CONTENT WARNINGS

Nothing specific.

They agreed on the scarce outline of the plan, such as it was, and left the florist around two in the afternoon in a dark blue Mercedes-Benz.

Phyllis drove. She was dressed like a factory worker in a navy blue blouse and denim pants with a canvas belt, looking ready for the factory floor of any wartime industry, a cutter of steel or seamstress of boots. Nobody would question her leading two well-dressed men through the secret paths of the city.

The Zombie sat up front, back straight, eyes searching for threats.

The Baron slouched on the rear bench, receding into the shade cast by the car’s roof at midday. The wheels hissed down lightly trafficked streets.

“Not likely to be stopped,” Phyllis said, glancing in the rearview mirror.

“It’s an attitude,” the Baron said. “Stay low for safety.”

“It’s an altitude.”

“Haw, haw.” He slid down lower until he could only see the sides of buildings.

The National Guard’s checkpoints were built along borders and major thoroughfares. Armored cars, half-tracks, and jeeps formed kill zones at narrowed intersections. Servicemen stood around with their weapons just in reach, drinking water from olive canteens and snacking on shared chocolate bars.

Phyllis discreetly avoided them, pulling into alleyways, parking for a minute, and then pulling out again. It was a slow pattern, a vehicular shimmy through the lines of buildings and dense rows. The path bypassed the soldiers and slowly wound east.

“Do you think they’d recognize my face?” the Baron asked.

“They’re on the lookout for a strong man with a shaved head and a tall Asian man with a light beard. It’s not much of a description without pictures, but it’d be enough.”

The Baron nodded slowly. “I bet they have my fake ID on record too.”

“Of course,” the Zombie said matter-of-factly. “It’s the gods-damn CIA.”

They took the car within a block of the East River, then followed Sutton Place to the underside of the Queensboro bridge. Here, it rose no more than twenty feet overhead. Looking out of the window, the Baron could see the rust-colored underbelly of the lower deck. Eggshell white paint, once protection against corrosion, had broadly flaked away, necessitating maintenance. To this end, two narrow catwalks were attached to the steel trusses beneath the roadbed, forming a kind of virtual tunnel beneath the bridge. Only the support piers interrupted their paths, forcing the catwalks to reroute around the outside of each pier.

In the Baron’s estimation, “pier” was a terrible word for them. In regular usage, “pier” suggested a porch above water, a dock or a walkway standing on stilts, piles, or poles. But these were piers in the architectural sense—vast vertical supports, bigger than any pillar, rising up to a hundred feet over land and water to carry the bridge.

In total, there were six of these titanic, architectural piers—massive arches of rebar and concrete, clad in limestone slabs—which bore up the vast bulk of the Queensboro bridge and the countless tons that it carried. Two piers rested on the shores of Queens, two held up the central spans over Welfare Island, and two rested here on rocky Manhattan soil.

Their journey would begin at the anchorage pier furthest from their destination in Queens, and for almost a mile, they’d walk suspended beneath the roadbed.

There was a Saturday market that ran in an old parking lot under this strip of the bridge, southeast of the actual Bridgemarket structure, which had been built into the vaults beneath the Manhattan approach back in the 30s. Its empty stalls were closed and padlocked shut for the week.

Phyllis pulled the Benz off the road, across the tarmac, and into a gap between two weather-stained, wooden shacks. She parked the vehicle on a mat of moldy hay, shut off the engine, and breathed out. “Any last preparations before we head out?” she asked.

The Baron leaned forward. “Do you think we’ll make it the whole way without anyone stopping us?”

“I don’t know,” Phyllis said. “The catwalks aren’t isolated. See those arches under the bridge?” She pointed towards the anchorage pier and the arch that capped its standing columns. “This one is solid, but four of them are hollow. They have a hallway, stairwell access, elevators—all the stuff for the old trolley stations. If you look back there…” She turned towards the waterside pier, pointing out the back windshield towards the arch over a hundred yards behind them. “Right there? They pulled off some of the limestone cladding and made little access entrances to the catwalks. My boys should be waiting for us in that one. The question is—will they have gotten rid of the National Guard before we arrive?”

The Baron turned away from the distant pier and back to face Phyllis. “If there’s Guard, they’ll stay there. Heckhaus will have it covered.”

“Probably,” the Zombie said, “but we can bully our way past a checkpoint.”

“No violence,” Phyllis insisted.

“I mean plain old bullying,” the Zombie replied. “Deception, aggression, frustration. Trust us.”

“We can bully. We’ll have to,” the Baron said. “Still, Phyllis, would you loan me another half-day? Just for safety?” He reached out with a bare hand, hoping she’d supply him with the prestige to dodge at a moment’s notice.

She frowned at him like he’d forgotten to wash after taking a piss. “You want to dodge?”

“No, but if things go wrong, I’m not making the mistake of running dry again. I didn’t have any options back at Tammany Hall. I’d like the option now.”

Phyllis grunted and shook his hand. “I wish you had a half day then.” She pulled that hand back only far enough to point at him. “But don’t you fuckin’ dodge unless things are swimming in shit. You’re keeping the Zombie on a leash.”

The Zombie laughed at the notion, but the Baron breathed deep, feeling a mixed sensation of prestigious pleasure and dreadful anticipation. “I will,” he agreed.

Everyone got out, emerging into the chill of the deep shadows beneath a waterside bridge. The tarmac underfoot crunched and settled, smelling like car exhaust and old motor oil.

“This is a nice car,” the Zombie said. “We okay to leave it here?”

Phyllis patted the roof. “It’s stolen. A chop shop swapped plates and loaned it to me for a drive. Someone will pick it up in an hour, then take it back to be broken down.”

“Where is this place?” the Baron asked. Dingy stalls surrounded them, as if they’d been capturing all the pollution of the surrounding city like filter-feeding barnacles.

“It’s the Queensboro Flea Market, or what’s left of it.” Phyllis raised a hand and vaguely swept out the space from here to the river. “Before they finished building East River Drive, it stretched down to the waterfront. There’s not much left now.”

“I guess tradition keeps it going?” the Baron asked.

“It used to be a big deal when the full trolley service still ran. People went to Bridgemarket for food, then here for gewgaws.” Phyllis kneeled and slid the car key behind the left tire. She pointed to a two-story building at the base of the anchorage pier, just past the far end of the parking lot. Its small windows were covered in creosote-treated wood, which was bolted to the brickwork and painted with stencils that read City Property. “It used to be four lines of trolleys instead of two, with trains on the lower deck. This was the train and trolley station for those platforms. Before they tore out the train tracks.”

“Aren’t there still trolleys up there?” the Baron asked.

“Just two lines, mostly for service to Welfare Island.”

“I assume they’re checking passengers on those?”

“Yep,” Phyllis said brightly. “You usually board ‘em a few blocks west of here, back on the street. They’re actually using the stop to transport troops from one borough to the other.”

“Too bad. I’d love to take a ride.”

“Not so easy, not today.” Phyllis started toward the old station, waving them along. “Two of my people should already be inside. Come on.”

The front door to the station was unlocked. Hinges squealed, and they trespassed into a vast, dusty space, all stripped masonry and wooden cubbyholes that once held offices, counters, and shops. Now it was weakly lit by three aged incandescent bulbs in wall sconces, hiding most of the stripped geometry in the shadows of ruins.

A couple of young men in denim uniforms were loitering in the weakly pooled light. One was pacing to and fro, smoking a cigarette; the other was seated on the edge of a collapsed metal ladder while chewing on a toothpick.

“Ma’am,” said the smoker. He dropped the cigarette and ground it out, then hissed at the seated man and signaled up. The other man stood. “We’ll get you up to the roof.”

“Thanks ma’am,” said the chewer. “This is good pay. My momma thanks you.”

“You’re welcome.” Phyllis picked up a stack of three fiberglass hard hats from beside the ladder. “Here’s our costumes. For the next hour, we’re bridge inspectors. The boys know I’m with the union. Bee? Zee? You’re contractors from out of town, Paul Davila and Fred Chang.”

“Chang?” the Zombie asked with wide eyes, about to laugh.

Phyllis scowled. “Do you know a real Chinese name?”

“Try Vietnamese, Le. It’s easy to say.”

“Fine. You’re Fred Le.” She pushed a hardhat into the Zombie’s hands.

“Yes ma’am,” he replied, tossing it up into the air and catching it on his head with ease. “Oh! The weight helps.”

“I bet it does,” the Baron noted. “Like a ring toss.” He accepted the next hat and promptly put it on. Its canvas bands irritated his unshaven scalp, but he didn’t complain. He just adjusted the hat slowly, using the cloth inside to scratch his head.

The Zombie helped Phyllis’s boys set up the ladder in the middle of the vast room, beneath a suspended structure of old metal mountings and hanging poles—the remains of stairs. The ladder skipped the second floor, reaching up the dangling lip of an old hatch in the ceiling, which exited onto the roof. The toothpick chewer went first with a pair of bolt cutters and snipped a lock off the hatch while everyone else anchored the base of the ladder with their hands. He opened it, revealing the dark underside of the bridge above, and then pulled himself out onto the old access platform. “All clear!” he called down.

One-by-one, they climbed up after him, feeling the steel bars rattle underfoot until they reached the roof themselves. Phyllis, then the smoker, and the Baron third.

As d’Holbach emerged into the outdoors, he took a deep breath, squinting towards the daylit stretches beyond the building. After the dusty interior of the old station, it felt comfortable out here, standing on an old rubberized platform with a perimeter of sturdy metal railings.

He knew things would feel very different once they’d ascended to the underside of the bridge. Even now, they could hear the occasional rumble of vehicles passing overhead. Some of them were deep, slow, and heavy—diesel engines running like a growl.

“Half-tracks,” the Zombie guessed, emerging last onto the rooftop.

At the far end of the platform, there was a steep metal stairway with nearly solid railings hanging in space, climbing up the exterior of the anchorage pier. One of the boys took the bolt cutters and snipped a padlock over a metal gate that blocked access to the stairs.

“There you go, ma’am,” said the man chewing a toothpick. “Access to the catwalks without going to the end of the line.”

“Thank you, boys,” Phyllis said. “Head on down, clean up. We’ll be fine from here.” As they left, she ventured onto the stairs first, hearing the hollow tap of hard rubber soles on thick steel. The stairway swayed slightly by design, moving gently with the bridge in the afternoon wind. She held onto the railings tightly until she was sure of her footing, then climbed up confidently. The Baron followed closely, and the Zombie bounded up and down the steps behind him, sprinting for fun on the rickety structure.

Phyllis was bothered by his hyperactivity first. “Will you do that on the whole walk?”

“No,” the Zombie said, “just while I can.”

“You make people feel like they’re going to fall,” the Baron reminded him.

The Zombie shrugged and kept his cycle, managing to climb up and down the stairs three more times before the Baron reached the closest connection to the catwalks. Each one was a meter-wide stretch of metal filled with drainage holes and coated with some kind of rough epoxy, strung out on the underside of the bridge’s curve. Ahead, it rose smoothly with the bridge’s rising slope, reaching the arch of the waterside pier about a hundred yards away.

A little to either side, the Baron could feel the empty air over the parking lot. It pulled at his instincts, warning him of peril, but he looked up and forward, shaking off the sensation of the void. When he was young, the open space underfoot would’ve crippled him with vertigo. Instead, he anchored his sense of place by the shadows of the heavy trusses and the thick layer of the roadway overhead. Then, and only then, he began walking forward.

Phyllis was moving ahead of him so quickly. She didn’t have much fear.

The Zombie jumped up and down behind the Baron.

d’Holbach refused to dignify his childish bouncing with discipline.

Beyond the overhead trusses, the lower deck sighed, drummed, rumbled, and roared with traffic. This wasn’t an isolated place. Even now, while checkpoints blocked easy the flow of these vehicular arteries, the secular world still moved. He kept that in mind; it’d be the best angle if anyone tried to stop them. Their “work” must continue.

Every fifty feet or so, there was a junction connecting the parallel walks, supported by more connections to the overhead trusses. The Baron eyed each one briefly, avoiding the crawling vision of the hard pavement multiple stories below.

Phyllis paused ahead and yelled back over the wind. “Remember, the waterside pillar has a room below the roadway!” She gestured back towards the spot where the catwalks wrapped around the outside of the waterside pier. “I still don’t see anyone outside, so my crew will be there! We’ll need to check in, or anyone watching will think we’re sneaks!”

“Are you sure?” the Baron called back.

“The walks are all open air!” she yelled to him. “No cover! We should try to get approval, or at least be sure nobody cares! Only run if we have to!”

“All right!” the Baron called. “Lead on!”

As they walked further out, the bluster of the breeze picked up higher and higher, and the last of the buildings disappeared far below. They weren’t over the East River yet, but there wasn’t much new development here. Only sad fields of gravel and weeds marched through the borderland beyond the last waterfront drive and the filthy water.

The warm smell of the polluted strait occasionally caught the Baron’s nose, motor oil and seaweed, and something bitter like coal ashes. Hopefully the wind blowing out of the northeast would bring clouds from the Atlantic and shade the filth from any more heating in the sun.

“I can tell you’re nervous!” the Zombie shouted behind the Baron.

“I am!” the Baron called. “But I’ll be fine!”

Phyllis reached the waterside pier first and waited close to its face, huddled against the wind, while the Baron and Zombie caught up to her.

On approach, the Baron could confirm that one slab of limestone cladding had been temporarily removed and taken in through the side, opening a narrow gap between the interior support pillars that formed the core of each pier.

He huddled up next to her, and a moment later, the Zombie joined them. With the wind shielded by their shoulders, he whispered the basics of a plan to Phyllis. “If there’s anyone in there, don’t vouch for us. Vouch for yourself and your workers, but stay separate. If we have to go violent, you need to stay safe.”

“Don’t go violent,” she replied forcefully.

“We won’t. We’ll bully and bluff our way onto the walks. I’ll take the lead, and the Zombie will follow. All right?”

“Fine,” Phyllis said. “Just do your best to keep the peace.”

“We will until we cannot,” the Zombie agreed.

Phyllis broke the huddle and waved them into the gap in the cladding, ducking through a narrow channel and entering into a service room once built for a bustling market by the water, now largely abandoned. Old trolley schedules were still bolted into place; their white-paint letters had yellowed over the decades, browned by an oxygen bath and stained with exhaust.

There were five men inside, standing at the bottom of a steel stairway that ran up to a narrow trolley platform, which spread across the center third of the bridge’s lower deck. Three of the men were dressed like laborers and wore hardhats, same as the one irritating the Baron’s scalp. Two were dressed in military uniforms and had clipboards—National Guardsmen.

The larger of the two soldiers was copying down names from New York driver’s licenses. Worst case scenario, they were taking their sweet time and making sure everyone checked in.

Phyllis smiled easily, and the Baron and the Zombie followed her in and greeted the three morose looking union workers with waves and sighs of relaxation.

She patted one of the boys on the shoulder. “Good news. I’ve been showing the inspectors our handiwork down by the old station.”

“Good enough, eh?” the man asked. He was of Irish ancestry, but his accent was clearly native New York. “We’ve been dangling by our balls for days.”

“Coverage is good,” the Baron said sourly, as if unwilling to court satisfaction, “no critical corrosion that I could find. We’ll need to schedule another visit from the engineers first.”

The Irishman smiled. “Fuckin’ hardass.”

“Tsch, tell me it’s okay to play it loose after a bridge collapse.”

The large Guardsman finished copying down the driver’s license and handed it back to a young black man, who had the sharpest look of the lot. The young man seemed to recognize the boss of this job at a glance. “Ma’am,” he said, “the guards are writing down names before they’re allowed out on the walks. It’s a real hassle. Slowing us down.”

Phyllis grudgingly pulled a wallet out from her pants. “Here,” she said, drawing out her license and offering it to the smaller Guardsman. “What’s the big deal anyways? Thinking you’ll spot pinkos in my crew? They’re too sharp to believe that labor party crap.”

“They’re union workers, ma’am,” the Guardsman said.

“They’re fucking kids who hang under a bridge like bats.” Phyllis’s griping was drawing their attention. Their eyes were wide. Maybe they’d never heard cussing from a lady’s mouth. “You think they have time to wait for you to play Poirot?”

“Who?” asked the large guardsman.

“Hercule Poirot?” Phyllis asked, as if the name were Frank Sinatra.

“Don’t know him.”

“The little inspector? Agatha Christie? A limp and a moustache?”

The guardsmen were shaking their heads.

“Do you even read?” Phyllis asked.

While they were distracted from even checking her ID, the young black man spread his arms and gently herded the Baron and Zombie away from the Guardsmen. The room was large, stretching most of the distance across the arch, and it was easy to get out of earshot. “Mind if I have a word?” he asked in a whisper.

“Please,” the Baron said.

“I figure she’s the dock boss, and we’re smuggling you boys?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you have a New York ID?”

“Massachusetts, under a fake name, and probably on their watch list.” The Baron nodded slightly at the guards. “We’ll bully them into letting us go.”

“I’ll kill them if they won’t,” the Zombie whispered.

“No, no, I don’t need dead white folk anywhere near me.” He rubbed his clean-shaven chin. “You ain’t passing through here. We might have to scratch this plan and send you back.”

“We can’t go back,” the Baron said.

“Yeah, well, you can’t fight the National Guard either.”

“I can,” the Zombie said.

The young man scowled briefly. “Don’t start nothing here.”

“I won’t,” the Zombie said calmly. “Not here. Not until you can walk away.”

“Enough chatter. It’s about to be our turn,” the Baron whispered.

The National Guardsmen were tired of losing to Phyllis’s verbal jousting and were actively ignoring her while they finished copying down her license information.

“You’re clowns,” Phyllis said, confidently denigrating them.

“Sirs?” the small guardsman called to the Baron and Zombie. “We’re done with the lady.”

Phyllis snatched the offered license and crammed it back in her wallet. She turned to the Zombie, who was approaching quickly, arms loose. “Do you have your ID?”

“It’s in the car,” the Zombie said, shrugging.

“This is a headache,” the Baron added, striding past his friend and offering a hand to the larger of the two guardsmen. “I’m Bridge Inspector Paul Davila. The tall boy here is Fred Le, a mechanical engineer. What’s your name, sir?”

“Sergeant Yearwood,” replied the man, shaking the Baron’s hand.

“And your friend?” the Baron asked, nodding towards the smaller soldier.

“Private Clark.”

“Sergeant, Private.” The Baron offered his hand to Clark, who shook it in turn. “Glad to meet you. We’ve been shuffling around Manhattan since five this morning, stopping at every checkpoint, and it’s well past two. We don’t have our IDs on us, and at half of the stops, we get held up, double-checking that we’re supposed to be here.”

“It’s slow,” the Zombie added.

“You don’t have your IDs?” Yearwood asked.

“We kept them in the car, where we thought we’d need ‘em.” The Baron kept talking, immediately speaking over the next response from Yearwood. “Listen—could you skip the rigamarole, just take down our names?” Before Yearwood could answer that, he continued with even more force, “We have to finish the inspection today, you see, while there’s still light, and there’s over a mile of this bridge left to go.”

Yearwood frowned as the conversation was finally ceded to him. “Where’s your car?”

The Baron felt a twinge of worry, but he answered promptly, “Where we parked it,” as if the question were stupid. This gave him a few more seconds to invent a real answer. If they’d been in Manhattan or Queens, it’s arguable that they would’ve gone back to their vehicle for the relevant IDs—at least after running into the first checkpoint. So wherever the car was, it had to be hard to reach, far from where they’d slept yesterday.

“No, where did you park it?” Yearwood insisted.

“On Welfare Island,” the Baron said. “Under the bridge.”

Yearwood and Clark both seemed confused by the answer, glancing at each other.

“Why Welfare Island?” Private Clark asked.

The Baron scoffed, as if that question was doubly stupid. “It was cheap! We took the ferry on Saturday, parked it for free in a city maintenance lot.”

“And you left it there?” Yearwood asked, taking back the yoke of the conversation.

The Baron gestured towards the roadway above. “Of course, we took the trolley back to Manhattan. Easy ride.”

“Staying at the Biltmore,” the Zombie added.

The Baron continued to press before anyone could question: “We wake up today, the whole city is in lockdown. We’ve hit ten checkpoints, and five made us wait while they called it in, even though we have a whole crew on this job, and they’ve got IDs. So please, Sergeant, we’re busy men. This is the only day we’ve got to get it done. Let us work.”

Sergeant Yearwood pursed his lips and took a deep breath, rumbling thoughtfully as he exhaled. “Ma’am, you’re the manager on this job, yes?”

Phyllis stepped forward. “Yes, sir.”

“Can you vouch for the identity of these inspectors?”

She smirked. “Of course not. They’re contractors. I met them down by Sutton half an hour ago.”

“But they’re legitimate?” Yearwood asked.

She tipped her hard hat towards him. “If they’re foolin’ me, it’s perfect, and the city is paying for them.”

Yearwood glanced over the Baron and Zombie. “How are you tracking your inspections?”

The Irishman raised a clipboard with a pad of paper clasped to it. “That’s me, sir! I’ve been workin’ this inspection for months. They’re just signing the papers, saying I’m right.”

“That’s why we only have to be here for a day,” the Baron said.

Private Clark spoke up. “Your IDs are on Welfare Island?”

“Yes, sir,” the Baron answered.

He tossed his clipboard onto a rucksack piled against the wall, unclipped a walkie-talkie from his belt, and depressed the call button. “Captain Spence? This is Private Clark, requesting permission. Over.”

The radio crackled the instant before a tired man’s voice emerged: “I’m listening, Private. What’s your request, over?”

Clark sniffed. “Sergeant Yearwood and I have a couple of city contractors who left their IDs down on Welfare Island. They’ve been stuck at every checkpoint between Manhattan and Queens, so I’d like to walk them down to Welfare Island to collect their papers. Over.”

“Go ahead, Private. I’ll send Warren down to cover your post. Over and out.”

“Thank you, Captain. Over and out.” Private Clark lowered the radio and clipped it back onto his belt. Then he smiled at the Baron, far too friendly for the pressure in the room, and he said, “Figured I’d cut through the bullshit for you, Inspector. Make things real simple.”

Sergeant Yearwood stared down Clark for a moment. He clearly didn’t like a man below him, skipping a level of command, but he could appraise Clark’s mood and see the serious suspicion in the smaller man’s smile. “All right, Private.” He added his clipboard to the makeshift pile. “A good idea is a good idea.” He turned back to face the Baron, resting the palm of his hand on the service revolver at his waist. “You boys mind taking a quick walk to Welfare Island? We’ll sort this out, send you on your way.”

Private Clark was dangerous. The Baron could tell. He regarded d’Holbach’s bullying as a threat, so he cut through any and all complications as soon as possible. The Baron could aim to complicate things in turn, insisting on starting the work here and now, but that palm on Yearwood’s revolver suggested that they were just shy of an arrest.

No. Anything other than immediate and complete thanks would sink them, despite the overwhelming support of Phyllis’s very real work crew.

“Thank you,” the Baron said with a smile. “I’m tired of fussing.” To Phyllis, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I know it’s a headache and a half.”

“Nothing a lil’ aspirin won’t cure.” She pointed towards Clark, doing the very necessary work to protect herself from this snarled scenario. “You have my thanks, Private. We’ll get this shit sorted out and leave before dinner.”

The Zombie smiled with joy at their new escorts. “Good. This is good. I hate heights, you know? I keep thinking someone will fall. It scares me to no end. I just want to get this done, you know? Then we can all get down to ground level, lickety-split. Mm?”

The Baron grimaced internally at the Zombie’s vaguely threatening wordplay, but he didn’t show any frustration. The Zombie’s very real cheer showed through, belying the similarly real potential for violence. If this went badly, he’d toss those Guardsmen to crash upon the sour waters or bitter earth, and right now, it was hard to imagine how it could end any other way.

But the Baron would do his best to alter that sad fate, even if Private Clark’s suspicion was to blame. For everyone’s sake, he’d try to keep the peace.

Author’s Note:

I love this arc.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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September 23, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warning.

The anonymous Artemisian led the Baron and Zombie a couple of blocks northeast, to a small florist’s shop renting the bottom of a last-century apartment building. She knocked against a door-mounted window, rattling a painted sign that read CLOSED while summoning the proprietor—an old man dressed in a white coat like a grocery clerk from 1929.

After opening the door a crack, he looked them over, nodded silently to the Artemisian, and allowed the Baron and Zombie inside. Their guide departed, and together with the florist, they walked through a darkened showroom, damp and earthy.

“I closed ‘cause of the fighting,” the florist said, gesturing at the mute parade of petals all around them. “But an Anastasia dock boss paid me to open the back.”

“A woman?” the Baron asked.

“Yeah, actually. She said you might be coming here. Bald man. Tall Chinaman.”

“Saves us looking for her,” the Baron replied.

The florist glanced back. “Are your shoes dirty? Your feet?”

The Zombie glanced down at the smears of blood across his bare toes, fully blackened after drying. “Most of it got wiped off in the grass. On the pavement.”

The florist grunted. “I’ll clean later.” He unlocked a door to the back, allowing them into an overburdened workshop. There, a series of half-built bouquets, reams of wrapping paper, and several piles of wicker baskets fought for space with a scratched wood block worktable, covered with sharp tools and an old radio set.

It was a cramped room, leaving little space for conversation amidst the clutter. Nevertheless, this was their meeting space. As hoped, Phyllis was already seated on a creaking stool at the end of the table, smiling at their arrival. The florist checked with her, verified that he’d collected the right legends, and left, shutting the door behind him.

Then they were alone, and the Baron released a sigh of genuine relief. “It’s been a hell of a day,” he said.

“Yeah?” Phyllis asked. “All the bombs going off, shaking the windows.”

The Zombie stood by the table, snickering like he knew a secret.

She cast a frown towards him. “What?”

“That was a magic guandao,” he said. “No bombs.”

Phyllis blinked twice. “What’s a guandao?”

“A polearm,” the Baron answered. “You know, a blade on a stick?”

“What kind?” she asked.

It was the Baron’s turn to be confused. “What do you mean, what kind?”

“On a stick. Knife? Axe? Sword?”

“Oh! Sword on a stick,” the Baron answered, “but this one fired exploding rainbows.”

“Very loud!” the Zombie added with genuine glee.

“No shit,” Phyllis muttered. “People could hear the blasts on some of my calls. So you two spent lunch dodging rainbows then?”

“They were mostly helpful,” the Zombie noted.

Phyllis smirked. “Well, tell me what happened in a moment. First, let’s get you washed up and changed. I swiped some of your clothes and shoes from the Biltmore.”

They used the florist’s washroom to clean off obvious smears of dirt and blood. Once they dressed up in fresh suits and shoes, they returned to the workshop to chat.

Phyllis was fussing with the radio set, an old war-time model. “Piece of shit,” she cussed at it, gently twisting its volume knob. For a brief moment, music was painfully loud; then she rolled it back a fraction, and it was inaudibly quiet. The slightest touch pushed the speakers to bursting or silenced them.

“Having trouble?” the Zombie asked.

“It’s a bad volume knob,” Phyllis said. “I want it on for the news.”

“Can I try?” he asked curiously.

She stepped back, glowering at the dusty thing. “Please. I hope you’re invincible against irritation.”

The Zombie laughed. “I’m not, but I won’t murder the radio.”

The Baron pulled out a wooden chair, tucking himself down against the table. “So, how did it go this morning?” he asked Phyllis, scooting forward and settling in.

The Artemisian sat down on her stool, perching her work boots on one of its crossbars. “Marco was shaken up. When he saw his mom, he just started crying. I don’t think he’d really thought about a future without his dad. Not until then.”

“That bad?”

“Depends on your perspective. He’s alive and safely out of harm’s way.”

“True enough.”

“You shouldn’t worry about him. This’ll be a bad memory someday, but we made him a cultist. There could be a lot of good in that too.”

“Yes,” the Baron said. “It’s just harsh. I left him with a ruined kidney.”

“He’ll live without it,” the Zombie muttered, staring at the old radio.

“He’s alive,” Phyllis insisted. “If you hadn’t helped, he’d be dead.”

The Baron raised his hands in surrender. “Fair enough. What else happened?”

“After I got back, I brewed some coffee, followed your instructions, and poked the Soviets until about nine. I put in calls to the UN, to the Soviet Mission. I mentioned the Cat o’ Nine Lives on an answering machine and said they’d find it in Tammany.”

The Zombie held the volume knob between rock steady fingers, twisting it so slowly that the motion was almost invisible to the eye.

“That was after the National Guard deployed to stop CPUSA?” the Baron asked, double-checking his own understanding of things.

“Afterwards, yeah. By the time I sicced the Commies on Tammany, Heckhaus had already deployed soldiers in a dragnet to pick you up. I think he’d figured you’d lost to New York this morning.”

“That sounds correct. It’s complicated, but he sent us a message a few minutes ago, asking for our surrender—”

“Wait.” The Zombie raised a hand for silence, and the conversation paused. Music slowly rose to a comfortable volume, and he gingerly released the volume knob. Blue Tango was playing on the old speakers. “I don’t like radios, but an orchestra ain’t bad.”

“You don’t like them because they’re not loud,” the Baron noted.

“Not without breaking them.” The Zombie stepped away from the radio, as if being too close to it might ruin the precarious positioning of the volume knob.

Phyllis leaned forward on her stool. “Look, calling everyone wasn’t much of a plan, but it worked, right? When the Commies hit Tammany, you two were able to get out.”

“It worked,” the Baron agreed, “but it ended up being far more dangerous than I’d hoped. CPUSA brought dozens of bodies. Tammany only let us go because Schuler insisted, and he made me swallow the Cat o’ Nines Lives.”

Phyllis’s eyes opened wide. “You’ve swallowed it?” She glanced up and away, then back to him. “I put my hand in Marco. It was… terrible. Removing it, I mean.”

“I know. I don’t want field surgery, but Schuler was right.” d’Holbach turned his head to the side and tapped his fingers below the fresh scar on his neck. “Look. Winged by a fifty cal. The Guard ambushed us. I died within seconds.”

“Gods,” Phyllis muttered, leaning forward to look closely at the scar. “How did it feel?”

“Awful. Like life, bursting out of my neck. Death really hurts.”

“It’s just as I said,” the Zombie declared, standing across the workshop table from the Baron. “Death hurts more than anything.”

The Baron cast a wan smile towards Phyllis. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful. You did what we asked, and it worked out. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, but we’re not done yet.” She sat upright on her stool. “I’ve been making a lot of calls. People are working the streets for me now. You met one of them already.”

“The lady who caught up with us earlier?” the Zombie asked.

“Yeah. She’s an Artemisian from the Bronx,” Phyllis said. “I had ten women running my perimeter around Tammany. I didn’t know which way you’d go, but I figured any of them would have an easy time identifying you on sight.”

“Hey, I almost looked street-legal this time,” the Zombie said. “I still had a shirt. I was only missing buttons and a pair of shoes.”

“You strut around like a psychotic,” Phyllis said wryly, “and your feet were covered in blood. Did you kick someone to death?”

The Zombie grinned broadly, like a proud sportsman showing off his trophies. “I jumped on a man’s neck, and his head popped off like a cork.”

Phyllis pretended to gag. “Gods.”

The Zombie cackled. “They made it all possible!”

Phyllis waved away the notion. “After sighting you, she brought you here. Bim, bam, you’ve escaped Tammany Hall.”

“They genuinely let us go,” the Baron noted. “Schuler led us out, then stayed behind to defend Tammany.”

“Why though? They had you—didn’t they?”

“We were too much trouble,” the Zombie suggested.

“No way!” Phyllis slapped her hands on her cheeks and feigned surprise. “You were trouble? Perish the thought.”

The Baron reached out to a pair of trimming shears and nudged a rubber handle with a finger, making them spin around on the hinge bolt. “He’s only half-kidding. To be clear, the gods paid for my escape, and the payout was on an obscene scale.”

“Oh… Well, shit. How big?” Phyllis asked.

“Seven centuries for escorting me away from the Hall, if Schuler was to be believed. That’s several times the payout on the boat task that Nagy sniped last week.”

