper. "I feel someone should have pointed this out to me before now."

"Would it have made any difference?"

"I... okay, good point, probably not, but it would have... I don't know... made me be a bit more careful or something."

"More careful... in a war..." she arched her eyebrow at me.

"Okay, okay, it sounds stupid when you say it like that. Maybe less careless about the people around me. I'd always assumed they were there of their own free will, and I was following their lead. If I knew they were there because of me..."

"No, that's not what I meant," Emma shook her head again. "They didn't follow you because they had to. They did it because they wanted to, even if they were following from the front at some points. They still knew you had their backs. Why do you think my father went with you to Ukraine?"

"Because he didn't trust anyone else to go."

She held that arched eyebrow. "So he trusted people to guard his family, he trusted people, normal humans, to back him - and you - on the ground, but there was nobody else he could have sent instead of going himself? He trusted Jamie and Raj to protect the castle while he was away, to protect me, but there was nobody he trusted enough to go with you to find a group of missing Inquisitors?"

"Then why did he go?"

"Because you were going, because he was a leader too, because he trusted you to get the job done, and he wanted to back you up in any way he could. He went because he wasn't going to send someone else to fight a battle he should have fought himself. He went with you for what I imagine were the same reasons that you went with him."

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

"He was a leader," she continued when it became clear my tongue wasn't going to cooperate yet. "He and my mother led this chapter of the Inquisition together for decades, and they did that by inspiring the people below them to follow them, not by forcing them to or expecting them to. It made people want to follow them. You're the same. You don't expect people to follow you, and you certainly would never force them to. You just do what needs to be done, and that is precisely why they follow you. I've known my father as a leader for my whole life, and that's why I can so easily see it in you. Which is another reason I'm so annoyed at myself for not seeing it sooner."

"To be fair," I countered. "You didn't know me then. All you knew was that I was someone who was very cavalier and unapologetic about killing other members of our species."

"True," she nodded. "But you were right about that, too; I had closed my mind off to any explanation that didn't line-up with my preconceived notions about what the world was like. I didn't even try to give you a fair chance to explain things to me. I was a bit of a bitch to you."

"Only a bit of one?" I smirked at her teasingly.

"Alright, I was a massive bitch."

"No, you weren't." I sighed and shook my head. "You were standing up for what you thought was right. Sure, you were woefully misinformed, but I can respect someone taking a stand."

"And there it is again," she smiled. "Not holding a grudge, not, I don't know, punishing me for something I did that was out of line..."

"Oh, I can absolutely hold a grudge," I corrected her.

"Yes, but only to those who are unapologetically against you. Those who've threatened the people you care about... people who are the enemy. For everyone else, you're fair and reasonable, even if they've annoyed you."

"Hmm, maybe."

"Well, I hate to break it to you, but that's what leaders do."

"Urgh, I need to stop being so noble then, do I?" I muttered, mostly joking.

She laughed again. "You couldn't if you tried. It's who you are. Anyway, we're here."

I looked up to see that we had emerged through the trees and into a clearing at the foot of a pretty high cliff, maybe a hundred and fifty feet of sheer, vertical stone. The very base of the rock face, however, was covered by a spattering of variously heighted bushes, so much so that the bottom few meters of the cliff - where it met the grass of the clearing - was entirely hidden behind the greenery. Emma paused for a moment, looking like she was trying to find her bearings and peering carefully at the cliff. "Ah, there it is," she finally smiled, her eyes locking onto a specific point of the rock, which, at least to my untrained eyes, looked no different from any other part of it. She started walking forward, moving to one of the bushes, reaching out an arm, and pulling the loose hanging branches of said bush to the side, revealing what could only be described as a crack.

I'm not sure why, but I was expecting an actual cave, or an actual cave entrance at the very least, the sort of thing a bear would use as a place to hibernate. Were there bears in Germany? Instead, there was just a crack in the wall, a little taller than I was and just a little wider than I would be if I walked in sideways. To be honest, if I were a little fatter, I'd never be able to get in, and neither would Emma if her chest were any more prominent than it was.

Not that I'd spent much time looking at it... but now that I thought about it...

I took a glance, one single glance, and she fucking caught me! My head turned to look at her, my eyes catching her in profile as she held out the bushes and looked at the crack into the cave system with a smile filled with nostalgia and pride at her own memory and navigational prowess. She was still gorgeous; there was no other way to describe her. I had thought that already on more than a few occasions, but it had been her eyes, her smile, her voice, or her general presence that had captivated me before. I'd never really had much of a chance before that moment to truly appreciate her body.

As you may have guessed from the women in my life before now, I never found the stick insect women who spent more time in a gym than in their own beds to be particularly attractive. I preferred my women to have an actual shape to them: actual curves, actual hips, actual breasts; I wanted to be able to look at them and see the femininity in them, not marvel at how slim they were. Slimness was overrated; I wasn't slim; I was in decent shape, but I wasn't what could accurately be called skinny, and neither was Emma. But that, to me, made her even more beautiful. Her hips flared out to just the right amount, her ass protruded behind her just the right distance, and her proud, prominent breasts, easily among the nicest I had ever seen with my own eyes, stood enticingly and naturally on her chest. She was a real woman.

I sucked in a deep, appreciative breath as I gazed at her; for those few seconds, this stunning creature held my entire attention. Then my eyes drifted upward... and straight into hers. She had been looking at me for most, if not all, of my staring episode.

I cleared my throat with a short, embarrassed cough and flicked my gaze to the crack in the wall, but not before noticing the amused look on her face.

So much for leadership.

"How big are they?" I asked, trying to change the subject before realizing how else that could be interpreted. "The caves, I mean."

She stifled a snorted laugh before turning her head to peer into the crack, too. "They're pretty big, about a dozen large caverns, some the size of a cathedral, and all of them are connected by tunnels that run all through the mountain. Then there are the tunnels that shoot off to nowhere in particular. It took us years to explore it all properly when we were kids, but there were some parts the adults thought were too dangerous to explore, so I'm not really sure how deep it actually goes. Still, there are plenty of places to hide and rest without having to worry about being found. Even if they find the cave entrance, it would be very easy to hear them coming. Sounds tend to travel a lot in there."

I nodded and cast a look over my shoulder to the woods behind us. From here, it looked like just another calm and peaceful part of the world. There was only the slightest trace of the smoke in the sky from the castle above the trees, and, as far as my eyes and senses were concerned, there was nothing following us in any direction as far back as the castle. But that was unlikely to stay that way for long. "Okay, it's a good place to hide for the night. We can get some rest and then work out our next steps in the morning. I should be up to full power by then, so I will be able to get us out of here safely if they are still in the area. But by then, I'd imagine they would have gotten the hell out of Dodge. A castle spontaneously going up in a ball of fire and then collapsing tends to draw a lot of attention to itself, and attention is one thing they don't want. If they haven't found us in a few hours, I doubt they'll stick around."

Emma just looked at me and nodded. She seemed to trust me and my word implicitly. If I said I could keep us safe after some rest, then that was good enough for her. Now that the deferential treatment had been pointed out to me, I could see it. I had just made a leadership decision, and Emma's trust in me allowed her to just accept it and follow it without question or hesitation.

I still didn't know how I felt about that.

"Okay. Ladies first," I nodded to the gap. "Or, you know, people who know where they're going first."

********

As I have already said, the cave was just a cave. Albeit one that had an incredibly well-hidden and cramped little entrance to it, but as soon as I squeezed myself through the opening, a few feet behind Emma, and dragged myself through the two or three meters of enclosing rock, I stepped out into... well, a cave. It wasn't massive; it wasn't one of those Cathedral-sized caverns that she had told me about, but it was still easily big enough to not just fit my whole apartment into but the entire upstairs of the Queen's Head with a little room to spare. Aside from the odd chunk of rock, the floor of the cave was filled with a fine, grey, sand-like dust, and small, slowly absorbing puddles were dotted around the ground, made from the rhythmic drips falling from above. Contrary to what I expected to see in a cave, the ceiling was smooth and arched, seeming to merge seamlessly into the curved walls. The only light was from the crack in the wall, and long shadows seemed to stretch out into the darkness.

But through that darkness, barely visible in the low light, I could just about make out the entrance to one of the tunnels she had told me about.

"I don't have anything for light," Emma finally said as I finished looking around.

"Yeah, stopping to pick up a flashlight or a packet of candles would probably have been a bad idea at the time, though," I smiled at her despite her not being able to see me. "Let me see what I can do."

