After the recess and with the approval of the various countries the selected hosts belonged to, Anya and the others met in a much smaller presentation room with Stark, Bisset, Renn, and Mona.

“That old Thai lady says it isn’t a matter of healing, from what she can tell,” Stark told them, “so we can’t just heal everybody’s brains or anything.”

“Why not just get Renn and Chell to force Omega’s mental control over the city away?” Anya asked.

“That would essentially be playing, hmm, how do you say lutte acharnée. Pulling the rope in both directions?” Renn said.

“Tug-of-war?” Chell asked.

“Yes, something like that,” Bisset confirmed.

“It would be doing that with a human mind,” Renn continued. “Even if I won, the mind in question might not survive the process. No, we cannot simply tear away the control. We must make Omega cease on its end.”

“What if we kill it and all those people die as a result?” Kemuel asked.

“We won’t know that until we’re done, but there are some preventative measures I can take, with Chell’s help,” Renn said.

“I’ll do what I can,” Chell said in a voice that sounded apt to crack any second.

“I wanna know why it hasn’t killed them all already, like those other towns,” Stark said. “Is it just playing with them?”

“Or holding them hostage,” Mona said. “Omega’s been the funny one since a few days after the invasion started, taking off on its own and such.”

“Whatever it has planned, we will not let it happen,” Bisset said.

“We’ve discussed our strategy, but only briefly,” Renn said to Anya and the other hosts. “Time is of the essence, and now that your governments have approved your cooperation, we should be going. Do all of you have at least 35,000 RAC in your accounts?”

Everybody nodded.

“Good. There’s an item called the ‘Crown of Isolation,’and prevents basic telepathic attacks. The problem is that telepathic attacks can adjust themselves to the mind of the person they’re targeted at, so it only has a sort of general, base-line defense. Still, it will provide you with some measure of protection in case myself and Chell fall and are unable to defend you. If that happens, you are to flee London and return to the mainland as quickly as possible.”

“Are you sure you can protect us?” Li Qiu asked. “It would not do to have one us come under Omega’s control again. Dr. Immonen’s powers were not dangerous, and he managed to do significant damage.”

“I’m sure,” Renn said. “Now if there are no more immediate questions, please purchase the crowns from your RAC stores and prepare any vehicles you may require for departure. I’ll explain the rest on the way to London.”

——————————————————————

The plan Renn had concocted with Bisset and Stark was simple enough: he and Chell would provide psychic defense while at the same time tracing the telepathic trail of Omega to its source. Since this did not involve a direct “linking,” like what Immonen had done when he touched the captive alien, they would not be in danger of being overtaken.

While they were doing that, Kemuel would use his speed to scour the city in case Omega was hiding nearby, and be able to carry at least one or two other hosts (probably Chell and Li Qiu) quickly out of danger if something were to go wrong. If Omega was still in space, Li Qiu’s distance attacks should be able to hit it. Mona and her undead army and Anya’s firepower would be defense if anything more physical started to happen.

Everybody except Mona could fly or run quickly enough to make the short trip across the English Channel easy enough. Mona rode in her carriage and sipped tea as they flew along, only a few minutes away from London.

“Why’d you really want me along?” Anya asked as she flew next to Renn.

“Your powers have diverse and powerful capabilities. You;re a heavy hitter. And since I can only protect so many people, I need the heaviest hitters.”

“Uh-huh,” Anya said and continued to stare at him.

“Also, Omega taking control of Dr. Immonen gives you a personal reason to want it dead. You’ll go after it more than most other hosts,” Renn added. Anya frowned.

“You always have ulterior motives for the things you do?”

“I have my motives, same as anyone,” Renn replied. Anya’s frown deepened and she let the conversation drop. Talking to Renn was as productive as talking to a wall. His helmet concealed any expressions he might be making, his tone never varied much, and there was always the threat of him scanning her brain. Chell said reading minds directly like reading a book was next to impossible, but Anya would rather not take any chances, even with the Crown of Isolation.