“Damn. How many people died for your escort?”

The Baron shrugged uncomfortably. “Dozens, probably.”

“It might be the right price then. A lifetime of prestige for each lost man. Sum it all up, and pay it out like life insurance.”

“Maybe.” The Baron scratched the edge of the scar on his neck.

“Well, this time we’ll be better prepared,” Phyllis continued. “I’ve put a lot of thought into this. Crossing over into Queens is essentially impossible at the moment. The ferries are running slowly, the Coast Guard is herding up private boats, most air traffic is grounded, and they’re checking IDs for all passengers at train and subway stations.”

“What about buses?” the Baron asked.

“They’re subject to the same National Guard checkpoints, and they’re running reduced service. If it was affordable, Langley would stop the whole city like a bad watch.”

“Are they concentrating on Manhattan?”

“The Bronx also. They’re looking to isolate you on the move to LaGuardia; grab you while you’re heading into Queens. With all the noise on the radio about Denisov’s flight out of the country, your destination should be clear to anyone with half a brain.” She rapped the table with her knuckles. “The secret is out. The battle lines are drawn, and Langley will win a conventional war.”

“So are there any alternate paths?”

“Sort of,” Phyllis said.

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“My original thought was to access one of the underground rivers or canals. The city already has motorboats in the water, and maintenance workers will smuggle anybody up or down the waterways for a price. Take that safehouse under Broadway. Another fifty feet down that tunnel, and there was a dock for the canal.”

“What’s the catch?” the Baron asked.

“Time, direction, and safety. I asked around, and someone was already investigating the waterways on Sunday. I think the CIA updated a list of available services.”

“So Heckhaus would know where we were going, if we used an underground river?”

“I think they’ve covered everything in Manhattan and the Bronx, and the creeks under Queens are short and flow away from your destination.”

“I’ve snuck through cities before,” the Baron said, “unpredictability is key. I don’t think going underground again is the right plan unless we’re on foot and forced down.”

“Right, so I’ve been asking around for the last hour or so. My Cosa Nostra contacts have a lot of access to union workers who’ll run a side job, discreetly.”

“Are you sure we can’t just smuggle me into the borough?” the Baron asked.

“Smuggle?” Phyllis was genuinely confused.

“Put me in a car trunk and drive me to LaGuardia. Without Schuler’s help, how’s anybody supposed to find us?”

Phyllis frowned. “I don’t think I’ve been clear about the level of security, Baron. These aren’t checkpoints where they glance at your driver’s license and wave you on through. It’s a military occupation of Manhattan Island, with a smaller detachment on the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge to block you from sneaking into Queens through the back door. I’m talking tanks, Baron, Stuarts and M24s. If you don’t have urgent business, you don’t go, because they’re going to paw through everything and arrest you if they don’t like what they find.”

The Zombie was briefly admiring his last pair of good shoes. He glanced up. “So they’re ready to fight a war then. What do they expect?”

“I’d bet it’s just a precaution,” the Baron said. “What if New York helped us? Or what if we escaped and they tried to take us back? Many of New York’s cultists are still in the field, and there’s no strong chain of command. This morning, loads of them were walking out of Greenwich with paper orders and firearms. Incidents are bound to happen all afternoon.”

“They are happening,” Phyllis said. “I think the bulk of the National Guard in Manhattan are rolling around the streets, trying to provoke and pick up armed cultists. New York or CPUSA, they don’t care. Everyone they arrest is accused of Communism and thrown in a paddy wagon.”

“So what’s your plan then?” the Baron asked.

“Well, until Anastasia bothers to assign a new man to the district, Red Hook is mine, and I’ll probably end up the underboss regardless. People want me to owe them a favor, so I’ve called up a lot of new contacts. I’ve got some pull and people now.”

The Zombie rubbed his fingers together, the universal sign for cash. “I’ve got a connection,” he said, vaguely imitating a bad New York accent.

“There’s a crew running a monthly visual inspection under the lower deck of the Queensboro Bridge, and another one trying to paint trusses. They’ve been using temporary catwalks that connect up to the old roof-access trolley stations.” Phyllis leaned forward over the table. “My contacts have union workers in both crews. We can pose you as city inspectors, slap on a couple of hard hats and walk you under the bridge.”

“Do we pass any checkpoints getting to these maintenance walks?” the Baron asked.

“No. We can literally climb up to them through the old trolley stations. Nobody is watching them either because they’re technically not accessible. Fortunately, all it takes is a ladder and some bolt cutters and we’re off.”

“What about the climb down in Queens?”

“Already taken care of. There’ll be someone waiting at the far end. The main problem is the middle of the bridge. There are places on the anchor piers where they might have checkpoints running, but you’re not going to find a better path. We’ll have to risk it.”

“That gets us to Queens,” the Baron said, “but what about LaGuardia?”

Phyllis folded her hands. “What about it?”

“I dread going there. My current plan is simple at best.”

“Few chess pieces, few strategies,” the Zombie said.

“What is your plan exactly?” Phyllis asked.

“I figure the Zombie can punch a hole through security while I sneak in from another direction. Then we meet up on the airfield, intercept our targets on the runway, and hand Denisov the Cat in plain sight, where nobody can afford a shootout.”

Phyllis furrowed her brow, crossing her arms. “That’s it?”

“I know, but I can’t formulate anything better. Not without more resources.”

“Well, I might have the resources for a better idea, but…” Phyllis glanced at her watch, then lifted a finger. “Wait a second.”

“What is it?” the Baron asked.

“It’s the half-hour. Should be the news.”

“On the half-hour?” Stations had to identify themselves hourly, and usually ran the news at the same time.

“It’s been happening all day. Shh.”

The music cleared, and an NBC chime played behind a golden-throated broadcaster. “66WNBC, the only station you’ll ever need. We interrupt the second hour of our musical variety broadcast to bring you an update on the emergency in New York City. Earlier this morning, Soviet diplomats disavowed any hand in the ongoing communist violence, and the governor’s office sent out a report, blaming remnants of the US Communist Party for yesterday’s shootings. According to Pentagon sources, new facts appear to bear out these claims.

“While WNBC reporters cannot access or report on classified information, we see no reason to question the Pentagon’s conclusions. They were first to call for an escalated state of readiness. Now they’re the first to call for a de-escalation in international tensions.

“Nevertheless, the threat of violence remains in our streets. National Guard crews are actively sweeping Lower Manhattan for signs of communist sympathizers, saboteurs, and anarchists. If you have any knowledge of these traitors or have spotted anyone suspicious, please contact your local authorities with any information. Your call may save lives.

“The governor’s office has declined to comment about the ongoing operations in the city, citing security and public safety concerns. Impressions from WNBC reporters and wire reports from the Associated Press paint a picture of escalating preparations, with more soldiers moving out of LaGuardia and deploying across our neighborhoods and in our streets.

“While some may protest the inconvenience of safety, WNBC’s management wishes to remind our listening audience that good, honest Americans are already fighting in our streets. We ask you to cooperate with the government during this dire emergency. Together, we will stand firm against subterfuge, and God willing, we will prevail. We come to you as the voice of a nation, and we assure you, as long as free men can speak, you will hear us on 66WNBC.

“Godspeed to all members of the National Guard of New York, and good luck. We salute your service, and we pray our listeners do as well. This was WNBC, New York. Now back to the music. We have Billy Ward and the Dominoes, singing ‘Do Something For Me.’”

The Zombie stepped over and turned down the music with a light tap of the volume knob. “So it’s officially not an exercise?” he asked.

Phyllis sighed. “Yeah. Just about an hour after dawn, the governor announced that they’d uncovered evidence that Sunday’s firefights were the efforts of a Communist fifth column, operating without the knowledge or consent of the Soviets. What started as an exercise became a full deployment. Now the Pentagon seems to buy the story.”

The Zombie smirked. “They don’t want to start a nuclear war. Not yet, anyways.”

The Baron pushed aside the larger worries, concentrating on the small realities in front of them. “You said you might have a better plan?”

Phyllis scratched her nose with the back of a knuckle. “Yes, but it’ll need some explanation first. When did you want to reach LaGuardia?”

“I don’t know. At least by three, so we can watch for the Soviets. We might catch Denisov outside of the airport. If not, we can follow him in and find another moment.”

She traced an arc on the tabletop with her finger. “So, there’s some odd details about this setup. Normally international flights go out of Newark or Idlewild, and sometimes private international flights are permitted to take off in Speed’s Airport, but LaGuardia is almost exclusively East Coast service. It’s an unusual place for the Soviets to fly from.”

This was all new information to the Baron. “I haven’t had much reason to fly through New York recently. What’s the trick here, you think?”

“Basically, the National Guard are deploying out of there. They’ve been landing C130s since Sunday morning, unloading military vehicles. That’s how they got all this armor and equipment on the streets in short order. The Soviets probably wanted to fly from Idlewild, but I’d wager Heckhaus pulled strings to force them through LaGuardia, right in the heart of the secular army. He wants the Soviet cult under the sword.”

“What’d be his reasoning?”

“Honestly? I think he’s expecting a fight.”

The Zombie spoke up: “He’s at least preparing for me.”

“Yeah,” Phyllis said. “The point is—this won’t be an easy infiltration. Nobody will just walk in. It’s an active war camp.”

The Baron had done his fair share of trespassing, and he presumed Phyllis had done the same. In most cases, you didn’t need a plan or a secret entrance. You dressed for the part, behaved like you belonged, and walked in. That’s all it normally took, even in secret military installations, because time and boredom took the teeth out of any security regime. But if people were expecting a fight, high energy and tight nerves kept them sharp. If LaGuardia was readied for an open battle, the entire airport would be buttoned up tight.

“I follow you,” he said, “what options are we left with?”

“That’s where my plan comes in. It’s tentative, but once we’re away from the bridge, I want to get you up in a garbage truck. That’ll get you through Queens. It’s a little slow, but eventually you’ll reach Jackson Heights. You can hop out before the trucker heads to Fresh Kills, then go north into East Elmhurst on foot. There’s a two-acre park overlooking the airfields there.”

“Two acres?”

“Yeah. It’s just a crescent of lawn, not even named, but I can hire some landscapers to show up and trim the place. You could hide in their van for the duration of the job, and they’d finish up whenever you were ready to leave. As for getting into LaGuardia, I don’t have a strong suggestion. The normal crews are on paid leave during the emergency. For today, the airport is a military installation. I can get you there, but you’ll have to figure out how to assault it.”

The Baron took a deep breath. “We’ll figure that out once we get there.”

Author’s Note:

A/N goes here.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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September 19, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Gore, torturous violence, falling to death.

The Zombie’s vengeance couldn’t be satisfied with a few broken bones or a handful of someone’s innards pulled from their living abdomen. The direct perpetrators would know his wrath, and the rest of the National Guard would see their weapons turned against them.

All of that began with skipping the empty air between this bloodstained soil and that shattered window. The ballistic magic that had recently prevented General Osman’s demise could now enable a series of murders. With Schuler’s help, the Zombie could become an intelligent missile, and he could bring back a secular weapon so powerful that it nearly required his invincible hands. All of it could happen now, not minutes later.

Now, while anger burned.

The Baron stared up at him, sorrowful but understanding. d’Holbach’s blood soaked the collar of his white t-shirt, literally bled through the cotton. That injury would be answered.

Meister Schuler shook the Baron’s shoulder from behind. “We have to go!”

The philosopher’s head snapped to face that touch, stretching the open wound along his neck. Strings of torn tissue and ropy arteries strained along invisible lines, and fresh blood surged through the clotted flesh and along the wound surface before flowing up into his brain. “Okay. Yes. I’ll go,” he said, alive despite the missing chunk. He cast one last look at the Zombie, nodded his tentative approval, then turned and ran for the cover of the nearest tree.

Schuler stepped towards the Zombie, meeting his gaze with lustrous copper frames. Eyes communicated a silent understanding. They’d both turned enough living men into corpses to share a common value system. While the Baron hesitated, Schuler saw wisdom.

“Turn and face the building,” the Diviner said.

The Zombie pivoted, pointing a bloody hand towards the fifth-story window, some twenty yards away and up. “There.”

In the window, a guardsman struggled beside the machine gun, tugging on its bolt. In a moment, if secular efforts failed, magic might solve its broken mechanisms.

Meister Schuler put his hand on the Zombie’s back, bent as if he was about to throw him forwards, and wished, “Launch.” Then Schuler expressed the strength of titans, or maybe the gods threw the Zombie and Schuler merely mimicked it at a discount. Either way, the only comparable acceleration in the Zombie’s memory was from 1943, when he crashed a jeep into a concrete barrier and launched himself over the hood at about sixty miles per hour.

The world blurred; wind roared. The Zombie tumbled over exactly once, seeing the trees spin around him and then retreat away with the rest of the park before the building rolled into view, offering an open window to catch him. Gravity slowed him to the peak of an arc, but air resistance hadn’t stripped more than half his horizontal velocity.

The guardsman working the Browning’s bolt was staring at the mechanism. He looked to someone behind the weapon, who simultaneously spotted the Zombie and pointed in dumb shock. Thus, the man at the bolt glanced back just in time to witness the invincible man’s ballistic body, crashing into him.

It was like a collision in a Newton’s cradle, miraculously inelastic. The Zombie struck the guardsman, his invincible body stopped, and his victim absorbed all the momentum, flying across the room. The Zombie landed heavily on his chest and belly. The guardsman tumbled like he’d fallen from a passing truck and crashed into the back wall, breaking several bones. The impact sounded like a bundle of spring branches cracking over a knee.

One guardsman, still pointing at the Zombie, shouted at the absurd mechanics, at the collapsed Zombie, and at the crumpled and dying man beside him. “The fuck just happened?”

“He fuckin’ flew!” yelled another, as if that explained anything.

Then all the other voices joined in, overlapping: “Is there a fuckin’ catapult?”

“That’s impossible.”

“I don’t fucking know!”

“Maybe it was a trick of the light?”

“What fuckin’ light are you looking at?

Someone roared at the top of his lungs. “Shut up! All of you, shut up!”

Voices died away, and for two heartbeats, everyone was silent. There were five healthy guards in the room, staring at each other. A wet wheeze escaped the sixth, crumpled man, and he shuddered one last time, falling still. He wasn’t long for the world.

The Zombie waited with one cheek to the floor, eyes open and unblinking. He’d let them marinate for at least a few more seconds, and when he rose, their fear would be exquisite.

The man who’d demanded order spoke with the iron-certainty that he understood the world. “There has to be some sort of rational explanation.”

Then the guy at the back gestured at the crumpled man. “What about what Bobby said?”

A very reasonable sigh of frustration. “What about it?”

“He said those rainbows were magic. What if this was too?”

So the Zombie had already killed the occult member of the squad. Perfect.

The very reasonable man replied, “Magic isn’t real, private.”

And the Zombie couldn’t help himself. “Oh, it’s real, and you’re all dead,” he said, putting his arms beneath himself and pushing up to his feet.

“Oh, shit!” the reasonable man sputtered. He pulled a 1911 from a belt holster and jerked the slide in a clumsy panic. “Shoot him! Shoot the fucker!”

The Zombie stretched as men shouted, lifting personal weapons and toggling safeties. Then he ambled cheerily around the Browning’s temporary emplacement—a tripod mount, mounted with sandbags onto a factory-floor push.

The man with the pistol finally racked his weapon, lifted it, and pulled the trigger. One terrified shot instantly became a fusillade, as two other guards opened fire at the same time. The Zombie walked into the storm, feeling the bullets skip off him, stop dead, or sail through unimpeded. The man with the pistol ran out of bullets first; the slide stayed back.

“Stop shooting!” someone roared. “Don’t hit the Sarge!”

Gunfire stopped, though there were panicked shouts. “Watch it! Watch it!”

“Are you the Sergeant?” the Zombie asked the reasonable man.

The Sergeant, pale-faced, answered by wordlessly trying to reload his 1911 before dropping the loose magazine onto the floor.

The Zombie darted forward, thrusting his fingers towards the Sergeant’s chest. Luck favored the attack; instead of stopping, his fingers sank through cloth and flesh with unnatural ease, and the Zombie instantly curled his fingers over, hooking all four of them over a man’s living rib.

The Sergeant threw himself backwards in animal panic, and that one wild motion broke the rib and set it floating, but there was too much flesh and muscle holding that anatomical handle in place. The Zombie turned and dragged the Sergeant off his feet, eliciting the primal scream of a murder victim. If the poet Dante had truly dreamed of Hell, this was the sound he’d heard echoing throughout the nine circles. This agony. This unreal terror.

Everyone watched, stunned, as the Zombie dragged the screaming, half-paralyzed man for five long seconds. He held the Sergeant as if he were a suitcase, hanging from that rib, arms dangling and feet dragging, and he took him all the way to the window, heaved with poor form, and received the gods assistance while launching the screaming Sergeant over the windowsill and out onto the street below. They heard him fall across all five stories, two seconds of vanishing terror, until he struck the ground with a wet thud.

Then the Zombie turned back to the stunned onlookers and said, “Four to go.”

The Baron stood with his back to an old tree, while Meister Schuler finished lifting hands off the freshly scarred skin of his neck. He hadn’t seen the man fall, but he knew those kinds of screams. They haunted his worst nightmares. “It’s like the Napoleonic wars,” he told Schuler.

“Or when people know they’re being crushed,” the Diviner offered.

“It’s awful,” the Baron replied.

Schuler patted the Baron on the shoulder. “The body makes it awful. Otherwise, we wouldn’t struggle to live.”

A second scream erupted from the distant window, and a few seconds later, they both heard another man fall to the ground and slap onto asphalt with a wet smack, barely distinguishable from the ongoing battle. The Baron had nothing to offer in defense of the Zombie’s defenestration or against Schuler’s cruel observation. Indeed, the world contained agonies, and his dearest friend sometimes inflicted them in his name. Worse, there would be no justice for that pain; or maybe this was justice in some narrower sense, a response to the lethal shot to his neck.

One could ache with moral righteousness all they wanted, but no amount of feeling could change suffering, and in the end, he needed the Zombie’s violence to protect him.

Schuler peered at him through lustrous copper frames. “Do you feel guilty?”

“Never enough to stop fighting,” the Baron answered honestly. “As long as I’m around, I know he kills fewer people. He hesitates because of me.”

“Then why are you upset now? This is no worse than Salem.”

Another long, falling shout ended on hard streets. The Baron flinched, then met Schuler’s eyes again. “I wanted to leave without this kind of fighting. Without cruelty.”

“To my mind, this is less cruel,” Schuler argued. “In a few minutes, he’ll be carrying the nicest weapon on the battlefield.”

“Nice?” the Baron asked. “The Browning?”

“In his hands, a machine gun’s bullets can kill quicker and more kindly than even Green Dragon Crescent Blade. Just ask him to be quick. Merciful.”

“I’ll ask, but he might refuse me. He doesn’t want mercy.” The Baron tapped the scar on his neck, covering the healed carotid. “He wants satisfaction.”

The Zombie had killed his second soldier by driving his head through the panels of the wooden door and yanking down on his arms until his throat caught on the splintered edges. That corpse had kept everyone else in the room long enough for multiple defenestrations.

Now, only one possible victim remained. The final soldier was a skinny figure, holding onto a fatal chest wound with both hands. In all the madness, a ricochet had bounced off the Zombie like light off a mirror, striking him with his own shot.

Unlike the others, he hadn’t screamed or shouted even once. He was just a private, but he had the steel of a killer. When the Zombie turned to him, the soldier asked calmly, “Do I have to go out the window?”

The Zombie laughed under his breath. “How would you like to die?”

“Old.”

“Not an option.”

The soldier coughed. “Quick then.”

The Zombie glanced around the bloodied and gunshot floor, finding the dropped 1911 and the fumbled magazine. He nudged the pistol with his bare toe. “This?” he asked.

“Better than dropping.”

“Brave man.” The Zombie scooped up the weapon, grabbed the ammo, and reloaded it expertly. “You’ve earned this. Close your eyes?” he asked, aiming.

The last soldier grunted, shutting his lids.

The Zombie waited to the count of four, utterly soundless and motionless as he readied the fatal shot. Between the eyes, angled down to strike the brainstem. Then he pulled the trigger, and his last victim left this world without the pain of anticipation or any perception of his death.

“Not a single scream,” the Zombie said, tossing the pistol aside. “If the gods save you, hear this. You would’ve been a legend in another century.”

He quickly checked over the mounted Browning. It had most of an attached ammo box left, more than enough to kill the rest of the National Guard checkpoint. He fussed around the head of the tripod, pulled the pintle latch out, and freed the weapon. At a glance, he couldn’t tell how it was broken, but it’d hardly matter. It’d probably break even worse in a second, and then Schuler would restore it for the final assault. Unlike most men, he wouldn’t have to fire it from a hip or underarm position and could aim it without risking a shoulder injury.

Holding the Browning by its carrying handle, he went to the broken window, put one foot onto the sill, and looked down at the three bodies that he’d dropped onto the pavement. Each was mangled by a ragdoll impact, surrounded by the slow seeping of blood through all the cracks. He peered further out, above all but the oldest trees in the park. The Baron and Schuler were recognizable, hiding behind the oldest tree.

The Baron waved, recognizing him.

He waved back, then casually jumped out of the window, twisting to put himself between the Browning and the Earth. In that two second plunge, as the building rushed up and away, he prayed for the gods to preserve the weapon against his invincibility. Then he struck the road, splashing pavement in a spray of dark gravel, and the machine gun’s handle snapped off in his hand with a bang, but the gun itself rested neatly against his chest, stopping entirely.

“Hahaha! Yes!” He scooped up the machine gun by the foregrip, rolled up onto his knees and onto his feet, and carrying the massive thing like it was a mere hunting rifle, he sprinted towards Meister Schuler and his oldest friend. His heart soared.

“This weapon!” he shouted, glad for the kindness of the gods. “This fucking weapon! This violence, this proof! They love me!”

“Who loves you?” the Baron called as the Zombie came into earshot.

“It’s the will of the gods!” Meister Schuler shouted, smiling gleefully along with the Zombie. “If gods make devils, then they must love their fell creations!”

The Zombie whooped and sprinted past them. “Fix the weapon!” he shouted. “I’m clearing the gods-damn checkpoint!”

“Already fixed, in blessed silence!” Schuler yelled at his back.

“Make it fast!” the Baron shouted, pleading. “Kill them quick!”

“I will!” the Zombie roared, pleased with the tacit approval of murder, handed over by the most moral man. The soil and grass vanished beneath his footfalls, kicking up into wild plumes. New York soldiers were crouched behind the trees, firing at sandbags over a no-man’s land littered with the bodies of CPUSA mercenaries.

“Go get ‘em!” one New York cultist yelled.

The Zombie whooped, shooting past the last New Yorker, and he leaped over the outer hedge onto the intersection of Union Square West and East 15th street. Four members of the National Guard remained, shooting blindly at the Zombie’s approaching figure. About five blocks away, another jeep was pulling onto the street, carrying a vehicle-mounted Browning and a back seat lugging three more soldiers. Reinforcements were rushing in.

The guardsmen at the sandbags concentrated fire, peppering him and the Browning, but it hardly mattered. If the gun didn’t fire when he pulled the trigger, Schuler would restore it again.

He closed the last of the distance at a full sprint, clutched the machine gun to his chest, and performed an Olympic quality long-jump, legs up and out, sailing right over the sandbags. When bare feet hit the asphalt on the other side, it crumbled beneath his landing, and the rest of the force bled away into invincible joints and limbs. Soldiers were shouting at him.

“Shoot him! Shoot him!”

“I am!”

“He’s bulletproof!”

The Zombie bounced up into a standing position, planted his right foot, and swiveled, lifting the machine gun into a shoulder-aimed position. He closed one eye and peered over the sights, looking at the four desperate, already dead men.

One of them said, “Broken.”

There was a loud click in some internal part. The Zombie pulled the trigger, and nothing happened.

That cultist shouted, “Run for it!”

The weapon unclicked. Schuler had sensed the wish, and he’d repaired the weapon. So the Zombie pulled the trigger again, and the gun jumped in his iron grip, barking with enough force to tickle his cheek and tousle his hair. The first bullet managed to turn the cultist’s face into a hole and his brain into an insensate splash across a sandbag barrier, and the second two just chunked off pieces of bone until the corpse barely had a head.

The Zombie didn’t let off the trigger. He swept the weapon over, blasting out parts of the street and spattering sand, until he wrestled the secular source of thunderous wrath to face the next soldier, taking off the top of his skull. The third soldier foolishly jumped up and tried to run, which meant he took three shots to the chest before falling backwards onto the pavement like dead weight.

The last member of the National Guard shouted, “Right pocket!” and vanished with a clap of thunder.

The Zombie let off the trigger, lowering the Browning’s massive barrel. “Huh,” he said. There’d been two embedded occultists. Langley hadn’t sent enough men to hold this position, which meant they’d either planned to rely entirely on reinforcements, or they’d planned to use cultists for intelligence gathering on New York’s current movements and little else.

The only major threat left was the enemy jeep. The Zombie swept around, aiming the weapon again, ready to kill as many civilians as necessary—and the radio roared into life on the back of the nearby truck. The voice was Robert Heckhaus, shouting: “All lower Manhattan units, belay your current orders! Do not approach Union Square! I repeat, do not approach Union Square! Until further notice, retreat to a minimum of four blocks distance to avoid enemy mortar fire! Your commanding officers will have new orders for you shortly! Over and out!”

The incoming National Guard jeep, three blocks away, suddenly cut right, tires screeching on the pavement, and shot around an intersection and out of view.

The Zombie laughed, tipping the Browning up and leaning it against his shoulder. “Good enough for me,” he said cheerily, glancing around at the corpses. “You lose, and I win.”

The Baron heard the thunderclap of a dodge and the final shots of the Browning machine gun. Then silence finally fell over Union Square Park, and it was the true end of this battle. Even if his shoulders remained clenched, even if his heart pulsed and prepared him for a resumption of death and destruction, he understood that the Zombie had finished the job.

 Over the last few minutes, the remaining CPUSA forces in the park had been driven into a National Guard checkpoint, and now the Guard itself had been eliminated. By now, the New York enforcers—those men with skills like Enzu, Mr. Roach, or Lt. Sadgrove—should’ve cleared Tammany Hall. All that remained was to walk to the intersection, to finish this task.

Meister Schuler was standing one step back and to the left of this old tree, smiling placidly while peering through his bifocals at something in the distance. He tipped his head slowly towards the Baron, raising a hand like a gentleman asking someone to a dance. “Follow me, Baron. It’s over. Together, I will win my prestige, and you will win your final chance for the world.”

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach accepted that old, calloused hand and left the comfort of cover, of strong wood and bark against his back. There was no reason to hide now. All nearby enemies were dead, and if they somehow weren’t, the Cat could save him again.

As they walked through the grass, he said to Meister Schuler, “I can’t kill like you can.”

The Diviner shook his head like he’d heard a child complaining about the bitter flavor of nutritious vegetables. “Mm. You can kill. You have killed. I know this.”

They reached the hedge, and the Baron finished formulating his response. “I’m saying, I’m not a wizard, and you have oceans of prestige at your back. Is there anything I can say to get you to help me? To fight for the world you live in?”

Meister Schuler giggled. “You often speak of loyalty, devil. You shouted it at my keepers this morning. Was that a lie?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

Schuler looked back, catching the light in his bifocals, turning them briefly blank with reflections of the sun. “You haven’t given me a century of creature comforts despite my madness, Baron. They have.” He led the Baron towards the final gap in the sandbags, where the Zombie stood waiting. “I am as loyal as you. Respect that.”

“But it’s the world,” the Baron said. “For them, be loyal and save it.”

“No,” Schuler murmured. “Tweed is waiting for the world to die, so he can die with it. Find your own heroes. I’ll stay here to defend my cult against an army, and if you need prestige?” He briefly turned his head towards the Baron. “Buy it, or earn it.”

“You really don’t care,” the Baron said.

“I really don’t.” Schuler stepped between the sandbags, and the Baron crossed the final line with him. Then Schuler released his hand, and the Baron was in the checkpoint, surrounded by three corpses, three abandoned jeeps, and a flatbed truck with a radio set in the back.

Schuler spread his arms, fell to his knees on the pavement, and beamed at the open spring sky. “Ahhh!” he said, letting out a deep breath. “Beautiful day! That is a reward!”

“Friend,” the Zombie said, waving him closer. “Aren’t you glad you swallowed the Cat?”

“I am,” the Baron agreed, putting a hand on that neck scar. “I’m still here.”

The Zombie reached out very, very carefully, put a pair of fingers gingerly on the Baron’s scar, and grinned as if that wound, and that survival, were his in effigy. “You are here, and I won’t let you leave this world before your time, you old bastard.” Then he removed his hand and laughed, and the Baron couldn’t help but smile with him, even in this grim hour.

They had in fact escaped Tammany Hall.

The radio in the flatbed truck crackled to life. “Baron? Baron d’Holbach? If you’re still at the intersection, please respond, over.”

The Baron recognized the voice with a twinge of paranoia. “Is that Heckhaus?” He glanced around. “Does he have a spotter on us?”

“No!” Meister Schuler said, jumping to his feet and bouncing on his heels. “No, that was the end of the task! His Oracles say you are here, because the reward was paid!” The Diviner darted past the Baron and Zombie, rushing over to snatch up the handset. He depressed the call button, shouting gleefully, “Special Operations Group, Robert Heckhaus! The Baron will not be answering this call, for this is not his place. It is mine! Over!”

He released it and hummed, waiting for a response.

Heckhaus came on the radio. “Then pass along this message to him. Since the Baron must be alive, tell him that he’s failed. The National Guard is taking over Manhattan, and we’re encircling Tammany entirely. At this point, I suggest he surrenders to me immediately. If he does, my hospitality will be generous, and his patriotism will be rewarded. Over.”

Schuler pressed the call button and laughed like he’d heard a bad joke over a beer. “One moment. I’ll tell the Baron what he needs to hear, and then I’ll tell you what you need to hear.” He lifted his hand away briefly. “Baron, if you please?” He pointed past the truck, towards a distant building. “There’s a woman two blocks away, waving at you.”

The Baron took two steps left, looking down the empty roads, evacuated ever since the fighting began. There was a woman leaning out of a storefront—not Phyllis, but a lady of similar stock, wearing pants and work clothes. She waved eagerly, as if summoning him over.

“An Artemisian,” the Zombie said behind the Baron.

“Absolutely,” Schuler said. “I sense her prestige. Now, if you devils will go and participate in your apostasy, I would appreciate being rid of you. Hmm?”

The Baron took a deep breath and sighed. For him, the day wasn’t even close to over. “Let’s go,” he said to the Zombie. “Maybe she knows where we can find Phyllis.”

“I hope she knows how to get out of Manhattan,” the Zombie said. “You heard Heckhaus.”

As the Baron started off along the sidewalk, he heard Meister Schuler back at the truck again. “Agent Heckhaus, thank you for waiting! The Baron ran off with his soulless monster, gods know where they’ve gone, but here’s some important news. I, Meister Schuler, will remain here, defending Tammany. So go to your secular contacts and tell them to fuck off entirely. They’ll have to give up on the Hall unless they want to keep losing men to ancient weapons and powerful wizards…”

They left earshot before Schuler finished, and if Heckhaus replied, they never heard it. They didn’t have to. They’d escaped, and by hook or by crook, their next step was to reach Denisov and deliver the Cat out of the Baron’s belly and into the diplomat’s bloody hands.

Author’s Note:

That ends one of the really heavily rewritten arcs in my book! I hope you enjoyed it. <3

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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September 16, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No special warnings.

The Baron knelt by the window, jerking a thumb out over the edge. “Let’s talk about strategy. CPUSA is still in the building, but the enforcers are clearing them out, right?”

“That’s right,” Schuler agreed.

“And there’s New York men outside. Lieutenant Decoin, correct?”

“Yes, but he’s with most of his forces, moving along 17th street. They’re aiming to retake the north entrance. What you’re hearing to the southwest are a few squads trying to secure the park before the National Guard moves in. CPUSA is facing a pincer.”

“You know all that?” the Baron asked.