If I had some sort of internal system that told me how much power I was using or how much I had left, what I didn't have was any way of telling how much power individual abilities were using. For example, I knew that my bulletproof skin didn't use any power whatsoever unless it was actually hit by something, and then the strength drained from me would depend on what it was that hit me, how hard it struck, and how fast it was traveling. Basically, the amount of power it would have taken to stop it in its tracks. I knew that making fire, as I had done in Donetsk and at the castle, didn't actually use up as much as you would think; I wasn't really creating anything; I was manipulating the air, and that was what was combusting.

That became important the moment I activated my "Cat eye" ability. The low-light vision that Jeeves had found for me outside that same Inquisition office during the gunfight. The instant I activated it, the cave seemed to light up as if bathed by perfect daytime. That lasted about twenty seconds before that internal system started to sound the alarm. Apparently, for reasons that I couldn't begin to comprehend, that ability used more power than I had to spare.

Okay, option number two it is, then.

I held my hand out, my palm facing upward, and let a small orb of fire grow in the space above it. It was small, it was weak, it was nothing like as hot or powerful as the flames that had turned the castle to ash, but it was bright enough to fill the cave with light. Apparently, manipulating that tiny amount of air just enough to ignite it used significantly less power than doing something to my eyes, or the light hitting them, or whatever it was that Cat eye actually did.

Emma gasped as her eyes found my palm, then flicked up to wander around the cave. There was a smile, another one of those nostalgic ones that seemed filled with memories of happier times, on her face for a few moments before she took a deep breath and started forward. "We should go deeper," she said as I began to follow. "I know a place where we can rest safely."

I nodded as I stepped into my place next to her. "My place next to her;" that was an interesting thought, and yet one that seemed to naturally filter into my mind. She was looking ahead, letting memory guide her to the place she appeared to know so well, but my eyes were firmly fixed on her. I couldn't tell you what I was thinking at that moment; yes, she was beautiful. Yes, she was brilliant. Yes, she seemed to hold the respect of people I respected myself, and yes, she had a body to die for. But there was something more about her, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. It was like I was seeing her in her natural environment, which was an odd thing to say in a cave. I had called her a princess, and I had meant it at the time. But although she technically was one-the granddaughter of the Queen of this chapter of the Inquisition-I had also meant it in the way that only petulant, self-important, opinionated people who had never been outside of their little bubble could be. That morning, in her office, I couldn't imagine ever looking at this woman and feeling that there was more to her than what was being thrown in my face, and yet, here I was.

She had seen the very worst of what life and war could do to people. She had suffered the sort of loss that most people couldn't comprehend. She had, as I had put it earlier, seen the bodies and smelled the blood, and, unlike me when I had been in that position, she wasn't a raging ball of uncontrollable fury. She was hurting in a way that I knew all too well, but she wasn't succumbing to it; she wasn't losing herself to it; she wasn't letting that anger and pain consume her as I had done.

She was... I don't know. I had always told myself that my response to the things that had happened to me had been about survival, and although I still believed that, she was surviving too, but in a much different way. There was a strength to her, a fortitude that seemed totally at odds with the girl I had met a few hours earlier. But more than that, there was a grace in the way she was doing it. I was the animal: she was right about that, and when an animal gets bitten, they bite back. It's instinct. She wasn't an animal. When I had said that during our fight at the office, I really had meant it as an attack, even if she now thought it was just a statement of fact. I really didn't, and still didn't, think she had it in her to fight back, but therein lay the difference. She was better than that, and to fight back was to lower herself to the level of the people we were fighting against. I had always found those people to be painfully, hopelessly naive, but now, seeing it in practice, I couldn't help but admit, even to myself, that I admired her.

Holding convictions and maintaining your principles was, as I had told her so confidently earlier, easy when there weren't people shooting at you. But she'd had people shooting at her, she'd been right beside me through our flight from the castle, and although she had finally given in, although she had finally been forced to see that it was either them or us, although she had finally given me permission to let loose, she was still holding onto her moral principles. The only difference was that she was now seeing them through the lens of what had happened to her. She was seeing the Praetorians as the enemy instead of just anyone who killed another of our kind. They had attacked, and I had defended. They had come to the castle looking for a fight, and I had been forced to give them one or let myself, her, and everyone else die for their cause. She saw what I had been made to do, what I had been forced to become, and she understood.

That was the part that had been so draining in her office. She didn't understand, she couldn't understand, and so I had lost all inclination to try to explain it to her in the face of her attitude.

But she understood now.

She was relying on me to keep her safe. She needed me to protect her. She was totally dependent on me if she wanted to see her mother again or even survive the next few hours. She hated what I had needed to do to get us this far; she hated the idea of what I would need to do if we were found, but-and here was the difference the last few hours had hammered into her-she understood why they were necessary. So now, that hatred seemed to be aimed at the people who deserved it, the people who had pushed me into a corner and forced me to act.

And yes, hatred really was the word.

I couldn't tell you how I knew, but I could feel it radiating off her in waves. Outwardly, she was calm, composed, and generally holding her shit together, but inside, she was seething. The part of her that had been so viscerally opposed to the idea that any of our kind could deserve death had not just been washed away by the day's events; it had been obliterated. She was sorry-for lack of a better word-that things had to have happened the way they did, but she wouldn't shed a single tear for any of the Praetorians who had been caught up in those firestorms. Their screams, their pain, the terror in their eyes, they deserved all of it. She may never become the sort of person who would relish in the annihilation of our enemy, but that didn't mean she would offer them a single shred of pity or remorse. They had brought it on themselves, and the animal beside her had made them pay.

There was a small, a very small consolation in that. They hadn't taken the lives of her father and her friends and gotten away with it. Justice, if that is what we were calling it, had been swift and entirely without mercy.

"You okay?" she asked. I hadn't realized that she had been looking at me, her face etched with concern. "You seemed a million miles away then."

"Yeah, I'm okay," I offered a weak smile back. "Just thinking. I do that sometimes when I'm tired."

"You only think when you're tired?" she smirked teasingly.

"Yup, I'm not very good at it any other time. But when I'm tired, I stop trying to avoid it."

She giggled softly. "We should find you somewhere to rest then before you hurt yourself."

I hadn't been paying much attention, at least not consciously, but we had traveled a fair way into the cave system while I had been thinking. The first tunnel had brought us out into a much larger, much more jagged-looking cave. Stalactites and stalagmites seemed to reach out everywhere, each one trying to bridge the gap from floor to ceiling of this cavern. The floor itself was a lot less even, too, and much more rocky than the first chamber we had been in. There was a pronounced angle to the cave, the entire ground seeming to slope down toward the left-hand side of it, and although I couldn't see that far through the weak light of my fire, I could hear the sound of running water. It was like this whole chamber was falling off into a ravine that carved its way through the center, but we weren't heading that way. Sticking to a barely noticeable patch of flatter, smoother rocks to the right - something that looked almost like a man-made path - we hugged the wall until we found another tunnel hidden behind a rock formation that looked to have grown around an eons-old instance of those 'mites and 'tites finally connecting. It was a tunnel that I would never have been able to find without Emma's guidance. I didn't even see that it was there until we were only a few feet away from it.

That tunnel led another few hundred feet into the mountain, where it split into three. One heading right, one heading up an incline to the left, and the third-the one we took-taking a sharp descent a few meters further along the path to the left. The floor was slippery, countless years of water erosion scouring the grip from the ground, and both of us had to slide down on our feet while leaning back to hold onto the floor. It wasn't an easy descent by any stretch of the imagination. More than that, it wasn't quiet, either. Imagining armed men trying to follow us down here without alerting us to their presence was more than just impossible; it was laughable. We'd be able to hear them coming from anywhere in the cave system, and that was if they found it in the first place.

The bottom of that slope ended in another cavern; although this one was not only much smaller, it was much lower, too, both of us having to stoop to get through it without hitting our heads on the ceiling. There was another tunnel straight ahead, but Emma stopped me before I could take more than a few steps. "Don't wanna go down there," she cringed with a shake of her head. "That leads to some pretty dangerous drops, it's one of the places my Dad and the others didn't want us exploring. C'mon, we're going this way." She spun around and, in another instance of there being a tunnel I would never have seen without Emma pointing it out, found another opening behind us. This one wasn't quite as hidden as the last, but the edges of it seemed to blur together like the formation of the rock surface on each side of it had been intentionally carved to make it look like a solid wall unless you moved to just the right angle to be able to look into it.

"Jesus, it's like a maze down here," I chuckled with a shake of my head. "Finding the bathroom in the night is gonna be fun."

