Monique Lamb touched the Bluetooth headset in her ear. “I’ve landed.”

Winnemucca, Nevada might as well have been an advertisement for the 1950s right down to the diner with the smiling kid out front, roses on his cheeks, his hair dark, and that suit with the skinny tie. Antique. When did vintage become irony? She wanted to ask the mascot for Bob’s Drive-Inn, home of the Big Boy Burger. He wasn’t about to answer. Too much gray dust in his teeth. Too much sunshine baking him yellow. The place smelled like desert heat and wasteland plants withering.

Broken glass speared the big gap-toothed windows of the derelict restaurant. Monique Lamb would’ve bet there wasn’t a single unbroken pane in the entire town. And nothing human walked the weedy asphalt. That was why she was there.

“If you need backup, we can get you backup.” Her new assistant wasn’t working out. She couldn’t remember his name, which wasn’t a good sign, and so she often thought of him as Mother Hen.

“I’ll take it from here. Don’t get paranoid on me.”

Her assistant was right there to answer. “I’m not paranoid. If I were paranoid, I would have a full strike team on the perimeter, ready to descend on your position in seconds. Oh, wait, I do. You didn’t see pictures of what that thing did to the people.”

“I hope you have helicopters. I like helicopters,” Monique said.

“Yes. We have several types of helicopters. Small, medium, and extra spicy.” Mother Hen could go on all day. He was funny, in a kind of non-funny way. Or maybe it was because she liked to be the one who told the jokes.

“I need radio silence,” she said. “I’ll call in Security if I feel like I’m in trouble. I need radio silence.”

“No, you won’t.”

Mother Hen was smart. “No, I won’t.”

Monique let out a long breath, focusing on the moment, and the loose robes around her. The security detail would have combat boots and fatigues and guns, lots of guns. As for Monique, she preferred her Battle Artist robes, earthy brown, edged in forest green. She could only imagine how odd she looked, a short, stocky woman, short dark hair, dark eyed, with olive-colored skin, walking through a deserted town like she was an Artist looking for a Battle Arena.

She did have a backpack, an unavoidable necessity, with food, water, her phone, and a Whitney container.

She wore her Masonry Emerald on her right ring finger. Her left ring finger was for her wedding ring, a bit too many diamonds, a bit too shiny. Logan bought it for her as a joke a long time ago. She wasn’t married. She wore it because she didn’t intend on every marrying, and it kept men at bay.

Logan had never been funny. Now, he was tragic, which had a terrible humor to it.

She let go of the thoughts easily. After nearly thirty years of training, she was accustomed to dropping thoughts, no matter how hard, or sticky, or troublesome. And Logan was all those things.

She breathed in and out, feeling her prana, in every part of her body. She walked barefoot across shards of broken glass, her skin not breaking. A Chevy from the 1950s had lost its window in the sixties years since Winnemucca had been abandoned. What wasn’t faded paint was rust. Around her, single-story ranch homes clustered. Not a single bird tweeted in the afternoon heat. The silence was so profound, she heard her own heartbeat.

She loved the isolation and purity of the desert. Among all the death, she felt her own life keenly. Clearing her mind, she sharpened her senses, which was a simple thing to do, out in the world, away from board rooms, conference rooms, and her office. No matter how many windows she had there, it was still a cage, a necessary prison, for her to do her work.

SoulFire was her work, people counted on her, fifty-thousand employees spread across the globe. What she did in her corner office cage, was important but this felt purer. She’d not been out on a collection run in a long time, too long.

Official reports claimed there was a class-five cambion in the middle of the Great Basin Preserve. It had eaten through campers at the Rye Patch Reservoir to the southwest along the old I-80 highway. They’d rerouted the road to the south after SoulFire lobbyists insisted they needed the open space, hence the Great Basin Preserve, though the trains still went through. As long as they didn’t stop, they were fine. Amtrak was doing well, offering scenic tours of the Nowhere, or that was what they called the Great Basin Preserve, which stretched from Fort Tahoe in California to Salt Lake City in Utah.

Monique squinted against the blinding sun, only March, and the afternoon heat was nearly unbearable, shimmering off the horizon of flat wasteland. She wasn’t sure she liked the name, the Nowhere, since this place was somewhere, and vitally important to her company.

She’d grown up in the Underbelly of Bay City, or she’d survived her childhood, which was closer to the truth. For a while, she’d fled the poverty and chaos and lived in Platte River City. The PRC was on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, where Cherry Creek ran into the Platte. She and her friends called eastern Colorado the Wilds. That had made a certain amount of sense. They lived in the civilization of the PRC, on the edges, the fringes—in eastern Aurora, where daemons still roamed, but were easily dealt with. The more savage cambions haunted the Wilds.