“As much as anyone can. While I was fighting the Zombie, General Osman wished to make a phone call on a dead handset. Boss Tweed dispatched scouts after he dodged, and they reported in by radio. Our eyes are opening to the world around us.”

“So how many people will we have to carry us across the park?”

“Guaranteed? Only myself and your Zombie.” Schuler looked up at the ceiling. “The General will help after I report in though. The terms of the task will convince him, and once the soldiers see his support, they’ll follow my orders.”

The Baron didn’t share Schuler’s confidence, but he didn’t want to argue with their temporary, task-driven ally. “Will you do the talking?”

“Yes, but Baron, be at ease. I’m the Wizard of the East. Osman won’t deny me.” Schuler stood beside the Baron, back pressed to the bookcase. His glasses caught the light as he scanned the dark green hedgerows and spring green trees, gently shuffling in a cool breeze. “We’ll clear the path, cutting across the greens towards the Flagstaff.” He gestured to the copper-clad pole, holding a flaccid sheet of stars and stripes far above the surrounding park. “Focus on survival. Spare the lives of the Cat, for whatever purposes the gods desire.”

The Baron squinted up at the Diviner. “If the gods want to help me save the world, then why stop after crossing the park? Why not assign the task to give the Cat back to Denisov, if that’s the point of their intervention?”

“Excellent question,” the Zombie added.

Schuler looked down at the Baron, peering with a slightly slack expression—not for a lack of focus, but to let his thoughts flow freely. “Have you ever known the gods to tell a human-ready narrative? No?”

“No.”

“Yet you do know the gods intervene to punish temple-breakers, to bring justice to Falls, and so on.”

“Yes. They targeted me in Europe.”

“So consider that you are now, however briefly, a means to an end in a much grander scheme, but you’re not the point. Nothing you desire is the point. Not a single damn thing in this world is the entire point of their actions. Otherwise, we’d have figured it out by now.”

“That’s a disappointing answer,” the Baron said. “It’s accepting ignorance.”

“It is.” Schuler looked back out at the world, at the robin’s egg sky, at the dead men scattered along the paved footpaths, separating the green groves. “Only the Apostate knows, Baron. What matters today is that I’ll finish the gods’ task, and I’ll earn prestige in their eyes. What happens to the world is not my concern, nor that of the gods. If you desperately need an answer, I’d guess that you’re meant to die somewhere else, not in New York’s hands. I still think these are the last days of the Earth.”

“They better not be,” the Zombie said gravely. “The Pact is as serious as any atomic bomb, and I’d like to read more books.”

“Fair enough.” Schuler scanned the length of the ruined sedan outside the window. “Let’s get in cover behind the car. I’ll jump first. Zombie, second. Baron, third. Go quickly, and it’s unlikely they’ll shoot our mortal man. Ready?”

d’Holbach glanced at the CPUSA corpses around the door to the office, covered in bricks and red dust. “Do we want to dig up any of their guns?”

“I’ll grab something outside,” Schuler answered. “The Zombie has his fists.”

“He can throw me again,” the Zombie suggested.

“That I will.”

The Baron took a deep breath. If they were satisfied with their capacity for violence, then there truly was only one way forward. “I’m ready. On go?”

Schuler grunted.

The Zombie stepped up behind the Diviner. “Three, two, one, go!”

Schuler grabbed the windowsill and vaulted, throwing his feet over and out. The bottom story was on ground level, but the window was deep, as long as a brick and a limestone slab stacked together. Four shots rang out; two struck Schuler in motion, throwing splashes of blood across the limestone cladding of Tammany Hall. The Diviner landed on the glass shards with a crunch, then ducked down behind the car. Both wounds were already restored.

The Zombie vaulted next; another two shots rang out.

The Baron went right on his invincible heels, vaulting last. A final shot rang out, but scattered off the Zombie just in front of him, sending fragments of bullets into the stretch of sidewalk beside the car. The vehicle was parked facing the wrong direction for this side of the street, but that was to their benefit. The Baron landed, crunching glass, then jumped over the dead man in a suit, angling for the spot where the open driver’s side door would protect his body on the left. The Zombie slammed into the exterior on the right, placing himself between d’Holbach and Schuler.

At a glance, the sidewalk facing the park was empty but for a few more corpses. That made sense. Anyone posted up against the building was an easy target from shooters on all sides of the conflict. “What’s next?” the Baron hissed.

Schuler cleared his throat. “I wish to be heard by General Osman. General, please come to the west wall, right beneath the pediment. Cut a hole with the blade, but stay out of view, and ask Mr. Roach to be your spotter. We’ll talk once the wall is open.”

“You’re asking him to damage the Hall with a magic weapon?” The Baron tried to keep the astonishment out of his voice, but this moment was continuing to change faster than his expectations could keep up.

“I’m not asking the General,” Schuler answered. “I’m telling him what to do.”

In the back of his mind, the Baron had already known the masquerade was damaged. The occult was spilling over into the secular in ways that’d be remembered for decades. Hundreds of men would perish. Property damage would take months or even years to resolve. The police were already dismissed from New York’s streets, replaced by the National Guard.

In some sense, these were the first days of what might be a final battle, ending in nuclear warfare. Yet he anticipated the next few minutes with an itch of frustration.

The Green Dragon Crescent Blade was about to be fired out in the open. Anyone staring out of some window at the madness would soon see rainbows slashing the clear spring air. Fragments of jade would be found mixed with the park soil. Explaining any of this would be challenging. Conspiracies would form around the occult evidence, and secular history would be full of cracks. Like scar tissue, urban legends would eventually subsume the unreal elements, healing over the breaks, but until then, people would whisper stories about a strange, bloody day in the spring of 52.

The Zombie was laughing at his own thoughts, low and pleased. He glanced over at the Baron. “We’ll deliver you. Trust me.”

The Baron licked his lips. “Yes—”

A curved arc of violet light cut out of the second story beneath the pediment of Tammany Hall, the intent of a tremendous sculptor to chisel out a new hole. Then the spring air exploded green, as loud as artillery in the hills, and a few yards south, powder and limestone sand rained down onto the sidewalk, mixing with stone confetti of sparkling jade. Red light glowed briefly over the street, muted by the white sunshine.

The Baron whistled. “I wonder what the National Guard will say.”

The Zombie answered in a whiny, mocking tone: “I’m an American soldier, but I just shit my pants because a rainbow exploded in the sky.”

Schuler laughed. The Baron managed to control himself and only smiled.

A second arc of rainbow light, shaped like the letter V, soared towards the treetops in the park, followed by another green explosion, cutting loose all the brickwork and limestone of that second story wall. An angled segment tumbled outward, crashing down to the sidewalk and shattering. Dust briefly poured out of the hole in the face of the Hall, and in the park, all gunfire fell silent. Two artillery blasts had forced a momentary pause in their battle.

“Schuler!” called the voice of General Osman, reedy and distant over the breeze. “Are you out there? What madness have you asked me to do?”

“I am here!” Schuler yelled back. “With Baron and Zombie alike!”

“The Baron? Did you capture him?” Osman yelled.

“No, General! Do you have Mr. Roach spotting?”

“What do you mean, no?”

“Do you have Mr. Roach spotting?” Schuler repeated.

The tip of a Garand shoved out of the hole, waggling from side to side in an awkward wave. “I’m here!” Mr. Roach called. “The General is staying in cover!”

“Is there anything happening at Union Square West and East 15th?” Schuler yelled.

The Garand tip retreated a bit, turning forty-five degrees southwest, towards the same spot Schuler had pointed towards earlier. It was an intersection directly across the wooded body of the park, ending at a street about two-thirds of the length south from Tammany Hall. “The National Guard is setting up a checkpoint!” Mr. Roach answered.

“Then we have a new task from the gods!” Schuler yelled up to them. “Seven centuries of prestige for taking the Baron across Union Square Park to the National Guard checkpoint!”

“Dead or alive?” General Osman yelled.

“Alive! But I will kill all else, General, including the soldiers at that damned checkpoint! If the gods demand that we let the Baron go, then we will use the Zombie, we will collect our prize, and we will beat back the Guard! Would you assist us with artillery?”

There was a long pause. The Garand retreated briefly.

“Will he help?” the Baron asked.

The Zombie answered before Schuler could. “He will. More than he wants the Cat, he’d love to conquer and keep this territory out of Langley’s hands.”

Schuler gave a thumbs up. “Exactly, devils. Trust in his love for war.”

“We will cut them all down!” General Osman shouted. “Mr. Roach, call the angles! Schuler, take command, highlight muzzle fire, and make sure we receive that prestige! If the Boss complains, we’ll offer him the Hall itself as our prize! Now, boys, to war!”

“To war!” Schuler yelled.

“To war!” the Zombie shouted.

“To war,” the Baron muttered, peeking carefully through the car windows at the park, heading towards the Independence Flagstaff. There was a lot of open ground from the north end of the plaza to the outer stone wall and its stout hedge. Running across it would expose him to nearly twenty seconds of open gunfire.

It’d be better if they could move the car for cover, but the front wheels were missing.

But how were the rear wheels? He knelt, glancing past the curb and beneath the car. Both rear tires were inflated. No obvious damage. This was a 2-door sedan, seashell green. It might do the trick. “Zombie, do you recognize this vehicle?”

“This?” the Zombie asked, still crouching beside the Baron. “Chevy Deluxe Sedan, last year’s model. 2-speed automatic transmission. Yeah, I recognize it.”

“What’s the drive train? Front or rear?”

The Zombie paused for a moment. Then a huge grin broke out onto his face. “Rear wheel drive!”

“Lucky then. We can use it for moving cover.” In this condition, the car was difficult to drive forwards, but trivial to run backwards. With the engine gunned, they could drag the front bumper until the entire thing broke down. It’d protect them all the way across the barren north plaza until they could ram it into the stone barrier beneath the first line of hedges.

“An excellent idea,” Schuler judged. “Get in, devil. I’ll start the engine. Baron, we’ll run close behind and drive straight towards the Flagstaff.”

“Let’s do it,” the Baron agreed.

The Zombie skirted around his back, then hopped up into the driver’s seat. “Light it,” he called, quickly shutting the driver’s side door. “No windshield. If you have orders, shout ‘em.”

“Start,” Schuler commanded.

The car’s engine turned over and rumbled into life.

The Zombie laughed, tapping the accelerator while the car was in park. Twice, the engine roared. Then he depressed the brake, switched the automatic transmission into reverse, and grabbed the steering wheel with one hand. Someone shot a rifle through the back windshield, striking the Zombie in the shoulder. “Let’s roll!” he roared.

Then he yanked the wheel, tapped the gas, and backed away from the sidewalk in a sharp arc. Instantly, the bumper caught on the curb and snapped off with a bang of failing steel bolts, followed by the front end of the chassis scraping over asphalt with a blend of heavy rattles and metallic screeches, shearing off two showers of white-hot sparks from the friction. With a couple of quick yanks, he angled the rear to the southwest, facing directly towards the Flagstaff at the center of the park and East 15th street on the other side.

The car wouldn’t last long in this configuration, but with luck, they could reach the hedge before the engine compartment failed or the drive train broke.

The Baron and Schuler skittered around the vehicle, putting it between them and most possible enemy positions. The Diviner planted his hands on the hood; the Baron mimicked him, keeping low. Then Schuler yelled, “Go! I’ll limit your speed!”

The Zombie didn’t hammer the accelerator, but he gave it a generous press, and the car lurched into another metallic wail, immediately yanking it out of their hands.

“Ten!” Schuler wished, bursting up into a sprint, and the Baron joined him at a break neck run. That was ten miles per hour, pathetic for a car, but only slightly slower than a strong human sprint.

The Zombie jumped the far curb up onto the plaza, making a loud bang as the front hood slammed into the concrete lip. The Baron caught up to him on the flagstones, sprinting into the backspray of steel sparks until he could plant his hands on the rumbling vehicle and keep them there, lowering his head to stay in cover.

Schuler stayed back a few feet to spot targets in the middle of his own run. A rifle shot passed through him, striking Tammany Hall far behind him and knocking out a window. More bullets burst through the car, striking the steel and the Zombie himself. The Baron flinched, but there was nothing to do but keep running. Twenty feet out from the wall. Ten feet out.

“Release!” Schuler wished.

The limits on the sedan vanished, and the Zombie whooped as the engine lurched out of the Baron’s grasp, accelerating. A single heartbeat passed, and the Baron redoubled his efforts to keep up, knowing how this would end.

The sedan struck the outer wall and the hedge with a crash of stone, brush, and steel, like someone dropping the entire percussion section off a catwalk into an orchestra pit. The vehicle stopped dead, but the engine sputtered through three smokey coughs before releasing its pistons with a loud ping, like a hammer striking an anvil. The hood itself rattled over jumping engine parts, then fell silent. With a joyous cackle, the Zombie crawled up and over the dashboard, through the missing windshield, and onto the hood.

Schuler caught up, slamming his hands onto the car. “Ready, Zombie?”

“Do it!” the Zombie yelled, standing tall.

“Launch!” Schuler wished, and the same forces that’d once thrown the Zombie through a wall now catapulted him up into the air, ballistically flying along a shallow arc through the trees beyond the hedgewall. The invincible man tumbled over, peaked before two elms, and crashed through a bundle of tree boughs, scrabbling at the branches with his arms to right his body as he fell down to the shaded soil and landed awkwardly near the center of the grove. Boughs and leaves rained down around him, torn off the trees by his cannonball entrance.

Total distance, maybe twenty yards, a quarter of the distance to their destination, and more than enough to place him between multiple enemy positions. The Zombie stood, kicking off his other ruined shoe, and the first shots began to issue from around trunks, from the other hedgewall at the far end of the grove, and from beneath park benches. Disturbed leaves, fresh holes in his clothes, and puffs of blasted soil indicated a surprising volume of ricocheting bullets.

“Four seconds, CPUSA has bright muzzles,” Schuler wished, squatting beside the Baron. d’Holbach was breathing heavily, trying to recover after a sprint, so he couldn’t find the breath to voice the absurdity of that wish. It gave knowledge indirectly by changing an unknown number of bullets at multiple unknown locations for a significant period of time. The price should’ve been obscene, but maybe Schuler already knew where the enemy was. He could sense the world as the gods sensed it. Maybe this was cheap enough for a Diviner like him.

The next enemy shots taken in Union Square Park flashed like camera bulbs, unmistakably bright even against the noonday sun. Half-hearted shots at the Zombie were now fatal mistakes. Most gunfire stopped immediately, but it was too late.

The eagle-eyed Mr. Roach watched from afar.

“Loud,” Schuler wished. Immediately, his voice echoed like a bullhorn across the parkland: “New York soldiers! Shoot anyone who runs from those positions!”

The Baron glanced back at Tammany Hall, and he saw the first violet slice pass through the bricks and arc through open air like an arrow, brightening towards glorious cyan hues. He covered his ears; the end of the slash touched one of the CPUSA positions, huddled down on the other side of the grove behind a second hedgewall.

That one slash nearly reached the center of the park.

The enemy soldiers had seen what the Green Dragon Crescent Blade could do to the Hall, but Schuler’s orders had coerced them to stay in cover. Three men were crouched behind those bushes—the Baron could make them out, struggling to rise through the violet arc.

The slash exploded into green, annihilating the hedge, destroying half a foot of rock wall, and leaving three sets of human legs tumbling to the ground, while three dismembered torsos rolled backwards through an orange and red haze onto the pavement around the Flagstaff. A rain of jade scales signed their thunderous deaths.

Before anyone could process what had happened, General Osman had already thrown out another two violet slashes, sweeping out two more locations along the far hedge.

“Baron!” Schuler yelled, trying to be heard as further explosions of green decimated enemy positions. He pointed past the wrecked car, to the fresh cuts in the far hedgewall. “Do you see the Flagstaff base?”

It was impossible to miss the truck-sized granite pedestal, but in such chaos, Schuler was only being thorough. “I see it,” the Baron replied.

A momentary peace followed the last two artillery strikes. “We’ll run through the grove. I’ll lead the charge. New York’s men will rush the enemy positions. You’ll count to five, then follow, using the tree trunks as cover. Understand?”

The Baron absolutely understood what this meant. New York soldiers were about to charge, and though it’d win them a forward position and possibly the entire conflict, it’d cost lives. He was experienced enough at strategy to recognize this, and intelligent enough to know that he could no longer refuse the inevitable casualties.

He’d risked his own life many, many times over the last few days, pushing the boundaries beyond the point of foolishness. His principles had worked—barely—in an environment where words still shared space with bullets, but negotiations no longer had a role on this battlefield.

The Baron had to accept that men would die, and he’d have to kill some himself and accept the sacrifice of others. This was a microcosm of the war he’d hoped to prevent, but if he delivered the Cat to Denisov, it might end today, instead of spreading like a wildfire.

So d’Holbach girded himself, ignored the guilt, and agreed with what Schuler intended and what the Zombie surely wanted. “Start the charge. Five seconds, and I’ll run.”

The Diviner nodded. “Loud,” he wished. Then like a bullhorn, his voice echoed, signalling to both soldiers and enemies that the hour of battle was a hand: “New York! Center park, advance!” Then he stood, wishing again, “Flashes,” and he ran up onto the hood of the ruined car, strode across the roof, and jumped down to the soil of the grove.

Five seconds, starting now.

New York soldiers deployed on Schuler’s orders. Maybe they were simply that loyal, or maybe they feared the Diviner’s unnatural awareness. Maybe it was both. Squads of armed men materialized out of the shaded landscape, wriggling through hedges, leaping up from low spots in the grove’s topography, and unfolding from behind tree trunks into a broad, armed advance. All of them started shooting, suppressing enemy positions as they moved.

Three seconds.

Two bundles of CPUSA mercs were trapped in the middle of the trees, somewhere close to the Zombie. Both groups decided to shoot back at the New York advance. Their muzzle flashes were again brighter than the surrounding sunshine, alerting Mr. Roach.

New York reacted immediately. Most soldiers rushed to the temporary cover of tree trunks, pouring fire towards those concentrations of enemy forces. Four friendlies fell to their knees, grappling at fatal entry wounds. Two collapsed, instantly dead.

Time was up.

More slices of rainbow arced down through the groves themselves, and those CPUSA mercenaries scattered, screaming as green light cut down thirty years of tree growth and about half of their number in thunder-loud blasts of rainbow light. Then every other member of CPUSA jumped up and either fought earnestly or ran like hell, and there was no sense of order anymore.

The Baron followed directions, jumped up onto the car hood, and leapt over the ruined hedge onto the grove lawn, immediately sprinting towards the nearest unoccupied tree for cover.

Twenty yards out, the Zombie was running down a screaming man in a WW2 uniform, beating at his back with invincible fists. The third strike visibly crumpled the victim’s spine, and the Zombie tumbled over the fresh corpse before quickly scrambling to his feet.

The Baron sprinted for the next tree, head on a swivel. More camera flash shots. CPUSA no longer cared about positional advantage. They shot because the enemy was closing in, flanking them, gunning them down. It was a rout, a slaughter. Screaming men fell over, peppered with bullets until something vital was struck, silencing them.

Meister Schuler sprinted through the trunks at an impossible speed, wish-augmented. He pointed at one CPUSA man running for the back hedge with a Springfield M1903, and he shouted, “Here!” The bolt-action jumped back towards Schuler, breaking the merc’s wrist, and the Diviner caught up to the arc of the weapon, catching it cleanly by the stock while sliding to a stop in black boots, casting a plume of leaves and soil ahead of him.

He raised the rifle with one hand, operated the bolt with the other, and snapped it up to aim. No wishes were needed, not with his unreal awareness. He shot the gun’s owner in the back, operated the bolt, and snapped to the next target. Noting his stopped position, a merc unleashed a burst with an SMG, hitting him in the chest and neck, but the wounds closed while Schuler sniped his second target in the head. Another round blasted through the Diviner’s cheek, surely striking his brain while knocking his glasses askew. Nevertheless, Schuler only shuddered once, righted his glasses while operating the bolt a third time, and cleanly shot a man running past the base of the Flagstaff. The assailant with the SMG saw this and ran.

“Fuck!” the Baron cursed, awed at the unfair power of the Diviner.

“Baron!” Schuler yelled without looking back. “Advance!”

d’Holbach sprinted forward again, darting from trunk to trunk while Schuler killed two more men with the last two loaded rounds. The Springfield was empty.

Schuler roared, “Javelin!” With perfect form, he launched the rifle skyward, and with an absurd grace, it arced over and down, hitting a different CPUSA merc right at the edge of the grove and stabbing four inches of barrel into his lower back, knocking him clean over.

The Zombie was running for the same target. When he saw the merc fall, he jumped up and came down with both invincible feet onto the back of the fallen man’s neck. The miraculous result was a wet crush of obliterated meat and bone. The head rolled several feet, and the Zombie slipped in gore, laughing wildly, but he didn’t fall. He found the next target and sprinted after them, two bloodied hands extended to snuff another life with gruesome grappling.

The New York advance swept up behind the Baron, firing at fleeing targets. More rainbows of the Green Dragon Crescent blade stabbed into the park, slashing through standing structures and any CPUSA mercenaries who’d dared to stop and fight. d’Holbach had only one line of trees left ahead of him; he bolted up to the last one, staring at the nearest hole in the next hedge. Beyond it, scattered human legs introduced pools of blood leading to dead torsos. That’d been the first artillery strike from General Osman. It was an awful road to salvation.

Schuler and the Zombie both converged on the Flagstaff pedestal, individually pushing over the hedge. The Diviner had a pistol, barking and biting with unreal precision. The invincible man drove enemies away with a reputation for sheer brutality. Behind them trailed a shadow of safety, composed entirely of surviving New York soldiers. Maybe a quarter of them had fallen in the charge, hurried to the afterlife in service of the world’s largest cult. The rest moved as if none had died.

“Over the next hedge!” Schuler yelled. “Push the advantage! Don’t let them regroup!”

The Zombie grabbed the lip of the Flagstaff pedestal and climbed up onto it. He planted bloody footprints on its granite surface and wrapped a bloodied hand on the copper cladding of the flagpole. Peered towards their destination, he shouted, “CPUSA is engaging the National Guard! I repeat, CPUSA is engaging with secular forces!”

The sounds of gunfire rapidly rose at their destination. Another long arc of rainbow shot over the park, coming down close to the far end of the second grove. A green explosion shook all the leaves and boughs, making soldiers flinch in their advance.

“New York, keep moving!” Schuler yelled, boosting his volume with prestige.

The Baron ran past the fallen bodies, right up to the pedestal’s east face. He pressed himself against a bronze bas-relief of a naked woman and called up to the Zombie, “I’m here!”

The invincible man appeared at the edge above him, looking down. “Injuries?”

“None,” the Baron said hurriedly. “Am I good to move?”

“Yeah, I’ll cover you. Let’s run!”

The Baron ducked around the north end of the pedestal. The Zombie jumped down just ahead of him, providing a mobile shield. All around, New York cultists were running to the hedgeline, clambering up, and pushing forward. The Baron ran amongst them, squeezing between two hedge bushes and into the shade of this final grove.

At the intersection beyond—at the destination for Schuler’s task—the Baron could make out the National Guard checkpoint. Three jeeps were parked next to a flatbed truck full of equipment, and in front of those vehicles, six American soldiers were crouched behind sandbags, exchanging fire with the advancing occult. One of them had binoculars and was pointing at the violence in the park. Another was crouched, yelling into a radio handset at the back of the parked truck. Their weapons often paused—CPUSA mercs or New York soldiers repeatedly wished to break the Guard’s guns—but one of those six must be a cultist. After a moment, each Guard rifle returned to action as if it’d never been broken.

In effect, Langley’s secular hand was enforcing order with lethal force. They were treating Lower Manhattan like a warzone. What was Heckhaus’s excuse? What story was the media told? Was this a Cold War incident? Or were they labor riots incited by socialist or anarchist parties? The secular outcome would find its context tomorrow. Given the current tensions, blame would probably land squarely on remnants of the CPUSA, crushing them to dust.

Still, those vehicles had delivered very few soldiers to the checkpoint. It’d be trivial to overrun their position with Meister Schuler and the Zombie. Langley would lose this location, even if they had enough secular firepower to conquer the rest of the borough.

With every known threat accounted for, the Baron’s brain could finally dismiss the concerns of immediate survival. Well-practiced, he repeated the exercise that’d saved his life in the subway, and as he moved in the Zombie’s shadow, he scanned the environment for unknown threats.

On the south side of the coming intersection, Amalgamated Bank owned a five-story box of a building, fully stripped of all the decorative cast iron that’d once made it the prize of the jewelers, Tiffany & Co. Its tiny, slit-like windows were well-shadowed from the bright sunshine, allowing the Baron to look inside, but they were largely empty. The Baron could make out only a handful of shadowed faces, likely employees, called in on a Monday despite the violence. Now, they were witnesses to a terrifying fraction of the occult world.

On the north side of the intersection, there was a twelve-story office building, a grid of brick and steel holding up dozens upon dozens of tiny windows. That density offered a number of possible positions for spotters and gunmen, but the angle of reflection was poor from the Baron’s position, and most of its windows showed only a reflection of the midday sky.

He shaded his face with his hand and peered at the building anyways, focusing on the floors closer to the ground, just above and below the Dubois Uniforms sign that faced the park.

 Later, he’d conclude that his body language triggered a response. On the fifth floor, in the windows just above the painted sign, a figure moved, pushing a dark, mounted machine closer to the glass, and before the Baron could recognize the hostility in that act, they destroyed the windows by unleashing an unmistakable wrath upon Union Square Park.

The M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun was the reaper’s typewriter, spelling out battlefield eulogies. Its .50 BMG cartridges were nearly as long as a dollar bill and produced five times the force of a Springfield .30-06 for a bullet five times as large. It boasted a rate of fire exceeding four hundred shots per minute and excellent accuracy up to a mile. To put it bluntly, the Browning was designed to shoot down airplanes, and it’d been repurposed for shredding enemy vehicles and mowing down combatants through dense cover.

When the Browning erupted, the Zombie was standing in the wrong place to properly shield the Baron. Its barrel swung down to fire through the trees. Branches blasted into pieces, deflecting rounds. Bullet impacts swept across the soil, traced over the Zombie, and reached the Baron before he finished reacting, long before the Zombie could help.

The Baron dove into his friend’s back while a round tore past his shoulder, just over the collarbone. The Zombie swept around in turn, protecting the shorter man with his body, arms spread wide and back hunched, but the gesture came too late. The Baron felt a twinge of nerves and slapped at the side of his neck, and he missed. The firing stopped.

“Broken!” Schuler yelled to the New Yorkers. “The gun is disabled! Get up! Move, now, now!”

The Zombie grabbed the Baron’s shoulders and held him at arm’s length, mouth open. Eyes like platters. He mouthed words, forgetting to breathe, then took in a sharp breath and asked, “Friend?” That one word was strained under the weight of mortal terror. For a man with an invincible body and no inner life, fear for another was nevertheless unbearable.

d’Holbach felt waves of pain rocketing up and down his neck. The right side of his face was paralyzed. He felt a jet of blood from his carotid artery; then another splashing his palm as he clamped down on the wound. Each pulse drained him, made him dizzy. His legs shook him, and his visual field shrank. How much blood had he lost before he even felt it?

“Paul-Henri!” the Zombie shouted. When d’Holbach fell to his knees, the invincible man gripped his hand to keep him up. “Can you move?”

“They winged me,” the Baron said, trying to crack a joke, to cover up for the cold horrible feeling that was cramping down through him. His left eye was half closed. Only the right side of his mouth forced a smile. The bullet had barely clipped him, but it’d torn straight through a muscle, severing nerves and an artery. He was still losing blood, but he couldn’t feel the Cat. Wasn’t this fatal? Wasn’t this the road to death? “Am I dying?” he asked.

“You’ll live!” the Zombie yelled, desperate for anything other than inaction. “So stop holding onto this life and move! Before they fix the weapon, hurry up and move!”

The Baron understood. He took his hand off the wound, felt one more pulse of spurting blood—and the Cat seared through him like the dawn over a dazzling ice sheet. Fire burned up from his heart and through the artery, sealing it shut. He felt lines of fire cut through the muscles on his face and through the severed muscle of his neck. Invisible cords of force tied him together, and he willed them to move. Fire pulled his muscles, tickled his nerves. Like the puppeteer, he hooked the strings and commanded their dance, and the reins were his again.

He grasped the Zombie’s invincible hand with his own bloody fingers and felt himself lifted effortlessly off the ground and thrown forward. He stumbled deeper into the grove, seeing New York soldiers rushing alongside him while Schuler ran back towards him.

In the sky above, a rainbow arced out of Tammany Hall and swept across the park diagonally towards Dubois Uniforms, but it stopped short of the office building and exploded in thin air. Thunder echoed across the buildings without destruction.

“Did they miss?” the Baron asked Schuler.

“The General is out of range!” Schuler yelled, running over to meet them. “I’ll escort you! Heal you! Just keep moving!” He waved the Baron forwards, towards the checkpoint.

“Wait, wizard!” the Zombie barked, staring up at the Browning, poking its black barrel through the shattered window. “Launch me up there first! I want that damn gun!”

Author’s Note:

We’re closing in on the finale of this arc!

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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September 12, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Choking.

The Baron had shouted his throat raw. Enzu had magically jammed an SMG. The wish that sustained the Baron was almost certainly resolving minor issues in his ankles and knees, dismissing gradual inflammation after dropping a whole story onto thin carpeting.

These were signals, mundane and occult, and Meister Schuler was the most sensitive radio on the planet. There was no doubt that the Diviner would catch up to the Baron, probably before he could leave the building. So while d’Holbach sprinted west along a narrow hall, he made a strategic decision, which he hoped would save him from rapid recapture.

“Zombie!” he roared at the top of his lungs. “I need help!”

In response, somewhere behind him in the east, his own voice rang out in desperation, “Zombie! I think Schuler is copying my voice with prestige! I’m here!”

“Are you kidding me?” the Baron yelled. Voice mimicry was a very high-cost wish. The difference between the sound of your own voice and someone else’s was significant, and it usually wasn’t worth the prestige to cross that gap. A false voice often bought you only a few moments of confusion. In general, simple silence was preferred over illusory sounds.

Yet Schuler had just mimicked the Baron for a brief tactical advantage. He was already coming, and a series of wooden cracks were emanating from the center of the building. The invincible man was likely punching his way through a light, hollow panel door, while Schuler was surely catching up from somewhere. Every direction was a potential threat, so no direction was preferable except forward and out. He followed Enzu’s directions to the end.

 “If you don’t find me, come here!” the Baron yelled, turning left at the end of the hall. Past the corner, there were offices marked with the names of various secular administrators and tax officials. Most were shut. One door was propped open by the corpse of a CPUSA man with a claw hammer buried in his neck and a wooden wall recently painted with arterial jets of blood.

Enzu must’ve killed this man without getting a drop on his clothes. What class of killer had the Baron saved at the East River Docks?

“Murder Incorporated,” d’Holbach muttered, stepping carefully over the legs of the corpse and into the office. In the secular world, that band of hitmen had succumbed to law enforcement in ‘41, but there’d been rumors about their continuation. Even Phyllis—in the role of a secular gangster—had worried about them back in Crown Heights.

Now Enzu was not only claiming to be ex-Murder Inc, but he was showing the talents of a long career in finding men and turning them into bodies. Had he retired back before the war? Or had he been a member in some new group until much more recently?

It was too late to ask, and ultimately, it didn’t matter. Old killers threw around the names of death squads, and young killers quailed like every word had the weight and strength of fine steel. Maybe it was all a story. Maybe it was real. It hardly mattered to the dead, and the Baron needed to find that window before he joined their number.

There was a large office window shaded with wooden slat blinds, facing the street towards Union Square Park. The Baron squeezed into cover, putting his back against the gap between the window and a tall bookshelf full of legal tomes and printed journals. He tugged a pull string to raise the blinds.