She laughed again. "It's not far now, just through here," she said as she led me into the hidden tunnel. "We used to call this one the camping cave. If we ever stayed the night here, this was the one we slept in. It's big, flat, and the ground is, or was, covered in sand, so it was pretty comfortable as well."

"Comfortable for a cave," I added.

"Better than a chicken's lip." She giggled.

"This is true," I nodded as we stepped out of the comparatively short tunnel and into the camping cave. We stopped and looked around.

It is an odd feeling to be met with the past life of someone who, essentially, is a stranger to you. The only way I could really think to describe it was to move into a friend's childhood home, then go into the loft and find that their stuff was still there. Relics from their childhood, things that their parents deemed valuable or meaningful enough to keep, stuff that, to anyone else, would be less than worthless but held worth to them. Drawings and craft projects from when they were children, report cards, Christmas trees and decorations, old clothes, unneeded suitcases, things that were kept 'just in case' they were ever needed again. That is, in a manner of speaking, exactly what I walked into.

But instead of Christmas trees that hadn't seen the outside of their boxes in a decade, we found the old, charred circles of stone from campfires of years ago, discarded pans and pots. Old, empty cans of food, a discarded pair of old socks, and a dozen other things that spoke of a history of fun and warmth so deep below the surface of the earth. This was a cave that had seen camping trips, family times, fun with friends, a life of innocence and safety from so long ago; all of it left behind in the belief that it would be used again one day in the future.

Emma had known where we were going; she obviously knew what the cave looked like, but just like a trip into that loft, she had clearly forgotten about the things that had been left here, and a choked, heartbroken sob burst from her lips as her eyes glided over the same relics that mine were.

I pulled her into my arms, wrapping them around her as she buried her head into my shoulder and let the pain and the shock wash over her. "I'm sorry," I whispered, running one hand through her hair, the other around her waist, and the ball of fire floating up to a point above us. "I know how much it hurts."

"I didn't expect..."

"I know," I kept whispering as soothingly as I could. "And little things like this will keep jumping out at you. There's no way around it. Your entire sense of normal has been smashed, and you're gonna be reminded of that over and over again. And it really fucking hurts. But you'll get through it; it will take time, but you'll be okay."

"How can I be okay?" she cried. I could feel the wetness of her tears against the remains of my tattered shirt. "How can any of this be okay?"

"Because what's the alternative?" I asked, lifting her head away and looking down into her red and puffy eyes. "We have to be okay; we have to live our lives because if we don't, they win. Even if they lose, they still win. They want to take everything from us, but we won't let them. Look around," I nodded to the room around us. She turned and looked around at the long discarded and forgotten items. "Those are memories. Memories of good times with your Dad. Yes, right now, they're making you miss him even more; they are making you feel the pain, but that's not what they are. They are memories, and those bastards don't get to take those from you. They are yours, they are only yours, and only you get to decide how you see them. You are too strong to let them taint the memory of better times."

She held my eyes, that strength behind them flaring again for a moment before it crumbled. "They're all gone." she sobbed, crashing her face back into my chest.

"So we live in their honor. We never forget them; we never forget who they were to us, but we go on. Because not going on is an insult to who they were. You are strong, you are independent, you are vibrant, and you are beautiful, just like your Dad raised you to be. Not being those things is a disservice to his memory. The Praetorians don't get to change that, they don't get to rewrite history, and those fuckers only have that sort of power over you if you let them. We aren't going to let them, are we?"

She was looking up at me now. She had snapped her head back and had been staring into my eyes since the moment I had called her beautiful. I hadn't meant it to come out like that, but... well, when I started talking, my tired brain didn't seem to want to stop.

I swallowed hard. "Are we?" I repeated

She shook her head. "No, we're not."

"Then look," I nodded out into the cave. "And remember."

She took a deep breath and turned, being sure to stay within the hold of my arms. I could see the glisten of tears as they ran down her cheeks, but her lips gradually curled up into a small, soft smile until her eyes landed on those socks, and a snort of laughter burst from her lips.

"I told him they were here!" She blurted out. I didn't say anything; I just let her remember. "Those were my Dad's favorite socks; he said they were the only ones that didn't rub his feet when in his walking boots or his formal shoes. We came down here for my birthday one year and were climbing down to the water in that second cave when he fell in. He took them off to dry them, and he must've left them here, although he swore that he'd put them back in his bag. He thought Jamie and I were playing a prank on him and hiding them. I told them they must've still been down here, he just... I guess he never got the chance to come back for them."

"How long ago was that?"

"Oh gosh, I must've been around... twelve, maybe? I'm not sure. We used to come down here a lot."

"You've not been to these caves since you were twelve?"

"Oh no, we came down here a lot of times since then; we just didn't climb all the way down to here. We usually took that incline up to the left at the intersection; there are a lot of smaller caves up there, and they're all a lot like this one, just smaller. Good for hide and seek. We didn't come down here much unless we were camping."

I nodded with a chuckle. "So Bob whipped his socks off to let them dry and then forgot about them."

"Or we doused the fire and left him in the dark," she giggled with another tearful sniff. "We were always playing pranks like that on him. He'd pretend to be angry about it, but he was awful at hiding his smile."

"I bet he got you back, though."

She giggled again. "Oh yes. One time, I came home from school, and he had glued everything in my bedroom to the ceiling, perfectly in place, even down to gluing my comforter to my bed and taping my stuffed animals to the chair. Then, he spent the next few hours looking at me as if I was speaking a foreign language when I complained about it. Like everything had always been like that. I thought I was going crazy by the time he finally cracked up laughing."

I chuckled. I had gotten to know Bob well enough over the past few months to be more than familiar with that teasing, fun side of him. He had been so formal and cautious when we had first met, and I had trusted him about as far as I could throw him. Okay, that was a bad choice of words; with my powers able to seriously amplify my strength, I could probably have thrown him pretty far. At the time, I had called him Bob just as a way to piss him off, to show my defiance at the power display the Inquisition was trying to put on by having our first official meeting at the International Court of Justice. As soon as Isabelle had started to play along, so had he, and it had turned into a symbol of our alliance and our friendship. But now that I had gotten to know them-Isabelle, Bob, and the rest of their chapter of Inquisitors-I had started to believe that the ICJ was probably the perfect place to represent their real identity. They stood for unity, they stood for justice, and they stood for honor, despite the lies told about them by the Conclave and the efforts of the Praetorians to undermine them. They had come to be the strongest, most steadfast allies I could have asked for.

And now Bob was dead. Isabelle was missing - presumed safe, but assumptions had a way of biting me in the ass - and the rest of their chapter was, well, I didn't know. Clearly, a lot of them were dead; the Praetorian attack had seen to that, and an unknown number had been working for the Praetorians themselves. The rest were... somewhere else. I had no idea how large the chapter was, I didn't have the first idea how many loyal Inquisitors were going about their lives and their business, totally oblivious to the events of the last twenty-four hours.

All I knew was that I was sworn to protect potentially the last of that royal line, not because she was royalty but because Bob, her father, my friend, had made me promise to. More than that, something about Emma was endearing her to me more and more; something connected me to her. Maybe it was just her link to her family, perhaps it was those sparks that had so inexplicably jumped between us in the castle, maybe I just saw a lot of myself and what I had been through in her. But, as I watched her smile at the memories of happier times, I could feel that resolve harden.

Nothing was going to happen to her while I was still alive to stop it.

"You need to sleep," Emma said with a deep sigh, pulling my thoughts back to the present. "You look like you're about to keel over."

"I'm not gonna lie," I smiled back, "I feel about the same, too."

"How long are you going to need?"

"To sleep?" I clarified, waiting for her to nod before frowning. "Honestly, I have no idea. I've never really used that amount of power before, at least not in one go. A couple of hours should get me recharged enough for us to move. Are you okay, though? For food and sleep and everything, I mean?"

She nodded. "I ate just before I met with you this morning, so I'm okay for now, and I don't think I'd be able to sleep if I wanted to."

I rested my hand on her shoulder, offering a soft smile. "You'll sleep when you're ready. Let me light that old fireplace so you have some light, but wake me if you need anything. Even if it's just to talk."

"Thank you," she returned my smile. Then, she watched as the little ball of fire up by the ceiling started to descend to the old stone circle close to one side of the cavern, igniting the dried kindling inside it in an instant. The room seemed to brighten as the fire took hold, and after a minute or so, its warmth started to fight away the coldness in the air that came from being so far underground.