The RAC store item was a simple metallic band that encircled her head. She had had Felix throughly explain the item to her and confirm that it could not be used against her in any way: no mind-linking to Renn to let him take her over, or Omega, or any other psychics. Felix had confirmed it was exactly as advertised: a defensive item that offered basic protection from psychic attacks. There were stronger variations with prices to match, but Renn, Chell, and the item descriptions assured her they would all be of limited use to prolonged psychic assault.

“Psychics are OP,” Anya muttered.

“In small bursts, maybe,” Renn said. “But we have no way to recharge like you do, and our most powerful attacks, such as mind-control, require us to be in direct contact with or at least extremely close to our targets.”

“If you say so,” Anya replied.

“London ahead,” Kemuel said over the comms as he ran below. “Looks quiet.”

“No, darling, it looks dead,” Mona added as her carriage soared above the land and the outskirts of the great city.

“Chell, make sure you’re focused on keeping things out, and mostly on Kemuel as he runs around during his search,” Renn said. “We’ll land together and look for any sign of Omega’s psychic trail if Kemuel can’t pick up a signal.”

“O-okay!” Chell said.

Renn lead them to the center of Trafalgar Square, and the hosts came to a stop at the foot of a tall, white column topped with a statue. Two vast fountains sat to Anya’s left and right, and just beyond them was the National Gallery: a grand old building lined with more columns and topped with a dark dome. Crimson banners advertising the latest displays inside fluttered in the wind and provided an occasional cracking noise as they unfurled and snapped back. The square should have been bustling with tourists and locals, but it was entirely still.

And yet, it wasn’t empty.

There were hundreds of people in the square, but all of them were as still as the statue of Nelson atop his great column behind Anya. Some of them had frozen in the middle of walking, one foot raised up but never to descend. Others had fallen over in odd poses, unbalanced by their precarious posture but still petrified in it.

“Creepy,” Chell said.

“Stay focused,” Renn said. “Kemuel, please conduct your search.”

“Got it,” the man said and zipped away.

“I’ve got him,” Chell said.

“Yeah, this is a drop strange,” Mona said as she disembarked from her carriage and observed the hundreds of unmoving people. “You picking anything up, love?”

“Yes. It’s an active effort on Omega’s part,” Renn said. “There is a trail but it’s unclear, winding. I’m working on it.”

Anya took a few steps toward one of the frozen people, then to the side, and noticed they weren’t all completely frozen.

Their eyes followed her.

Before she could say anything, one of the people unfroze and turned to face them. It was an old man with a scruff of facial hair and a very red nose.

“Thieves,” he said and pointed at them. “You know, but you do not understand.”

“What the hell?” Mona asked. She spread her cloak and dark shadows pooled out of it, along with smell of earth and mold and darker things. Skeletons crawled out of the folds of her cloak, just a few, then dozens, all of them armored and wielding enchanted weapons that glowed with magic. In a few seconds Mona was surrounded by a small army of at least a hundred skeletal soldiers.

“Steady,” Renn said. “He’s just a man.”

Unlike Immonen, the old man spoke naturally, complete with a London accent. His words were a bit stilted but otherwise he sounded normal.

“What do you want?” Anya asked.

“You,” another voice said, this one came from a blond woman.

“What you stole,” another person unfroze and took a step toward them, a young man with tattoos on his arms.

“We didn’t steal anything,” Anya said.

“Flame Dominion. Light Dominion. Gravity Dominion. Xhama Thul. Xhama Rahn. Battle Aura,” a child with a blank gaze said behind Anya and she spun, her eyes wide.

“You stole what is ours, what we cultivate,” two people said in tandem. “What we devour.”

“This is making my skin crawl,” Mona said as she continued to summon more servants. A trio of tall, floating figures in ragged cloaks appeared behind her, each one wielding a long, deadly scythe.

“Do not kill them,” Anya snapped. “They’re not themselves.”

“We do not wish to fight,” Renn said to the assembled crowd. “Can we resolve this peacefully?”

“We will resolve,” a small crowd of teenagers said. “And we will gain understanding. We will devour.”

“That does not sound peaceful,” Li Qiu said. Her gray cloak shimmered and emitted a soft blue light that surrounded her. She threw a handful of poker chip-sized silver discs onto the ground around them, then waited.