Bleak spring sunlight struck the room at a near-vertical angle, illuminating the otherwise darkened office. The Baron peeked around the edge of the windowsill. There was a dead man in a suit lying on the curb next to an abandoned car with a shattered windshield. The driver’s side door was open, and both front wheels were missing. There were no tires, no rims, just bare axle mounts and a hood planted against the asphalt. Broken with a wish? Probably.

Further afield, cracks of gunfire echoed across the empty spaces and vacant streets, bouncing off flat facades and multiplying the sounds. For fear of bullets, nobody crossed the park’s main walkways or the open stone plazas on the north end. Instead, the fighting was concentrated in the southern half of Union Square, amidst several groves of vivid green trees, hemmed up between low dark walls of stone and waxy-leafed hedges.

There weren’t piles of bodies in any one spot, nor any obvious firing positions, but the cracks of gunfire suggested that somewhere in that tangle of greenery, around the old statue of Washington and the towering copper-clad pole of the Independence Flagstaff, desperate men were still shooting to prevent other men from shooting back.

Of course, there were some corpses. At least five lay in view in the main north-south boulevard that separated the east and west sides of the park’s greenery. If the Baron risked a closer look, he could probably find more.

This was a terrible spot to depart Tammany Hall, but he doubted the entrances would be any safer, and there was at least a wrecked car here for some cover.

The window had a lock on the top of the frame, but it opened on a swing hinge and wouldn’t leave enough room for him to squeeze through. He glanced around, looking for something to quickly knock out the glass and clear the frame of shards.

There was a short step ladder for the bookshelves. The Baron picked it up by the top step, drew in a deep breath, and swung the legs at the window.

“Bounce!”

The step ladder bounced off the glass like the Baron had struck rubber, nearly whipping out of his hands. He staggered once, casting a wild glance back over his shoulder.

Meister Schuler was standing on the far side of the bloodied CPUSA corpse, smiling pleasantly. His hair was far messier and full of dust now, and the glove on his right hand was missing. “My dear devil!” he cried, meeting the Baron’s wide eyes.

That wish couldn’t last long. The Baron swung again, and the step ladder bounced again. He readied a third swing.

“I’m no threat,” Schuler added. “Give me a moment to explain—”

The Baron swung again, ready for a third bounce, but the step ladder passed through the window with a crisp crash, loosening arm-length shards of glass to rain upon the indoors and outdoors alike. Each falling piece flashed in the sunlight like clear ice, cutting the air like swords before striking and shattering into countless daggers. d’Holbach held onto the stepladder, watching the razor edges splash across the windowsill about a foot from his bare hands.

Schuler huffed as the sound dissipated. “Baron, please.”

d’Holbach swept the edge of the short ladder along the bottom of the windowsill, knocking out the last knives of glass. There was enough room to vault out. He turned and heaved the ladder at Schuler, who dismissed it with a silent wave of his right hand, destroying the wood like someone had struck it with a metal bat.

“Will you listen?” the Diviner asked seriously.

The Baron stared at the most powerful man on the continent. “What, no threats?” he asked, shifting his weight and scooting closer to the windowsill. He’d vault quickly, then try to land into cover behind the ruined vehicle.

“Not from me,” Schuler said.

The Baron scooted right up to the edge of the window frame, glancing towards it meaningfully. “Who from then?”

Schuler pointed at the broken window, at the sporadic gunfire in the park. “Them. You can’t go outside unprepared. You’re stuck in here, with me, a little longer.”

The Baron hesitated, pressing his back to the wall and looking carefully at Meister Schuler. Still in black clothes, all business except for those lustrous copper frames. He didn’t look crazy. He looked both focused and completely at ease after brawling with the Zombie. It was worth a few seconds to ask this version of Schuler, “What do you mean?”

Schuler smiled. “Thank you, Baron! You’re finally listening to me. Words fail to convey the danger of this situation, so allow me to demonstrate.” He marched across the office, scurried around the manager’s desk, and swept aside the shards of glass with a sweep of his boot.

Then, flourishing his bare hand like a talented composer drawing out the pause, he stepped out into the narrow slice of daylight, cast by the high midday sun.

There was a wet thwip sound. It reminded the Baron of the Zombie slinging a rock into thick mud. Schuler bodily jolted, and a second later, the crack of a high velocity hunting rifle sounded across the park. The Baron flinched at the noise, and then realized that there was a tidy pucker on Schuler’s chest, left side. Over his heart.

“Schuler?” the Baron asked.

The Diviner raised a finger and rasped with only his right lung, “Lub,” then pointed out of the window. “Dub!” As if called forth, arterial blood heartily gushed from the chest wound, spilling over his dark clothes. He clapped a hand over the fatal puncture, stumbling back into the darkness of the office and coating his bare right hand in bright crimson—and then stopped, standing perfectly still. A moment passed; no fresh gushes behind closed fingers.

“Fuck,” the Baron cussed, lacking any other way to express the sheer terrifying display of power that Meister Schuler had committed in front of him.

The Diviner turned his head towards the Baron, smiling. “You understand now. They’re looking for runners, even while we struggle to uproot them from the hedges.” His voice was clear, unbothered. He lifted his bloody hand, revealing neither wound nor even damage to his shirt.

“You could’ve told me,” the Baron uttered. “I would’ve believed.”

“You, Doubting Henry? Believed? Ha! The only temple you worship is the cave wall.” Schuler strode over to the bookshelf, looking over the titles quickly. With his gloved hand, he pulled one off of a high shelf, then promptly slid it into a different spot on a low shelf. “The situation is changing rapidly,” he explained, scanning more tomes. Another book went to another spot. Then he relaxed, spreading his hands before the simple rearrangement like he’d completed a work of art. “Hansel found his crumbs, you see?”

The Baron’s heart hammered in his chest. The Diviner was casually spending enough prestige to dismiss fatal wounds, and why? To intimidate the Baron? To make him comply?

At least d’Holbach knew what the crumbs were. “You mean microtasks.”

Schuler patted a row of books with his bloody hand, leaving palm prints on the spines of several tax volumes. “Micro and otherwise. Any task is a guide to the gods’ will.” He glanced over at the Baron. “This is why I’m here first. You wouldn’t have listened if the Zombie were close. He would’ve swung at me, and I never could’ve made my point.”

“What point?” the Baron asked, vaguely irritated with the Diviner’s occult grandstanding. “I don’t understand the metaphor. Hansel was lost in the woods after a bird ate the breadcrumbs.”

As quick as a gunshot, Schuler exploded into laughter, turning towards the Baron and opening his arms as if to hug him, then thinking better of it, dropping his hands to his pants. “I’m the bird then! They call me cuckoo, after all! Ha-ha!”

The moment wasn’t remotely funny, which made the Baron wonder if Schuler was either mocking him or enjoying a moment of madman’s mirth. Another chuckle emerged from the Diviner, playfully arguing with a somber mood punctuated by gunfire.

At this rate, between Schuler and the snipers around the building, there was no way out of this room without help. “Zombie!” the Baron yelled. “I’m here!”

Schuler nodded at the Baron’s sudden shouting. “We do need him. However, we shouldn’t make too many cries. CPUSA is still in the building.”

“All the more reason to call for the Zombie.”

“Mm.” Schuler looked up, tipping his head around like someone looking for a radio signal. “Seven more mercenaries are in the main hall with the rest of the staff. Six, if…” The Diviner trailed off, eyes unfocused, and he raised the bloody hand for silence.

The Baron tipped an ear towards the building, checking if he could hear anything, or if this was a reaction from Schuler to an occult event.

There was a distant but substantial snap of shattering wood. The sound seemed to come from across the hall, but Baron couldn’t see any offices there, only old walls made of rough bricks. These bottom floor rooms had been built around the end of the last century. No cheap partition walls. “Is that—” the Baron wondered aloud.

“Shh!” Schuler interrupted, waving a bloody finger to negate the question, even as his expression remained slack. His eyes drifted down to the hardwood floor in front of the window. In the shadows, glass shards captured the diffuse glow of reflected sunlight.

A fresh CPUSA mercenary sidestepped into view in the hallway, framed by the open office door, holding a revolver in his hand. He aimed at the back of Schuler’s head over the exsanguinated corpse of his comrade. “Surrender,” he ordered.

Schuler gestured forward with his bloody hand.

There was a single, audible click of a pistol part snapping, instantly followed by a massive roar of shattering masonry. A long stretch of the bricks behind the merc jumped forward like a blanket tossed over someone’s back, overlapping and crashing down on a human body with the combined force of a half-ton of fired clay. Promptly crushed. Not even a scream.

The sweep of clattering bricks rolled outward from the point of impact, knocking over the old corpse in the doorway and scattering along the hall. The Baron stared in mute horror while a cloud of brick dust rose from the settling wreckage, flowing into the room. The smells of clay and lime filled his nostrils, dry and irritating.

Beyond the wreckage, through the hole in the wall, a large office was visible. Four desks were arranged for a team of clerks, flanked on either side by banks of tall filing cabinets. Along the far wall, an antique wooden door lurked in the dusty gloom.

Schuler lowered his hand and raised his head. “Thank you for your patience. I was elsewhere.” He glanced around, sniffing the dusty air. “Apologies for the mess. I needed to clear the way.”

“Clear the way?” the Baron asked. “You just killed a man.”

“Who, the corpse in the door?” Schuler glanced back over one shoulder at the fallen bricks. “Oh. There was another man.” He squinted, deeply confused by the accident he’d engineered moments before. “Hmm.” He pointed past the wreckage to the antique wooden door. “Didn’t mean to kill anyone. I was just opening the wall for him.”

The moment his sentence finished, there was a sledgehammer bang against the office door across the hall, and an antique handle burst out of its housing.

The Baron’s heart soared with relief. “Zombie, is that you?”

“Yeah! I’m here!” the Zombie shouted back.

“I’m with Schuler! Don’t worry, I’m safe!”

“With Schuler?” the Zombie yelled. Wood crunched twice as an invincible human fist barged through latch mechanisms and mounting screws, finally knocking the door inward on its hinges. The Zombie strode wide-eyed into the office across from them, still clasping the Cat o’ Nine Lives in his left hand. His shirt was no longer tucked in and was missing all of the buttons over his stomach, and one of his leather shoes was completely gone. “I heard the wall crash and came running.” His gaze darted around. “Are you a prisoner?”

“I don’t know,” the Baron admitted. “I think he wants to help.”

Meister Schuler chuckled kindly, like an odd uncle sharing a delightful surprise with his nephews. “My dear devils, I’m sparing no expense, not now. We’re in this together.” 

The Zombie stumbled over the brick pile and its buried corpses, glancing both ways along the hall before crossing into the office with d’Holbach and Schuler. “You knocked me over until I fell through the floor,” the Zombie complained. “Were you faking his voice?”

“Yes,” Schuler answered.

“So you were fucking with me after you saved your people?”

Schuler grinned at the Zombie. “I needed a moment alone with the Baron. To show a threat, and to prove a point.” He patted the nigh-invisible stain over his black-clad chest, briefly rewetting the darkening layer of blood on his right hand. “Shot in the heart, then healed, you see. I won’t die so long as I have prestige.”

The Zombie furrowed his brow. “Schuler, I have no inner life. I don’t know what emotions feel like, and this body can’t suffer pain. But I swear to all the gods of this Earth, you’re more frustrating than being poked in the eye. Repeatedly.”

“A fine compliment, but time is brief.” The Diviner wrinkled his nose, adjusting his bifocals upwards. “Would you kindly feed the Cat o’ Nine Lives to the Baron?”

d’Holbach’s brain hitched for a moment. It wasn’t that he’d never considered swallowing the Cat, but it wasn’t a particularly good idea either. If he swallowed it, delivering it to Denisov would require pulling it out of his own stomach lining—on a city street or at an airport—without any prestige on hand to heal the injury. Of course, Denisov had every reason to quickly treat him, but there weren’t any guarantees.

And while he wasn’t going to openly defy the Diviner here, the Baron wasn’t above asking very necessary questions either. “Is that wise? If I swallow the Cat, that’s a fresh reason to kill me. Nine of them, to be specific.”

Schuler grunted. “Of course it’s wise. It’s a blessing from the gods.”

“They’re not gods,” the Baron replied curtly, “and the Cat is a tool.”

Schuler shook his head and shuffled towards d’Holbach, as if closing the distance to receive a confession. Even without the cassock, he appeared priestly, bearing the cocksure confidence of a man who had seen their own salvation in a cup of red wine. “Baron,” he murmured softly, “why don’t you believe in the gods?”

“I’ve answered this question a thousand times,” the Baron replied.

“Indulge me?”

“Anything can be powerful without being divine. No event could ever convince me otherwise. You call them miracles? I call them artificial—engineered somehow. The whole world is a system of physical parts. I believe it encompasses everything.”

Schuler tapped the bloody spot over his heart. “This power doesn’t count as divinity?”

“Let me answer your question with a question. Do you worship the state?”

The Diviner smirked. “America? No.”

“Of course you don’t,” the Baron said. “Power doesn’t deserve your faith. It demands accountability. The same applies here. When the so-called gods interfere, I think we should hold them to a higher standard. I say, ignore their evil tasks; adhere only to what’s good. I say, let’s correct their unjust system. That’s what I think when I see their miracles. That’s where my heart goes.”

The Zombie grinned. “My friend may be a madman, but he’s striving like mad for a better world. Who cares what he believes?”

Schuler smiled along with the Zombie, but his next words were addressed to the only mortal man in the room. “Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. Even if you don’t believe in the gods, would you be surprised to learn that the gods believe in you?”

It was a ridiculous question for an absurd moment. In the silence that followed, two guns were fired in Union Square Park. With every passing second, people died, not just here but everywhere. The world turned onwards, and streams of little, meaningless actions poured together into broader historical flows. Decisions were made in government offices, atomic bombs were built in factory lines, and through the sum of all human efforts, civilization teetered ever closer to ruin. The Doomsday clock offered only seconds to midnight.

Yet the only way forward was through, not just this moment of insane questioning, but across that park and out into the broader conflicts of the age.

“What does that mean to you?” the Baron asked.

Schuler pointed out the shattered window, towards a street beyond the park trees, visible only as a line cut between rising buildings, heading west. “There, like a beacon of possibilities, a task has been set. Escort the Baron to that spot. Alive.” He let his hand drop, staring at the breadth of contested land between here and there. “It’ll be worth every ounce of force to bring you there, but the fighters outside won’t respect your Pact. They’ll kill every occult foe and retrieve the Cat o’ Nine Lives, or they’ll die trying. So let’s save two madmen with one stone, eh? Swallow the Cat. Guarantee your survival, and the gods and I will deliver you from this battlefield. Then you’ll have your last chance at saving the world or dying a martyr for its future.”

“Who is the second madman?” the Baron asked.

Schuler placed his hand on his chest. “What happened to that keen power of observation, my dear devil? It’s myself, of course. If you don’t survive today, the Zombie will kill me first. He hates me, and rightly so. I’ve threatened everything he loves.”

The Zombie took a long, deep breath. He normally didn’t breathe unless he was about to speak, and technically, he couldn’t feel physical pain, but there was a possibility that the Baron had often considered but never confirmed, for it’d embarrass the Zombie to ask. If the Zombie could feel fear? Loneliness? Agonies of the heart? Then he might need to take a deep breath now and then, imitating calm to ease the dull ache of stress.

“Friend,” the Zombie said, raising his left hand and the Cat o’ Nine Lives. “He’s right. They’re shooting at silhouettes out there, not at men. Hold out your hand.”

The Baron held out his hand, palm up. Delicately, as if there was nothing more precious in the world, the Zombie placed the sculpture in d’Holbach’s palm. The Cat was unusually cold and heavy, curled up and smooth. “Are you sure?” the Baron asked.

“I am,” the Zombie said. “Once the rest of the world realizes that CPUSA is out for blood, they’ll stop caring about the Pact.” He frowned, gently patting the back of the Baron’s wrist, lingering only a moment before withdrawing. “I won’t deny the gods today. Swallow it.”

“Atomic bomb logic?” the Baron asked. He brought the Cat close to himself. It was black and smooth, about as large as a walnut, and an obvious choking hazard.

“Yes. We’re on the verge of an apocalypse.”

“The stakes are indeed that high,” Schuler murmured.

The Baron closed his hand around the Cat. It never warmed, not even in a clenched fist. Like most prehistorical artifacts, its properties were wholly anomalous. Basic thermodynamics appeared to fail around it, if only because it’d been crafted in a time of profound ignorance. What seemed beyond possibility now was once obvious and simple in the metaphysics of primitive man. Something could “just be” cold if you didn’t know better. Something could “just be” always clean, incredibly tough, and capable of sustaining the dead.

The Cat was extremely old, far older than the proto-Slavic culture that had rediscovered it. Nobody had been able to afford the wish for the knowledge of its origins. Like many of the world’s most powerful artifacts, it was far older than recorded history, coming out of the same silent eon as the Zombie himself. Somewhen between the emergence of homo sapiens and the birth of civilization, there’d been a golden age of harmony between man and the gods.

This power had come to the modern world out of that Atlantis, that Lemuria, that Mu, that blessed Land of Fire that fell by the Zombie’s hand, that first age of ziggurats and sacrifices and pre-Biblical wars and the summoning of meteors on the eve of battle, and every other divine intervention encoded into myth and legend so that the world might remember a taste of ancient truth.

One of the primary rules of the system of prestige was that no wish could resurrect the dead, but here was the nearest thing to an exception. The Baron could only swallow it once. If it went in his mouth again after today, it would just be a chilly stone.

 “If I swallow this,” the Baron said, “we’ll have to cut it out without prestige.”

“It won’t be a fatal wound for you,” the Zombie said. “You nearly lost your arm once.”

“I remember.”

“We sewed it tight and there’s not even a scar now. You can take a lot more punishment before a wound is fatal. The gods have made you tougher than the rest.”

The Baron smiled wanly. “Remember when I lost my pinky to the second knuckle?”

“Yeah, and it grew back after a year or two. Neither age, illness, nor injury can take you. Trust me. You’ll be okay, so swallow it. For my sake, friend, swallow it.”

The Baron took a deep breath. He was in a nearly unique position to swallow the Cat and survive its loss. He’d endured the slow grind of time because the so-called gods always repaired him. They would save him from this as well, as long as the wound didn’t kill him quickly. Still, he hesitated. It’d be so much easier if it weren’t inside of him, in need of surgery.

“Elizabeth would do it if she were here,” the Zombie added.

The Baron laughed at the emotional incision of that comment. If there was anyone the Baron admired for strength and cunning, it was her. “She’s the only other person who could do it. Also, thank you for calling her Elizabeth for once.”

“Swallow it,” Schuler insisted. “We must leave soon.”

The Baron rubbed his fingers on the Cat. It felt sticky against human skin, as if it wanted to help him hold it. He lifted it towards the Zombie briefly. “Cheers!”

The Zombie smiled. “A toast to our coming victory. Drink from the cup of life.”

The Baron put the Cat o’ Nine Lives in his mouth.

Schuler jerked like a mule had kicked him in the jaw. He covered his ears, writhed and shouted, “Orchestra!” as if he were trapped in a pit full of deafening instruments.

The Baron tried to move his tongue, to reorient the little statue in his mouth for easier swallowing, but he couldn’t. It was made with purpose. It had energy. He tried to spit it out so he could start over, but that too was impossible. The Cat’s stickiness was one-way. When the Baron’s gag reflex pushed back, when his palate pressed against the cold sculpture, it stuck fast to his tongue. When the reflex automatically pulled back, readying for another thrust, the Cat slid down with it. A horrible gagging sound erupted from his throat, then was plugged.

It wasn’t merely like choking. The Baron was choking.

His eyes watered, and his diaphragm convulsed uselessly. Like a barbed quill, movement only forced the Cat deeper. His throat stretched painfully around its icy exterior. His stomach tried to squeeze, but the Cat refused to depart. Down, down, down it went.

Finally, the sculpture passed his trachea, and a breath jerked its way into his lungs, and he began coughing and retching.

Schuler was on his knees now, ears uncovered, head tilted up in awe. “The music! Beautiful music!” He blinked, squeezing tears from his eyes, wetting the lustrous copper frames where they touched his nose. “Ancient spells, singing in the air! My gods!”

The Cat was well down the Baron’s esophagus now. He tried to vomit, and it felt as if his throat swelled with acid, but the pressure of expulsion couldn’t move the Cat. Irrationally, the Baron feared he would burst. The Cat held steady, a cold lump.

“Does it hurt?” the Zombie asked.

The Baron nodded rapidly. Not only did his stomach ache, but the Cat was beginning to warm up. Body temperature could hardly compare with its searing surface. It sank smoothly towards the depths of his belly, burning away all other sensations. It slipped into his stomach, and for a second, the Baron knew it was boiling hot. He let out his breath in a squeal of pain, then burped literal steam. The Cat was cooking a hole in his stomach lining, destroying tissue and nerves and attaching itself like his flesh was melted wax.

Then, just as suddenly, pain ended. In the nest of the Baron’s intestines, the Cat o’ Nine Lives finally found a place to nap. “Burned,” the Baron groaned. “My stomach.”

“Then healed,” Schuler said, blinking away more tears. “So quickly healed.”

There was no doubt that the temperature had been real. Its warmth was still cooking out of the Baron’s belly, as if he’d chugged a whole bowl of scalding soup. However, Schuler was correct. The burned tissues were recovering supernaturally fast. Whatever had been done to install the Cat o’ Nine Lives was over. It began to feel right, natural, even comfortable. It felt like a part of the Baron, and it scared him that the artifact could so clearly modify his chemistry to relieve his anxiety. Then he stopped feeling scared.

“Quiet again,” Schuler said, closing his eyes. “I can hear the planet now. Whisper. Whisper Earth.” A rifle shot outside didn’t disturb his newfound peace.

“Protected for now,” the Zombie judged.

The Baron placed a hand over his belly, fully aware of the Cat’s presence. It was a cool stone, napping inside him, waiting for a lethal hour.

Ten lives and nine safe deaths remained.

Author’s Note:

And so, the Baron has acquired the right to die and live again.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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September 9, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warning.

The Zombie tossed the bowler up and caught it on his brow before tugging it down by the brim. He was glad the hat had survived the blast, though he doubted it’d make it through the afternoon. His invincibility didn’t extend to his clothes, but they were often incidentally preserved through the same miracles that protected his body. If a bullet phased through him, it often phased through his suit without damaging it.

The question was—how would his shirt or pants stand up to the Green Dragon Crescent Blade? That rainbow-slash was thoroughly destructive, and he didn’t want to loot another dead body. He planned to dodge the cuts as best as he could, if only because that was a fun game, but if he were lucky, his clothes might survive one or two incidental blows.

If they didn’t? Well, he’d just steal what he needed so he could walk the streets without drawing attention from the cops. Nudity was extremely funny, but it was uncivilized and caused too many problems for the Baron. Under these occult circumstances, it’d probably be easier to get away with murder than walking shirtless along a Manhattan road.

With the Cat in his left hand and General Osman’s orders at his back, it was time to sweep the rest of the floor. Given the dead merc’s position, it was probable that CPUSA had used magical silence to infiltrate the temple itself. When High Oracle Gagliano had declared its desecration, a New York cultist had already died. A shot in the dark? Maybe a slit throat. Only the Zombie could safely scout forward now and flush out a well-prepared enemy.

He smiled and trotted a little further down the hall, stopping at each door to look far into each lounge, office, and sitting room. Across three rooms, nothing happened; no sounds emerged, and nothing interesting was discovered beyond scattered debris.

“Is it clear?” Osman called from beyond the edge of the door.

“Not yet!” the Zombie yelled.

“Hurry up! We’re ready to move!”

The Zombie approached the fourth room on the left side, which had already been struck through by the previous slash, and he found another corpse, headless and missing an arm. The Zombie stopped and whistled, marveling at the victim’s bad luck. This merc had crouched down into cover, just inside the open door, and that’d been a perfect angle to catch the rainbow-arc right below his throat, cleanly severing through neck and collarbone.

“Zed, sighting left again,” Mr. Roach called faintly, still lying down in the main hall and watching events over the iron sights of his rifle. The man must have excellent vision, to deduce that much from the Zombie’s body language alone.

The invincible man grabbed the damaged door jamb with his right hand and leaned into the room, curious if the merc’s loose head had struck the back wall. The result was better than expected—the head, arm, and most of a shoulder had sailed clean across the break room and landed in a steel sink, where they’d mixed with debris from a shattered cabinet. But that detail was quickly forgotten, as something far more interesting moved in the dim.

Two living CPUSA mercs were crouching behind an upturned table, yelling in complete silence into a radio, as if pantomiming terrified shouts.

The Zombie grinned. They’d wished for their own special silence, which nobody else could hear. “That’s expensive,” he noted pleasantly, interrupting their hidden report.

Both mercs jerked and swiveled towards him, mouths hanging open in inaudible screams. One of them pointed a gun at the Zombie, and then their wish for silence ran out of time.

The other one was yelling into a hand radio, “Zed detected! We need orders! We need—”

“Left, full room!” Mr. Roach declared, quite a bit louder.

“—help! Fuck!” the merc finished yelling, then dropped to the floor.

The armed merc pushed to his feet, sprinting for the door. Right at the Zombie.

The invincible man grinned and tightened his grip on the jamb. “Brave,” he judged, as the running merc desperately threw himself at the scant gap between the Zombie’s left arm and the damaged door.

A distant martial cry heralded a fresh arc of violet light, cutting across the break room from wall to wall.

The running merc jammed his body into the space between the Zombie and the door—and the Zombie simply thrust his body leftwards using his right arm, pinning the merc between his invincible shoulder and the doorjamb. Ribs instantly creaked, popping then snapping like overcooked wishbones. This crush prevented any escape.

“No!” the man shrieked in agony, as the world flashed cannon-blast green just behind him. The break room split along a fresh shockwave, wrecking walls and cabinets, destroying the overturned tabletop, and severing off a heavy slab of door with enough force to clip the back of the trapped merc’s head and leave his neck bent at a dead angle. Eyes instantly lost focus. Dead as a nail, even after dodging the rainbow-slash.

Red light faded away, and jade confetti rained over the second merc in the room. He’d lived, diving beneath the slash, but he was half-trapped beneath a fallen slab of hardwood tabletop. Groans of pain were audible despite the general crumbling and clattering of debris.

The Zombie released the dead man from his shoulder check and strode through the wreckage of the break room, angling towards the survivor. “Hey, asshole! Alive down there?”

The living merc yelled beneath the remains of the breakroom table, wordless and defiant.

The Zombie kicked the heavy wooden plank with the tip of his leather shoe. The toe box crushed instantly, but his invincible foot launched the damaged tabletop with a spray of splinters. Once freed, his next victim started squirming, clawing away from the inevitable danger with one bloodied hand.

This CPUSA merc was younger than most, somewhere in his late thirties—probably a recent acquisition of the Worker’s Party, inducted right before the Smith Act trials.

“Some die young,” the Zombie judged, kneeling down beside the squirming man. “But not as young as the children your boys killed yesterday.”

“What?” the merc rasped.

The Zombie bunched up the back of the man’s collar in his fist, twisting it up tight until the merc groaned, and then he lifted him bodily from the debris and damaged wood, shaking off a light clatter of jade fragments amidst bits of plaster and lath. “Your comrades killed children,” he repeated. “And nobody is asking me to spare your life.”

Blood was running down the merc’s limp right arm. He gurgled, not quite choking because the top button of his uniform was open. After the last slash, he could still move, but he was weak, almost floppy. Injured back, perhaps? But not yet dead. “Fuck you,” he spat, disrespecting the Zombie moments before his demise.

“You don’t think you’re responsible,” the Zombie observed, dragging the merc bodily out of the open door and into the main hall. “I’ll have to make an example.”

“Fuck you,” the merc repeated, even as his boots dragged across the carpet.

The Zombie lifted the man’s collar, holding him at arm’s length, like a dangling, freshly-butchered side of beef. “Armies don’t operate on responsibility. Do they?”

“Fuck… you,” the merc whimpered a third time.

The Zombie snickered, waving to Mr. Roach with his left arm, holding the Cat. Then he shouted loudly, so that all the floor could hear him: “Armies are killed, one bloody soldier at a time! If you don’t run, you will die today! Like this! General, center hall! Sever the body!”

A vertical arc of violet light surged out from the side of the hallway at an oblique angle, travelling as fast as an arrow’s flight while leaving behind vast bands of sapphire blue and sky-bright cyan. For an instant, colors flowed smoothly towards the standing edge of the slash, some meters behind the Zombie. A near miss, so the Zombie dodged towards the slash, dragging his dangling victim into its vertical plane. The merc screamed, intersecting the rainbow.

Loudly bright, the color of spring exploded through the air—the slash tickled the Zombie’s palm—and an unrecognizable wash of pulped flesh was torn from the Zombie’s grip and thrown loosely back onto the hallway floor.

Hat gone again. Shirt hem fluttering on the shockwave. The Zombie roared with laughter, shaking the gore off his right hand and looking around for the corpse. He found only scattered limbs on either side of the fading red arc, nearly unrecognizable as anything other than leaky meat and chipped bone. The rainbow vanished, and jade fragments fluttered through the empty air in mute celebration. Most of the magical force had gone into a single human body, folding it vertically in half. Instant death for the killers of children and their comrades. “You should see this!” he shouted at any remaining mercenaries. “He’s hamburger!”

The Zombie threatened his enemies for two reasons. First and foremost, it was fun, but second, fear had tactical significance. He hoped to pin the mercs in place or force a retreat.

For a full second, no response came.

Then all at once, eleven CPUSA mercenaries swarmed out of various lounges and rooms, converging into a single mass while running at full sprint towards the Zombie. No orders were passed between the mercs. Occult silence had obscured any prior coordination. Boots hammered across carpets, heads angled down, and desperate eyes peered forward—towards victory or death. They clutched a variety of guns to their bellies.

Instead of falling one after another to a magical superweapon, they’d chosen to launch a final assault on a superior foe.

“Incoming!” the Zombie bellowed.

“Pierce!” Mr. Roach yelled in turn, almost certainly applying a second or two of altered properties to the rifle cartridges in his Garand.

The Zombie tried to throw himself in front of the bulk of the group, arms wide, but there wasn’t anything to grab onto with his right hand. He couldn’t secure his footing.

The merc at the head of the charge lowered his shoulder and rammed bodily into the Zombie, a suicidal tackle. With a wet crunch, both skull and shoulder folded against the Zombie’s chest, but dead weight swept into him, carrying him off his feet and onto his back. The floor itself cracked open to catch him in a fold of torn carpeting and broken planks, only stopping his momentum against the creaking joists below. The dead body sprawled on him, twitching.

Then ten surviving mercs swarmed past the Zombie, and gunfire erupted.

The Baron was well-clear of the sightlines when he heard the telltale crunch of the Zombie smashing through copious amounts of wood.

Meister Schuler took one step left, then squatted, and the first shots of the battle sailed past and above him, peppering the back of the main hall.

Lt. Sadgrove frowned, positioning himself to the left of the Diviner.

Mr. Roach fired his Garand. The crack of ignition was clearly supersonic, and the kick of the rifle was hard enough to punch Mr. Roach’s shoulder back like he’d fired a buffalo round. A pair of heavy crashes signalled bodies stumbling mid-run and falling to the floor.

More gunfire returned in earnest, peppering in through the open doors, and Mr. Roach simply stared into the fusillade, fearlessly adjusting his aim on the ironsights. “Pierce!” he barked again, pulling the trigger. Another explosive shot signalled another pair of falling bodies.

“Four down!” Sadgrove declared. Then a moment later, “Grenade!”

A Mk II fragmentation grenade—a genuine WWII pineapple, green-grey cast iron—flew in through the doors and bounced exactly once off the carpet before the Baron finished turning to dive to the ground. He landed, hands behind his head, a reaction that’d saved his life twice before.

“Away!” Schuler shouted. It was the last word audible before the thunder crack of the grenade’s explosion and the sharp hailstorm of scattering shrapnel.

“Get up, Baron!” Osman shouted.

“A pleasure to see our wizard at work,” Lt. Sadgrove muttered.

d’Holbach raised his head. There was no sign of any damage to the room. Nobody else had moved, though Sgt. Wade had flinched away from the main doors.