I sighed wearily, starting to feel that tiredness clawing at me, and looked around. There was a slight rise in the floor off to the right of where we were standing, as good a place as any to get my head down. I released my hand from her shoulder, walked over to it, and laid myself down. I would be lying if I said it was comfortable, but considering we were in a literal cave, it was a lot more comfortable than I had expected. It was more than enough to sleep.

Emma stood where she was, looking at the fire and letting her eyes wander around the cave for a few more moments before she walked over and sat herself down next to me.

As if weights attached them to the ground, my eyes seemed to pull themselves closed, and I drifted off to sleep almost immediately.

********

The world was awash with fire.

Fields of it, towering flames licking at the heavens and consuming the remains of shattered buildings that littered the landscape as far as the eye could see. It didn't take long for me to recognize this as the dream that had haunted me for months.

First, it was the tunnel, with that Dragon/Bear beast thing hunting us down. The faces of the Evos I had been fleeing with were still as fresh in my mind as they had been the morning after. One of them, a man who had looked over his shoulder in pure dread at the creature stalking us, had been Nathan, one of the men who had invaded my city during the battle at the compound, only to be met by Faye and the nightmare she had inflicted upon them, the man who had surrendered instead of being butchered like his friends, the man who had first recognized me as the Dynast - the Praetorians' word for the one who bore the mantle - and, most confusingly, a man who I wouldn't meet for almost six months after the night I had that first nightmare.

The second dream was a few months later, not long after Becky's death. I had stood amongst the shattered remains of my friends, watching hordes of those beast things rushing toward me. It had been a warning of what would happen to me and the people I love if I didn't act. It had been the moment I had fully committed myself to fighting back; I had stood my ground against the tide, then obliterated any of those fucking creatures that had gotten anywhere near me. Then I had charged after the ones that tried to get away.

Now, it would seem, I was witnessing the aftermath of my choices. The creatures, the hulking mass of blackened spines, burning eyes, gaping jaws, and billowing smoke, were in full retreat. Bodies of their brethren, or what was left of them, were scattered everywhere. Some were blown to pieces, others reduced to smoldering piles of ash, and the rest were running. It didn't take a genius to work out that this was my dream's interpretation of what had happened at the compound and the castle after it.

A gust of wind and a deafening, booming roar drew my gaze upward. The Dragon, massive enough to blot out what little of the mindscape sun made it through the swirling clouds of smoke, flew overhead. His piercing, inscrutable gaze wandered over the battlefield, casting judgment on all it surveyed, man and beast alike. His eyes fell on me for only a moment, barely a second, but I could feel that wave of determination and resolve rise within me. I had accepted my place as his mantle, as his bearer, and I was carrying out his will without question or fear of that judgment. There were things the Dragon couldn't do, places it couldn't go without me, tasks it couldn't complete; that was my job, and - judging by the almost overwhelming sense of strength I got from that single glance - he was perfectly happy with what I was doing and how I was doing it.

That was good enough for me.

For my part, I was just walking through the fires of that judgment. I didn't really know where I was going, only that my destination lay further along the fire-flanked road on which I was traveling. Up ahead, through the flames and smoke, was a hill, and upon it sat a city.

Rome.

I knew it without having to even think about it. Not that the city on the hill looked anything like the actual city of Rome. It was just a thicket of tall buildings on the crest of a rise, conspicuous by the fact that they seemed to be the only ones that weren't currently on fire. More than that, the hordes of those creatures appeared to be in a headlong retreat toward it. Not all of them, others were scattering in different directions, a few of them braving the fires and fleeing me by the fastest route available, not caring where they ended up. Others looked like they had simply given up the fight, the fires in their eyes extinguished and the smoke rolling over their jagged jaws dissipating on the winds. They were just hunched over and walking away... five of them seemed to be heading in the direction from which I had come, their forms nowhere near as massive as the beast I had encountered in the tunnels and still significantly smaller than the ones stampeding toward the city.

There were a group of them behind me, too, different from the rest. There were still the same creatures, but they were not like any of the others I had seen in the dream so far. Where they were black and smokey, these were more like a lighter grey, but the fire in their eyes was much more pronounced. The oily black spines on their backs didn't seem to soak in the light, but reflected it with a vague, hazy aura, and the claws on their feet, so obvious and dangerous on the others, had retracted into their cat-like toes. But they weren't attacking me, they were following. I frowned at them for a moment before realizing who they were. Nathan and the others who had surrendered to me in the compound. They had apparently done more than just recognize me as the Dynast, they had committed to following me, and, at least according to this dream, they were somehow still alive, although I didn't have the first idea how that could have happened yet.

I was starting to get the hang of these dreamscape metaphors, but I still didn't have the first idea of where they were coming from.

That would be a question for later, I guessed.

The war was reaching its final stages now. The Praetorians, in their attempt on the castle, had broken the back of their own army; they had thrown the strongest of their forces against me and - although they had scored some victories in the deaths of Bob, Rhodri, some Inquisitors, and forced the rest of us to flee - they had suffered massive casualties in the process. The remains of the dead around me, those from the compound in Russia, those from my fight through Ukraine, and those burned out of existence at the castle, were strewn everywhere and were more than enough proof of their losses. Emma had called our kind an endangered species; I hadn't given that statement much thought before now, but it was clear that our kind made up only a tiny percentage of the population of Earth, and the Praetorians only a small percentage of that number. They weren't the rampaging hordes that I had imagined. Neither their power nor their resources were limitless, and I had put a pretty massive dent in both of them.

They had gambled, and they had lost. And now, with my warning to Marco doubtlessly echoing in their ears and the failure of their assault, they were running.

"Good," I growled after them, my voice carrying on the wind to every one of those creatures and to the city that was harboring them. "Run, little vermin. There is no rock you can hide beneath, no hole deep enough to protect you from what's coming, and no amount of running or fighting can save you! Your time will come soon enough, and your deaths will not be pleasant. I'll burn and bury you right here next to your friends, and then you'll know the real meaning of power!"

The Dragon roared again, the boom of its anger rumbling across the land. The blasted remains of buildings, already consumed by fire, collapsed around me; the wafts of smoke billowed under the movement of the air, all of it starting to flow toward the city on the howling winds, and two sets of eyes, mine and his, were now firmly, unwaveringly fixed on our next target.

This war was going to end, and unless they killed us first, Rome - or at least this metaphorical version of it - would be a pile of smoldering ruins before we were done, and every single one of those creatures would join their friends in the fires.

I could feel that malevolent smile pulling at my lips, the smirking scowl of a predator watching his prey make that single bad turn that would leave them cornered and trapped. I could feel the power refilling inside me, the coiling anger at the deaths of my friends fueling the strength of my will, of the Dragon's will. I could feel the fatigue leaving my body; I could feel that reservoir refilling; I could feel the fire behind my eyes blazing back into furious, righteous life again. I could feel their sense of dread and confusion. I could feel their entire sense of reality starting to crumble. I could feel everything. I was everything. I was the mantle; I held the highest form of moral authority; I was the bringer of judgment; I was the arbiter of justice; I was the harbinger of death and destruction for all who earned the Dragon's wrath.

And I was coming for them.

Then, suddenly, I wasn't alone.

I didn't know if the figure beside me, bathed in golden light, had been there for the entire time I had been fixated on the fleeing swarm of my enemies or if it had just appeared at that moment, but she was there.

Yes... she.

And I would know the shape of that body anywhere.

Emma...

She was walking with me; she wasn't stopping me, she wasn't there to give voice to her outrage, she wasn't there to criticize my actions as she had in her office, she was just there, watching.

I stopped and looked at her, really looked at her, and just as I did, she stopped and looked at me, too. Her eyes bore into me, as if she were searching my very soul for something, for answers, for understanding.

I cocked my head to the side, and she did the same thing. Examining me as I examined her. She was mirroring me.

No, that was wrong. She wasn't mirroring me...

She was my mirror.

Where I was wrath, she embodied mercy. Where I was violence, she was the calm. Where I was judgment, she offered acceptance. She was the counterpoint to everything I had been for so long. I was cold, calculated fury; she was the warm serenity of an embrace. I was the tight, unyielding grip on my pain and my rage; she was the gentle whisper of compassion. She was... she was my mirror.

She was everything I was not. She was the total antithesis of who and what I was, the complete opposite of me in every single way. And yet we were the same. There couldn't be one without the other, and although this was the first time I had seen her, at least in the dream, I instantly seemed to understand that she had always been here, just out of sight. But now she wasn't hiding; she was here with me, literally standing in the fires with me. This wasn't my fight anymore; it was ours.