It was ironic. Monique’s upbringing was anything but tame. Yet places like the Wilds and the Nowhere, miles of flat dust and sage, had seemed far more dangerous than her own living room back in the Underbelly. It definitely wasn’t. Yet the mind is a tricky thing. Skewed perceptions can create whole worlds that are nothing but half-truths or outright lies.

The Winnemucca houses ended in more dust, dirt, clinging sage, and yellowed bunchgrass. She walked to the end of the block and onto the dust, feeling at the softness with her toes.

She reached out with a Fourth Study technique from her Quintessence sign. Awareness. She felt the shifting energies of the world, the prana leaking into her from the life around her, however small, however meager in the Nowhere. A mouse sat chewing on a seed in the tall grass in front of her. A grouse kicked up dirt in the back yard of the house on her right.

In the house on her left, roaches in the kitchen, and she saw the black and white tile, the layer of dust on the linoleum floor, a box of baking soda left in the kitchen cupboard. Whoever had lived there had taken their major appliances. Sure, with the cambion rise of the 1950s, it became harder and harder for people to live out here. That and the urbanization of the modern age.

She kept a hold of her Awareness, even as her prana ticked away. She felt her way through the houses, searching, hunting. She had to smile, thinking of her sociology classes at Boulder University west of the PRC. The pull of urbanization, the push of the cambion crisis, had accelerated human migration into large cities. It had seemed inevitable, especially with factory farming and the corporatization of agriculture, but it all could’ve turned out differently.

She’d loved her classes as much as she loved the Battle Arts. The academic leagues had honed her skills to a fine point. But it was really a teacher she found, a strange old woman, living in the Sierra Nevada’s in California, that had elevated her craft. Monique was easily recruited into the corporate world.

People praised her talent. She kept up the ruse, saying it was easy, and she was born to fight. That was true. Her home had been a battlefield where the victor received all the spoils, there was no mercy, and no quarter given. Surviving her childhood in the Underbelly had been a zero-sum game of all or nothing. She’d learned. She’d learned her lessons perhaps a little too well. Then again, Logan and Calabra were both brutal teachers.

In the basement, the third house on the left, she felt the shift of energy. A daemon was there, something dark and powerful, in a cool, damp place.

She dropped her Awareness study. She jogged down the middle of the street, sweating. She touched behind her left ear. “Status.”

The implant in her neck beeped on. The soothing female electronic voice answered her. Sharira is one hundred percent. Prana is ninety-nine percent.

The door to the little house was shut, locked, by the owners, though they’d been paid for their land. General Energy and Strength, sixty years ago, had the foresight to scoop up as much land as they could. Around the new millennia, they were renamed, rebranded, as SoulFire Incorporated, with a brand spanking new website and everything. There had been ad campaign to recruit talent. Your parents might have worked for GES, but you’ll work for SoulFire.

Monique reached back, channeling the prana up through right hand to create a stone fist behind her. The massive set of rock knuckles battered through the lock and the door rocketed open, smashing through the drywall on the other side.

She wanted the cambion in the basement to hear her. She didn’t relish going down those steps to take it on, not when it was obviously hostile. Class-five. This thing could power an aircraft carrier or a Mars rocket. It might just land SoulFire a fat Lockheed-Martin contract. Monique knew Phil Lord, the CEO, was working on getting more government contracts.

Monique stomped across the floor of the living room, through a little archway, and into the kitchen, where the roaches were. She opened a cupboard. The baking soda had leaked out of the box and filled the corner.

A low wall separated the kitchen from the staircase leading down. A back door opened to the backyard’s weed collection.

Monique expected the cambion to come swooshing up the staircase. Instead, all she was given was darkness, the opening into the basement a dark mouth. She needed light and decided on Moon Blind from the Luna sign. Prana left her fingertips to shine light down into the basement, which was bare concrete, a webby shelf covered the wall holding grimy glass jars and a few cans of food, bulging and spoiled.

Monique stepped down the stairs. Adrenaline spiked her system. Yowza, it felt good.

This cambion was unique, troublesomely so. Daemons rarely murdered. They never planned an ambush. Yet, Monique had the sense that it was luring her into a trap.

That would be interesting. She reached out with her fingertips for light and stepped down the steps. The amount of energy in the basement made her prana prickle. The hair on her arms stood straight up.

She paused to wonder if her Whitney unit could contain the daemon. She slung the backpack around, dropped it to the floor, and retrieved the box. She’d already prepped the Whitney. Theoretically, it should be able to hold the cambion.

She turned the corner.

