Monique walked across the flat asphalt, dust covered, wind-blown, with high electric fences topped with rolls of razor wire. The fences were for people, surely, but also for the daemons, drifting across the countryside. She’d experience, firsthand, how deadly they could be—deadly but also valuable. Funny how often those two things were connected.

Security offices stood in the difference as well as a small cluster of apartments, corporate housing for SoulFire employees, from executives, to security, to janitors.

She could’ve sent her assistant, Mother Hen down to the SoulFire storage facility on the outskirts of Carson City Nevada. Not that Nevada was that much of a state anymore. It had been reduced to two cities, Carson City was one, which stretched unbroken to Reno to the north. The Meadows was the other. The loneliest highway had become even lonelier.

Vannix House had facilities along the interstate, I-15 connecting Angel City to The Meadows. The rival company was trying to scoop up any daemons who drifted near the freeway. It was a nice idea, though she thought SoulFire was doing more of a business hunting cambions in the Great Basin Preserve…most of the time. Her recent failure wasn’t normal. Which is why she wanted to see what other daemons SoulFire associates had brought into the containment unit.

Mother Hen had harped on her about working the weekend, and though he’d offered to go to out to Carson City, he hadn’t been too thrilled. She was going to have to find him another position at SoulFire, or fire him completely. That would be a task for later on in the week.

Monday night, she wanted to check out the daemons before leaving the Nowhere. The next morning, she was due at a corporate meeting in Bay City, 8:30 a.m. She wanted to get this business done and then get home. There, she could sit on her mat and cycle in her usual place. Home was still home, at least for now. Also, she wanted to check on Logan. She got reports from the in-home care nurses, though that wasn’t the same as seeing him with her own eyes.

A Humvee buzzed up. On the side was the SoulFire log, three blue flames, flickering—one for the soul, one for the mind, and one for the body. The door opened and a young man came clattering out. Young, definitely under thirty, and a little too boyish to be called handsome, with a nose that wasn’t quite right. He had dark hair and brown eyes with flecks of green. He was in the normal suit and tie of a corporate guy. The tie would loosen, the shirt would wrinkle, during the long hours.

“Ms. Lamb!” He came over to her like a puppy trying not to trip over his feet. “Mrs. Lamb, I’m Aleksy Kowalczyk. Bob Dunmire got in touch with my boss. He said that I should escort you down into storage facility.”

Monique nodded at him. “That’s great, Aleksy. If I knew who Bob Dunmire was, that would make it even greater.”

The guy blanched. “He’s a senior VP of facilities. You wouldn’t know my boss. You wouldn’t know me. We thought that the name might mean something.”

“Bob Dunmire? That is the vanilla ice cream of executive names.” Monique held up a hand. “That was probably unfair. No, that was definitely unfair. How much do I have to pay for your silence?”

“I wouldn’t…it’s not…I’d never tell anyone. What you said was funny.” The guy was miles away from laughing.

“So you were sent here for your sense of humor?” Monique asked.

“No, I was in Bay City. I got a flight in. I was just kind of around. Not that I’m not qualified. I’m a gold-class daemon engineer. In case anything goes wrong. I can help.”

“Gold-class?” Monique was feeling shameless. How could she not mess with this guy? “They didn’t send me a platinum? I’d feel safer if they had.”

“But you are, no, it’s okay. I’ll protect you.” He then raised his hands to his mouth. “I didn’t mean that. I mean, you are fine. You’re more than fine. You’re the Chief Battle Artist. I mean, you’d protect me, not that anything bad is going to happen.”

“I’m short though,” Monique said. “And I’m not as young as I once was. I might need you, Mr. Kowalczyk. Come on.”

They approached a single concrete building with a reinforced glass door and a handscanner next to it. Monique scanned them in, the device checking her prana as well as her fingerprints. The doors opened, they moved through a lobby, and came to an elevator. Another handscanner was in the elevator. Monique touched that one as well. Her and the Kowalczyk kid zoomed down. Not far. Only a three or four floors.

The doors opened up. The racks of containment units stretched into the distance. Each aisle had a letter and each slot had a number. The smaller units were to the left, down Aisle A, each the size of a loaf of bread. The bigger ones were to the right, growing progressively bigger—the Aisle Z units were car-sized.