But she wasn't my opposite, not exactly; that would imply some sort of opposition; she was simply the other half of me, of us, of this pre-ordained partnership. If I was the war, she was the peace that would follow it or the peace that could be lost if I didn't do my part.

Her eyes seemed to widen at the same time mine did, understanding dawning on her at the same instant it did on me.

She wasn't here to fight beside me; that wasn't her part to play. She was watching because if she wanted to win the peace, she needed to see what was at stake if it failed; she needed to see how that peace was won and if I was to be the one fighting it - alone, if necessary - then she was going to be the one that would provide me with a place to rest after it was over. That was her role, that was her part, and if I was the mantle of the Dragon's judgment, she was the bearer of the Dragon's rule.

No, we weren't opposites, we were each one side of the Dragon's greater whole.

She took a single step back, the first move she had made that didn't mirror mine since she first appeared to me. She turned her head to look at the city on the hills and the retreating hordes, a pained expression on her face. Then, turning her gaze back to me, she sighed deeply and offered me a single nod.

She understood. She knew what needed to be done. Although she didn't like it, it went against everything she saw and wanted to see when she looked out at the world; she knew that to reach that world, for us to build it, I needed to finish what had been started.

Now, she was looking at me, really looking at me in a way that nobody, not even Faye, had ever looked at me before. Faye, Charlotte, any woman who had ever truly been inside my city and saw the real me had only ever seen me as I saw myself. It was an odd distinction to make, but that isn't what Emma was seeing now. She was seeing the version of me that the Dragon had entrusted with this sacred task. She saw the weight of it; she saw the burden; she saw the pain and the rage and the fury and the grief that came with it. She saw me not for who I was but for what I was. This was a side of me that neither Charlotte nor Faye could have ever understood, not through lack of effort or even through lack of comprehension, but because they weren't in these fires. Emma was. She was right here, right now; she could feel the weight of the Dragon's gaze - and yes, he was looking at her too with just as much acceptance and approval as he gave me - she could feel the howl of the wind, and the heat of the fires, she could see the enemy, she could feel the danger they posed, she understood the damage they could do to the world she wanted to see, and she understood what was being expected of me in order to stop them. She saw it all; she saw the things that not even I had been brave enough to look at... because in seeing that side of me, she also saw my weakness.             

And despite my strength, I was weak in all the ways that she was strong. Mercy, compassion, any shred of the idea that the fuckers running to the perceived safety of their city deserved anything less than painful, merciless death, the picture of the peace that would follow this war, all of it was a distant echo to the turmoils of my mind. I had no idea what that peace looked like; I had even less of an idea of how it could be built. I didn't have a clue how a world in which this bullshit would never happen again could even begin to be formed. I couldn't even imagine a world where my life wasn't governed by the fury at my enemies, let alone one when they were gone. As the old adage went, I couldn't see the forest for the trees; I couldn't see past the end of my own nose; I just had the strength to keep going, to keep fighting, despite that weakness.

But she could see the bigger picture; she knew how to govern, and she knew how to win the peace that I would have fought so hard to achieve. She was the half that was needed for our kind to really understand the one thing that they had never had...

Unity.

And there it was, the realization that filled both of us at the same instant. That was the Dragon's plan all along, that was his desire, his end goal. He wasn't just about the justice I would mete out to those in so much need of it; that was just the part I played, that was just the role I had been allowed to see, and now we were seeing the rest of it. A future for our people, one that wasn't defined by conflict and opposition, one where we could be allowed to live, really live... in peace.

But first...

I turned to look at the same city Emma had glanced at. I saw the same hordes, I saw the same dangers, but to me, they were not a threat; they were a challenge, and it was one I would meet head-on.

I looked back at Emma, then up at the soaring Dragon, then back to her again, and offered her the same nod she had given me.

I would win her her peace.

I turned back toward the city and started to walk. But her hand snapped out, wordlessly wrapping around my wrist and pulling me back toward her. I didn't get the chance to pull away, I didn't get to tell her that the enemy was that way, and they needed to be dealt with, I didn't get time to argue with her...

Because she pressed her lips to mine. A searing, affectionate, loving kiss that spoke more to me than any words ever could. I had her unwavering, complete support and understanding. I had seen her, and she had seen me. She would be my rock; she would be my anchor, and she would be there for me in a way that nobody else ever could be because nobody else could have ever understood - because that's what I was to her. But she understood. No matter what happened, no matter what I needed to do, no matter the weight on my shoulders, she would understand because she had seen what I had seen; she had stood in the fires with me as I had stood in them with her. She had seen the real me; she had seen what this war was doing to me, and we had both accepted each other completely; she could feel the struggles I had within me, how much I hated the things I had been forced to do and the person I had been forced to become, and despite all of it, she understood. She would help me back to the man I had been before I had been thrust into this world and into this fight. She would be the strength I needed when mine faltered; she would help me rebuild, as I would help her survive. The kiss was a promise that we would be in this together until the end.

********

My eyes snapped open.

I didn't even bother to check how long I had been asleep; the amount of power coursing through my veins was more than enough evidence that it had been long enough. Emma, at some point, had clearly let herself drift off to sleep as well, her body lying right there next to mine, but her eyes had snapped open at the exact moment that mine did.

We held each other's gaze for an eternally long few heartbeats, her eyes dilated and flushed, mine wide and hungry... and we fell together.

Her lips crushed against mine with a heat that pulled the breath right out of me. This wasn't the regal, proper, timid girl who I had known since our flight from the castle, nor was it the fiery, opinionated woman I had met just before that; this was something different. There was a need in that kiss, one that I felt mirrored in every fiber of my being.

She rolled herself toward me just as I rolled toward her. Our bodies - now on their sides on the sandy cave floor - pressed tight against each other as if we were both trying to get as physically close to each other as possible, but never once did we let our lips part.

This wasn't just a kiss; it was going to be so much more than that; this was the solidification of a connection that had been eons in the making, like we were always meant to be. A connection the Dragon may have fostered, but we were both accepting without question or hesitation. This connection was older than us; it was older than our parents, it was older than the castle that I had burned down; it was older than the settlement that had grown into the town in which I had been born. It was older than any of the history that had surrounded both of us for our entire lives; Mankind - be that humans or our evolutionary offshoot of them - had barely mastered the use of stone tools when these events had been set in motion; and yet it was something that both of us seemed to understand instinctively... It was timeless. It transcended thought or logic; this was purely about feeling and a new, powerful, burgeoning connection. It was, by far, the most visceral and staggering one that I had ever felt.

The bonding process, just like the one that had only been in its infancy when Faye was gunned down - only much, much stronger - now burst to life within both of us, taking us completely by surprise. Part of me knew what was happening, I had, after all, felt something similar before, but it had never even occurred to me that an Evo could bond with an Inquisitor before now. Yet the logic, the questions, the mystery of it all was lost to the moment and the immediate, complete acceptance of it all on both of our parts.

But most of all, I could feel her. I could feel the aching in the pit of her stomach, one that had formed so recently for very different reasons and was now being filled by the moment she now felt with me. I could feel the heat inside her; I could feel the yearning for a connection she never thought she would find; I could feel the craving for acceptance she had wrestled with her entire life, someone who saw her, all of her, and accepted her entirely because of, not in spite of, what they saw.

Everything about her, things I hadn't even noticed before now, was suddenly driving me crazy. The sounds of her breathing, the feel of her breath wafting over my skin, the smell of her, the feel of that glorious chest pressed into mine, the tickle of her hair against my cheek, the way her fingers moved to my hip and started to stroke, half-tentatively, half-teasingly, up and down between my side and my thigh, the soft moans she was breathing into my lips. The depth of her brilliant, bottomless blue, glazed-over eyes on the few moments they flickered open to stare at nothing, I could feel her heart hammering against her chest just as mine was doing; I could feel the slight tremble of her body as the need, the excitement, and the nerves coursed through every vein, and I don't know how, but I knew that she could feel all these things in me as well.

But I wanted... no, I needed more.

Our hands started moving at the exact same moment, as if some unseen force was choreographing us. Mine moved down to the curve of her ass, pulling her against me just a little tighter. I knew she would be able to feel my hardness, even through my jeans; I knew she would be able to feel that throb of need, as I could feel the heat of her and the soft, almost instinctive grinding that her hips started performing as soon as that contact was made. Her hands hooked themselves under the hem of my tattered shirt. It had been one of my favorite Tees before the carnage of the castle, but now it was a ruined patchwork of tears and burns from the impact of bullets and the searing heat of the fire. Still, though, she was peeling it up my back with a care and respect that bordered on reverence.