Her light spilled out of her, taking a bit more prana, but she had plenty. She’d exceeded the Jupiter Belt ten years prior. After that, she’d tried to keep track of her power, but at some stage, trying to measure her Studies became more work than it was worth.

Something was in the corner, something dark. A second later it shimmered, growing brighter, a ball of dim light, seething. It lashed out with bright tentacles.

She dropped the backpack. Then she used Summon Armor and Summon Weapon from the Metallurgy sign, a Harmonic sign to her natural Masonry abilities. Her robes turned to steel and from her right hand emerged a steel sword. She slashed through the tentacles. They fell to the ground wriggling there, before vanishing into a smoke which then dissipated.

The thing rolled to her right, a ball of translucent energy, with coils that caught her light and prismed it out into multi-color light. It lashed out again. The tip of it touched her, striking her prana, which made her wince. Her sword vanished but her robes continued to protect her from other slashes.

Back to Masonry, she pushed the concrete up into a rough bowl, drawing dirt up with it. Dust drifted down from the ceiling. She continued to raise the concrete until it wasn’t just a bowl, but it became a globe, sealing the daemon inside.

Or most of it. There was a physical component to the creature, mostly, it was manifested prana, yet the tentacles lashed out of the concrete orb, but those were blind attacks. She avoided them easily, ducked, backed away when necessary, or otherwise dodged them easily. She stepped around the lashing coils. As she walked, she triggered the Whitney, the blue lights flashing. The device took hold of the daemon’s energy and siphoned it in. The Whitney whined as it converted the prana into electricity, which filled the coils of the containment matrix.

That whine turned into a scream. She set the Whitney on the floor.

Monique sensed the attack seconds before the shadowy fist appeared behind her, sweeping forward toward her head.

She used the Luna ability, Ethereal Dissipation, to change her body, so that when the fist punched into her skull, she’d turned her entire sharira self into pure prana. There hadn’t been simply one cambion in the basement, but two. Ha, she’d sensed the baking soda in the cupboard but not the existence of the second daemon.

The new thing was man-shaped, shadowy, which was unusual. Ninety percent of the daemons were made of light, shapeless, but this thing was something else. It had used the tentacle cambion to distract her before attacking. The shadow man smelled like rot and something slightly spicy, a spice she couldn’t quite place. Cinnamon? Maybe. But it was like cinnamon sprinkled liberally on the corpse of a sea lion.

Monique created another steel sword, blocked the next attack, but didn’t strike right away.

The Whitney made sounds she’d never heard before, a piercing scream, technology that was seconds away from catastrophic failure.

She wasn’t going to succeed in this hunt, that was clear, and so it had become a research mission. Which was equally important.

The shadow man punched at her, and she avoided each attack easily. The thing was powerful, but it was sloppy, unrefined, a beast of a fighter. She eventually let go of her sword and let the prana flow back into her, cycling it back easily. She reached out. The shadow man, he had a definite presence, almost something like a prana core inside him. This was a completely new entity.

Monique didn’t need her steel robes and let them become cloth again. The house was doomed. The Whitney would explode, and she would have to deal with the fire. She’d lose her phone. Of course, everything was backed up on SoulFire’s Cloud, and the company would simply buy her a new one. That would be the least of the paperwork she’d have to file.

Ethereal Dissipation from Luna, coupled with a Wind Walk from the Sky sign, allowed her to float up through the ceiling and into the living room, leaving the fight behind. She jogged out of the house and walked out into the middle of the street.

She touched behind her left ear. “Status.”

Sharira is one hundred percent. Prana is eighty-five percent.

She’d been efficient at least, and her skills had kept her safe. The technology, however, had failed her.

Just in case, she used Bull Wall to draw the asphalt up in front of her as the house exploded outward. All the gas and water had long ago been turned off so there wouldn’t be fire. Just the force of the explosion itself. Debris struck her wall, pinging off it. A bathtub struck the street behind her, fracturing into a million pieces of porcelain. Drywall dust hung in the air.

She closed her eyes, and once again, used Awareness. Both the tentacled cambion and the shadow man were gone.

Her poor Mother Hen. He would’ve seen the explosion through satellite feeds, and he’d worry. Mother Hen was a worrier, very detail oriented, and most of the time, that was beneficial. Yet sometimes detailed people had a hard time seeing the big picture.

Monique didn’t have that problem. Her encounter with the entity would have long-lasting effects. It seemed the cambion crisis that had emptied out large sections of rural America was not getting better. The shadow man proved that it was only getting worse.

It would only complicate the world further. Monique’s life wasn’t about to get any simpler any time soon. And she was already juggling so much. She wasn’t sure she could add a world-altering discovery to her already complex existence. It was a problem.

That made her grin. She loved problems.

Solutions closed doors. Problems opened them.