Aleksy took out his phone and studied it. “So, you wanted to see the last cambion that was pulled in from the Great Basin?”

“That’s why I’m here. And to refresh my memory on what all this looks like.”

Aleksy swiped his thumb across his phone. “Okay. I found it. Slot Z4. The first three slots are empty. That’s the biggest one in the place. It was caught by a team on Thursday, near Salt Lake City. Wilcox signed it in.”

Monique laughed. “First Dunshire and now Wilcox. There goes our diversity hiring policies.”

“I’m Polish. My parents are immigrants.”

That brought another laugh from Monique. “Well, good, that helps. Do you want to go first to protect me?”

“I never should’ve said that.”

“No, I’m glad you did. It gives me something to tease you about.” She followed him down the aisles. The place buzzed from the energy. The whoosh of air-conditioning settled cold air onto the cement floors. The slightly singed smell of daemons filling circuitry tickled her nose.

The guy inhaled deeply. “I love how that smells. My parents had an electronics repair store, well, they still have it. I don’t work there anymore. I grew up smelling drodes. It was exciting for a long time.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry, you don’t want to listen to me.”

“It’s fine. I’m still wondering why you pulled the short straw as my escort. I figured I’d be here alone, or with the facility manager.”

Aleksy stopped and turned. “Mr. Johnson offered to come in, but it was his daughter’s birthday today. They were going out. I said we didn’t need him.”

“It’s that keen decision-making skills that will take you far in this company.” She didn’t smile but let her eyes show she was joking. “All of your corporate dreams will come true. Is this what you dreamed about when you were ten? Working for SoulFire and escorting around sarcastic executives?”

Aleksy finally found a smile. He was relaxing. “What I really wanted? What I dreamed about? Not living where I worked. Now, I have an office in Bay City, and I have an apartment near the wharf.”

“You share an apartment.” With housing prices in the City what they were, the gold-class daemon engineer couldn’t afford his own.

“I don’t live where I work. I have a salary, benefits, and some stability. I get to travel a little bit.”

“Of course. Carson City, Nevada. It’s close to heaven, without a doubt.” Monique gestured with her hand. “Keep going, Mr. Kowalczyk.”

The found the Z4 containment unit, a huge steel box, lit up.

Monique went to the screen and pressed her palms against it. She felt the security protocols probe her core. She then reached out with her prana. She’d read Wilcox’s report. The big daemon had manifested as a long creature with broad shoulders, almost like a hyena, but with spikes jutting out of its head. Its hooves were also spiked.

Most daemons were just blobs of energy, especially the lower class of daemons called drodes. Those were grabbed and cycled or sold for pennies. Most of the cambions didn’t have a distinct shape either. Unless they were level four or higher, like the tentacles thing she’d met in Winnemucca.

As for the shadow man? That was something completely different. Daemons were pockets of prana that could be converted into electricity thanks to the various Whitney units, developed in the 19th century.

Inside the containment unit was a level-five cambion, without a doubt, and it would power several city blocks for years. Such a capture would definitely help their quarterly earnings. SoulFire had contracts with Pacific Gas and Electric Company, at least in Northern California. Vannix House in Angel City took care of SoCal.

Aleksy stood back, against the wall, while Monique reached out to check the entity. There wasn’t anything unusual about the daemon. It was big and powerful, able to manifest itself, so it could roam the world. If Wilcox hadn’t captured the daemon, it might’ve hurt someone in Salt Lake City. Daemon scrappers, hunters, might go after a cambion this size, if it were found in a city or on public property. However, a lot them might think twice about going up against something so potentially lethal.

A Battle Artist would be braver, confronting the creature, and then probably selling it to SoulFire. If the Battle Artist was ambitious, they might try to cycle the huge daemon. That was an interesting dilemma people faced. Fortune or power?

There was always the danger that a cambion that big might damage your prana or kill you outright. The safer bet was to take the money and run.

The bottom line for Monique? They were seeing more and more of the bigger daemons. It wasn’t a threat to public safety, not yet.

What she had found, the tentacle monster and the shadow man? Those might be anomalies. They’d been bloodthirsty and worked together. They’d killed two people at the Rye Patch Reservoir. Such murders were just as anomalous.