Inevitably, our lips had to break for her to pull it over my head, but as soon as it was clear, she pushed me onto my back, swung a leg over my hip, and pulled herself over me. My back crashed back into the ground as she pressed her lips back to mine, her hands running through my hair as she ground herself needily and hungrily against my bulging pants. My hands were on her back in an instant, pulling her against me while exploring the fact that she was woefully overdressed.

Just as hers had done, my hands found the hem of her top. Hers seemed to have survived the events of the castle in much better shape than mine had; blotches of soot and dirt had stained the once-pristine white V-neck; there were a few snagged marks where branches had caught her in the woods, but otherwise, it bore none of the damage that my shirt did. That thought was quickly buried beneath the acres of soft, smooth skin that revealed itself to me as I slowly dragged her shirt up over her head. This time, however, as it passed her head, she sat herself up on me, holding my eyes with an intensity that took my breath away, and she reached behind her to unclasp the black lace bra that had done a herculean job of holding up her gorgeous, voluptuous chest.

They bounced free in what I could only describe as the most awe-inspiring breast drop in history. Being male, I had no idea how breast sizes worked, but I remembered Becky telling me that she was a prime example of the fabled Double-D. Emma's, however, were significantly larger than that. I would struggle to hold each of them in two hands, and her diamond-hard nipples peaked invitingly above the wrinkled, excited flesh of her areola. She giggled softly, her eyes fixed on mine as they wandered in veneration over her half-naked body.

I had seen naked women before, lots of times, in fact. I hadn't exactly been inexperienced before I had gained my powers, and that first month after leaving the hospital - before I met Evie - had been an exercise in carnal greed and experimentation. Not to mention my regular forays into porn in my youth. I had slept with more women in the past year than I could ever have thought possible - or reasonable - in my life before it, but there was one thing that the last year had taught me beyond anything else. Well, two things...

Firstly, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. Was Emma the stereotypical bombshell found on catwalks and porn shoots? No, not even close. Was she one of those girls who dressed in skintight dresses and shook their asses on dance floors all over the world? Nope, I couldn't imagine her being anything of the sort. But would she turn heads on the street? Abso-fucking-lutely. But what made her even more beautiful in my eyes was the fact that she would never have noticed those looks and would argue to the death against them ever having happened. There was a naturalness to her beauty, an effortlessness, perhaps even a maturity to it - not that she looked old by any stretch of the imagination. It was more that I was seeing a woman, a real woman before me, as opposed to those adolescent fantasies that Hollywood and Playboy thought all men should like. There were blotches and blemishes on her skin; there were curves in places she probably wasn't happy with, and there were lines and wrinkles that were airbrushed out of any other woman's photoshoots; they were those little imperfections that women the world over had been told for their entire lives that they should be ashamed of... and they were stunning! And each of those supposed imperfections added up to a tapestry of utter beauty that - out of the billions of women on Earth - only Emma had. It was unique to her, and at that moment, and forever more, it was mine. She was mine. And of all the women I had seen, all the girls I had been with over my lifetime, I had never - never - seen a more gorgeous creature.

Let alone one that was sitting, half-naked, on my lap, looking at me with the same desire that I was looking at her with.

The second thing I learned was that sex without connection is meaningless. It's just a messy way to jerk off. Some people enjoy that meaninglessness; some people are perfectly okay with sticking their dick in someone - or having a dick stuck into them - just to be able to say they had, and yes, that first month after the hospital - not to mention a few times since - it had been me doing that exact same thing. But the exercise had left me feeling hollow. I had blown off some steam and worked out some stresses and frustrations, but that was about it; there was nothing deeper. And after a lifetime of searching for a connection that I had never found as a child with my family, the emptiness that came from cheap, meaningless sex had put me off the idea forever. My connection to Becky was something new in my life, and Philippa had been an extension of that. My relationship with Charlotte had been built on trust, and our few times together had been about seeking comfort as well as blowing off that steam. Still, only Faye had ever shown me the sort of connection I had always craved, but even that had been cut off during its infancy. It had never been allowed to develop into something more profound.

But now, here, with Emma, I finally realized that I had found something I hadn't consciously known I had been looking for. We were bonding-in real-time. The connection to someone, something that transcended mere words like 'love' or 'intimacy' was something that I had known of on a theoretical basis, but it wasn't something that I had ever thought to be more than just the stories of some bored romance novel writers, let alone something that I would ever actually find. Yet here I was, my back pressed into the fine sand of the cave floor, looking up at this woman through the flickering light of the fire and knowing - completely - that this thing that was happening between us was something that would change our lives forever; something that had the power to redefine who we were, and something that would not only bind us for the rest of our lives, but it was something that had always been there, waiting for us to find it and to accept it. If there was ever something that could be called fate, this was it, except our version of fate had wings and liked to set things on fire.

My thoughts were pulled back to the moment when Emma took both of my hands, lifting them slowly and deliberately and placing them on her chest. Who was I to argue? I let my hands move on their own, my eyes flicking between her heaving tits and her eyes, then back again as my fingers hefted and kneaded the gorgeous, generous flesh of her chest while my thumbs teased over each nipple. She wanted me; she wanted me more than she had ever even thought possible to want a man before. I could feel it pouring out of her as if I could read her like any normal human, except this was pure instinct. I wasn't trying to read her; she was an Inquisitor. It would have been pointless. But this connection between us was letting me feel her as if it were the most natural thing on Earth, just like I assumed she was feeling me. She loved the way I looked at her, she loved the way I touched her, she had loved it when I had thought of her as mine, and she loved that I was as invested in this bond as she found herself being. I sat up suddenly, taking control of the situation out of her hands - so to speak - and moved one of mine from her chest to the small of her back, pulling her in tight as I latched my greedy lips onto the firm flesh of her nipple. Lashing my tongue against it, raking my teeth over it, and sucking firmly as I arched a little to press my hardness against her more ardently.

A soft mewl of pleasure left her lips, and she ground herself onto me a little harder as my hand slid down over the swell of her ass and onto one of her cheeks, pulling her a little tighter and a little more forcefully onto me.

"Pete..." she whispered to the warm cave air as she let her head fall back, pressing her chest harder into my lips. It was not said as the start of a sentence, just a simple articulation of our moment, of our connection, of our bond. I groaned into her nipple in response, letting my lips and my tongue vibrate onto her with the sound and pulling another moan of pleasure from her beautiful, parted lips. Her hands were in my hair again, needily pulling my head harder onto her chest, holding and cradling me there as if my parting from her would have been the greatest crime to have ever befallen our people, which, I suppose, in a manner of speaking, was true.

But I wasn't done with her. I knew what needed to be done, but more importantly, I knew what she needed me to do. As had happened before, I could feel what she wanted from me. I could see that roadmap to her pleasure in my mind, and I was more than willing to follow it.

Still without removing my lips from her skin, I lifted. The moan that fell from her lips was all the proof I needed that my mind wasn't playing tricks on me as I turned her over and laid her down, pressing myself down onto her. I took my hand from her ass, crushed as it was against the floor, and moved it to hers on the back of my head, removing them and - holding her wrists in one powerful grip - moved them above her head and held them there. Emma wasn't submissive in any other part of her life; she held the sort of power and responsibility that require complete and constant control, a permanent state of vigilance, but at this moment, with me, she wanted nothing more than to surrender, to give herself over to a man she trusted with every fiber of her being. She wasn't a pet, or an object, or a possession, nor would I ever treat her like that, but there was a time and a place in her life where she wanted to be led, where she wanted to follow, and I was more than happy to lead.

I shouldn't have known this; I shouldn't have been able to read her as easily and completely as I could. I couldn't even begin to understand what was happening to us or how I knew the things I knew. But the moment consumed and banished those thoughts as if they were puffs of smoke in a storm of melding emotions, and another moan from her - deeper and more guttural this time - told me that she was giving herself to me as totally as I was demanding from her.

Her fingers flexed once, only once, and then they relaxed as I finally pulled away from her breast and held her gaze.

"We are one," We both whispered simultaneously, without the first idea of where the words were coming from. "You are mine, I am yours, and we are forever. With this moment, we complete our bond for the rest of our lifetime."