“What?” the Baron asked, turning over to look at the others. Mr. Roach was still lying in plain view, watching the hall with his rifle. Schuler was squatting, and Lt. Sadgrove was alongside him, staring into the hall. Sgt. Wade was cringing, clutching his Tommy with his back to the right wall. General Osman was posing again, preparing another magic slash—this one would have the angles of a horizontal arc.

Sadgrove met the Baron’s gaze. “Schuler handled it.”

“How?” the Baron asked.

“It bounced back into the hall.”

General Osman shouted a war cry, then swung twice, releasing two horizontal rainbows in quick succession—one at chest height and one angled down towards distant knees, sweeping out both sides of the hall at two elevations. Claps of green-thunder echoed as portions of the building were slashed inwards, irreparably cutting loose vast sheets of plaster and lath. Secondary cracks followed even as the first booms echoed; these were the glassy implosions of cathode ray tubes. Two dozen falling televisions had just shattered against the floor.

“Holy shit! Holy shit!” Wade yelled as the rolling blastwaves cleared, leaving behind the hideous sound of crumbling walls deeper into the building.

“Supports,” Schuler declared lazily, standing up. “Four of them, General! Repaired!”

“A fair price for a clear floor!” Osman replied heartily.

Schuler grunted. “One survivor. Lieutenant, may I puppet you?”

“Yes, Diviner,” Lt. Sadgrove replied.

Schuler wobbled into place beside the old soldier, then grabbed his wrist behind the Luger and aimed him at a stretch of crumbling lath planks. For a moment, they showed the combined grace of a drunk trying to adjust the arm of a marionette, but whenever Schuler briefly released him, Sadgrove’s hand locked steadily in place.

After a few more tweaks, the Diviner paused arbitrarily. “There! Last on the floor, whispering miracles. Fire at will.” He released Sadgrove’s wrist.

The Lieutenant sniffed airily. “Walls as spacious as air,” he said, and he fired the Luger. The shot seemed to go nowhere, hitting no visible surface, but a heartbeat later, Baron could hear a soft thud. After a moment, he realized that he’d heard a body falling.

“You’ve perfected shooting people through walls?” the Baron asked.

“My specialty, Baron,” Lt. Sadgrove murmured proudly. “A technique, inspired by the Rutherford model, spread to the public by science-fiction. I’ll use it while people believe.”

Schuler wobbled backwards a couple of steps, losing focus. “Dead in seconds.”

“Thank you, Diviner.” Lt. Sadgrove holstered his Luger at his waist.

Schuler waved at Osman, wrinkling his nose to keep his bifocals adjusted. “Send the Zombie ahead to be sure, but we can move at will, General.”

General Osman planted the gold counterweight against the floor. “Zombie!” he shouted, cupping a hand over his mouth. “Scout us to the stairs!”

There was a thud. “Got it!”

Osman grinned, enjoying this degree of cooperation from the invincible man. “If you find anyone still living, bring them here! I’ll make ‘em squeal!”

“Can do!” yelled the Zombie, audibly shedding a portion of shattered wood like someone dumping damaged lumber onto a burn pile.

The Baron grimaced, standing up and brushing off his pants. “Are you asking him to bring you torture victims?”

General Osman faced the Baron with disbelief. “Are you complaining about my protection, kraut?”

“Torture doesn’t teach anything,” the Baron argued.

General Osman scowled. “You’re not in any position to order me around. You’re a prisoner, and damn lucky one. Without me, these dogs would have you.”

The Baron scowled right back at one of the most influential leaders on the continent. “People lie to stop the pain, you know. Torture misleads men.”

“I’m not interested in your mad theories, philosopher.”

“You’re asking my Zombie to commit horrible crimes. I’m telling you to stop.”

General Osman released a cough-laugh, a sound of sheer disbelief. “That devil?” he asked. “The one who burned my men in Salem, laughing while they screamed?”

The Baron felt a surge of indignant rage. Salem had haunted him for decades; this cult had held him responsible throughout New England, making him beg for letters of passage while demanding that he check in with every vassal cult before they worked. A flurry of barbed words swept through him, but only one phrase found its way through the wall of his willpower. He couldn’t help himself. “Do you think I liked Salem?” he asked bitterly.

“What?” Osman replied.

“Do you think I wanted him to hold men to the fire?”

“You let him loose—”

“A mistake!” the Baron shouted. “Do not ask my man to torture people for you! Call him back for my defense, and use your own men!”

The General sneered. “Absolutely not, Baron. I’m not giving you any tools, nor bringing your devil to me. You will not be trusted so readily.”

“Agreed,” Lt. Sadgrove murmured.

The General gestured with his free hand at the folded wreckage of the double doors, now twice split by the broad slashes that’d cleared the entire second floor. The hall ahead offered the only navigable route. “This arrangement continues, both for your safety and ours. Now walk, Baron, and tell your Zombie to check the dead. For your safety.”

The Baron glowered, but he knew he had no power to alter events. “Zombie!” he called out into the hall, seeing only scattered corpses and debris and nothing of his invincible friend. “Be thorough! We’re walking out now!”

The Zombie stepped out of a side room, kicking over a load of wooden debris onto the collapsed torso of a mercenary, recently separated from its legs. He cast them a thumbs up, grinning. “I’ve counted the dead! You’re clear!”

Osman leered. “Did you match their parts?”

“I counted heads!” the Zombie replied.

“Haha! He is a good soldier, I’ll give him that!” Osman cheered. “Go on then, Baron. Move, before the enemy bars our way again.”

Pops of gunfire could be heard softly through the outer walls. Even if they’d slain a squad or two on this floor, the broader battle was still growing. New York’s soldiers would be returning to the area, CPUSA would be fighting them in the park, and the National Guard were certain to make a move soon. Time was genuinely scarce.

Without further complaint, the Baron strode forward into the hall. The first thing he noted was a couple of dead CPUSA mercs, face down on the carpeting, which was wicking up their blood. The walls, floor, and ceiling around them were pockmarked with grenade shrapnel. Even at a glance, the Baron could see that the Mk 2 had exploded unevenly upon return—a known flaw in the grenade’s design—but not a single fragment had flown back towards Schuler or his allies. The unlikely coincidence suggested this was another Diviner special.

“Elegant wishing,” the Baron judged darkly.

“Thank you!” Schuler called from behind.

Further down the hall, pairs of mercenaries had fallen to each shot from Mr. Roach. His rounds, imbued with the strength to pierce, had punched fist-sized exit wounds out of their backs—severing spines, shattering ribs, and shredding lungs.

With a damaged shoe, the Zombie shoved one mangled body into a hole in the floorboards, letting it come to rest on the joists underneath. He saw the Baron coming, waved, and then jogged on ahead, glancing into the empty and ruined rooms.

“Keep going!” Osman called.

d’Holbach glanced back. Everyone else was lined up behind him, using him as an indirect hostage against any possible threat from the Zombie. Schuler was closest and calmest, peering through his lustrous copper frames at all the ruined gaps in the walls.

The Zombie gave another thumbs up and jogged on further, flicking his head from side to side, scanning for threats with sharp eyes. “If anyone sees my hat, grab it!”

The Baron didn’t search for the bowler, but he studied the damage from the Green Dragon Crescent Blade. Those last two slashes had cut across the story in two broad swathes, freeing vast sheets of the walls before knocking them down. Beyond the ubiquitous slabs of plaster and lath, time-yellowed wall studs gaped like old teeth, split water pipes gushed freely into dusty gaps, and smaller steel crossbars bent outwards, tracing the force of the attacks. The stairwell—distant as it was—was just visible, running alongside a vertical support beam.

The illusion of distinct rooms had vanished; this was all a single floor, separated by artificial barriers. Many of the indoor lights were broken, but thin sunshine streamed through the dusty gaps from distant second story windows, and enough lamps and fixtures had survived to illuminate the gloom. Countless offices now laid in ruins. Shattered books, destroyed hardwood desks, and folded paintings presented themselves as recognizable losses. So much else was returned to raw materials, debris jutting with splinters or settling with gushes of powder.

If that magic guandao was used on the streets of New York, it could inflict unimaginable property damage and take many, many lives. Running from its range would require more than simple sprinting. The Baron would need the element of surprise, somehow.

Up ahead, the Zombie followed the once serpentine turns of the temple hall in an obvious zig-zag motion, stopping at the damaged stairwell door. The Baron followed quickly, following the old hallway while skirting around the occasional CPUSA corpse. The angle of the lower slash dug down, opening the gaps in the walls wider and wider, but the damage stopped right before it touched the carpet on the landing beyond the split stairwell door.

The Zombie whistled appreciatively. “Your building is still whole!”

“Good control,” Sgt. Wade praised his General.

“Always, Sergeant,” Osman purred with pride.

The Baron guessed that the General had some ability to alter the range of the attack. There was no obvious damage to the concrete outer walls, and he’d only cut through a few main steel beams, which Schuler had instantly restored.

The Zombie kicked the remains of the stairwell door through the damaged jamb, knocking them into the still-whole railing. Idly, he nudged a shattered piece of door around with his foot, guiding it between two black iron railing posts. It slid between the gaps and over the edge, tumbling down the open air shaft in the middle of the stairwell before clapping lightly against the ground floor. “Should I go down?” he called, glancing back at everyone.

“Wait there!” Osman replied.

Underfoot, there were occasional bursts of gunfire. The Baron recalled Lt. Sadgrove’s appraisal of the situation. Some enforcers were fighting against Soviet mercs, and Enzu was among them. Right now, the Zombie wanted to descend and join the battle, but he wouldn’t have a choice, not while the Baron was so close to Schuler, the enforcers, or Osman himself.

As they approached, an intuition scratched at the back of the Baron’s mind. He’d heard a light clap of impact, not a hard thud. A full floor drop was survivable for any athletic person with training, but it was far easier if the surface was softened in any way, like soil or carpeting.

He stared at the Zombie, opening his eyes as wide as possible, a signal to communicate. The Zombie met his gaze, then flickered away, looking around like a bored cat tracing a particularly interesting mote of dust. Then he turned back and yelled, “Osman? You don’t need me to scout?” He cast another thumbs up towards them, meaningless positivity to everyone but the Baron himself. It was a signal that he was paying attention to d’Holbach now.

“Wait a moment!” Osman called. “I’m going to sight first!”

The Baron set his right hand in front of his stomach, flattened out like a barrier. Then using his left hand, he “jumped” a finger over the barrier and whipped the finger down, suggesting acceleration. Then he casually slipped his hands into his pockets. Hopefully, the pantomime communicated the idea clearly enough.

The Zombie gave another thumbs up. “Understood, Osman!” It was an imperfect plan, but the Zombie approved of the escape attempt. Good enough.

d’Holbach looked back over his shoulder briefly, actively disengaging from his destination for a few seconds. “What are we looking for?”

“Guerra and Cecil will try to cover both stairwells!” General Osman called back to him from the end of the line. “If they’re close, I don’t want your devil punching my enforcers to death!”

So Osman was willing to risk a brief approach to the Zombie, hoping to avoid any out-of-view violence against New York’s finest fighters. The goal must be to keep everyone in view of Schuler, since he arguably was the most influential occult threat in the building.

Lt. Sadgrove, Sgt. Wade, and Mr. Roach were shuffling around each other to get a good look past Meister Schuler. Some were watching the Baron. Others were watching the Zombie. All of them were cautious, inspecting their prisoners closely, but they probably wouldn’t expect d’Holbach to open some distance with gravity’s help.

The Baron resumed his walk, turning the final corner towards the Zombie. If he sprinted at the last moment, there wouldn’t be enough time for anyone to react, to aim a weapon or finish a command. He’d simply vault the railing, land below, and run.

The Zombie pushed away from the cast iron railing and stepped back through the damaged door jamb. “I don’t see anybody on the bottom floor,” he said, taking two steps towards the Baron. “What do you think—”

The Baron launched into a full sprint at the Zombie.

The Zombie darted left, barely clearing a collision with his friend, then bounced right to cover him against gunfire while charging Schuler directly.

Among New York’s enforcers, the fastest amongst them was surprisingly Lt. Sadgrove. “Through!” he shouted, audibly unholstering his Luger with a metal click and scraping leather.

On intuition alone, the Baron jumped early, diving horizontally onto the railing’s handbar. Crack—a gunshot, intended for a calf or thigh, passed through both Schuler and the Zombie, missing beneath the Baron, all in the instant before his belly folded over the bar and momentum carried him into a tumble. Feet went over his head, like he was a child rolling over the top of a fence. A flash of the stairwell blurred around him, and then he was falling.

Vertigo greeted him for three racing heartbeats, suggesting panicked flailing or locked limbs, but he was a man conditioned by old wars. Practice demanded readied legs and spread arms, enforcing a sense of balance. A breathless acceleration. Less than a second later, he landed on his feet, absorbing the impact by folding up, flexing against deceleration like he was squatting, until he struck the carpet with his hands and fell forward onto his knees, half-rolling to a stop. The carpeting prevented some bad bruises on his kneecaps.

“Baron!” General Osman roared, somewhere above. Two more gunshots.

The impact had strained every bit of d’Holbach, but he was too fit to stop. There was a wall in front of him, a door behind him. He twisted away, leaping up towards the exit.

Overhead, the metal railing shattered with an explosive bang, and the Zombie’s body sailed backwards over the gap—still gripping the Cat—and slammed into the back wall of the stairwell, bouncing off the concrete superstructure and ragdolling onto the mid-story landing.

The Baron didn’t have to guess. Schuler was defending his General and the enforcers. Nothing to do but run.

d’Holbach pulled open the exit in front of him to reveal a confused man in front of a hallway full of corpses. All at a glance—a short salt and pepper beard, a plaster cast on one arm, and the other raised high and holding a Saturday night special in full view. This was the best possible result for the worst possible moment.

“Baron?” Enzu Guerra asked with alarm. There were six CPUSA corpses here and a great deal of blood. Had he killed all six men with a shitty revolver?

“Enzu!” the Baron shouted. “Move!”

Enzu spluttered uncertainly. “What are you doing here?”

Before the Baron could answer, there was a strange click in the revolver, as if some tiny part had snapped. The enforcer’s eyes darted up, a moment of recognition.

Far behind Enzu, a uniformed figure slid out of a door and into the hall full of dead bodies, holding a 12-gauge break action shotgun in his hands.

The Baron’s eyes opened wide.

Enzu roared, “Dud!” Somehow, without seeing, he’d known what to wish for.

A pull on a shotgun’s trigger. A murderous click, striking a dead primer.

Enzu tossed the wish-ruined revolver, spun around on one foot, and in a single smooth motion, he proved why he was an elite enforcer for New York. He reached into his jacket, drew a Beretta from a shoulder holster, and hipfired the pistol like a trickshot at a carnival. One shot, loud but controlled, with utter confidence. By the time the revolver hit the floor, there was a tidy hole between the merc’s eyes, and a pink mist drifting through the air behind him.

Shot through the head, into the brainstem. Instant death. The merc collapsed.

“Shit!” Enzu cussed. “Got lucky!”

“Lucky?” the Baron asked, still hesitating.

“Gun broke,” Enzu huffed. “It’s a good warning!”

“Schuler!” the Zombie roared on the landing above them. “You ruined my shirt!”

“I have to go!” the Baron shouted, rushing past Enzu, trusting that the man wouldn’t shoot him in the back.

“Wait!” Enzu yelled. “Baron d’Holbach, stop!”

The Baron didn’t answer. He was already nearing the corner, just past the fresh CPUSA corpse. He’d give it a glance, and if there was a window in view, he’d sprint for it.

Instead of finding a clear hall or any path forward, he discovered a man in a grey business suit, kneeling with a Thompson sighted. “Surrender—”

The Baron’s heart leapt up through his throat, and his running momentum became another panicked dive to the carpet, clearing the hallway and scrambling into cover against the wall. “Enzu! Help!” he roared.

“Ey, what?” yelled the man in the hall. “En-zu, it’s me! I’m comin’ in!” His voice was slightly nasal, and he hit the “zu” with a sharp z and a long vowel.

“Cecil!” Enzu called. “Be careful! That’s the Baron!”

d’Holbach rolled over onto his ass, looking down the hall. Enzu was holding his Beretta towards the floor, keeping his fingers out of the trigger guard.

“The fuckin’ legend?” Cecil came out of the hall, facing towards the Baron and gripping his Thompson in his hands. He had short black hair and a young-looking face with a shallow chin, but his hairline was receding. “Fuck me, that’s the Salem guy, right? Isn’t he a prisoner?”

“Yeah?” Enzu replied, and it was definitely a question.

“I need a way out!” the Baron cried, pushing to his feet. “Schuler and the Zombie are fighting!” he shouted, hoping that an apocalyptic potential for property destruction would make his entire case for him.

Cecil glanced halfway back at Enzu, then focused back on d’Holbach again, lifting the Tommy’s barrel to track the Baron. “Should we arrest him? Or something?”

The Baron cringed. He’d have to argue his case. “You need to understand—”

His voice was drowned out by the voice of a stern father, wrathful and damning with every booming word. General Osman, amplified by wishes, could be heard through all the floors and walls, as if he were yelling into a bullhorn. “Enforcers! The Baron d’Holbach is on the ground floor! If you find him, secure him until Meister Schuler or myself can collect him!”

Cecil lifted his Thompson, aiming it dead at the Baron’s chest but keeping his finger out of the trigger guard. “Answers that. Surrender, Mr. Baron. General’s orders.”

“I can’t!” the Baron shouted. “I have to run! The world might depend on it!”

“Not much of a story.” Cecil wiggled the barrel expertly down towards the Baron’s thighs. “Just stand still for a second.” Without moving his head or his weapon, he raised his voice. “Enzu, you got your cuffs?”

Enzu was approaching quickly, head on a swivel in case more CPUSA members came running after the General’s universal declaration. 

The Baron did his best to explain everything in one panicked speech. “The Russians are warring with themselves! One side hired me to force a stalemate! Stalin’s side hired these mercs to stop me! If I don’t escape now, Stalin wins, and then it spills out from there! It will end in nukes!”

Cecil shrugged, tapping a finger on the outside of the trigger guard. “It’s orders, Mr. Baron. Tell the General—”

“I already have!” the Baron roared. “The nobles don’t care! Ask Enzu!”

Cecil turned his head halfway, keeping the Baron in the corner of one eye and sighting Enzu in the corner of the other. “En-zu?” he asked.

The older enforcer winced, stopping behind Cecil. “It’s true. Every word. Keeping him is stupid. I just thought the old boys would let him go.”

There was a series of three wrecking-ball slams, as if someone was repeatedly ramming a car into a concrete wall. The enforcers glanced up, but the Baron ignored the sound; nothing was crashing down around him yet.

“Just stand down,” he begged. “Lie if you have to, but let me go!”

Cecil sighed, resighting his weapon. A ringed finger ran up and down the outside of the trigger guard. “I don’t know, man. My job is orders, not decisions.”

Enzu shrugged. “Nah, forget it. We’re paid by the body, not the prisoner. He’s not our problem if we didn’t see him. I say, let the Baron go.”

“Well—” Cecil began, only to be interrupted by a deep thud, followed by an acute shattering of wood, crunchy and splintering.

“The fuck?” Enzu asked.

Somewhere else in the building, a floor gave way, dropping glass and wooden wreckage down a story in a tremendous pour. No single note of that chaos was loud, but the sum of it drummed out of the walls like the rumble of a crashing wave, echoing in their chests.

The Baron regrettably recognized the sound. The Zombie had just fallen through the second story floor, dropping down the contents of a room and a tree’s worth of ruined joists.

“Fuck you, Schuler!” roared the Zombie, barely audible through the walls.

With dreadful anxiety, the Baron understood what he’d already heard. Like Kaiser Abbas before him, the Diviner had thrown the Zombie through multiple walls—those three rapid slams—and then he’d smote him down to the ground floor. It wasn’t hard; the Zombie was an object. He couldn’t be hurt, but he could be thrown around to keep him away from his enemies.

Somewhere in the building, Schuler had finally earned the space to operate independently of the Zombie’s threats. The moment the Baron did anything at all to draw attention, Schuler would know where to find him.

“Just point me toward a window!” he pleaded, a strained whisper-shout. “For the world!”

Cecil scowled. “Nah, fuck that, Mr. Baron. I know Salem. We got to cuff you to control the Zombie, or he’ll kill everyone here.”

“No, he won’t! I command him!”

“Yeah, sure you do. Just like Salem.” Cecil waved behind himself with a hand. “Cuffs?”

Enzu scowled, holstered his pistol, and set his shoulders back. The Baron saw a transformation in the old enforcer, a practiced relaxation dropped like a robe to reveal the underlying instincts. Enzu had shot seven men with a kind of gormless confidence, but now he displayed the long-practiced anger of a bloodthirstier man. He gritted his jaw. “Cecil? Look at me, boy,” he commanded.

Cecil waved Enzu off. “Cuffs first, man.”

Enzu tightened his free hand into a fist, flexing it a couple of times. “He ain’t running. That’s why he’s begging. Now, look at me.”

“Jesus, En-zu, fine.” Cecil didn’t change his grip on the Thompson, but he turned his head sideways to spot the elder enforcer.

“Jammed,” wished Enzu Guerra, and he threw a punch into Cecil’s temple with all of his weight behind it, following through. Cecil’s head whipped about half a foot, jaw slacked by momentum. Yet somehow, in that instant, Cecil got his finger into the trigger guard before he blacked out. Click.

“Fuck!” the Baron cursed at the sound, even as Cecil toppled over sideways onto the carpet, completely unconscious for a full second or two. “Holy shit, Enzu!”

“He ain’t dead,” Enzu declared.

Immediately, Cecil regained consciousness, groaning loudly. A hand reached out, grabbed the jammed Thompson, and cradled it to his chest like a teddy bear as he struggled to recover. “What the fuck, man!” he yelled, blinking rapidly.

Enzu took one step forward, shouting, “Stay down! Don’t squeal!”

Cecil flipped him the bird. “Fuck you, man!”

“You crossing me?”

“No, but—”

“I was with Murder Inc!”

Cecil raised a hand in surrender. “I ain’t! I ain’t crossin’! You just… you fuckin’ punched me!”

“You‘re damn right, you aren’t crossing me!” Enzu snapped his fingers, then waved the Baron off like someone dismissing an errand boy. “End of the hall, to the left. Office is open. Take the window. And if Schuler finds you, tell him I sent you. Maybe he’ll fuck off for a friend.”

The Baron looked down at Cecil, rubbing the side of his head. “What about him?”

Enzu shrugged. “You spared me, so I’ll spare him. So shines a good deed, yeah?”

“Yeah. In a weary world.”

“Good,” Enzu said. “Cecil won’t say shit, so run, gods damnit.” He pointed towards the empty side hall, with all its closed doors and unknown threats, all the terrors of a potential battlefield. “Before ol’ Schuler gets here! Run!”

The Baron nodded, pivoted around the corner, and sprinted down the empty hall. CPUSA was still out there, in the building and beyond. Schuler would surely find him, and the Zombie might not catch up in time. Yet the Baron must try. He must run.

Enzu agreed, shouting with all of his heart, “Run like the world is coming to an end!”

Author’s Note:

I love this arc!

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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September 5, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Dismemberment.

The Baron was exactly the kind of man who looked a gift horse in the mouth, inspected the teeth, and complained about rotten molars. As he followed Schuler out of the Caretaker’s room and into a narrow hall, he sought to understand their prompt evacuation. “Why would you take us to Tweed? Why not keep us locked up until Enzu comes, like I asked?”

Schuler paused, fixing them with a glare while adjusting his bifocals with a wrinkle of his nose. “Enzu will be fighting! As will you!”

“The Baron won’t,” the Zombie muttered, stopping in the Baron’s shadow.

d’Holbach raised a hand for momentary silence. “Schuler, I need to understand. You could keep us safe in that room with the Cat. Why pull us out?”

“Because there’s no purpose there!” Schuler said hurriedly. “Don’t you understand?” He swept around and started walking again. “Follow me!”

The Baron jolted into motion, trailing close behind him, and the Zombie continued to track at their heels. “I don’t understand,” d’Holbach admitted.

“When the gods demand action, I live with purpose!” Schuler reached a stairwell door at the end of the hall, throwing it open with a defiant swing of his arm.

“What do you mean?” the Baron asked, catching the door after it bounced off a wall stop.

The Diviner was stomping down the stairwell, but he answered the question loudly, sending his voice echoing up and down three stories. “Microtasks, Baron! Crumbs!”

The Baron rushed down after him, taking the steps two at a time with a hand on the railing at all times. “What about them?”

The Zombie shut the door to the third story and followed quickly.

Schuler reached the second story landing and wrenched open a wooden door, exiting directly into the heart of Tammany Hall. “The gods themselves spread crumbs! Hansel follows!” He thudded his own chest with the palm of his free hand. “But there are no crumbs here, only out there!” He gestured wildly at the wall and the world beyond. “So I hear the message! I must go out, and you must be handled. If you will accept Tweed, then fine! To him!” He waved through the open door, to the temple halls beyond. “Now, go!”

“I don’t accept anything,” the Baron said as he passed by Schuler, out of the stairwell and into a crimson-carpeted passageway. “I just wanted to talk to him.”

Specifically, d’Holbach wanted to use Tweed’s personal guards as a breakout force, at least until an opportunity to escape presented itself.

“He knows what you want!” Schuler shouted, holding the door only long enough for the Zombie to rush in after them. The Diviner clapped this last door shut, then oriented himself towards the inevitable. “Ahead. Through the main hall, and into the triumvirate’s court.”

The Baron led them onward at Schuler’s direction, skirting past lounges and offices, rushing towards the center of the building. Schuler followed in jagged bursts, and the Zombie brought up the rear, grinning with anticipation. Violence was at hand.

They were about three turns away from their destination when a porcine old man leaned out of an office up ahead, spotting the Baron at the lead. A frown screwed up his round face, bending a waxed mustache, and he tugged on his own lapels with an audible harrumph. His suit jacket—double-breasted, wool, fit more for the winter than this spring condition—was of fine quality, but decades out of date, like a living Mr. Pennybags. “Schuler?” he called, finally spying the only familiar face in this small crowd. “Are these the prisoners—”

“Shut up! Shut up!” the Diviner yelled at him. “My head hurts,” he added, a growling afterthought. “I need directions, crumbs, crumbs, crumbs…”

The old man half-shut the door in front of himself like a shield. His eyes sought the Baron, silently begging for some understanding of events, but d’Holbach only spared the stranger a nod. There was no time for social niceties.

Every second might cut the difference in the coming battle, and the Baron was looking for an opportunity to leave. If he was going to start his exit alongside Tweed, then they needed to rendezvous immediately.

“Apologies, sir!” the Zombie called at the rear, giving the porcine man a mock-salute “We’re hurrying to the Boss!”

“Why?” Mr. Pennybags asked, a single word of demand that also contained the bulk of all his fears.

The Zombie pivoted on one foot to walk backwards, answering as he left, “Men are attacking the temple! You should meet up with the rest, organize!”

“But sacred ground?” Mr. Pennybags objected, and those three words were an entire argument about culture, about the sanctity of temples against violence, and about the risk of punitive tasks against transgressors.

Good men, those with lives and responsibilities, didn’t fight inside temples. These were neutral territories until they weren’t, until someone was ready to die while desecrating holy ground. In the worst case, such a profaned place could become mundane land, and anyone in debt would simply awaken in a different sanctuary.

“They’ll attack if they can win!” the Zombie yelled cheerily, dismissing every bit of religious tradition with an acknowledgment of simple, awful power. If the enemy had enough bodies, they’d storm any shut door, even in these secluded places.

Rifles popped outside the building like firecrackers. Someone laid into a car horn for several seconds. There was more gunfire in another direction, and an eruption of voices ahead of them. The main hall lurked just out of view, filled with a leaderless tumult, likely a crowd of lesser nobles or Tammany Hall cultists. The Baron slowed, reconsidering.

“Follow or fall!” Schuler yelled, skirting past the Baron and into the main hall. After a moment’s heartbeat, where his eyes met the Zombie’s unflinching gaze, a silent agreement was struck. If a Diviner shouted such things, it truly was safest to follow his “crumbs” a little further, those little tasks of the gods that somehow guided his wizardly steps through the world.

The Zombie fell into step with the Baron, and together, they emerged into the panic of a dozen lesser nobles. These were powerful people, unused to fear. Every moment of anxiety released another exclamation of frustration, another sharp word.

Who would dare attack New York? How could they bring a force this close to the heart of Lower Manhattan? Were the guards dead? Had their posts been wiped out silently? There were no windows in the temple. Nobody could even glance outside to see the fighting.

Some younger men were clustered at the secretary’s desk, shouting into a pair of telephones at the internal operators. The switchboard women wouldn’t know the answers to their half-formed demands. They needed intelligence; they needed leadership. They had neither, though a couple of armed enforcers were stalking the crowd, urging calm against chaos.

“Sound and fury,” the Baron said to his companion.

“All idiots,” the Zombie replied.

Men stepped aside or Schuler shoved them, creating a momentary passage through the lesser nobles. The Baron and Zombie strode forward, occupying that space before it could close. An accountant had the presence of mind to open the final door ahead of them.

Out of the court came the next blows of a shouting match.

Boss Tweed struck with a roar: “Who opened the door!”

“Sir!” the accountant quailed, “The Diviner—”

“Here!” Schuler rushed in, folding and unfolding his hands in nervous twitches. The Baron and Zombie trailed after him, and the door slammed shut behind them. One crowd vanished, but this space was no quieter, if only because these men, still seated on their thrones, were used to talking with the unquestioned authority of armies.

“Our remaining security forces are entirely secular,” General Osman spoke forcefully, not bothering to question why the Baron had returned to their chambers. “Only a handful are former military. We coddled the fucking nobles and spread ourselves too thin.”

“I wasn’t going to let Manhattan slide into anarchy—” Tweed said.

“We can’t call the real soldiers back in,” General Osman continued. “Nearly all occult warriors, the trained, the armed, they’re fighting to keep our streets.”

“Many are dead now,” Gagliano suggested.

The General sneered. “You don’t know that.”

Gagliano shrugged. “We sent them out to clear Manhattan. They failed, and their radios are silent. How’s that possible, unless they’re gone?”

Osman bark-laughed once, a sharp sound of pure disdain. “We’re dealing with an occult foe, you old bookie! They only need one captured radio and a few years of prestige to preemptively silence us—station by station.” He punctuated those last words by jamming an index finger into his own palm, as if pressing the button on a terrible weapon.

“How?” Gagliano asked. “We hid most of the guard posts.”

“If it’s CPUSA, they look like civil workers,” the Baron said, deciding to insert himself on Osman’s side before this conversation spiralled back around to the same argument and wasted precious time. “Police, firemen, you name it. They’re all embedded civvies.”

“Meister Schuler, why have you brought him here?” Tweed asked sharply.

“He asked to come,” Schuler said.

“I would’ve called for him anyways,” Osman added.

The Baron spread his hands to the triumvirate. “I’m just telling you, it’s almost certainly them, same as it was in Red Hook—the Soviet fifth column.”

General Osman pointed a finger at the Baron. “He’s right, you know. We’ve run into scouts, and they’re all looking for him. This is about the Cat.”

“Which is why we have to leave,” the Baron suggested.

Boss Tweed laughed derisively, weaving his ring-encrusted fingers together across his portly belly. “I’m not leaving this building. We’re defending it!”

“Bullshit!” General Osman yelled. “I’m your gods-damn Banker! I’m heading to the nearest safe house—with the Baron! With the Cat!”

“What about us?” Gagliano murmured.

The General scoffed. “If they desecrate the temple, then you two dodge with the nobles. If they don’t, then you come with us! Either way, these are my forces, under my command!”

The Baron felt a faint satisfaction, recognizing Osman’s strategy. Dodging while inside an active temple risked returning you to the same building. However, if the enemy spilled blood on holy ground, then two things would happen. A great task would fall on the heads of the desecrators, guaranteeing their rapid demise, and the local sanctuaries would stop working. After that, all dodges would send debtors to other temples, making it easy to escape the Hall.