“Let these people go or I’ll burn you from the inside out,” Anya said. “You saw what I did to that big shithead in Hawaii.”

“Yes. And we gained. We devoured. No more of this, now. Your auditory infections offend,” an old woman said. Then as one, across the entire city, millions of voices said, “We will learn, and devour.”

“Shit,” Anya replied, and then the crowd around them charged forward. Anya used a strong, wide field of gravity to start pushing the crowd back, away from the little group assembled at the base of Nelson’s Column. It wasn’t hard. The people coming at them were just that: people. Ordinary humans as frail and plain as she had been several weeks ago.

They weren’t being controlled directly, by the look of it. When Immonen had been fully taken over, his movements had been jerky and awkward. These people moved just as normal humans would, save for their obviously violent intentions. Many of them picked up make-shift weapons or pulled knives from their pockets.

The idea that this would hurt any of the hosts was laughable.

But…

Keeping the people away wasn’t an issue. Them having a total disregard for their own well-being, was. As Anya’s gravity field began to pull the crowd away, many of them lunged forward more violently. They threw themselves toward the hosts, and fell on their faces. Noses broke and teeth shattered and blood sprayed across the hard ground of the square. One man tried to leap forward, snarling and cursing in a thick British accent, and landed funny on his leg and gave himself a compound fracture.

“Dammit!” Anya said and changed the gravity to force everyone who got close flat onto the ground. It would be very uncomfortable, and make it a little difficult to breathe, but it held the people still and kept them from hurting themselves.

But more were coming. The city had been silent moments ago, but now was filled with the furious roar of a mob of millions, all converging on their location.

“It’s not anywhere in the city!” Kemuel said over comms. “Or anywhere in the surrounding areas in every direction. Do you want me to keep looking?”

“No, get back here,” Renn said, his voice tense. “Whatever Omega is doing it’s doing more of it.”

“I feel it!” Chell said through a gasp of pain.

“I’m holding them!” Anya said. The little discs Li Qiu had thrown around the group crackled with energy and they were all surrounded by a transparent blue dome of light. Mona’s small army had set up a defensive perimeter around them and was shoving back against anybody that came close.

“We’ll be fine now,” Li Qiu said.

“They won’t be!” Anya snapped. “Look at them, they’re insane or something.”

A woman tried to claw her way forward across the ground and her fingernails snapped off with sharp cracks and Anya winced. The roar of car engines sounded behind them, and Anya screamed as five black taxis plowed through the crowd, running over and bashing through dozens as they sped at the hosts.

“No!” Anya said and lifted the taxis up off the ground and held them in place in their own personal gravity bubbles. There were only five of the cars, but in less than three seconds they had either killed or severely injured dozens of people. More car engines roared in the distance.

“We should just leave! If we go, they won’t charge us!” Chell said.

“No, they’ll just run into the Thames or the ocean or run until their hearts burst, or just abandoning them to Omega, and then it could move on and do this again,” Renn said. Kemuel appeared as he finished speaking, his white dreads whipping past his fast as he stopped, the wind at his back.

“I’ve been able to move a lot of people out of the way of vehicles on my way here, but it’s madness out there,” Kemuel said.

“Keep at it!” Anya said as more cars drove toward them. A blur of white and Kemuel was gone again, and people were whipped out of the line of the oncoming cars. Mona’s skeletons charged at the vehicles, yanked the drivers out, then turned the cars into immobile pieces of scrap by bashing them apart as they came near. The floating robed creatures pulled the taxi drivers out of the cars Anya held suspended in the air, and she managed to crush the taxis enough and set them down once the drivers had been removed.

The skeletons began to move the taxis and other cars into a kind of barricade around the hosts that would hopefully slow the enraged Londoners down somewhat. It wasn’t enough. The mob scrambled over the barricade, threw themselves at the skeletons and battered their own bodies in their blind fury.

Anya did her best to hold them back as gently as she could, but it wasn’t enough. The whole city had gone mad, and even as she held the hundreds of people around her at bay, she heard glass breaking in the distance as hundreds more threw themselves out of windows, more cars thumping over bodies.

London had a deathwish, and she could only delay it.