There was a reason the word 'lifetime' was singular; we didn't have separate lifetimes anymore; there was only one, and it was ours. We both just stared at each other for a moment, breathing heavily and just... watching. We should have been shocked or even a little surprised by the fact that we had both seemingly spontaneously uttered an oath of commitment to each other, apparently out of nowhere, but the moment was too profound to do anything other than just accept it. It was all-encompassing, it was all-consuming, but most of all, it was just plain true. I was hers now, in every way I could be, and she was mine. I owned her heart, I possessed her soul, I held the very fabric of her being in my palm, and it was a responsibility and an honor I suddenly knew I wouldn't part with for the world.

She sucked in a deep, quivering breath as a wave of goosebumps blossomed over her skin, a wash of them spreading from her delicate throat, down over her pale, perfect chest, over the curves of her abdomen, and under the waistband of her pants. I watched them move, I watched her flush, and I knew where I needed to go next.

Shifting my weight a little, I reached down and hooked my fingers into the last of her clothing-pants and panties caught in my grasp before I started to pull them down. She planted her feet onto the ground, arching her back in a way that did some incredible things to her chest, and lifted her hips to let me strip the rest of her. I had taken my hands off her wrists to peel the last of her clothes off, but she hadn't even attempted to move them from their place above her head.

Suddenly, she was naked.

I was leaning back on my haunches, just looking at her, admiring her, taking in all that I possessed with a fire in my chest that I didn't even know was possible. Pure heat and molten magma flooded through my veins. This was Emma, my Emma, and every single inch of her, inside and out, was presented to me in a way that just screamed sensuality. She probably had no idea what she was doing to me at that moment, and I doubt she would have believed me even if I told her; she wasn't the sort of woman who would ever have believed that a man - let alone one that she desired - could see her as anything other than the flawed girl who looked back at her in the mirror every morning. But if she could only have seen herself through my eyes at that moment, she would have understood one single, inescapable fact... and it really was a fact.

I had never... never... craved, yearned for, needed, or wanted anyone or anything more than I felt for her in that moment. She was... Everything.

I opened my mouth to say something, anything, just to tell her how incredible she looked, how much I wanted her, anything at all, but only a single word came out, one that sent a shiver running through her body and caused her lower lips to slicken in renewed excitement and anticipation.

"Mine."

Her response was a breathy whisper of need that somehow managed to match my own. "Yours."

My pants were off in a heartbeat, and my boxers, too. I wasn't even consciously aware of taking them off, but I was suddenly just as naked as she was. Then I was back over her. My hand shot out and clamped around her wrists again, pulling another suck of trembling breath past her lips as I pressed my granite-hard manhood against her center. I could feel the heat and the wetness from her, the engorged lips, ready and eager to take me as I held her eyes.

This was it; this was the moment, and both of us knew it. This connection, this bonding, this thing that the Dragon had started, it was pre-ordained; it was the culmination of events that had begun long before either of us had been born. It was, if one wanted to be technical, something that was happening to us rather than something we were a part of. But, for it to happen as it was meant to, it still needed to be a choice; we both needed to choose this, and this was the moment where it needed to be made. Either of us could still walk away, the bond would fail, and things would go back to the way they were. Or we could choose to accept it.

I held Emma's eyes, the tip of my cock pressed against the molten heat of her core and waited.

She took another deep breath. "Forever," she whispered the final part of her sentence with a nod.

I sank into her. All of my weight, all of my power, all of my passion, all of my bottomless, endless affection, all of my... everything... all of it pushed into her in a single fluid motion. She gasped loudly, her back arching again and her eyes fluttering as she came immediately. I didn't know if it was the bond, or if it was the need, or if she just orgasmed really easily, and frankly, I didn't care, she was cumming around my cock, her pussy spasming and contracting as her breath hitched in her throat.

I pulled back to the tip of my cock and drove into her again. And again. And again. Over and over, each thrust came a little quicker than the one before it as I held her wrists above her head, held her eyes with mine, and held her body open for me as if that was the way it was always meant to be. My free hand, the one that had been resting on her waist, slid down and pulled one of her legs higher up onto my hip, the other one mimicking the motion to open her up a little more for me and letting me sink a little deeper into her. But this wasn't a rut, this wasn't a fuck, no matter the dynamic of power between us, no matter the declarations we had made to each other, this wasn't a mindless, instinctive race to the finish. I wanted her pleasure; of course I did, and I wanted to take mine out of her, but this was more than that. This was a coupling on the most fundamental levels of our being. It was our joining. But most of all, it was the moment we not only made our choices but committed to them and then felt the consequences of that.

Those sparks, the ones that had flashed between us in the castle, started appearing again, but this time, they were coming from every single point that our bodies touched, inside and out. And instead of being little jolts of energy that felt like small static shocks, these were vast, open torrents of flowing power. From me to her, from her to me, we were melding through our very skin. Her eyes stayed open, even as she came down from that first penetrative high, locked onto mine with that same intensity as they had shown earlier. She wanted this as much as I did. For this moment, nothing else mattered. Not the war, not the death, not the loss or the pain, or the grief, or anything else. Nothing outside of this cave, nothing outside of this moment, even existed, let alone mattered, and our bond blazed into solid being inside us both. I didn't need to look, but I could feel my city changing, morphing, and reforming to accommodate not only this new profound addition to my life but also this mystical and mysterious exchange of power between us.

With each new thrust, and with each new gasped breath from her, it grew and solidified, our bond, our connection, our new place in each others' lives, call it what you will, it was there, and it was real. Her legs were being knocked a little higher with each drive into her until her thighs were clamped onto my sides, and her feet locked themselves together over the small of my back. She wasn't pulling me into her, that wasn't her part in this, but she was making damned sure I wouldn't pull away either. Her tits bounced harder with each thrust, my chest being positioned at just the right height above her to make her nipples drag over my skin with each sway of them. Her breathing was becoming quicker with the pace, too, and the waves of it washed over the skin of my throat and my shoulders as I kept stroking into her.

I could feel my balls tapping against her ass; I could feel her wetness leaking out of her, coating me like she was marking her territory, making the slide of my cock into her depths almost frictionless as I kept going. I could feel her fingers clenching and relaxing, over and over, as the next of her highs started building. I could feel it; I could feel that knot growing in her stomach and slowly sinking down to the place it knew it would find the rapture it craved, I could feel her breathing quicken even more, and I could feel my cock throb inside her, like a silent permission for her body to do what it needed to do. Part of her wanted me to tell her to hold it; it wanted me to own her and use her completely, but although I knew that time would come, it wasn't now. Now wasn't the moment to establish a sort of dominance over her, it wasn't the time to put her into the positions I wanted her, take what I needed from her, and slam all of the pleasure I was capable of giving into her. This was about something deeper, more profound, and much more important.

This was our first. It was the first moment our bond came into being. It was the first time we had uttered words that would become our anchor in the storms yet to come. It was the first time we had found sanctuary and security in each other. It was the first time we had seen what the Dragon had wanted us to see. It was the first time we had gone from being Emma and me to being us.

"Pete," she breathed again. "Please, I need this. I need you. Please... Inside. I need to feel it."

"Say it again," I commanded, my voice not harsh but still firm. She knew exactly what I meant without me needing to clarify.

"I'm yours," she moaned between gasps, her eyes widening as the precipice of her climax drew closer. "I'm completely yours. You have me, all of me. I need you to claim me. Make it forever! Fuck, Pete, I love you!"

"Cum for me, Emma," I groaned as I felt myself harden and swell inside her. "You are mine! Fuck!"

The sound that came from her lips was one of pure, carnal, animalistic pleasure, and yet was almost completely silent. A scream that was carried away on the wash of her breath as her back arched again. Her pussy clamped down onto me like a vice, milking me and coaxing me to that point of no return. I wasn't fighting it, though, I was just watching this stunningly beautiful creature, my Emma, writhe and thrash beneath me, her eyes rolling as she rode the wave of the pleasure I had given her. The rhythmic spasms of her center were too much, though. I drove into her one last time, holding in as deep as I could, and released.

Stars seemed to explode behind my eyes, pinpricks of light that seemed to flash around not only my vision but around my city as well, it was like fireworks celebrating the birth of a new nation were going off through every single part of me. I moaned deeply, dropping down onto her again, crushing her chest to mine as I filled her, and kissed her with every single ounce of passion and pleasure I had. "I love you," I whispered into her lips between kisses. I had known the woman for less than a day, and yet I knew it was true. I knew her as well as I knew myself, and aside from an annoying habit of showing mercy to criminals and traitors, she was as perfect a match for me as I could have ever imagined. For now, we just breathed, holding each other, slowly moving together as we let the aftershocks of our shared high roll through us.