Monique stepped back. She wiped some sweat off her forehead. She’d used a good bit of her own prana to feel out the creature inside. She turned. “So, a family electronics repair business? Did you also do any capturing or cultivation?”

Aleksy’s eyes turned furtive.

That was a yes, despite whatever he said.

However, she had the idea the guy didn’t lie very often or very well. He just wanted a job in corporate America, to pay his bills, and to get a little comfort. He hadn’t talk about dreams of arenas, fame, and fortune. It seemed he’d given up those dreams early. Was that for the best? Or simply on par with most human beings?

“Mostly we did repair work.” He paused for a long time. “But we did do some capturing. Mostly referrals. But it’s the South Bay, you know, Apricot and South Valley. We mostly dealt with drodes and one or two level-one cambions. Nothing major. Why?”

“You’ve never seen daemons work together, right? Or to employ more strategic thinking?” Monique had to be careful. She didn’t want the guy gossiping that he’d escorted the CBA around some Nowhere containment facility and she’d talked about daemon intelligence. That was a seething cauldron of debate, and you had hippies wanting equal rights for daemons, which didn’t make sense, because there had never been signs of life. Well, until recently.

Aleksy put his hands behind his back. “No. Never. After a century of study, we can definitively say there is no intelligence there, not even in the manifested daemons, like what’s in Z4 there. They are clusters of energy, nothing more, though it does make me wonder.”

“What does?” Monique asked.

“This thing was hyena shaped. Why that particular shape?”

Monique didn’t have an answer. She’d read SoulFire R&D reports positing different possible explanations—mimicking biological life, taking on possible natural shapes that remained undiscovered, following patterns of energy not unlike the logarithmic spiral. As early as Descarte, scientists have noticed that certain shapes echoed throughout nature. The universe was a big place, and while the scientific method had unlocked many of the mysteries of the world, there wasn’t an answer for everything just yet.

As for the shadow man, there wasn’t an answer for him at all.

Monique had come to the storage facility looking for some inspiration, but she’d found none. She was going to have to face the executive board and inform them of their Winnemucca mystery. Two daemons, working in conjunction, tricking her, and overloading a top-of-the-line Whitney container.

SoulFire’s CEO, Phil Lord, would love that. He was a man who liked a good mystery. Their COO, Alvin Fujimori, wouldn’t be so pleased. And of course, he would lay the blame at her feet. Fujimori didn’t think any of the big corporations needed Chief Battle Artists. Of course, Winnemucca proved her case for her.

Aleksy wasn’t about to interrupt her thoughts. He stood there, a good little soldier in the SoulFire army. There were a lot of them, working long hours, doing what they were told.

She surprised herself by feeling jealous of him. She finally answered his question. “I don’t know why the higher level cambions have shapes. And between you and me? We don’t know what they are, not really. You didn’t hear that from me, though.”

“I won’t speak out of turn, ma’am.”

She grimaced. “And I was just starting to like you. You ma’amed yourself right out of my good graces.”

The shock on his face was adorable.

“Better luck next time, Aleksy Kowalczyk.”

* * *

Monique got home before midnight, which was a blessing. She lived in luxury apartments near the Presidio in Bay City. She had a view of the Red Gate.

The night nurse was there, an older woman, with gray hair and bags under her eyes. Her big purse contained both knitting and an eBook. Cathy had been with them for a long time, since Logan got sick.

Cathy was frowning. “Ms. Lamb, I don’t mean to complain, but there has been a problem with payment.”

Monique pulled up her phone. Her main checking account had been drained. So were her savings. All gone. She noted the icy feeling in her guts, the light sweat on her forehead, and then the annoying calculations of how much work it would take to figure out what happened. It was an item on her to-do list she didn’t want to deal with. And yet, here was Cathy, wanting to get paid.

Monique let go of her terror and doubt. She laughed. “Well, Cathy, you’ll get the money. I might have to sell a kidney, but I have two, right?”

The woman didn’t respond. Between her and the Kowalczyk guy, either Monique was losing her sense of humor as fast as her money, or she needed a new audience.

Well, at the board meeting, she could try out her new material. She’d leave them rolling in the aisles. Hopefully, Fujimori wouldn’t get his way and fire her. At this point, she needed the money, desperately.

She left Cathy to check on Logan.

He wasn’t much of an audience either.