Unfortunately, the Baron had no prestige, and even if he’d carried some, dodging was dangerous at best. Every temple in the city was full of armed men with standing orders to arrest him, and he’d be utterly separated from the Zombie again. He needed to escape on foot.

“Are you counting Schuler?” the High Oracle asked Osman.

“Of course I am! And the Zombie, unless he wants to see his precious Baron die!” General Osman ran a hand down his tremendous white beard, a light tug of frustration on his own chin. “You don’t want that, do you, you fuckin’ devil? You want to save your kraut master?”

The Zombie nodded once, no jokes or snipes, even while Osman spat decades-old racism. “We have to leave,” he insisted calmly, repeating the Baron’s words.

General Osman grunted with satisfaction. “There you have it.” He rose to his feet with the ease of a much younger man. “Even the bloodthirsty Chinaman sees the wisdom in it. We’re leaving. With the Devil’s help.”

“Is that so?” Gagliano asked the Zombie.

The Baron watched a flicker of emotion pass over his friend’s face, but the severity of this situation forced the obvious conclusion. “It is so,” the Zombie agreed

Gagliano waved off Osman’s triumphant grin. “Fine, have it your way, General.”

Osman wasn’t a tall man, but he was broad and muscular. He faced Tweed. “You too, Boss. Unless they desecrate the temple, we have to move on foot. You have to come.”

The large man shifted in his plush throne. “Have to?” he asked, staring over his little beard at his General. “If I go outside and people recognize me, the cost of my life skyrockets. You know this. I swore, twenty-five years ago, to stand my ground—”

“You swore it when we could surround this place with guns!” General Osman shouted. “Oracle, Leader, and Banker!” He thumped himself on the chest, marking himself as the primary pool of prestige for the New York cult. “We can’t afford to lose anyone over a gods-forsaken principle. As your general, I order you both to stand up!”

Gagliano shoved his chair back a half-inch and stood. “I already agreed.”

Tweed shifted his bulk, then used both arms to lift himself out of his chair and onto his feet. “Fine. You old bastard. Fine.”

“Schuler!” Osman pointed at the wobbling madman. “Hit the boy outside with an order. Get on the horn, signal the posts. HQ will be occupied by the enemy. I want anyone within a mile to move to the safe house on 7th street. Everyone else, return to the nearest temple. The enemy should respect temple boundaries except for this Hall. Understood?”

Schuler focused in with a ripple of facial muscles like a tremendous twitch. “Yes, General!” he said with a sharp salute. “Any orders for the other nobles in the building?”

“Tell them to stand by. If the enemy desecrates the temple, all non-combatants will leave by dodging. Otherwise, we’ll secure the main hall and arrange for their escape.”

“Yes, General!” Schuler ducked through the chamber doors and started repeating these messages to a mousy young accountant, huddling just outside the triumvirate’s chambers.

“Lower Manhattan will be shutting down,” General Osman told the rest. “This also means that the fucking spooks are about to hammer us like a jutting nail.”

“Langley will?” Tweed asked.

“Of course!” Osman answered. “I know their playbook. They’ll look to occupy the Hall with the National Guard, so we need to move to a defensible position until—”

Gunshots exploded into raucous chatter underfoot. Everyone straightened, instinctively stretching away from the floor. Then the gunfire stopped.

“Tommies going off in the lobby,” Osman said, “now silenced. It’s war.” He turned towards the apartment door behind his throne. It bore no visible handle, only a brass bump where one ought to be. “I wish to open it,” he said grimly, and with a series of metallic clicks and the chunk of a jumping latch, the door swung open.

“Where are you going?” Gagliano asked him.

Osman laughed, striding through a half-shadowed hall into the poorly lit depths of his apartment. “To arm myself, Oracle!”

From this angle, the Baron could see a thickly-carpeted anteroom with walnut furnishings—a small table, a hat rack, coat hooks—opening onto a private sitting room, overburdened with leather-clad furniture and ringed in by towering bookshelves. Snippets of crimson wallpaper peeked over the arrangement like a barely restrained glare.

For an instant, the General wasn’t in view, but from one side, there arose a clatter of wood against wood, like someone drawing lumber from a pile. Then a black-green crescent thrust into the antechamber, shimmering like a peacock feather, followed quickly by a long black haft clenched in Osman’s tremendous hands.

The Zombie spoke faster than anyone else, and his grin audibly shaped every word of appreciation. “Is that a fucking magic guandao?”

The General strode out of his apartment into the triumvirate’s chambers, raising the guandao towards the ceiling of the court, and the door swung shut behind him, automatically locking through some similarly archaic magic. All true artifacts were at least five centuries old—the door’s mechanism was salvaged from a 13th century French fortress, for example—but the guandao was likely far older, and it bore all the fantastic decorations of its era and place, unspoiled by time or combat.

Osman grinned with pride. “This is the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, as written in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the greatest of all Chinese novels! The weapon is a masterwork, a tenth century artifact from a Song artificer, made in the folkloric image of Guan Yu’s legendary blade. It was forged nearly four centuries before any oral tradition became a written word! I’d wager the legend itself begins in this artifact, this weapon of great and terrible war!”

From the cadence of his words, anyone could hear that General Osman was reciting a long-practiced speech. He twirled the weapon’s pitch-black haft, revealing the texture and shimmer of polished bituminous coal. The joint between its pole and blade was gold-plated and decoratively shaped like the mouth and forelimbs of the namesake dragon. The counterweight was similarly plated and styled to represent the tail and hindlimbs of the beast.

The crescent blade itself erupted from the dragon’s mouth like a gout of black flame. One edge was as sharply defined as the curve of the moon; the other was spiked like the licking tongues of a bonfire. But it wasn’t truly steel, nor even a chemically colored metal. The blade was a product of wishes through and through, shimmering like a bird’s feather or a beetle’s shell, void black at some angles and rippling vividly green at others.

“It’s a weapon from fiction?” the Zombie asked cheekily.

“Ha! It’s a threat, a display of power. If someone mistook it for a legend, all the better.” The General gently tilted the blade, admiring its shifting colors overhead. “It’s one of the few magic weapons on the planet that rivals or surpasses military-grade hardware. And you?” Osman lowered the peacock-green blade till it vaguely pointed at the Zombie himself. “You will scout for us. Walk ahead, call out enemy positions, and I will cut them down where they hide. If you do that, your precious Baron will survive.”

“I love being threatened with a good time,” the Zombie replied.

“Can the Cat survive it?” Gagliano asked, looking towards the Zombie’s left hand.

“That artifact? Absolutely,” Osman said. “It’s made to survive anything lethal to man. Hell, it’s been struck with an Apple of Perun. On record no less! They found it in a pile of burning ashes, unblemished. Cool to the touch.” He shook the guandao. “This wouldn’t even budge the damn thing. The only object that’s tougher is the Zombie himself.”

“Fascinating,” Gagliano muttered.

“Schuler,” Osman commanded, “I’ll need you to monitor the building. If I hit a support strut, fix it. I don’t want the third story to fall on our heads.”

“Yes, General,” Schuler said.

“And keep me apprised of the temple’s status.”

“Desecrated,” Gagliano said softly.

Everyone in the room paused. It was such a perfectly timed and terrifyingly specific result. There’d been no sounds of gunfire, which meant someone had just died in silence.

“Speak again?” Boss Tweed asked.

“Seconds ago,” Gagliano replied, “the gods placed a large task on the heads of five men, damned for profaning holy ground. The payout is decades, more than enough to justify fighting over every last inch of this building.” He glanced at Osman. “Think our enforcers can clear out CPUSA before the National Guard moves in? We’d need them all.”

“Of course! To the man!” Osman said, raising the guandao like a flag.

“To the man,” Tweed agreed quickly. “And don’t let the Baron distract us from this task.”

The Baron felt a spike of frustration. “What distraction? What are you expecting from me?”

“Moral grandstanding,” Tweed answered. “Arrogance!”

Osman gestured to the other members of the triumvirate. “Gentlemen, hand me your pools and dodge to Greenwich. I’ll retrieve you once Manhattan is cleared.”

High Oracle Gagliano promptly shook hands with Osman, saying quietly, “All but a half a day.” He took a deep, sorrowful breath, then blew it out like a sigh.

Osman moved onto the next figure. “Tweed,” he said, offering to shake the Boss’s hand.

Tweed waved him aside with an irritated grunt. “Don’t bother. I wish for six years, three months, nine days, and twelve hours of renewed youth and vigor.” Instantly, he vanished into debt, leaving only the pop of a collapsing vacuum. Outside the room, the collective volume of the lesser nobles audibly rose from a murmur to a furor.

High Oracle Gagliano was hesitating before he dodged, staring at the Baron.

General Osman looked over at the Oracle. “Why are you still here?”

Gagliano pointed at the Baron. “Schuler, does he have any prestige?”

The Diviner blinked, reeling from the question, but answered with clipped, quick words: “No. He didn’t dodge me this morning. He’s empty.”

“You don’t know that,” the Baron said quickly, even though it was true. On reflection, he really should’ve asked Phyllis to hand him another half day. It wouldn’t have made a strategic difference, but it might’ve made a tactical one, and it would’ve undermined New York’s strategy.

“I trust his judgement,” Gagliano muttered.

“Get to safety, Oracle,” Osman ordered.

Gagliano nodded, wrinkling his smashed nose. “Penny in my left pocket.” Another clap of collapsing air, and the High Oracle was gone, leaving only four men in the room.

Osman swiveled to face toward the main hall, planting the counterweight of the guandao against the floor. He posed, ready to command his nobility. “Schuler, open the door!” 

Schuler spun about and threw open the court door, slamming the knob into the wall outside. For a second, the thud of the impact silenced all conversations. A dozen faces snapped to Osman, wordlessly waiting to receive the guidance of their General.

“Everyone,” General Osman bellowed, “spread the word! This is no longer holy ground! Non-combatants, transfer all excess prestige to the nearest enforcers, then dodge to another temple! Fighters, be ready to occupy territory after Schuler and I sweep through!”

Instantly, the crowd broke out into a series of shouts, seeking both to accept and give away prestige. Power was rapidly flowing from lesser nobles to a handful of occult guards, and as they finished their transfers, the non-combatants vanished. The air cracked repeatedly, a series of small imploding vacuums, summing up to the thunder of a rout.

The Baron stepped closer to the Zombie. “Be ready,” he whispered, inaudible beneath the tumult of magical teleportation. “I’ll find our moment.”

The Zombie nodded, even as he stared out at the chaos of evacuation with a grin.

A middle-aged man in a guard uniform came running up the hall to Osman, a Tommy swinging at his hip. “Sir, we’ve lost control of the main lobby!”

“Seargent Wade!” Osman called, waving him close. “Report?”

Sgt. Wade ignored the vanishing nobility, delivering prompt intel: “We observed and approached an armed party in Union Square Park. On contact, they opened fire, killing one and injuring two, then fell back to the trees. Lt. Decoin sallied out with the majority of our forces to surround and root them out. Once they were engaged, a strike force deployed from cars on 17th and rushed us through the north entrance.”

“One feint, one real attack,” the Baron whispered to the Zombie.

The Zombie chuckled, smoothing down the front of his blue dress shirt like a preening bird. The battlefield was his domain, but strategy was the Baron’s, and d’Holbach had correctly predicted another move from their opponents.

“Where’s Decoin now?” General Osman asked the sergeant.

“Pushing up 17th street, fighting to get back in.”

“The attackers, all occult?” the General probed.

“Well-funded, General. They jammed the guns, overpowered the secular crew. They’re sweeping the first floor now, pushing into the second.”

“Did any secular officials retreat to their offices?”

“Yes, General, but the attacking force is wishing locks open.”

“Why?”

“They’re moving everyone into the speaking hall.”

“Any cover story?”

“Someone got a call up to an administrator before the attackers reached the switchboard. They’re claiming they’re here to take revenge on the Lucchese family. Everyone hears that they’re aiming for Gagliano. They know he isn’t dead.”

“Mm. He’s not their primary target,” Osman judged, “but they’re pulling a cover story and minimizing secular casualties. Our plan should be the same. We’ll hide the occult dead and keep the official body count down.”

“What about our escape, Osman?” the Baron asked.

Osman cast him a plain glance, no longer scowling. “We take the north stairwell to the ground floor, then break through the wall onto 17th street. From there, we circle east around the block and hit alleys heading south. It’s about ten minutes on foot to the safe house on 7th. I trust you’ll cooperate and make this easy for us? For Schuler?”

“Of course, General,” the Baron answered, even as he mentally scoured the plan for obvious holes. His best bet would be to find a breakaway point on the ground floor, where the Zombie could run interference against Schuler and Osman at the same time.

If he could get out of the building, New York would be tied up with suppressing the fifth column, and they wouldn’t be able to give chase. The Zombie would easily catch up, and then they’d look for a place to rendezvous with Phyllis, starting back at the Artemisian safe house on Canal street. If they could find her, they’d take any help they could get. And if they couldn’t? Then they’d simply make their way to Denisov on their own.

A question passed through the Baron’s mind. Where was Phyllis right now? Did she really instigate this conflict? Or was the CPUSA acting on their own?

Unless the mercenaries delivered the Cat to Malik today, all former party members were going to be exposed. No matter what, this battle would be CPUSA’s final hurrah.

The last of the nobles vanished, leaving behind only two armed enforcers. One of them was an old man with a souvenir Luger from the war. He was counting loose bullets and dropping them in an old army coat pocket. The other was a young man in a suit with a greasy looking M1 Garand, recently pulled out of storage and scraped free of waxy, half-dry cosmoline. His pockets bulged with clips full of rifle rounds, both pants and jacket alike.

“Lieutenant Sadgrove! Mr. Roach!” Osman said, smiling with familiarity. “How is your prestige?”

“Fresh years, General,” the old man said in a soft British accent. He must’ve been Lt. Sadgrove; two off-white cloth pips rested on a dark green shoulder mark, indicating his rank in WW1.

“That’s a full count on fleeing nobles,” the young man added curtly. “We can cut loose, General.” He must’ve been Mr. Roach.

“Any other enforcers still in the building?” Osman asked them.

Lt. Sadgrove blinked with calm eyes. “Top floor, Thurston and Oaks are guarding the stairwells. Ground floor, Guerra and Cecil are roaming. We’re making hell, General.”

The Baron noted Guerra’s name—that’d be Enzu, already fighting.

“Good. Sadgrove, cover the Baron. Make sure he’s safe.”

“Yes, General,” Sadgrove muttered.

“Schuler, Mr. Roach, take spotter positions. Wade, you’ll stay by me. I’ll manage artillery while the Zombie scouts.”

“Can do, General,” Mr. Roach said.

“Yes, General,” Sgt. Wade added with a salute.

Everyone arranged themselves as ordered—the Zombie at point with General Osman right behind him—and they marched forward through the open court door and into the main hall. The Baron followed slowly, feeling the presence of Lt. Sadgrove at his back.

The hall leading out through the main temple door was already cleared. The dull glow of chandeliers cast deep shadows behind the furniture and into the doors of unlit lounges. All doors to offshoot halls were now shut, but the Zombie was approaching the double-doors to the main thoroughfare, the winding hallway that’d take them out of this place.

“Clear the line, Baron,” Lt. Sadgrove suggested. The Baron complied immediately, moving towards the left wall and some semblance of indoor cover.

Osman stopped one step to the left of the doors, facing the wall. He gestured, and the guard with the Tommy moved up to the right, crouching beside the doorjamb. A few yards back, Mr. Roach lay prone near a seating bench that he could roll under, sighting his rifle.

Meister Schuler wore the same combat clothes from this morning, but he quickly pulled on a pair of black leather gloves, flexing them with soft creaks. Then reached up with his middle finger and shoved his lustrous copper bifocals half an inch up the bridge of his nose.

Osman snapped his fingers at the Zombie and pointed at the door, then shifted his pose, lifting that massive guandao into a head-down chopping stance. It was time to scout the enemy.

The Zombie grinned, nodded, and opened the doors to an empty hall.

The invincible man listened to the squeal of poorly oiled hinges, dragged down by solid wood panels. His gaze flickered along the empty hall, sighting all the lounges and offices that were now abandoned. Doors had been left open, providing a plethora of hiding spots. He’d hoped for roving squads, masses of fifth column fighters. Instead, he found a tangle of possible enemy positions, which needed flushing out before his vulnerable friend could escape.

The temple’s blessing was broken, so a murder had already happened somewhere on the second floor. At least one enemy was in here, waiting in ambush near a civilian corpse.

So he did his best to look mortal. He skulked and skirted close to the right wall, shuffling his shoes a little too loudly on the carpeted floors. He glanced into open rooms, peeking into corners and beneath desks. Men might lurk in the shadows cut by yellowing incandescent bulbs. Across various lounges and parlors, a few of the ubiquitous televisions remained lit but muted, displaying black-and-white images of daytime talk shows and soap operas, illuminating the odd angles of their rooms with the soft snowy glow of phosphorescence. The twin smells of cigarettes and liquor drifted at the edges of awareness like a kiss of fog.

Up until a minute ago, rich nerves had been dulled with drugs. Now, those wealthy and weak men had been cast across the city, assured that their dodges wouldn’t return them to the heart of danger.

The Zombie imagined the feelings of those elites, and he faked a fearful breath, tasting the air. He could almost detect the dripping sweat of human adrenaline. It wasn’t a real sensation, merely instinct impressed upon the empty darkness, but somehow, he knew someone was looking at him, waiting for a moment of inattention. Then a gun would be pointed, a trigger pulled. He shuddered as he stepped further along the hall, seemingly alone.

A creak of a human joint, a bent limb turning through a frozen position. The click of some metal part moving softly in a turned mechanism; not an action of any kind, but a new settling to the Zombie’s left. He twitched, looking sharply towards the sound.

Around the edge of one of the open lounge doors, a CPUSA merc with a Thompson SMG was standing with one shoulder leaning against the jamb, sighting the barrel at the Zombie. His well-worn uniform, the cropped haircut, the wrinkle of his clean-shaven jowls—another WW2 vet had become a labourer and Communist, only to be coerced into becoming part of the Soviet fifth column. A cold expression locked onto his face; he’d already settled his heart, accepting both his own death and the murder of other men. Nevertheless, he hesitated. Pity for the weak? For the fearful? His army had killed children just yesterday. He should fear vengeance.

The merc lifted a finger to his lips, an order for silence.

The Zombie opened his eyes wide, raising both hands, and he shouted, “Don’t shoot!”

The CPUSA merc looked similarly alarmed at the shout. “On the floor!” he whisper-yelled, a voice of heavily restrained frustration, pointing with his barrel in lieu of a free hand.

“I didn’t see you behind the door!” the Zombie cried in faux-panic.

Then Mr. Roach, far back in the main hall, quietly declared, “Left.”

The Baron watched General Osman carefully, attempting to understand the function of the artifact-weapon in his broad hands. Did the magic guandao have an activation ritual? A word or phrase? A secondary artifact to signal ownership?

Osman took two deft steps with the verve of a young man—one back, one left—lining himself up with the offices and lounges that branched off to the left of the main hallway. Then he planted the counterweight of the Green Dragon Crescent Blade onto the carpeted floor behind himself, and he struck a martial pose. This was in fact a ritual, maybe even a critical one. His left hand balled into a fist at his beltline, and then he sharply spread his palm flat and launched his arm outward under tension, raising it smoothly up through an arc over his head, before bringing it back down like the edge of a blade to stop in front of his chest.

In all of that preparatory motion, there was neither doubt nor awkwardness. The General exuded confidence and strength. The weapon might very well have only responded to the hands of a martial master, but even if Osman’s wealth had purchased the privilege of holding it, the man had clearly sweated at practice and earned the right to wield it.

“Hah!” the General barked, sweeping out with his right foot to hook the polearm just above the counterweight. He kicked the pole up towards his dividing palm, rotating the guandao around its center of gravity just beneath the dragon’s head, and with a clap of wood, he caught the haft, gripping it in both hands for an overhead swing. The rest came in one motion, a step backwards and a swift chop downwards—right in front of the wall—cutting a strange band of violet light into the air beyond the blade’s glimmering green edge.

Meister Schuler clapped his hands over his ears.

The Baron failed to mimic him in time.

From the Zombie’s perspective, there was a sudden violet shine emanating from the air around the mercenary, as if someone had tracked a crystal prism into a thin stream of sunlight, refracting the bluest edge of the rainbow across a layer of flowing dust.

The merc saw it too; the rainbow’s arc slashed a diagonal through his body for a quarter second, the duration of a single human thought, preconscious and without words.

The Zombie’s instincts interpreted the sign. This magic traced the arc of severing, but left no time to react. Cruel. Muscles twitched to start a smile—

Violet instantly flickered through blue, cyan, brightening explosively down the rainbow until its green flash overwhelmed both vision and logic, becoming so bright it was sound, folding this colorful arc of the world up into itself and sweeping it away on a thunderous slash. A blade-thin layer of wall, firearm, mercernary—his ribs, blood, guts, living flesh—all exploded into the shape of the rainbow itself, spread on the green as a shrapnel blast of powdered plaster, shattered lath, insensate limbs, and lazily tumbling halves of a severed torso. The shockwave of the rainbow’s passage smashed the Zombie’s stolen bowler off his head like he was staring at a stick of blasting dynamite. Green then burst like confetti, dissolving rapidly through yellow, orange, before easing into a red haze that was half misted blood and half a rainbow’s ending.

“Wow!” the Zombie cried with delight, inaudible over the clatter and splash of tumbling debris. Part of the nearby wall was cracking free, unsupported.

The confetti of green resolved itself, falling out of the fading red haze into a brief rain of jade flakes, flitting down lazily through the air like the shed scales of a passing green dragon. “Nice touch!” the Zombie added, giving praise to a thousand year dead Song artificer for understanding the art of terror. The Green Dragon Crescent Blade didn’t only cut with spectacle and inform its victims of their demise. Jade confetti signed every slash like a signature.

The Zombie looked down at the dead man’s face. Not even surprised, only confused. The overpressure of the blast-slash had knocked the merc clean off this mortal coil. If he’d wished for the afterlife, then he’d have a hell of a story to tell in the lands of the dead.

“Target?” called Mr. Roach from afar.

“Dead!” the Zombie declared, turning away from the body to look for his hat. “Absolutely fucking killed!” he roared, finding the half-crumpled bowler across the hall.

The Baron clapped his hands to his ears, a meaningless gesture at this point. The Green Dragon Crescent Blade wasn’t as loud as a bomb, nor even as loud as a cannon, but it was somewhere on the order of lightning strike just outside your bedroom window. It was bright, alarming, and then thunderous rumbles were echoing through his chest and shuddering across the building, shaking windowpanes in their frames.

“Bedlam,” Lt. Sadgrove whispered behind the Baron.

Before the debris cleared, Schuler cried, “Support!”

General Osman planted the pole of the guandao on the floor. “I hit something?” he called to the Diviner. “I thought I was careful.”

Schuler adjusted his bifocals with a twitch of his nose. Copper frames glimmered beneath the light of ancient bulbs. “Main steel beam, General. It holds now.”

“Good!” Osman declared. “Good! One down, one dead, and every last one of those Commies to go!” He waved for everyone to rise. “Prepare to move! Zombie, lead on!”

Lt. Sadgrove broke away from the wall first, following orders.

The Baron unhunched his shoulders, standing to his full height and following the lieutenant. With this kind of firepower in play, the standards of secrecy were already loosening. New York was firing off powerful magic weapons in the middle of Manhattan, and that boded poorly for any conflicts coming this afternoon. A taboo broken only once might be forgiven, still enforced; a taboo broken a hundred times was no taboo at all.

Many, many men were going to die today. The Baron would have to make damn sure that he wasn’t one of them. He had to find a way out of this madness.

Author’s Note:

For fun, let’s talk about magical, historical inaccuracy!

There’s always some when it comes to an urban fantasy novel set in the historical past, but this arc is where we begin to deliberately diverge in clear, undeniable ways. In our world, there wasn’t a battle in Union Square in 1952, yet in this world, that battle has begun. In our world, Tammany Hall was owned by an international union for garment workers, and the Society of St. Tammany had already dissolved; in this world, Tammany Hall is owned by a magically-preserved Boss Tweed. In our world, New York wasn’t gripped in a crisis of Communist infiltration; in this world, the National Guard is already rolling through the streets, setting up checkpoints.

This isn’t exactly our world anymore. It probably hasn’t been an exact match for a long time, so why have the same people been born into it?

Last chapter was a gesture towards an explanation, which I think would be fun to discuss openly. We saw some rumblings from Schuler about the gods picking and choosing elements to alter, to hew towards a particular course for history. That mechanism, however obscure and minute, is part of a broader recognition that this world diverges from our expectations at least a little bit. If we’re going to take this setting very, very seriously, we may need some explanation for how the same people have been born in that world as in our world.

The rest of the explanation, which we will eventually assemble, comes from the Baron’s philosophy. This doesn’t mean the Baron is right, but it is a gesture towards one narrative that could explain the difference. Look forward to arc 18 for that last piece, but feel free to speculate in the comments.

Suffice to say, I think this will be a very entertaining historical tension. It is a small set of deliberate differences, so that this story may expand into its final, violent act. Enjoy!

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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September 2, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

New York’s theology was born out of Boss Tweed’s fear. He led a cult whose primary purpose was to ensure the afterlife and meet death boldly, yet he’d extended his own life beyond a century at extreme cost. The economics were appalling. Each unnatural day cost him three days of prestige. He clung to the temporal world with an unholy amount of money and a desperate faith, believing that he played an ongoing role in the divine plan.

“We will create the afterlife on earth, or we will obviate the need for the afterlife altogether.” Tweed’s insanity projected over reality.

This madman had confined the Baron and Zombie to the Tammany Hall lockup. It wasn’t an iron-barred jail in some cellar beneath 19th century flagstones. There was no descent into New York’s underground, nor any rickety climb up to an attic space intended for ventilation. Instead, they were led up to the third story within the temple, to an unassuming baby-blue door marked with a tarnished brass placard, which read, “Caretaker’s Room.”

This was the sole sanctuary for the Tammany Hall temple, and if you opened it, there was a “natural” room within, which could serve double-duty as occult lockup for anyone—even the invincible man and his ward.

The Baron sat at a richly lacquered walnut desk, poking at a plate of food with a long-tined fork. The vast, plush chair at his back was far beyond any caretaker’s salary, and likely a seat for Boss Tweed himself in case he ever wished into debt.

The Zombie stood across from d’Holbach, gently stroking the emerald spread of arsenic-green wallpaper, inspecting a discolored region where a window had been removed, bricked up, and hidden away beneath renovations from the Gilded Age.

Despite its mundane appearance, that verdant paper and its backings were as strong as the Zombie himself. While part of a sanctuary, they were inviolable. Miracles protected this room, producing odd interactions with his invincible body.

“Feels weird,” the Zombie explained. “Too smooth.” He tapped the fingertips of his right hand against the wallpaper. “Like I’m stopped short. Not quite touching.” In his left hand, he clasped the Cat o ‘Nine Lives. He’d never tire of holding it, but he could grow bored, and the last five hours had driven him a little batty. He tested this enclosure for fun.

“Miracles touching miracles!” Meister Schuler called from outside the sanctuary door. He was tilting to and fro in a wooden rocking chair, and the color pages of a glossy news magazine spread across his lap like a sleeping cat. He didn’t read the articles; whenever he lost focus, he stared at them and mumbled about strange tasks in far away lands.

The Zombie chuckled. “Really nothing else like it, is there?”

“When you hold the Cat, I hear harmony and melody,” Schuler said warmly. “But the best miracles are careful, isolated. They’re so small, unasked for, sparkling in all the intimate moments. I see them through the walls at night, twinkling like stars. Tiny fixes, the small stones defining the flow of history’s river, each as precious as a diamond.”

The Baron turned away from his half-eaten spread of fatty meats, cold and congealed, and the stale bread and wilted vegetables that accompanied them. Most of what their jailor said was useless, even annoying—much like the rocking of his wooden chair—but this was philosophically interesting nonsense. “Are they wishes then, these little miracles?”

Schuler smiled like he was sharing a deep secret and peered at the Baron over his lustrous copper frames. “Nobody asks for them. They’re too small, like motes, no brighter than when you press your hands to your eyes. I used to think they were dreams.”

The Baron grunted. Maybe these motes were merely Schuler’s hallucinations, but d’Holbach was curious enough to press the subject. “What are they then?” he asked.

“Adjustments, Baron. Things aren’t always as they should be, but the world is under the gods’ grace. History shifts at their urging, you see—”

“No, no, I get that part. You’re suggesting that the gods are guiding history. I’m asking you, what are the gods altering?”

“Conceptions. Only those who are born have souls and can die. Thus, the gods are picking souls by altering the elements that guide the birth and growth of children.”

The Zombie grinned. “What, they’re picking which sperms and eggs combine?”

“Something like that,” Schuler replied, “or a finer manipulation.”

With a huff of disappointment, the Baron recognized a strange twist on a very old philosophical position from a 6th century Diviner, Aeneas of Gaza. His words had survived in the records of the Eastern Orthodox Church and thus reached Elizabeth for inclusion in Apostasy. Specifically, Aeneas had rejected the doctrine of “the eternal duration of the world,” stating that any divine plan would necessarily contain the elements of its own completion and eventual dissolution; he’d also argued that souls came into being with their bodies and were formed around them. In short, no soul existed before a particular person was born.

The ideas of Aeneas must’ve formed the foundations of Meister Schuler’s belief system. The Diviner thought the world was about to end, and yet he also believed that the gods were choosing the people who were born into it. Only Aeneas of Gaza could reconcile the conflicts in these beliefs, wherein the gods would fuss over the details of a doomed Earth.

After a long moment of appraisal, Schuler said, “You’re angry, Baron.”

d’Holbach shrugged aggressively. “I expected novelty, not heresies based on old ideas recorded in Apostasy.”

Schuler laughed warmly. “Oh, silly devil! You hear novelty, but you mistake it for stolen thinking because every thought has been uttered before.” He eased the rocking chair forward, no longer rolling back and forth, but focusing with clarity through his bifocals. “Heed me. I am an old wizard, and I’ve started to see the patterns in the clouds of miracles, and they are real.” Meister Schuler looked up at the walls, at the roof, then at the Baron and Zombie. “This place, these people—they aren’t supposed to be here. Today is a very different day, starting in a very different building. You understand?”

“No,” the Baron admitted, “but I’m listening.”

Schuler pointed with a finger at the door, then at a distant voice passing far down the hall, and finally at a mote of something invisible, like dust on an errant breeze. “Tammany Hall only persists as a result of wishes. It’s outside the course of natural history, far afield of normal. Without wishes, it doesn’t exist, and thus I say—we aren’t here, and there isn’t a battle in the streets. Except—here we are, and out there, men are dying. It’s a divine difference. We’re on a side path through history, yoked back towards similar results.”

The Baron squinted. There was a familiar concept hidden in this, one which prodded at his oddest considerations of what the occult might materially be. “Did you read my letters to Tweed? November, 1944? Or any of my other correspondence?”

The Baron hadn’t met Schuler before this week, but there were several copies of his theories floating around in the Americas. It was likely the Diviner had read one of them.

Meister Schuler brought his finger around to point at the Baron, and he smiled, blinking slowly but saying nothing more.

“Don’t make fun of me,” the Baron said. “Those ideas basically are science-fiction. They’re toy examples, showing what’s possible in principle. I don’t believe in them.”

Schuler let his hand drop onto his lap, lightly crinkling the color pages of his magazine. “They’re unknowable,” he said kindly. “But your core assumptions fit many worldviews. Excuse me while I return your scientific ideas of changing histories to their religious roots.”

The Baron huffed and dismissed the man. These were pointless abstractions and suppositions with no bearing on the crisis at hand. General Osman had ordered Meister Schuler to guard the Baron, with explicit requirements that he would neither sleep nor leave his post until such time as the Baron surrendered custody of the Cat.

Right now, only Phyllis’s progress mattered. Either something would happen soon, or they’d wait here until the late afternoon, Denisov would leave without the Cat, and the whole world would angle towards much darker ends.