"I love you," she beamed back into my lips as my hand slid a little higher on her wrists and laced my fingers with hers. "I..." her smile faltered, and her brow tightened. "I feel weird," she said, her voice laced with concern. I frowned back at her, about to ask what she meant when I felt it, too. "Something is happening. Something's wrong..." Her eyes widened as they met mine. "Pete... I...."

I felt myself falling forward, my vision darkening as her rolling, closing eyes faded from sight.

Existence shimmered to nothingness.

********

I stood on a platform, a bit like how I imagined what the very top of one of those circular castle turrets would have looked like if it were made out of the same white marble as my city's walls. Except instead of looking out over the mindscape, as I always had at times like these, I was looking out over a bank of clouds. They were everywhere, as far as the eye could see, everywhere I looked. The round stone platform was above them, but looking over the edge let me see that it wasn't floating, it was perched on the side of some enormously tall mountain, the slopes of which seemed to disappear down into the haze.

"Hello? Where am I?" I heard an achingly familiar voice echo from behind me. I spun around to find Emma standing at the base of a massive flight of stairs leading from the round platform and further up the mountain.

"Emma?" I called out to her.

She spun around, her eyes finding me before she rushed over and into my arms. "Pete? What happened? Where are we?"

"I... I don't know," I said slowly, although I had to admit there was something infuriatingly familiar to what I had felt when I passed out. It had been the same feeling as every other time I had entered the mindscape, except this wasn't the mindscape, or at least not a version I had ever seen before. More than that, Emma was here. She was an Inquisitor; she shouldn't have been able to get here at all, even if it was the mindscape. "Jeeves?"

Emma blinked at me. "Jeeves? Who's Jeeves?"

"Did any of those Evos you talked to ever tell you about their mind's city?" She nodded. "It's a little like this, and coming here certainly felt like entering the mindscape, but it's like nothing I've ever seen before. Jeeves is..." I frowned, not really sure how to explain it. "Jeeves is something unique to me, I think. He's how I communicate with my subconscious."

Emma's face scrunched up as about a thousand questions all rushed through her mind at once.

"Not unique anymore, Sir," Jeeves's smiling face shimmered into existence with the rest of him beside us. Emma yelped in surprise and jumped behind me. "Welcome, both of you."

"It's okay," I smiled to Emma, letting her step out from behind me and to her place next to me... there was that thought again, although this time, it felt right.... I laced my hand with hers. "Jeeves is basically me, although he does have something of a flair for the dramatic." I smiled at her as she squeezed my hand nervously. I turned to the aged butler look-alike in front of us. "Jeeves, what the hell is going on?"

"Not a clue, Sir. Well, I do, but as far as I am aware, it should be impossible."

"Dude, seriously, now really isn't the time for being cryptic."

Jeeves' knowing grin grew a little wider before he turned to Emma. "If I am correct, My lady, you are about to have a very hectic workday." Jeeves then turned and stepped toward the edge of the platform. "The mindscape, if you think about it," he started, "is a way for Evos' minds to connect. It's broad, open, and unobstructed to anything other than a city's walls, right?"

Emma and I both nodded. From the few Evos she had spoken to, she had heard a lot about the cities of the mind and had apparently deciphered the meaning of the mindscape for herself. But she was still listening intently. I, on the other hand, had never really thought about it. The mindscape was just a big field I could either look at from my walls or kill people on when they attacked me. I had never really given much consideration to the grander meaning of it all.

"The mindscape represents, for lack of a better term, the connection between all Evos." Jeeves finished but held up his hand as I made to speak. "I know, Emma isn't an Evo, so what is she doing here? The answer is simple." Somehow that grin seemed to grow even wider until it threatened to crack his face wide open. "She isn't connected to the mindscape; she's connected to you. My Lady has long since theorized that Evos and Inquisitors are two offshoots of the same species," a nod to Emma, "a fact that the Praetorians recently confirmed, so the question that everyone should have been asking is why Evos have cities while Inquisitors don't?"

Emma frowned as her hand relaxed a little in mine. It was another expression of professional curiosity, like the one she had shown in her office, rather than one of concern, but I could almost see her mind working.

"To answer this question, we must first contemplate how an Evo's city comes into being." Jeeves had started to pace now, tracking a path back and forth into the white stone floor as he laid out his thinking to me, or my thinking to me, or whatever. "For the overwhelming majority of Evos, the only way to awaken, to access one's city, was with the help of another Evo. At first, we thought that this guide actually helped unlock something by the use of his power, but M'lady's dealings with rogues - people the Conclave believed to be a myth - show otherwise. They somehow managed to unlock their cities without any outside assistance. So it is my theory that people's cities are always there, and Evos are either just shown how to unlock it or find a way to access it themselves, and that influx of power we felt from Marco when he awakened you was literally just his method of establishing a connection, of crossing the mindscape if you will."

"O...kay..." I drawled, sort of following.

"So if the cities are always there for Evos," Emma picked up Jeeve's train of thought, "they should always be there for Inquisitors as well," She said excitedly, her nerves now well and truly gone. "But..."

"How has an Inquisitor never unlocked their city?" Jeeves finished and waited for Emma to nod. "Well, firstly, we don't know that they haven't," he shrugged. "If the Evos and Inquisitors of the Ancient Roman era worked together as the Praetorians suggested, Inquisitors with cities could have been a common thing; it's just that these accounts have been lost to time. But I think the main reason why Inquisitors don't unlock their cities is because they don't know that they can, and, I imagine, it is a slightly more complicated process than Rogue Evos, which is why nobody has ever managed it accidentally." He stopped speaking, looking very pleased with himself.

"And that process would be?" I gestured my hand at Jeeves to keep going.

"I don't have the first idea, Sir. But in your cases, I would guess that it is some combination of your bonding process and those sparks of energy that have been jumping between you."

"Urgh, of course," Emma groaned. "With the schism between our people, how often would an Inquisitor and an Evo be in close enough proximity to each other, without trying to kill each other, for any sort of energy transfer to take place?"

"Okay," I squinted at the pair of them, "if we have unlocked her city, where is it?"

Jeeves smirked at me, "I think Sir is forgetting something."

"Obviously,"

"How did you unlock your city?"

"Marco..."

"No," Jeeves interrupted. "He helped you unlock your mind; he wasn't there when you first found your city. That was..."

"Oh shit, you're right. That was Charlotte."

"I'm sorry, I'm not following," Emma frowned. "What difference does that make?"

"It's a trust thing," I explained, starting to see where this was going. "For me to be able to see my city, I had to... I don't know... like, accept that she was going to see it with me or something like that."

"So how did you do that?"

"She..." I cleared my throat. "She kissed me."

Emma's frown was instantly replaced by a look of surprise, followed by a slowly spreading smirk. "Oh, she did, did she? Do you kiss all of your female friends?" I tried not to look too sheepish but probably failed. "We may have to have a chat about how close you are to these friends of yours," she grinned teasingly. "But I still don't understand how that helps."

I sighed, scratching the back of my head. "Okay, in my case, I was very closed off, and to show your city to someone is to literally let them see your mind, the rawest, most real version of it. There are only your walls holding them back. In a battle, it's different; you force the issue, but for friends, it's a trust and acceptance thing. By kissing her, it was a gesture of affection and trust that let my mind... I don't know... kinda accept that she wasn't there to harm me, I think."

Emma seemed to consider that for a moment before nodding. "Okay, that makes sense. Evos seem to convey emotions through the mindscape, so that gesture would let you gauge her intentions. Do we, I don't know, do the same?"

"One way to find out, I guess," I shrugged, chuckling at the absurdity of transactional kissing after what we had just been through.

I grabbed her hand and yanked her toward me, pulling her giggling lips to mine and kissing her hard, turning her, dipping her low in my arms, and then pulling her back up again. Her face was flushed, she was giggling uncontrollably, her eyes were dilated, and she was grinning like the village idiot, but she kept her hand on my chest as she steadied herself on her feet again. "Okay, for future reference, you can do that any time you like."

"Noted."

"So, did it work?" She asked, looking out over the clouds.

"I don't know, I can't see anything."

Jeeves cleared his throat, pulling both of our gazes to him before he nodded with a smug, triumphant grin at the peak of the mountain behind us. We both spun around, letting our eyes wander up the massive white staircase toward the mountaintop.

There, at its peak, was Emma's city.

I laced my fingers back with hers again, smiling at her slack-jawed, awe-filled expression. Then, I started leading her toward the stairs. "Welcome home," I whispered into her ear with a proud, loving smile. She looked back at me in wonder. "Shall we?"