Her lips pressed together in a grim line. “We lost all but five of the Big Cat Crew, counting Talya. It was a fucking bloodbath, but everyone left says they feel like they did something right for the world. Eleven kids are having warm meals in safehouses now. And that was always the point.”
I looked down at my fingers, considering what I should or could say. In truth, I was at war with myself. Kutkha’s scintillating omnipresence had returned to me, and I could feel the stir of magic in my blood. I had money, and my familiar. Europe and an escape into anonymity was still possible, and I knew without hearing that these relationships were still at a point of potential severance. There would be no debt between us.
“I had planned to leave the country before I got drawn into this,” I said, haltingly. “It wasn’t just the children. To be frank with you… this is the first time I have ever done anything like this. For anyone.”
“Well, you sure as hell stuck it out.” I could tell that Jenner wanted a cigarette, but she continued to occupy her mouth with food. After a bite of her wrap, she swallowed and leaned back on her hand, pointing at me with her shawarma. “Lemme tell you something though, Rex. You can run from the Third War, but you’ll never escape it. You don’t even escape it when it’s over and done with. Mason never got away from it. I never got away from it. Sometimes, I wake up and I smell this horseshit-and-plastic smell on everything. You know what that is? Agent Orange. That memory’s just from the war in this lifetime. I know what the trenches smell like. I know what the French Revolution smelled like. I’ve gone from war to war to war. Every one of them has stuck with me, and you know why?”
I thought for a moment. “Because there’s a bigger war underpinning all of them, and your Ka knows.”
Jenner kicked her feet into the air. “Bing-bing. You are correct.”
“Against the Templum?”
“You’ll always find something like the Temple Vox Sol, or whatever they are,” Jenner said. “I can tell you that things have been headed somewhere bad for the last three hundred years. That’s the limit of my memory, and most of that’s short and nasty. Twenty Years War, Chinese Revolution, Ethiopia, Vietnam, fuck… but I tell you now, this lifetime has been the worst by a long shot”
“Why?” I frowned.
“Because we drank the Kool-Aid.” Jenner’s face was eyepatch side-on to me, the blank leather inscrutable in a way her face never was. I could tell she was still in pain from the impalement, but she was being tough about it. “It started with Game Theory, the idea that HuMans can quantify everything they do with formulas, and that altruism – real HuMan compassion and cooperation – doesn’t really exist. Not only that, it’s bad for us. The Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Coordination Game. The guy that formulated this shit, John Nash, was schizophrenic. Want to take a guess why?”
“Mister Patroclus helped him with his theorems,” I replied. “The Big Black, as you call it.”
Her mouth quirked up at the corner. “He looked into the Void, and the Void gave him Game Theory, Rex. He made it sexy. He made it appealing to the people with money, with power. They really like the idea of a Zero-Sum Game with an outcome they can control. They want all of the money, all of the power. They think they’re better and they deserve better. Everyone else is just there to lube their way up Jacob’s Ladder.”
Itty-bitty machine parts. “I believe that when Nash’s theories were tested with real subjects in face-to-face situations, that they didn’t instinctively act out the Zero-Sum Game. The math predicted that the only path they could take was to sabotage one another. Instead, people in the Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments tried to assist one another. They were altruistic, not paranoid. They only engaged in the theorized course of action when directed or coerced.”
“Yeah. But the powers that be, they love this shit.” Jenner shook her head. “Thatcher. Regan. The current fuckwit in office. All of them… doesn’t matter what party they’re in. They want the Great Zero. They don’t want reality, altruism, or courage. They want obedience and fear. They want a fucking Apocalypse, because they think they’re the chosen few and the Sky-Daddy’s going to come down and take them to the land of eternal ice-cream and ponies while everyone else screams and burns.”
Her words hung in the air for several minutes. She ate, I brooded on what she’d said, and Kutkha watched on in patient silence.
“My Ka had a story for me, Rex. They tell you things, sometimes.” Jenner crumpled up the foil and threw it at the trashcan. It hit the edge and tumbled in. “Tiger’s got her own mind, you know. She tells me the same thing every time I change, every time we hunt. ‘Don’t look up’.”
I frowned, puzzled.
“Up is where the NO is,” Jenner said. “Queen Tigger says that if you look up at the Void, it sucks your eyes right out of your head, and then you’re gone. That’s how I knew I’d lost Mason. When I saw him that first time, and his eyes were missing, I knew he was walking dead.”
“Yes.” I closed my eyes for a moment, swallowing.
“I miss him.” She slid to the floor and stood, straightening her back and cracking her knuckles. “Mason was a good man. He treated me right all these years. We hunted together, we rode together… but every time I walk on the soil of this country, I’m always aware of the bones under the earth, Rex. All the people fighting and dying, coming to life, traveling into the Light or giving themselves to the Big Black. There’s people I loved who are buried here, and in twenty other countries. The cycle moves on. If he’s as tough as I think he is, Mason’s Ka will heal and come back to me.”
I remembered what Kutkha had said to me about the way that Morphorde dissolved the structure of a soul, but didn’t have the heart to bring it up with her. Maybe she knew, maybe she didn’t. Either way, it didn’t matter. Some things were not worth crushing. “One can hope.”
Jenner didn’t stop me as I disconnected my IV. I taped it across and got to my feet. The floor was cool linoleum, real and firm. I hurt, but I could move.
“So, what’s on from here?” She watched as I went to investigate the drawers, looking for my clothes.
“As you said, the war will follow me wherever I go.” I sighed. “Ten years, twenty years down the track, Sergei will find me, and I will be too old and too soft to defend myself. I brokered some information from the contact who told me about Moris Falkovich that I’m going to follow up. Which reminds me. Did Zane fight on Saturday?”
“Nope,” Jenner replied. “He called it off. Threw the semi-final… he was too upset by everything.”
A vague sense relief washed through me. “Right.”
“Speaking of fighting, I want to go down to Texas,” Jenner said, her expression hardening. “Lily and Dru and their fucked up buddy list have been sending kids down there for years, and who knows what’s happened to them. Problem is, we’re weakened. The Pathfinders are gutted. The Four Fires are reeling, and Ayashe’s trying to work two jobs. Their leadership goes to vote. She’ll probably get it, but it’s a serious conflict of interest. Besides that, Michael was the second-oldest… well, I guess he was the real Elder of New York, given that John was full of shit. That means I’m now the oldest Weeder in the city, and a dozen of my best men are dead.”
“A vulnerable position,” I said.
She grimaced. “Yeah. We got a meeting set up for tomorrow with some allies of ours in the Mid-West. Now that we know this cult of freaks is real, we’re going to hunt them down and tear them up while we can. They’ll be licking their wounds, but I bet they can replace their members faster than we can replace ours.”