“That’s it?” the Zombie asked the Baron, breaking the silence.

“What?” d’Holbach asked.

“You’re not going to keep talking with him?”

“No. I don’t like aggravation.”

The Zombie guffawed mockingly. “Friend, he’s talking about time travel—”

“I know—”

“He might be the only other person we’ve met who treats your philosophical letters with respect. Aren’t you interested?”

“The sci-fi details are just storytelling,” the Baron insisted. “I don’t actually know anything, except that I can tell a story in which the so-called gods aren’t divine.”

Meister Schuler was smiling pleasantly. “Aren’t you bored, Baron?”

“I am! You’ve had me sitting in here for hours.”

“Then why not chat?”

The Baron huffed. “I am not here to be made fun of. I’m sincere, and you, Schuler, are my strict opposite. If the so-called gods are guiding history, then we believe in fundamentally different reasons for that guidance.”

Schuler chuckled.

The Zombie shrugged. “Well I’m bored too, and I’d like to chat with him.”

d’Holbach waved the Zombie off. “Be my guest, but leave me out of it. I speculate. I don’t give in to wild flights of fancy.” He paused, realizing he was getting heated for no other reason than the Zombie’s entertainment. “Actually, Schuler, could you pass that magazine to the Zombie? I’d like a few moments of peace, and the man just needs something to read.”

Schuler lifted the magazine off his lap, holding it up like a shield over his face. “Would you like it?”

The Zombie raised his eyebrows. “Sure, if you’re done with it—”

“Flap!” Schuler wished, and the open pages of the magazine leaped from his hands and violently snapped back like a diving bird drawing its wings to its sides, accelerating into an arc towards the Zombie—who instantly snatched it out of the air with a predator’s reflexes, clenching its glossy spine between the fingers of his right hand.

The Cat remained locked in his left.

“Bravo!” the Baron cried, duly impressed by both the surprise wish and the sheer speed of the Zombie’s response.

Schuler clapped, and the Zombie bowed twice.

“Will that keep you distracted?” the Baron asked, not unkindly.

The Zombie grinned. “I’ll give you as much peace as it takes to read this. Then we’re talking about weird philosophy.”

“Fine. Thank you.” The Baron checked his wristwatch, seeking the angles of its glowing hands—about 11:30 in the morning. They’d been here for about five hours, and hopefully wouldn’t remain here much longer. “I’m going to make an early lunch out of my leftovers,” he declared. “Schuler, will you be fine without company?”

“I’m never alone,” the Diviner muttered, already losing focus. “The gods are with me.”

The Baron picked up his fork, opting to fortify himself. “Then I’ll enjoy this little slice of peace.”

Enzu came to visit them just before noon. He’d trimmed his salt and pepper beard a couple of inches and changed into plainer clothes, but the heft of his jowls filled out his broad face, and he habitually picked at the edge of his plaster cast with a finger. He patted Schuler on the shoulder and asked permission to speak with the Baron.

Schuler lolled back and whispered to his part-time watcher, “It’s raining in Qatar. There is a great task to drown a British officer in the oil-slicked waters near Doha.”

Enzu took this as permission and entered the sanctuary. “Baron d’Holbach.”

The Baron had been taking short naps in Tweed’s plush chair. He straightened up and raised a hand. “Enzu Guerra! I thought we wouldn’t have a chance to talk.”

Enzu pointed to a wooden chair across the table, old pine with a yellowing lacquer. Any man seated across from Tweed would be shorter, less comfortable. “May I?”

“Go ahead.”

The Zombie was standing beside the Baron, reading the news magazine. His free hand supported the spine. His fingers wrapped around the Cat and pinched together, turning the pages. He paused, looking over the glossy pictures at Enzu, and gave the enforcer a kind nod and a genuine smile.

Enzu pulled out the chair and sat down. “Zed, good to see you as well. It’s been a long morning. Three incidents in Lower Manhattan alone.”

“Murders?” the Zombie asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Do tell?” the Baron prompted. Enzu wanted to chat, and d’Holbach wanted to hear whatever news the man saw fit to bring them.

The enforcer snorted with faux disbelief. “It’s been wild. Twice we shot scouts from the fuckin’ Commies. Just like you said, it’s a fuckin’ fifth column.”

The Baron nodded. “They’ve been all over town since the fighting at Red Hook yesterday.” He gestured. “What about the third incident?”

“One of our boys shot at the National Guard.”

The Baron sat up. “At troops?”

“Yeah, I know! Confused ‘em for more Commies. No more casualties after that, thank the gods, but they arrested three of our boys.”

“So the Guard aren’t aiming for Tammany then?”

“Nah, not yet at least. Blame went on the mob.” Enzu scooted forward in his chair. “I tell you though, it’s bad. Real bad. The radio is babbling conspiracies, saying the Commies are making their move on the whole damn country.”

The Baron pushed aside the empty platter and fork. “It’s not entirely a conspiracy, but they’re mostly after the Cat.”

“I know! That’s why it’s so goddamn crazy.” He glanced around, as if a Communist might be listening in right now. “How long do you think these people waited on our home turf?”

“The fifth column? Years, don’t you think?”

Enzu nodded quickly, excited by his involvement. “You really stirred the shit, Baron. Only two days since you came to town, and people are scared witless.”

d’Holbach grunted an affirmation. “What’s Langley’s response?”

“Also bad. Gagliano says the CIA pushed the National Guard to deploy just after dawn.”

“Incredible.”

“Yeah, and Senator McCarthy has been hassling HUAC and the FBI with radio speeches, accusing them of resting while America is brought down from the inside. His quote.”

“McCarthy said that?”

“Yeah. There’s jeeps in the streets, rifles at hand, the works. Word is they’re forming a dragnet around the city and at major bottlenecks between the boroughs.”

“So they’re looking for me,” the Baron said.

“Maybe.” Enzu glanced at the Zombie, at the artifact clenched in his left hand. “Do they know you have the Cat?”

The Zombie smirked. “Not officially, but I think Agent Heckhaus figured it out.”

“Heckhaus…” Enzu squinted. “I know that name.”

“He worked a task here last week. Order of the Cincinatti.”

“Ah, yeah. I met him once. Hope it’s not twice, eh?” He knocked knuckles twice on the wooden table between them. “Stubborn guy. Smug too.”

“Did you hear that Boss Tweed is keeping me here?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that, Baron. Your story has been going around the crew. I still think you did the right thing, coming here, but sometimes the Boss can outsmart himself. He figures you might not make it back to your Orthodox contacts, so he figures you shouldn’t even try. Too risk averse, you know?”

“Mm.” The Baron saw no value in correcting Enzu about Tweed’s exact motivations.

“Anyways,” Enzu continued, “we all got dealt a bad hand. At least you’re getting a chance to fold before your life is in the pot. That’s good, right?”

The Baron briefly thought of Marco, the long-suffering teen who’d carried the Cat across the city, but he kept his focus on the task at hand. “We’re not out of the game yet. You’re capturing scouts, which means CPUSA is pulling intel for the Bolsheviks. If the Soviets sniff out the Cat’s location, they might try taking it.”

Enzu shook his head. “We got better discipline than that. Whenever anyone asks, we say you were last seen returning to the Biltmore.”

The Baron raised his eyebrows. “People are asking?”

“Sure. I mean, within New York though. Only the nobles and enforcers really know where you are.”

“The triumvirate or the lesser nobles?” the Baron asked.

“Both. Among the lesser nobles, it’s Osman’s war planners, mostly.”

The Baron disliked the war planners. He’d met them in the field several times since Salem. The scene was always the same—a gaggle of old men with handlebar mustaches and warrior dreams, standing around card tables under pop-up tents while chatting about the nobility of occult battle.

For them, the moment before violence was like the prelude to a gala; they anticipated the spectacle, the glory, and the insubstantial rewards of martial honor. None of them whispered with fear about death, because most of these war planners were the children of last century’s soldiers. They’d adopted the style and mannerisms of their fathers without any experience of “noble” combat.

In the prime of their youth, they hadn’t gone to war in France or Germany and crouched in a cold trench while their souls eroded. They hadn’t faced the endless heartbeat of the mechanical beast, the lub-dub of shells falling eternally, exploding and interrupting sleep. They hadn’t clutched gas masks while waiting for the rotten floral stench to signal that someone was about to die in visceral misery.

They’d gone to universities or worked in financial institutions while their peers had learned about the grim efficiency of modernity. They’d celebrated new luxuries while others had watched the fruits of science on the battlefield—impersonal, industrialized murder.

Those men in toy uniforms were well-studied, well-dressed, and capable of handling the logistics that made the New York cult’s military efforts run smoothly, but none of them were ready to battle the Soviets or the National Guard. They were only planners, not fighters.

“Just don’t let your guard down,” the Baron suggested. “If CPUSA comes knocking in the next few hours, I need you to come get us. We’ll need to speak with Tweed.” Truthfully, the Baron just wanted Enzu at hand when it came time to escape.

“You know something I don’t?” Enzu asked.

“No, but CPUSA was able to track us yesterday. If they show up here, I want Tweed to hear it from my own mouth. They’re a real threat.”

“I stole their car!” Schuler suddenly shouted.

“They’re driving vehicles from the UN pool,” the Baron explained, “all Soviet-owned. And they have occult combat training. It’s a sophisticated operation.”

Enzu frowned. “I doubt they’ll make it all the way here Baron.”

“Yes, but if they do, will you come to us?”

Enzu shrugged. “If I’m free, I guess.”

The Baron nodded once, as if accepting a promise. “Thank you, Enzu.”

“You’re welcome.” Enzu’s enthusiasm didn’t extend to promising any favors to New York prisoners, but he hadn’t explicitly refused either, and that gave the Baron some hope.

If and when someone attacked Tammany, d’Holbach wanted to put some distance between him and Schuler before trying to run. If Enzu escorted them alone, the enforcer would be the weak link in the chain of custody. He was sympathetic to their cause, knew the dangers of the Zombie intimately, and would likely give up and release them without bloodshed.

Of course, the Baron wasn’t relying solely on this possibility. If Enzu failed to retrieve them—or if Schuler followed them closely through the building—then the next best way out of Tammany was in the company of multiple high-ranking New York nobles and their personal enforcers. If there was any fighting, Tweed would probably move immediately to one of several neighboring safehouses in the city, and the Baron might be able to go with him.

Once they were moving, it’d be far easier for the Baron to find a moment of inattention when all sides were locked in conflict. Then he could flee.

Enzu scooted his little wooden chair back, preparing to depart. “I should go, but do you need anything else? More food? Something to drink?”

d’Holbach could use a couple of things, now that the man had mentioned it. “Can you spare any cigars? Also, I need to use the restroom.”

“Just walk down the hall and take a left,” Enzu said. “Tammany has guards all over. They know you won’t be leaving.” He rose. “I’ll grab up a couple of cigars too. This place is lousy with smokes and booze. Got any preferences for your stogie?”

“Can I have something that isn’t a stogie?” the Baron asked.

Enzu laughed. “I’ll pester one of the old boys for some of their personal supplies.”

“Bring me something pungent to eat,” the Zombie said.

Enzu waved to the Zombie with his uninjured hand. “I got you, Zed. Baron, I’ll walk you to the restroom.”

“Thank you.” The Baron rose and went out with the enforcer, past Schuler and down the hall to the public restrooms. A few random New York accountants and record-keepers gave them a worried glance, but Enzu was trustworthy and probably had a kill list as long as his forearm. If he was walking a man to the bathroom, they were safe.

In a claustrophobic water closet—likely twice updated with new plumbing since its original construction—the Baron relieved himself and washed his face in front of a mirror. He was still wearing a white cotton t-shirt, one size too small. The short sleeves showed off his muscles. It was undignified—what was he, a ditch digger trying to impress women at a bar? At least it’d be a little easier to run without a jacket.

He scratched his scalp. The stubble was thick and black. He’d gotten into the habit of shaving his head when powdered wigs were common, then continued the habit because he’d needed to fake balding and age. Now it was an integral part of his personal fashion. A baron was immaculate and tidy, curating an atmosphere of wisdom and refinement. He wasn’t a roughly shorn grunt—except today. He didn’t look like anyone important.

He asked himself, why was he so vain? He spoke aloud, “Vanity of vanities, said the Preacher, vanity of vanities. All is vanity.”

Ecclesiastes was the Bible’s darkest book. The Preacher would’ve claimed that the struggle to right the world was futile vanity and vexation of spirit. “That which is crooked cannot be made straight.” d’Holbach could hardly remember the chapters, but some of the quotes were unforgettable. Vanity is what made him stand in front of a mirror; was vanity also what drove him to save the world? Was it vanity to believe he could save anything? If it was, he still had to try.

There was one thing in Ecclesiastes that he believed wasn’t true. If the Preacher had known about nuclear weapons, he wouldn’t have written these words: “The Earth abides forever.”

d’Holbach returned to the sanctuary to find Enzu standing inside, holding out an ashtray laden with two cigars, a lighter, and a cutter—all the tools of the art of cigar smoking. “From High Oracle Gagliano.”

“Thanks.” The Baron accepted the gift. They were fine cigars, true Cubans, very dark and sweet. “Tell him I appreciate his tolerance.”

Enzu smiled. “Do you know what he said to me?”

“The Atheist is an evil man, but he’ll appreciate a good cigar?”

Enzu upgraded to a grin. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

The Zombie raised his right hand, clenched around a tiny sample bottle full of opaque red liquid, as bright as a volcanic sunset and as ripe as a field of peppers. His magazine was spread on the table now, forcefully opened to a random page. “Look what he got me,” he said cheerily. “Mexican pepper sauce, the first step to an early grave.”

The Baron snickered softly. “A drunkard’s grave,” he corrected, recalling the exact political cartoon that’d defined the Zombie’s personality for around three months during Prohibition. The invincible man had deliberately scandalized teetotallers by hitting every step down a short stair of absurd superstitions, right outside their meeting halls.

Once, a gaggle of old women came outside to drive him off a Boston stoop with strikes of their purses and bags, even while he swallowed whole pickles covered in pepper sauces and soaked himself in wild pours of clear vodka.

“I’ll be around the building for a few hours,” Enzu told the Baron. “We’ll catch up before I go, all right?”

“Of course, and thanks.”

Enzu paused at the door to add one last comment: “Just leave the ashtray on the table when you’re done.”

“I will. See you, Enzu.”

The enforcer waved to them both and left, skirting around Schuler, who was still slumped in his seat.

The Baron sat down in Tweed’s plush chair and arranged the ashtray on the table in front of him, with two cigars and a cutter beside it.

“You treat smoking like a tea ceremony,” the Zombie said.

“It’s pleasing.” d’Holbach picked the fine guillotine cutter, chose a tightly wrapped Cuban, and sliced a V-shaped notch out of one end. Gagliano didn’t know much about smoking, but he had people who told him what to buy. Becoming the High Oracle had forced him to acquire a sense of taste and refinement, which meant good cigars for valued guests.

The Zombie opened the tiny pepper bottle and tossed the cork into his mouth, quickly chewing and swallowing it in a common preamble. A couple quick sniffs over the crimson sauce. “I asked for something pungent, but he brought me the best.”

“Is that a compliment, or spite?” the Baron asked playfully.

“Ha! That man attacked me in an oyster bar. It’s a compliment.”

“Is that so?”

The Zombie tipped the pepper sauce bottle back like he was sampling a fine liquor. A few clicks of his tongue, then a smile. “That kind of man doesn’t know how to be passive-aggressive. He’s all earnest, all the time. Makes me glad I didn’t kill him.”

“That’s good to hear.” The Baron lit his zippo, carefully cooked the end of his cigar with a few passes of golden-yellow flame, waited some seconds for the burn to die down, and finally drew with a few pulls of his lips. Warm smoke flowed across his tongue, and beyond the taste of burning leaves, it was nutty, peppery, and very soft. A fine cigar to cushion a harsh day, an indulgence for a final hour of peace before the storm.

The Zombie tipped back his pepper sauce a couple more times, then grew bored of sipping and shoved the entire sample-size bottle into his mouth like a snake swallowing an egg—a maneuver that’d make anyone else violently choke or at least gag. He closed his jaw, and somewhere in the soft tissues of his throat, vice-like forces constricted, shattering glass with an audible pop and series of gnarly crinkles. Shards broke into razor sand, soon swallowed.

Schuler stirred at the sound, focusing through his bifocals at the Zombie. “Nothing classy about a drunkard’s grave. Fragile lives. Glass to sand.” He faded a little. “Drunk outside tonight, you see. It’ll be dangerous outdoors, but who cares? Not the drunk.” Fading further still, he slumped, mumbling. “Icy air falls like a hammer over the border of Kazakhstan. The mountains are like a wall, and the prices are high if you want a guide through the Dzungarian Gate.”

“What’s the task?” the Zombie asked the Diviner.

“Mm?” Schuler blinked lazily at the invincible man.

“You’re talking about a task, yeah?” the Zombie prompted.

Meister Schuler brightened. “Yes! She walks from China to the crater where the meteor fell.”

“She?” the Baron asked idly. There were many Artemisians on Earth, but Elizabeth had last been spotted in Central Asia.

“Can’t say,” Schuler said, sagging again.

“Can’t say what?” the Baron prodded.

“It wasn’t part of the deal,” Schuler muttered, then collapsed like a man who’d spent every last iota of energy and was finally exhausted.

“What deal?” the Zombie prodded.

Meister Schuler didn’t respond to any outside stimulus now. The Baron supposed that he wouldn’t react much unless they tried to leave with the Cat o’ Nine Lives.

“Fair enough,” the Zombie said, reading the magazine on the table.

The Baron finished smoking in silent repose. The cigar held its ash well, breaking off cleanly into the ceramic tray. When the flavor began to change, to grow bitter, he passed it up—still cooking—for the Zombie to eat.

The Zombie put out the cigar on his tongue, then kneeled beside the Baron while he chewed on the tobacco leaves. “What do you think?” he mumbled quietly around a full mouth.

“It’s nearly the half-hour mark,” the Baron whispered. “If anything happens, it’ll be soon.”

“Geese of a feather, flock together, the Zombie muttered.

The Baron chuckled. It was likely that Schuler was always listening, but the Diviner was unlikely to understand the principle behind that trite idiom. It meant that whatever the Baron tried to do next, the Zombie would be ready to help. Like two geese, they’d flap about and wreck things, making chaos, but only once there was a moment without attentive jailors.

From time to time, the Baron watched the glowing dials on his watch.

Phyllis couldn’t delay much further if she planned to break them out of Tammany Hall. The schedule was tight. While Denisov’s flight would leave around five, the Soviets would leave the UN Plaza at least a couple of hours earlier to work through any unusual obstacles or cut through any remaining red tape with the US government.

While the Soviets were waiting at the airport, or better while they were still on the streets, they’d be vulnerable to approach. There’d be a solid window for delivering the Cat.

Schuler stirred exactly at twelve-thirty. “Gunfire,” he said sharply, though nobody else could hear what he sensed. “There’s blood on the flagstones of Union Square Park.”

The Zombie looked up from his magazine. “Time?” he asked the Baron.

The Baron tapped his watch. “Half-hour on the dot. It’s coordinated.”

“They’re attacking in the park though? Not here?” the Zombie asked.

“I’d guess it’s a feint attack.” The Baron stood from the plush chair, stretching his legs and rolling his shoulders. “Once New York responds, the real attack hits here.”

“That’d work,” the Zombie agreed. “Who’s attacking?”

“I don’t know,” the Baron admitted. “I doubt they’re allies.” He slipped the last cigar into his pants pocket with the lighter and the guillotine cutter. “Schuler, you awake?”

The Diviner stirred again, rubbing the sides of his head and groaning. “I don’t know them! I can hear them, and I don’t know any of them. I don’t know, I don’t know!”

“He’s awake,” the Zombie concluded.

“I don’t want to focus!” Schuler closed his eyes and squirmed in the chair. “Damnation!” His left leg began to spasm, stomping the floor rapidly. “I need to rest! To! Rest!” But he couldn’t relax, no matter what strange psychological requirements he carried, because there was violence outside Tammany Hall. After a moment, he jumped to his feet, shouting, “You wanted to see Tweed, you devils? You wanted to speak with my king as his kingdom is stained?”

The Baron stared down the fickle madman with some worry. This wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but it was better than staying here. “Are you truly offering to help?”

Schuler nodded in two violent jags, nearly shaking his bifocals from his face.

“Then yes,” the Baron answered, “if Enzu isn’t coming—”

“I will take you!” the Diviner barked, waved them out of the room as if evacuating a burning building. “Come! Quickly! We’re going, so hurry!”

Author’s Note:

We start one of the largest arcs of heavily rewritten content. I’m very proud of this new version, so look forward to a good time as we really tear into the rising action of this final act of the book.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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August 29, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Period-accurate racism against Europeans and Asian-Americans.

Last century, Boss Tweed had arranged a cycle of illegal criminal enterprises, which he’d carefully supported with rigged courts, corrupt laws, and bought votes. He’d always ruled with popular support, for the greatest despot was loved by those he oppressed. He’d occasionally raised his boot and relieved the pressure, and they’d worshipped him for having the wisdom to relent once a year. Even now, that reputation defined Tweed’s leadership.

The Baron recalled that the Boss had celebrated the end of the war in ‘45 by declaring a year without tithes. For twelve months, New York’s vassals had kept the full fruits of their labors or sold their unused prestige for cash. Tweed had been widely praised for so generously doing what the cult should have done all along, and when the senseless tithing had resumed, many tithe dodgers had paid up to reward the triumvirate for its generosity. It was the rare dissenting voice which argued that Tammany Hall could’ve easily paid cash for every tithed day.

The Baron was one of those dissenting voices, but he was also the Atheist. Few were willing to listen to him, and adding his support could hurt a good cause, even encouraging the triumvirate to stomp it out. There were few men the Baron disliked more than Boss Tweed. With Gagliano there was mutual respect, and General Osman was predictably bellicose but ultimately practical. It was Tweed who believed in the New York theology and crafted its foul teleology.

“Insincere respect,” Tweed muttered, “coming from a thief in my country.”

Schuler picked some food off the buffet carts and munched on dripping pork and dark, overripe strawberries.

The Zombie didn’t even pay attention to the men in the room. The Cat occupied his left hand. After a quick look through the cabinets by the carts, he picked up a reddish-brown flask of laudanum with his right hand. Using his teeth, he pulled the cork and sniffed deeply.

“Keep your devil under control,” General Osman said.

“It’s just a bitter drink,” the Zombie said with exaggerated aplomb. He chewed up the cork and washed it down with a fatal dose of the opium tincture. “Very bitter.” He smiled with caramel dark teeth. “Tastes like cinnamon, sherry, and autumn rot.”

Gagliano frowned. “Is that truthfully the Cat o’ Nine Lives in your hand, Golem?”

“Don’t dignify the monster,” Tweed said. “I’d recognize the artifact anywhere, but I can hardly imagine the story that brought it here, and I can barely grasp the Baron’s betrayal of my trust. I can only conclude that Meister Schuler has saved you from embarrassment, General.”

Tweed was trying to egg Osman into overreacting, the Baron could tell, but he couldn’t quite figure out the man’s angle yet. Osman was gladly falling for his manipulation.

“Meister Schuler was deployed on my orders,” Osman said grimly, “and he saved you from the godless frog you fools invited into our fine city.”

“The frog invited himself,” Tweed said.

“I’m German,” the Baron corrected.

“Yes, we all know what atrocities your race is capable of, kraut.” General Osman adopted a different flavor of hate as easily as a skilled musician changed keys.

Schuler finished his bites and licked his fingers, then sidled past the Zombie to a tray full of hard, flaky cheese cubes and a tiny bowl of incredibly viscous vinegar. Each cube was pierced with a dark wooden toothpick. He picked one up with a drunk slowness, then whispered to the cheese and popped it in his mouth. He dropped the toothpick in the vinegar bowl, out of focus and unaware of the unsanitary result. It was disarming behavior, but the Baron knew that the Diviner was arguably more aware of the environment in this state and similarly harder to ambush. This was a tense interview, but it was an even more dangerous standoff.

“I’ve lived on American soil longer than you’ve been alive,” the Baron said, choosing to focus on his aspect of this battle. “I’m as American as anyone.”

“Time ill spent.” General Osman leaned back in his chair. “Look at these chambers. This is a place of business, a war room, and a court room. Do you see anyone? Do you see a single person, Baron? You’ve scared them. You’ve made our people fear the dark.”

The Baron shook his head. “Are you blaming me for people abandoning their posts?”

“They won’t abandon anything,” Tweed rumbled, “but they won’t come until Osman secures Lower Manhattan.”

“They’ll come after dawn, when civvies cover the approach,” Osman added.

d’Holbach sniffed. “Then I don’t see how I’m responsible.”

The Zombie was chugging laudanum. Despite taking enough narcotics to kill several grown men, he wouldn’t feel the drugs. It was the terrible flavor that attracted him.

Tweed combed his beard with his fingers. “Arrogance.”

“What about it?”

“It’s your greatest fault, Baron. You’re arrogant.”

“Are you talking about hiding the Cat? There’s nothing arrogant about aiming high.”

“I’m talking about temporal power, Baron. I’m talking about your damned monster. When was the last time that your decisions had consequences for yourself? When was the last time anyone had the power to punish you?”

“I face a lot of risk,” the Baron said, “most of it a result of my choices.”

“But you don’t face moral consequences, Baron.” Tweed scowled deeply. “This is arrogance. You have the privilege of doing as you please. You destroy good and orderly things at will, and you tell everyone, it’s for a good cause. Meanwhile, nobody can stop you.”

“What’s your point? Are you blaming me for the fifth column?”

“We’re looking for an enemy that you angered, and you still think you’re a good person.” Tweed gestured at the Zombie with a hand adorned with multiple plain rings. They were probably minor defensive artifacts. Quite a few had been collected during World War II. “Look at the beast you call friend. You bring him into our sacred chambers, and he mocks us, and what do you do? Where’s the discipline? You aren’t even contesting his vandalism.”

“I’d drink this swill even if he wasn’t around,” the Zombie said.

Schuler was leaving a small pile of toothpicks in the vinegar.

“I haven’t even told you why I have the Cat,” the Baron said, “or what I’m doing with it.”

Tweed slapped his hand on his armrest. “There are no excuses for arrogance! Let me be clear. You’re an evil man. You spread disaster and disorder because you force the world to conform to you. Is a door locked? You ask your iron man to break it down. Does someone stand in your path? You wait in silence while your monster dispatches him. Are there rights, laws, trusts, contracts, or oaths that bind you? You escape them, and nobody has the strength to enforce them. The Zombie allows you to act as if you’re morally invincible, and you mistake that for moral righteousness. You insist that your brute strength is a necessary evil.”

“I’m not the Zombie’s keeper,” the Baron said, “he keeps me.”

Tweed sneered. “That’s an easy lie, isn’t it? You push responsibility onto the weapon. You pretend you can’t or won’t pull the trigger. It’s shameful.”

The Baron grunted. Tweed accused him of arrogance, but the Baron only affected the lives of those who chose to participate in the occult—who chose to antagonize or oppose him. Tweed on the other hand approved of a system where the gods might assign a task to murder a man or sink a valuable ship, and he would believe it was good because the gods wanted it. He tithed vast quantities of prestige and imposed a vassal system on the cultic West. To enforce it, there was always someone out in the world with a smoking gun and a list of names, half of them struck through with red ink. “You’re no saint yourself,” the Baron said.

“I’m not,” Tweed agreed, “but at least I admit my evil. We’re the same, in a sense. The difference is, I create order, and I have the humility to acknowledge what sacrifices I inflict.”

“You’re wrong,” the Baron said flatly. “I watch the Zombie commit crimes on my behalf, yes, but you sign orders for servants to commit atrocities in your name. You want to talk about arrogance? You think you’re helping cults find order because you’ve conquered them. You think you’ve created a damn occult Pax Americana based out of New York City.” He frowned. “What does this have to do with the Cat, anyways? Do you think you’ll shame me into handing it over? Because I can’t even fathom the logic there, Tweed. I can’t.”

Gagliano, who had been listening to the exchange in thoughtful silence, spoke up: “Baron, I think Tweed’s point is simple. You thought you could take the Cat out of New York territory. That’s arrogance. You fought with the natural course of history. That’s arrogance too. The Cat is clearly here because it’s meant to be ours, and you’ve had the gall to keep it a secret from us. That, my dear Baron d’Holbach, is arrogance of the worst kind. As the others say, it is theft. And we are not happy with you.”

“You never owned it,” the Baron said, “and it’s not stolen. The Cat was lost, and I was hired to return it.”

“Lost in our lands,” Osman muttered.

The Baron raised a hand for attention. “Consider what’s at stake. The Bolshevik faction of the Soviet cult loaned the Cat o’ Nine Lives to the Orthodox faction. If they can’t return the Cat when the Bolsheviks demand it, they’ll be forced to pay a security to Stalin’s representative. That’s two nuclear option ikons, the Lazy Woman and one Apple of Perun. With those tools, Stalin would eliminate the Orthodox opposition. In a handful of years, the warmongers would be ascendant. They could come after you.”

“We’re aware of the Soviet conflict, Baron,” Gagliano said. “We have spies of our own.”

“Then you understand how close we are to a massive shift in occult power. Right now, the core of the Slavic arsenal is under Orthodox control. We need it to stay that way.”

“Kraut,” Osman said idly, “you said you’re not a thief, but here’s a riddle. Who had the Cat before you did? Was it a Russian or a New Yorker? I know the name of the Orthodox agent who swallowed the Cat o’ Nine Lives. Janos Nagy, the assassin. Did you take it from him?”

“I didn’t take it from Nagy,” the Baron said carefully, admitting no more.

“Of course,” Osman said, “but you know he was here in New York.”

“Do I?” the Baron asked flatly.

“He was still carrying the Cat only a month ago in East Berlin. I haven’t heard any reports about his death, but we lost several men on the SS John G. Paines. I put Schuler on the warpath, thinking he’d sniff out a hit from a rival cult, but it’s so much worse, isn’t it? Nagy came to snipe a New York task, and he died. Only one guess to name his killer, too.”

“Do you know who was on that ship?” the Baron asked.

“I know which men were hired on the record,” General Osman said. “Jacono was one of my best, and with a lot of luck, he might’ve done the deed and run off with the Cat. I tried to call on him after his death, only to learn from Maurice that you called upon him first.”

“I did,” the Baron responded.

“So, I conclude New York cultists had the artifact after Nagy’s death. By right of conquest, it was ours, but look now.” He pointed to the Zombie. “It’s in your beast’s left hand. No man would have the right to give it to you, so how did it get there? Thievery? Murder?”

“It was given to me,” the Baron answered carefully.

Osman shifted in his chair, leaning forward. “Deception then. I think about the bodies you left yesterday, and I see the Boss’s logic. You stole from us, Baron, but you don’t even believe you’re a thief. Like any other kraut, you’re arrogant.”

The Baron made the executive decision to push a little harder, to reveal a little more of the story in order to push back on this narrative. “Jacono gave it to the dock boss running the job, and that man failed to report it to you, let alone hand it over. The Russians killed him for his trouble in Red Hook, but not before he’d told me where he’d hidden the artifact. It was given to me for safe-keeping. If anyone is a thief, it’s the dock boss, though he didn’t know what he’d taken or why he was killed for it. He just wanted a powerful man to help him, so I did.”

“You give speeches,” Tweed said, “but there’s no substance there. Did this dead dock boss go to the gods? Could he vouch for you now?”

“I’m afraid not,” the Baron said.

“So, you expect us to trust you,” General Osman said.

“Yes. If I’d crossed you, I’d say as much and still think I was doing the right thing.”

“Of course you would,” Tweed said with a dark smile. “Of course.”

The Baron was frustrated by these petty arguments about his culpability. “Does it matter what happened? This is necessary. I spent the last day fighting a fifth column over the Cat. If they capture it, Stalin will demand the security payment, then recover the Cat later. He’ll win everything, and the balance of power will shift until it tips over. I’m helping everyone!”

“More arrogance,” Tweed said. “All you do is praise and excuse yourself for bringing disorder and violence to my city. When forced to recognize your crimes, you act as if it was necessary to bear the risk and responsibility on your shoulders alone. If what you said were true, how could you justify it? Why wouldn’t you ask the leaders and lawmakers for help? Why wouldn’t you trust us to be as reasonable as yourself, unless you believed that you were more reasonable than the entire world? Do you think you’re better than us?”

“I don’t think I am—”

“Yet you pretend to be an ubermensch,” said Tweed.

“A what?” The conversation was taking a sharp left turn towards one of Tweed’s philosophical obsessions. “You think I want to embody Nietzsche’s ideal?”

“Have you read him? Oh sure, you’ve put eyes to pages, but have you really read him?”

“I’m no pretender to some insane nihilistic superman.”

“But you are!” Tweed’s nostrils flared. “You seek risk like it’s meritorious, eschew the promise of the afterlife, even defy the obvious truths of souls, free will, and the divine! You cling to this life with a foul love, becoming the antithesis of all that is holy in order to squeeze another day of immortality. You abuse a good man’s wish!”

There was the connection that explained the change in subject. Nearly seventy-five years ago, Tweed had admitted to envying the Baron. That was before he’d faked his death and sacrificed his freedom for the safety of a self-made prison. The passing decades had only increased the man’s bitterness. “I didn’t ask for this, Tweed. Eternity was thrust on me.”

“Aye, you complain, yet you keep it. You’ve been given the opportunity every man in this room desires, but you’ve pissed away the gift and sought to create new meaning—to reject the divine purpose of the gods.” Tweed wiped flecks of spittle from the edges of his mouth. “I’ve heard your damned fantasies before, and it’s little more than childish science-fiction. You pretend to be everything Nietzsche calls the ubermensch, but you refuse to bear the name because you know it’s foolishness. So I curse you with it, would-be overman. You would-be ubermensch!”

“I can’t tell if you’re calling me a Nazi or an anarchist,” the Baron said.

“You suggested it,” Tweed said, “not I.”

The Baron snorted derisively. “This is why I can’t trust you. You think I’m insane. You won’t listen to anything I say.”

“Aren’t you insane?” Gagliano asked. “Consider the contradictions. You’re an atheist, yet you wish for help from gods. You deny the existence of choice, but you insist morality is real. You deny the existence of souls and speak with the dead. What else could you be?”

The Baron huffed with frustration. “My beliefs are consistent. Rational. They’re not gods—”

“Don’t!” Tweed interrupted sharply. “Don’t blaspheme in my temple, Baron!”

The Baron waved the offense aside. “Forget it. I didn’t come here to debate theology with true believers.” He gestured to his invincible friend, whose head was thrown back.

The Zombie was currently tapping the bottom of the laudanum bottle to drain the very last drop into his mouth. He lowered it, waving it towards the crowd. “May I eat this?”

“The entire thing would shatter,” the Baron said. “Set it down. Tell these men, how hard was it to defend the Cat?”

The Zombie chuckled, setting the empty bottle on a table. “Difficult. Baron d’Holbach nearly died three times by my count.”

“And if New York had been involved yesterday?”

“It would’ve been an occult war. Even if New York had aimed to help us, hundreds would’ve died in the fighting, all while I protected the Baron.”

“And why is that?”

“Because New York lacks perspective and preparation.” The Zombie wasn’t grinning. His verdict was delivered with solemnity. “They’re a regional interest and this is an international conflict.”

“Regional?” Osman shouted.

The Baron jumped on that point: “The last thing we need are tin soldiers rattling their sabers and alerting Langley, or the Soviets forfeiting their fifth column militia and deploying state-trained special forces.”

Osman stood from this throne. “We are the center of civilization!”

“Sit down,” Gagliano muttered.

The Baron rolled onwards, knowing that this was his last opportunity to win any reprieve from Tammany Hall. “The Zombie saw occult Spetsnaz operatives at the UN Secretariat. If you’d moved in force, you would’ve started a street battle against world-class soldiers.”

“We are the largest occult power on Earth!” Osman said fiercely, half to the Baron, half to Gagliano. “North America, Western Europe, South Africa, even the gods damned Pacific—I refuse to be called regional when our region spans oceans!”

High Oracle Gagliano stared down the General. Osman composed himself for a few seconds before returning to his chair in silence. He seemed to think his point was made.

Gagliano spoke to the Baron: “You mistake us for petty warlords.”

“He mistakes his demon murderer for an expert,” Osman said.

“The Zombie speaks the truth as he sees it,” the Baron said. “I trust him. I don’t trust any of you to make the Cat safe—to keep it from Langley or the Soviets. The stakes are too high.”

Schuler ran out of dry cheese to eat, dropped the last toothpick in the bowl, and leaned back against the wall. He had a glassy stare, head cocked and listening to a busy planet. The Zombie ambled over and picked up the bowl of vinegar-soaked toothpicks. Right in front of Schuler, he opened his mouth wide and ate the pile.

“Disgusting,” Tweed said. “Those were in his mouth.”

“This is a circus anyways,” the Baron said, “You can’t take the Cat from him. No matter what happens to me, you can’t pry open the grasp of an invincible man.”

“I was hoping you would give it up,” Gagliano said, “since you can’t leave.”

The Baron didn’t debate the point, because it was true for now. He was here under threat of death, but the Zombie’s Pact was similarly absolute, and neither Schuler nor the Zombie could be stopped. If either party struck a blow, all would die. It was mutually assured destruction. Instead, he made his final appeal. “I voluntarily came, because I hoped you’d see the futility of taking the Cat. I beg you—at least think about your interests. You know about the Soviet schism. You must know the Bolsheviks will risk everything to win the Cold War. Even Armageddon.”

“I don’t care,” Tweed replied curtly.

“You should.”

The old Boss grunted dismissively. “We’re not here to contest their Communist eschatology. Rather, I object to your insinuations that we cannot protect ourselves. We are more than capable of holding onto the Cat. As I see it, now that it’s here, it’s our job to safeguard it. It’s our purpose.”

“Your purpose?” The Baron was awestruck. “There’s no purpose, there’s only people, and this is the future of our civilization! We should want a stalemate! Gridlock! We need to bargain for time. Tomorrow will come only if everyone agrees that today isn’t our last.”

Tweed sighed irritably. “Baron, why do you insist on fighting with the course of history?”

“Fighting the course? History isn’t a path to walk. It’s a process, and we’re part of it.”

“We’ve had this discussion before,” Tweed said. “Hegel wrote it all down.”

Oh no. Not this again.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher born shortly after the Baron had first faked his death. He’d written labyrinthine tracts of linguistic ambiguity, taking advantage of particularly German idiosyncrasies to craft double meanings and assert contradictions and negations without any regard for classical logic or reason. His most infamous confusion had been the abuse of the word “geist,” by which he’d deliberately meant either mind or spirit, even while he’d denied that mind and spirit were the same thing.

“Spare me, Tweed,” the Baron said. “You misunderstood Hegel.”

Boss Tweed tutted. “You accuse me of your own faults, Baron.”

“I’ve heard your arguments before, and they’re wrong. At no point in Hegel is there a true dialectical process. There’s nothing like a divine plan!”

“It doesn’t matter. If it isn’t in his books, then it’s in the world. History is a series of Falls, both secular and occult, but they aren’t descents into anarchy. They’re steps up a ladder, higher and higher, approaching a historical end—a final unity!”

“This is a complete misinterpretation,” the Baron said.

“It’s a proper interpretation in light of what we know about reality.” Tweed smiled broadly. He honestly believed he’d found a deeper insight inside verbal spaghetti. Like a man finding castles in the clouds, he’d spied a self-serving worldview hidden between the lines of philosophical white noise. “Consider the Hegelian dialectic again.”

“You’re deluded,” the Baron said.

“It goes ‘thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,’ Baron. The old thesis was London’s world. Prestige was used to wish for knowledge, and occult colonialism decided the fate of nations. The antithesis was the Russian response, the anarchic revolt. They personified our urge to destroy civilization, to revert to a state of nature where we would all be masters, none slaves. Their conflict created the Apostate, a focal point of sin, and she seized the power of the thesis and the will of the antithesis. She forced the birth of the new synthesis through the Fall of Truth. London collapsed, and we rose to take their place on the throne. We adopted the new thesis—we use prestige primarily to seek the afterlife.”

“You’re confusing what happened with what ought to happen. New empires rise to replace old ones, but that doesn’t mean that empires must exist.” The Baron’s argument had no visible effect on Tweed, but the is-ought fallacy was never truly intuitive.

“Everything that happens has a reason, Baron. When I saw the Cat in your monster’s hand, I knew deep in my heart, it was meant for us.” Tweed patted his round, soft chest. “You’ve come to give us this tool, because we must have it for the coming conflict. If we are the thesis, then someday an antithesis must rise. Why not the Soviets again? Who are we to second guess the course of history? They seem more likely than most, and they’ll serve the course of history, even if that means finding a new synthesis in the detonation of a bomb.”

“You think nuclear war is Hegelian?” The Baron was flabbergasted. This was a fatalistic twist on the old New York theology he’d heard in the interwar period.

“I don’t know what to think,” Tweed said gruffly, “except that it isn’t our choice to make. History will find a way to the proper end. In the secular world, we have the thesis of the West and the antithesis of the East. How will the Cold War end? What synthesis will they bear?”

“Peace. I hope.”

Tweed laughed at peace, at the Baron’s reason, and at everything that wasn’t his conception of history. “The rise of the secular superpowers was inevitable. The entire world can finally be drawn into a single conflict, and we can begin our approach to the final synthesis, the ultimate unity of the world-spirit. Baron, you have brought us a weapon because we need it, because it will preserve life in death, and we will be reforged in the fire. When the fat is burned away, what remains of New York will be the synthesis of the final era of history.”

“Do you hear yourself? A final synthesis, a final era—what does that even mean?”

“These aren’t empty slogans,” Tweed said, fervent in his belief. “The answer to your question is also in Hegel. The purpose of history is to eventually resolve the most fundamental conflict of the Hegelian dialectic. The thesis is life. The antithesis is death. We taste the synthesis by wishing to go to the gods, but a true synthesis will resolve the dynamic tension by eliminating the differences between life and afterlife. Baron, if we allow history to finish its course, we won’t need to fleece the gods for immortality. We won’t buy it with the blood and sweat of hard-earned prestige. We will create the afterlife on Earth, or we will obviate the need for the afterlife altogether.”

“How?” the Baron asked. “How would any of this make sense?”

“An idiot’s question. If you’d asked the men of London why their cult would fall and what their successors would do without wishes for knowledge, what do you think they’d say? Madness. Improbable. Even impossible. They couldn’t conceive of the synthesis.”

“Nor can you,” the Baron said.

“Nor can I,” Tweed agreed.

The Baron waved all of this aside. “I’m not giving you the Cat o’ Nine Lives.”

“Not today,” Schuler said quietly.

The Baron turned to the Diviner. Schuler was focusing in, straightening and standing. The Baron asked him, “Then you’ll let us go?”

“We have to keep you here.” Schuler closed his eyes. “We must, yes.”

“There’s no good reason to keep us here.” The Baron looked to the triumvirate. “Tweed, I know you’re a cunning man. I know you’re a practical man, a winner. I’m asking for your permission to let us all win. Let me take the Cat and deliver it to the Orthodox faction.”

General Osman spoke up. “There’s a clear angle, kraut.”

“What’s that?” the Baron asked. “Do you think you can reason the Cat out of the Zombie’s grip? I think you’ll find it’s unmovable.”

Osman leaned forward. “Let me make my feelings on this matter utterly clear. I would see this world destroyed before I’m beaten by you, and I don’t fear death. If you attempt to leave without my permission, I will order Schuler to kill you, and I will die victorious because I’ll have seen your corpse laid out on the floors of a ruined temple.” He sat back again. “I’m not rushing to meet the gods though, and I doubt you are either. There’s only one way you’ll leave alive, and that’s if you hand the Cat over to us. This is fact, non-negotiable.”

“Tweed, you approve of this?” the Baron asked.

Tweed pursed his lips. “Why hasn’t the security been paid to the Bolsheviks? The Cat is lost, and they know it. Why isn’t this already a lost cause for you?”

“You won’t answer my question?”

Tweed steepled his fingers. “The way I figure it, the Soviets have set a deadline. How much longer did they give you? A day? Two? A week? A month? It doesn’t matter. Once it’s clear that you’re not leaving Tammany Hall, they’ll have to pay out the security.”

The Zombie scowled at the room. “I would kill your entire cult if the Baron died.”

“Baron d’Holbach.” Tweed leaned back in his crimson throne. “Answer me truthfully, and I’ll make your stay comfortable. Once the security was paid to Stalin, giving the Cat back to the Orthodox faction wouldn’t make a lick of difference, would it?”

“It wouldn’t,” the Baron agreed reluctantly.

“Then you wouldn’t have any reason to hold onto the Cat afterwards?”

“Beyond spite or personal use, no.”

Tweed smiled. “We’ll be holding you for a few days. Once we have evidence that the security is paid out, we’ll reconvene here and discuss whether or not you want to keep the Cat. Time is on my side, Baron. History itself favors the New York cult. As in all things related to the course of history, patience is the greatest virtue. If we wait, we win by default.”

“You’ll irreversibly damage the balance of power in the Soviet cult.”

“That’ll happen regardless. We’ll just benefit as the gods intended, and we’ll take the Cat o’ Nine Lives for our own. You’ll either succumb and surrender, or you’ll wait here until the synthesis occurs.”

“I’m sorry, Baron,” Gagliano said, “but they’re right. We have nothing to gain by letting you go, and someday soon, the Cat will be less important to you than your freedom.”

“You’ve lost, kraut,” Osman finished. “New York wins. We always win.”

Author’s Note:

Boss Tweed has strange beliefs.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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August 26, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No particular warnings.

d’Holbach followed Schuler’s instructions, getting in on the passenger’s side. There was a bullet hole in the vinyl seating and several holes in the door paneling. There’d been a tremendous battle over this car, sometime this morning. It might be quiet around Tammany Hall, but this was concrete proof that an occult war was starting in New York.

Schuler shut his door and started the vehicle. The radio was tuned to static and turned down low, almost inaudible. He pulled into gear without even looking at the Baron, without even looking at the street. It was as if he wasn’t there, as if the entire car was little more than an unconscious action, like breathing, like digestion. Schuler was listening to the whole world.

They U-turned in the intersection and ran the red light in both directions. There was a civvie’s car coming down 14th, but Schuler made no rush to avoid it. Nothing he could do this close to Tammany would catch the attention of secular police. The Hall’s secular shadow cast darkness across the park square and surrounding blocks, and the eyes of authority couldn’t penetrate the gloom. The friendship of the political machine, however weak it might’ve become, was still vital to police business in Manhattan.

The consequences of this rapid capture could be dire. While the Baron knew the Zombie’s presence would do a lot for his safety, nobody else outside Tammany would share his confidence. Their logic would be simple. The longer he remained in New York’s custody, the more likely it was that he’d hand over the Cat o’ Nine Lives.

Malik and Heckhaus would believe in the Baron’s failure. They’d trust that the only option left was to abandon the artifact or commit to open conflict.

In an occult war, who would win? With men like Schuler or Slavic artifacts like the Apples, occult forces had the undeniable advantage in assassinations and small-scale urban combat. However, prestige was quickly exhausted, and Langley’s secular forces were trained to defend cities and resist armies. If one of them made a move for the Cat, how would the war end? How would it be framed in the secular media? Somewhere in the thicket of possible answers rested the tiger of nuclear armageddon. If not today, then someday, it could wake at the smell of American and Russian blood. Once the Bolsheviks had the rest of the artifacts, conflict with Langley was inevitable, even planned. The tiger would roar, and all the threats and posturing of the Cold War would turn into a thunderstorm of bombs.

The only way out was to escape Tammany Hall quickly.

Schuler was the main reason that they couldn’t leave.

The Baron opted to reason with the Diviner, even if it was unlikely to succeed. “Meister Schuler, did you know that the Russians are fighting to see whether or not the Cat lands in Orthodox hands?”

“No,” Schuler said softly. “I’ve never cared.”

Schuler’s indifference was hard to fathom, but the Baron rolled with it. “I understand that attitude, but it’s important. If the Cat doesn’t end up in Orthodox hands by the end of today, we’re one step closer to nuclear war.”

“Makes sense,” Schuler said.

“So you believe me then? I’m trying to return the Cat in order to prevent conflict.”

“You don’t have to soften the blow,” Schuler said as they pulled onto 17th and drove along the face of Tammany Hall. “You want to stop the end of days.”

“Great. Then you know why I need to take the Cat and go.”

Schuler shrugged. “It’s not my problem.”

The Baron was taken aback. “Schuler, you believe me?”

“I do.”

“But you live in the same shadow of the bomb.”

“When it’s my time to die, I’m ready,” Schuler said. “What I ask myself is, do I think you’ll stop a nuclear war from happening?” He glanced at the Baron, flashing the copper of his frames through the light of a passing streetlamp. “And I answer, no. War is inevitable. The end is near, so I ask myself, what is it I value in these last years of life?” Schuler smiled, focusing on the Baron and leaving behind his reverie with the chorus of the gods. There was a sharpness to his eyes now—a specific attentiveness to detail, revealed in the way he moved. “Focusing like this gives me a headache, Baron. It makes me sick, after a time it makes my limbs shake. I have to lose focus to feel good again, to hear the music. It’s a taste of heaven here on Earth, when I lose focus—but Baron! When I’m listening to the divine music, I forget to eat. I forget to sleep. I need others to care for me. I need room and board, and nobody in the world will give me those things and my freedom at once… except for Boss Tweed.” Schuler turned away, but he didn’t zone out this time. He looked for the turn to the lot alongside the Hall and took it. “They say I’m a madman, and they’re right. I’m mad as a hatter. It keeps me healthy in man’s twilight.”

“You won’t save the world for your own pleasure?”

Schuler laughed dismissively. “Baron, please! Be reasonable. I’m not an evil man, but I am practical. I can’t save the world, but I can live all my days with all my heart.”

“You can save it. More than anyone.”

“No, I can’t. I’m not an army. I’m not a government or bomb. I’m a man. I channel the divine music because I am a tool of the gods, and they direct me hither and thither.” He wiggled a hand like a fish swimming upstream. “That is what I do. Unlike you, I am in their grace.” He pulled into a parking spot. “You make a misery of your final years, you know.”

“These aren’t my final years,” the Baron said.

“You’re going into the Hall with the Cat,” Schuler insisted. “If you have some chain of logic where this is a loss and nuclear armageddon hangs from the end, I think you can call it now. It’s already over.” He shut off the car. “I’m sorry, Baron.”

“You’re Nero fiddling while Rome burns.”

“There weren’t any fiddles in Rome,” Schuler corrected.

“Another reason you shouldn’t aspire to be him. Let me go.”

“You’re a man in the riots, throwing cups of water at the Circus while she burns.” Schuler opened his door. “You’re not leaving. Boss Tweed will want to see you immediately.”

The lot wasn’t officially for Tammany Hall alone. It was the next address up, pay to park. Despite this, the watchman on post didn’t rise from his chair. His head tipped up from his book in his booth, recognized Schuler, and dropped back down to read again.

Sunrise was maybe an hour out now. The streetlights around Tammany were shining on the first scraps of pedestrian traffic in this area, professional men and women at the extreme ends of corporate America. CEOs, CFOs and sundry other officers of finance were up early, an alphabet soup wrapped up in expensive tailored suits of black or grey. Clerical workers, secretaries and human computers filtered between them, readying themselves for the mentally rote but vital processes of sorting numbers, of turning the crank on the economic machine.

It’d be some hours yet before politicians, lawyers, and criminal contacts finished their breakfasts and came around the Hall to barter for territory, money, and control.

The Baron exited the car and followed Meister Schuler south along the face of the Hall. It was a three story building, dark red brick trimmed in white marble and smooth grey Tennessee limestone. Small, shallow arches rose over every window and door, and the Hall itself was capped with a large semicircle of brick and stone, which rested over a half-eye of window glass. It was easy to imagine someone standing on a high ladder, looking out of that dark shimmering surface at the world below.

If the Baron hadn’t seen the interior twenty-five years ago, he would’ve believed that Boss Tweed still spied from that perch with a jaundiced eye. Truth be told, it was just a high window to let light into the titular meeting hall at the building’s heart.

That hall was not where they’d be going.

The Zombie was standing outside the door beside Enzu Guerra, the enforcer whose arm was still in a cast and sling. “He got here ahead of us,” the Zombie called, gesturing to his new companion.

Schuler skirted around Enzu, not rudely ignoring him but already sinking back into his relaxed semi-fugue. He wasn’t losing his identity or forgetting himself, but the outcome was eerily similar. He hummed and passed through as if everything else were decoration.

Enzu stepped forward to shake the Baron’s left hand awkwardly. His salt-and-pepper beard was mashed to one side, the tip crooked left as if caught in a permanent gale. He’d slept on wet hair and woken up without time to preen. “d’Holbach,” he said, “is it true?”

“Is what true, Enzu?”

“Zeddie says you need to deliver the Cat o’ Nine Lives to the Russians.”

If the man was friendly to the Zombie after such violence, he was either cowed or unshakably brave. Enzu appeared to be the latter, so the Baron repeated the facts for his consideration. “If the Orthodox faction loses the ikon, Stalin’s Bolsheviks win a security payout of one Apple of Perun and the Lazy Woman. That’s the short and long of it.”

Enzu squinted, an unfocused glare at the future. “Easy assassinations,” he judged.

“That’s right. It’ll be war if they ever bring their weapons to bear on American resources. Stalin will have a third of the Slavic arsenal today, who knows how many tomorrow.”

Enzu scratched his beard. “Who have you been fighting with then?”

“Members of the American Communist Party. They’re a fifth column for the Bolshevik faction.” The complications could wait for the boss. Enzu only needed enough to know that the Baron was the “good guy.” They could pretend yesterday’s violence was forgivable because of the Baron’s good intentions, and Enzu might act as their ally on the inside. Support was a rare luxury in the lion’s den. The Baron would let a man into his confidence to have it.

“Jesus, so this Soviet business is the truth.” Enzu looked grim.

“Mostly true.”

“You got to tell General Osman about this,” Enzu said.

“He will,” Schuler muttered from the open double doors. The desk guards inside were picking up phones, making calls. “I’ve brought him to talk with the triumvirate.”

“Just tell them what you told me, Baron,” Enzu said.

“They’ll want to take the Cat,” the Baron said, “There’s no way they’d give it up.”

“I know, I know. But you have to give them a chance. They’re smart men, Baron. You’ve just got to convince them that it ain’t worth the cost. You got to persuade them, please.”

“We’ll try,” the Zombie said.

The Baron smiled congenially at Enzu. “Talk to me after our meeting with Tweed. All right?”

“Sure, Baron.” Enzu gave him a brief, lazy salute. “Good luck.”

The Baron followed Schuler through the doors with the Zombie right behind him. Once the doors closed, the Zombie pulled the Cat out of his pocket and gripped it tight in his left hand. There was no hiding it, but there was also no doubt that taking it would be a tussle with the world’s oldest murderer.

“Scratch any calls to security,” Schuler said to the desk guards, “Call the old man’s club. The Chinaman is our guest today. No complaints.”

“Yes, sir.” The guard hung up the phone and redialed.

“Tell them the Baron is here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m not Chinese,” the Zombie complained.

“Are some of them secular?” the Baron asked quietly.

“Both,” Schuler said. He guided them into an elevator at the side of the lobby, but didn’t enter with them. “I’ll follow you up. See you there.”

 The Baron couldn’t fault the man for being security conscious. He wouldn’t be able to dodge the Zombie in a tiny box, so he sent them up alone.

The elevator doors shut, leaving them in a momentary privacy. The Zombie made a quick comment. “We have no leverage here.”

“They don’t have much leverage either,” the Baron noted.

The Zombie opened his hand and looked at the Cat. “It’s their home turf.”

“The artifact is in our hands. Schuler knows he couldn’t take it from you.”

The Zombie grunted. “They might threaten you for it. We can’t actually do anything to any of these men. If I kill one of them, you’re a dead man, and they know it.”

The Baron shrugged. It was true, but it wasn’t worth worrying about. “I didn’t want you to kill anyone anyways. We’re minimizing the body count.”

“Yeah.” The Zombie closed his hand around the ancient artifact.

They stepped out into an office hallway with egg-shell walls and baby blue carpeting. This was the secular business of Tammany Hall. Offices were labeled with names and titles, several of them with emeritus attached. It was a true nobility. Executives and directors were kept on the payroll long after they’d stopped serving the political machine, and union dues were fed like roughage into their insatiable wallets. It was a shameful bureaucracy, old and bloated. Without the occult core, the secular organization would’ve collapsed under its dead weight.

“Care to guess which elevator Schuler will take?” the Zombie asked. “I could whack him like a mole. Cave his skull in and call it a morning well spent.”

“None,” the Baron said. “Listen carefully. None of the others are running.”

After a few seconds, a stairwell door opened further down the hall. Schuler waved them over with a drunken stagger. “To the north, towards Hyperborea.”

They followed the Diviner down the hall towards a grand pair of intricately carved oak double doors. The ornate brass handles stood above a pair of multicolored tassels. It was a design stolen from the Orient, a mimic of an ostentatious temple door.

“Most of the nobles are out today,” Schuler muttered, “on account of the weather. Cold, uncomfortable atmosphere, smelling of yesterday’s gunpowder.” He sniffed deeply. “But I feel the age of the triumvirate.” He pulled open the doors. The crimson carpet was immaculate. The cultured smells of cigars and cocktails faintly spiced the air. Something delicious and fatty had been fried in cast iron, a servant’s kitchen preparing breakfast for the masters.

They stepped inside, and Schuler shut the grand doors behind them. There were so many rooms here, spreading off the main hall. Lounges, pool tables, parlors, bars—and televisions. From one spot, the Baron could see more of the boxes at once than he’d seen in a TV dealership. Nearly every room contained one of the glassy, dark machines. He’d once read that there were no more than fifty-thousand televisions in North America, and three-fifths of them were in New York City. NBC was here. The New York cult was here. Considering the prevalence of sets in this temple, the Baron wondered if there wasn’t a connection between occult wealth and the growing secular media empire. Tammany Hall was technically sacred ground, but there was no rule against technological wonders. In a home of the gods, they watched television.

Schuler led them deeper, beneath metal chandeliers and around corners strengthened with elaborate wooden trim. The lights were low but persistent. A man might rest in any of these windowless rooms, collapsed on an armless couch while pretending that the furnace heaters and dim lamps were thick coals in fireplaces, smoldering straight till dawn.

Then they reached the end of the main hall, passing an empty secretary’s desk to reach the heart of the temple. There was a step up to the last door, which Schuler opened first.

It was a central courtroom, a place to stand before the triumvirate. Closed gates barred the steps up to a raised semicircle and a judicial bench staffed with three ancient men.

The triumvirate shifted, glaring down at their guests. They were seated in three grand, blood red chairs with high backs, thrones of wood and velour. Behind those chairs were simple doors, one breaking left, one breaking right, and one going directly back. These were the entrances to the personal apartments of the occult leaders, all three too old and too infamous to return to the secular world.

Tremendous shelves crowded the walls between their seats, burdened with stacked bottles of liquor and wine, rising in Incan tiers to the ceiling and organized by color and clarity to form a cloud of grim darkness around the center and a crystal lightness to either side.

Around the backs of the room were rolling carts stacked with food and clean plates, a buffet of rich aromatic meats and fruits, dry and heavily seasoned or wet and swimming in juice, capable of standing for hours without losing their intense flavor or delicious texture.

Cabinets with further liquids stood beside them—fruit juices, sodas, syrups and medicinal tinctures of bitter plants and fouler chemistries. At the very bottom stood jars of powders, pills, and other sundry highs and lows. Dishes were scattered across the bench, left casually for someone else to collect.

“Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach,” said one familiar voice.

The man on the left had a broad, flat, clean-shaven face, mildly asymmetrical, as if his head was slightly turned aside and he was looking past the Baron even when their eyes met. He had short, curly storm-grey hair, shallow lines, and a nose that was broad and long, projecting down and not out. It might’ve been smashed in a fight more than fifty years ago, when his day job was burglary and armed robbery for the mob. He wore stately robes of shimmering royal purple, closed along the front with a line of matte black buttons.

“High Oracle Gagliano,” the Baron addressed.

Gagliano had officially died in ‘51, but in truth he’d permanently retired to this hidden place in order to rule over his occult flock. He was the religious leader of the world’s largest cult, the shepherd of a New World empire, and the adjudicator of the nobles who would inhabit this place on better days—when there wasn’t a rumor of Soviet attack. His primary responsibility was to be the Oracle of Oracles, to hear the greatest tasks given to distant lands and to dispatch elite cultists to snipe them or aid in their completion. Otherwise, he presided over internal conflicts within New York territory, deciding based on testimony who would be allowed to earn the prestige for a particular task or redistributing that prestige if it was won by the wrong man.

“Atheist, you’ve brought a lot of hell to my city,” said the man on the right.

He was muscular and thick, and not running to fat like the other two members of the triumvirate. He bore a tremendous full beard, snow white but thick and glossy. It cascaded onto his expansive chest, covering up any medals that might be decorating his uniform. He clearly tailored his health with prestige—his hands were blemished like overripe fruit, yet his eyes and build suggested a young sailor’s vigor. He’d wished for the vitality to seed his favored son—he was too old to bed a woman otherwise. His family even shared the same tendency towards body hair, though the old man’s tailoring was tidier and covered up both sleeves and collar. It was only the immenseness of his white mane that suggested how heartily his hair grew.

“I’m not responsible, General Osman, but I’m sorry.”

The senior Osman was a centenarian, the second member of the New York cult to extend their lives at the expensive ratio of three units of prestige to one unit of restored youth. His responsibility was to lead the military might of New York. Vassal cults were bound by one law—might makes right—and General Osman’s command was mightiest of all. Even in far distant Europe, his missionaries arrived with the demand to submit or perish. Those who paid the tithe to New York were spared the rod. Those who rebelled were crushed, burned and scattered by Osman’s forces, up to and including Meister Schuler if the conflict was extreme.

In turn, those who swore loyalty were protected. If an enemy sought to conquer vassal territory, no defense would be fiercer than the “White Lion’s roar,” as Osman called his occult retribution. New York’s Cult was a feudal system and a protection ring; Osman was a warrior-prince and underboss.

“You have the Cat o’ Nine Lives,” said the eldest at the center.

This pear-shaped man was dressed in a 19th century business suit, roughly adorned and roughly tailored yet made from fine materials. His bowtie was in a shameful state, but this studied sloppiness was a deliberate defiance. Tradition didn’t rule this man. He defined tradition. Even now, he was sloppily bearded and half-bald. Even now, he lived with a perpetual squint of exhaustion and a ruddy complexion. Time had ravaged him, even as prestige had dragged him back from the brink of death again and again. This year, he was almost one hundred and thirty, and purging his body of cancers, inflammations, and other maladies had cost the cult dearly.

But if not for him, where would the cult be? What purpose would it have? Who would hold the center by sheer authority and the raw will to order atrocity and pillage mercilessly? He’d faked his death nearly three-quarters of a century ago, escaping from Ludlow Street Jail when it became obvious that the government would no longer parley with him or honor any bargains offered to his name. He’d stolen too much for too long to earn any forgiveness from that world, so he’d sunk into this one and lived in this place since the twenties, never stepping outside to see the sun.

“Boss William Magear Tweed.” The Baron bowed slightly.

Altogether, these men ruled from the throne. They were the shadow behind New York, defining its occult purpose and crafting policy with absolute authority. They delegated much to others, trusting that the best administration ran itself as smoothly as any industrial machine. They were the engineers of human organizations, the reason that Tammany Hall was still a meaningful name. This place was once renowned for a marvelous ring of corruption, a democratic party machine. Now, it was the rotten heart of an occult world power.

Author’s Note:

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August 22, 2026